Five Simple Tips to Saving Money At Home
Guest post by Jessi, a Canadian writer, dog lover and social media enthusiast from Canada. She spends her days encouraging homeowners to take repairs into their own hands as a Community Coordinator for home repair and appliance parts resource, PartSelect .
Saving money hasn’t always come easy to me; in fact it’s only recently that I’ve really started understanding why every dollar I make doesn’t need to be spent. When I finally geared down and decided to focus on savings, I started by making small changes around the house that would help me hang on to my money. Here are the ones I’ve found to have the most impact!
Turn down the heat
We have hot water baseboards heating in our home, powered by oil. Instead of maintaining the same temperature in the house the whole day, we purchased digital thermostats and put our heat on a schedule. The temperature is regulated so that it’s lower at night and while we are at work, and turns up slightly for the evenings! We also committed to keeping the temperature at a max of 70 degrees and wearing sweaters and blankets if we get cold.
Plan meals ahead
The grocery store is a two minute drive from our house and is on the way home from work, so one of us was stopping in every day to purchase whatever we needed for that days meal. Instead of making five mini-trips, we started planning our meals ahead of time and saved a lot of money in the process. Basing our meals off the sales that week allowed up to pick-up the most cost-effective food, and cut back our bill significantly. Who knew thinking ahead applied to grocery shopping too? (Everyone but me, apparently haha)
Enjoy date night … at home
Dining out is awesome, but you don’t have to spend all that money to enjoy and intimate evening with your partner. Instead of heading to a restaurant , my boyfriend and I moved date night home, each committing to cook for the other one night a week. If neither of us are feeling up to the challenge, we pick-up take-out – we’re still saving the cost of a tip and the markup on a bottle of wine.
Make your own wine
Speaking of wine, when we sat down and crunched the numbers we realized we were spending around $20/week on wine for us and friends. We decided to try making our own and have been so pleased with the end result! For $90, we were able to purchase a wine kit and everything we needed to get the process started – 3 months later we have 35 bottles that cost roughly $3 each, a saving of $14 each week.
DIY
I started working for an online home repair resource about a year ago and it opened my eyes to just how much money we were paying out for things we could do ourselves. We stopped calling repairmen and started taking matters into our own hands. Over the past year we’ve fixed our garage door, our washing machine and dishwasher, not to mention countless drywall and hardwood repairs caused by our chewing-obsessed dog. She’s lucky she’s cute!
While these few changes might not seem like much, they’ve really made a big difference on my finances as well as my whole household. I think our commitment to saving money actually strengthened the relationship between my partner and I as it was something we really worked towards together. Best of all, we were able to put some of our savings towards travel and have been on two short trips already this year!