I love to save money. I can spend $1,000 on something and never have remorse but be irked for a couple of hours over wasting 50 cents. It is all contingent on the value (monetary or perceived) value of the item obtained.
For instance, I consider accomplishments to be of value and can wrap what a particular item accomplishes into the value of it. In doing that, I might pay more (monetarily) for the item than usual.
People pay me to help them with their budget and finances, so I have to keep guidelines and a system, but when I budget for things, I consider more than the face value. That is not something that is readily transferred to application in someone else’s budget. So, I have a budget “principle” I use that allows the ability to be used in a real life and not just on paper.
Anyway, we’ll talk about finances and budget in another post, but this one is about saving money, getting deals, looking for a bargain, finding a way to spend less… that type of thing. I love all those phrases!
I’ve mentioned that Shelley (sister-in-law) and I have written an ebook and you should definitely check it out in my previous post. The book is devoted to one spending less concept, which is using coupons as a method of payment. We treat couponing as a viable part-time job. The money savings is sometimes not even believable and whatever you save, you earned.
Some women are finding by applying our extra spin on the couponing strategy that they make more by using the “Keep the Cash” method(s) than they have at their part-time job. Not to mention getting to stay home and take care of their own kids instead of paying for childcare.
Again, I encourage you to look at the info and the link in my earlier post and check into it.
Right now, I’d like to mention some other money-saving tips just for fun and just because I love that sort of thing.
Of course, Do it Yourself is the BOMB! Whoo-hoo, I love making my own stuff. Whether it is figuring out a recipe for some popular dish or doing my own taxes or figuring out my own medical symptoms, I love the DIY stuff.
I recently decided I didn’t like all the chemicals that swirl around us in our homes, so I checked into making some of my cleansers myself. Now I should tell you that I was a bleach person. I’m a natural blonde, but my hair was about the only thing I didn’t use bleach on. I didn’t think anything was truly clean unless bleach in some fashion had been applied to it.
I don’t like the smell of bleach, but I can tolerate it and eventually I guess maybe I couldn’t even smell it anymore because I had gotten used to it. I probably will not ever completely eliminate bleach from my entire life, but WOW! That is one dangerous chemical!
Although sure nothing could get cleaned otherwise, I forced myself to replace bleach with some other types of safer cleaners and was pleasantly surprised. I did not want to hop from one pure chemical (chlorine) to some mixture of equally toxic chemicals that we find in store-bought cleansers. That narrowed down my options considerably. Basically, after all the options, I was left with vinegar, lemon, and baking soda. It just didn’t seem like enough. I tried it and yes, things seemed to be clean but I just wasn’t convinced.
I wrote my friend who is a missionary in Mexico and lives an incredible ALL NATURAL life. I need to insert one comment here: I admire her strength but I probably will never be an “all natural” woman. She has her children in birthing tubs delivered by her husband. I am completely in awe of that strength and I admire and respect it, but won’t ever do it. She makes her own honey, when her husband goes out to their shed, where they have a family of honey bees constantly producing rich and succulent honey combs. Actually, the bees "make" the honey, but either way, I won’t ever do that.
She makes all her own clothes and the clothes for her 7 children. I won’t ever do that. I sew but usually for fun. She uses cloth diapers. Okay, I won’t EVER do that. She scrubs clothes on a washboard and hangs them out in fresh air to dry. Why? She likes the fresh air smell on their clothes. We don’t have fresh air in the states, so I won’t ever do that. Her husband bought a washing machine, but she doesn't always use it.
Okay, enough said. She is WAY fabulous and more “natural” than me. I admire her greatly; I just can’t and maybe won't ever even try to be that. Tammy has wonderful insights into cooking naturally and uses all natural cleansers. She makes her own cleansers and her own soap and her own laundry detergent. Are you ready for this? She makes her own vinegar.
So, I asked her for tips on cleaners. I told her about my vinegar mixture and that I thought things were “clean” but just still felt they could be more …. Something. She had the immediate answer: alcohol. I had not thought of that. She told me to add ½ cup of isopropyl (70%) to my mixture and that is what I did. When I started cleaning with it, I immediately knew what I had been missing: "disinfection." Is that a word?
Disinfected. I didn’t feel like everything had been disinfected and the addition of the alcohol somehow filled that need. Think about it: hospitals use alcohol to keep germs away from incisions into our bodies. I feel so much better about my cleaning mixture. She also told me to add just a drop or two of lavender oil. I’d heard that before and truthfully, I haven’t added that yet, but I may try it sometime.
So that’s my daily all-purpose cleanser. I mix it into empty spray bottles in the following increments; you can adjust up or down however you are comfortable. The alcohol also cuts through the vinegar smell. However, the smell of vinegar is an absorbent, so it doesn’t last long anyway.
In a spray bottle:
3 cups vinegar
1 cup alcohol
Lemon (fresh squeezed)
NOTICE I LEFT OUT THE BAKING SODA. I also increased the alcohol amount just because I wanted more disinfectant properties in my mixture. Most people are aware of this from Science experiments in school, but just in case you didn’t do those experiments:
Vinegar mixed with baking soda will make a HUGE bubbling and will scare you into almost a faint. In school, we built fake volcanoes and then added vinegar and a touch of baking soda to make them “erupt” with lava that we colored red with food color.
So, if you are going to add the baking soda (sometimes I do), make your mixture in a bucket and then when the lava stops bubbling, pour it into the bottle.
Sometimes I pour vinegar and baking soda into my kitchen sink with the intention of it bubbling its way down the drain and acting as a type of abrasive rinse.
So there’s a tip for today: New all purpose cleanser without harmful chemicals.
