Emergency Supplies
Water Pumps
Storage & Serving
Cleaning
Cast Iron
Baking Supplies
Canning
USA Made
Amish Made
Order Catalog
Here are some things I do to help keep us within our very tight budget. See if you can pick out one or two to begin with, and apply them to your own household.
- Eat out rarely, and cook meals from scratch; stop buying processed foods.
- Grind our wheat for homemade breads, tortillas, pancakes, etc.
- Make homemade yogurt, ice cream, etc.
- Raise a garden and can any extra produce and meat we come into.
- Raise chickens for eggs and meat.
- Keep goats for milk.
- Unscrew unnecessary light bulbs throughout the house.
- Keep the air conditioner set high, and the heat low. Use a wood stove in the winter time.
- Unplug appliances not in use.
- Condense trips to town to conserve gas.
- ake homemade soap and other toiletries myself.
- Fix broken things and mend tears instead of replacing damaged items.
- Stay away from the mall and only shop for clothing second hand.
- Use cloth napkins instead of paper towels.
- Buy prepaid phone cards for cell phones.
- Ditch the television all together.
- Cancel any and all unnecessary bills, memberships, subscriptions, etc.
- Let kids enjoy the outdoors and play at the park instead of paying for extra curricular activities.
- Be low maintenance; learn to go without the salon for tanning, getting your nails done, and highlighting your hair.
- Find free activities to enjoy as a family or date night for entertainment.
- Wash Ziploc bags and reuse them.
- Hang dry all clothing instead of running a clothes dryer.
- Use newspaper for going to the bathroom. (I’m kidding! Kidding people! Just had to toss that one in there for kicks.)
- Dilute whole milk with water, especially when cooking and in cereal.
- Use cloth diapers and wipes instead of expensive disposables.
- Dilute shampoo and conditioner with water. It’ll still work just as well and last twice as long! (Don’t try this on the cheapest brands though, it doesn’t work well on them.)
- Use half the recommended amount of detergent in the dishwasher and washing machine.
- Only use a pea size amount of toothpaste instead of a whole glob!
- Lightly dab on moisturizer instead of saturating your face with it.
- If you use dryer sheets, tear them in half to make them last twice as long.
- Clean countertops using plain old water most of the time instead of spraying costly cleaners.
- Used the backs of worn-out overall legs to make pants for little boys and overalls for babies.
- Made diapers and underwear out of flour and sugar sacks.
- Made smaller clothes out of bigger hand-me-downs.
- If their shoes wore out before a year, the children went barefoot.
- Bartering; not only goods for goods, but work for work.
- Used patterned chicken feed sacks to make curtains, aprons, and little girl’s dresses; three sacks were enough to make a housedress.
- They mended worn out socks with a patch from another sock.
- They saved string that came loose from clothing and added it to a string ball for mending and sewing.
- They used newspaper instead of toilet paper. (They really did!)
- They saved every scrap of material for making quilts.
- When there was nothing more to eat, they had lard sandwiches.
0 Comments