Thrifty Thursday

 Hello dear friends!  Hope you all are doing well!  Since the blog posts most of my readers are interested in are the strictly thrifty ones, I decided that from now on I would write a post once a month of what I am doing each month to save money.  We are a family of three adults, and we live on basically $1200 a month. (From a pension, we don't take Social Security, in spite of paying into it for over 40 years, so save your hate You-Know-Who) We have another fund that is set aside for emergencies, but that is rarely touched and is for real dire situations, like a windstorm blows off the roof, or an unexpected medical emergency. All other expenses come out of the regular $1200 a month fund, including property taxes, doctor office visits, car insurance (that's 1/10 of our monthly income), car repairs, etc. We don't have a mortgage, as we made sure to have that taken care of long before we retired.  Our house was a very cheap fixer-upper and we put a good-sized down payment on it when we bought it and had been on the market for around five years before we bought it.  So that is the first handy thrifty hint; many can now work from home since the whole lockdown thing, so perhaps you can find a home in cheaper area?  A lot of homes have gone way up in value, maybe you could sell your home and make enough from the profit to pay for a home entirely, in a less expensive area?  Not having a mortgage is not only a real money saver, it also is a nice piece of security.  

In spite of the food inflation, we still spend less than $200 a month on groceries.  We buy staples, such as flour, sugar and oatmeal, cornmeal and beans in bulk from an Amish store.  We avail ourselves of another Amish salvage grocery store, which is where we buy our coffee and whatever else we find an amazing deal upon. We use every scrap of our food.  Very little goes to waste.  For instance, when I fry bacon, I will drain the fat and use it to sauté onions, grease bread pans and even for the fat in some breads.  When I can turkey and chicken, I will boil them unseasoned, let the broth set overnight, skim off the fat, then I will take the broth and season it to use to can the meat.  I use the fat in baking and have in the past made soap from it.  (I still make soap, but now I use coconut oil, which is expensive, but still cheaper than the quality bars of soap in the supermarket,).  We only buy (and eat) what is on sale, except for a few staples, and even those we try to find a bargain on.  This month we bought 20 pounds of bone-in ham at 89 cents/ lb. (Meijer stores) and Aldi's had butter for $2.68/ lb., limit 4 per visit.  I bought four pounds and Jamie bought another four pounds, which we froze. Since I don't bake much anymore, that will suffice for a year, if we ration it.  We don't use butter on our bread, but use jam or jelly, which I make from berries in our own yard, it is strictly used in baking. While I was in Meijer's I noticed that they had canned goods for 33 cents a can.  I can my own vegetables that we grow in our garden, but if I didn't, you can be sure I would have used that sale to stock my pantry shelves! AND no, groceries are not cheaper in my area, these are all national grocery chains, and their prices are pretty much universal. What I DO, is take the time to read the weekly sales ads. It seems that every month there is some sort of special sale, this month it is ham, last month it was turkey.  I will figure out how much I need for a year and buy accordingly.  Are we going to eat twenty pounds of ham this month?  No.  I canned about twelve pounds of one ham, and when I was through, I had some nice ham broth with some chunks of meat in it. Wasn't going to waste that, so I used that broth to can an additional nine pints of soup beans.  Ended up with nine pints of ham and nine pints of beans, both will be the basis for some nice meals, such as scalloped potatoes, pea soup, bean soup, sandwich spread meat pies and hash.  And since each meal will be enough for two meals, that thirty-six meals for less than ten dollars.  And of course, the ham bone went in the freezer for soup.  More meals. And of course, most of the other ham will go into the freezer, for more meals, too.

We eat simply and we live simply.  We don't own a lot of things that people think are necessities.  We don't own any sort of fancy phones. We use MagicJack and have a Cricket phone for emergencies.  We don't have cable TV, we either watch something on YouTube or watch something on DVDs, which we buy at garage sales and thrift stores.  We don't travel.  We only go "out" to the thrift stores and grocery about twice a month. But when we do go out, we make it count and it's an all-day affair. We don't use credit cards and pay cash for everything.  We buy used cars and haven't had a loan in decades.  As soon as we buy one car, we start saving for the next, putting aside money each month, just as you would a car payment. I definitely don't get my nails done or even haircuts. We keep ourselves healthy by eating nice organic vegetables we grow in our garden, not eating too many sweets and fried and processed foods, drinking lots of purified water and by exercising every day.  I walk at least three miles every day even in the coldest of winter.  If the weather is really bad, I will jog on a rebounder for half an hour.  (Which I purchased at a garage sale.)

We have natural gas for our heating, but mainly use wood to heat our home. Our thermostat is set at 60 degrees and rarely switches on, except for the coldest days. Our wood is purchased locally from a man that cuts it to length, but we must split it to fit into our rather small woodstove.  The last truckload of firewood cost us $1200 but will last for three years. We augment the wood, with branches and limbs that we gather from the neighborhood.  We gathered enough this year to heat our home for the month of November. Speaking of gathering wood, rather than spending $40 on a Christmas wreath, we gathered enough pine boughs and white birch branches to decorate our window boxes and door while on our walks. They held a Christmas tree sale at the village green and left all the trimmings. And the wind blew quite a few branches into our yards.

The basket was a dollar from a garage sale.

I try to spend only $1 for each item of clothing, which I buy at a church thrift store and garage sales.  Obviously, there are some things I cannot find for so little, but you'd be surprised what you can find, if you are willing to look.  Some stores are better than others.  I like the Ralph Lauren and April Cornell brands and a vintage brand called Susan Bristol (the best woolen skirts).  I might not find something every time I shop, but that's okay, the fun is in the hunt.  Another local thrift store always seems to have tights, new in the package, for fifty cents.  As a matter of fact, I just bought a pair there, this week and they were on sale for 50% off!  What do people do?  Buy tights and then decide not to wear them?  Jamie had a brand of sneakers he loved.  When K-Mart went out of business, he bought five pairs for $5 each at their final clearance and put them away.  When a pair wears out, he simply goes into his closet and pulls out another pair.  We are not hard on our clothes.  I wear aprons and wash my sweaters by hand.  And I'm a stickler for natural fibers, which I think last longer.

My hobbies are sewing and knitting.  Whenever I find nice yarn or fabric at the thrift store, I buy it.  I love the Civil War fabrics that the quilt designers were coming out with a few years back, and it seems like we have some nice quilters in the area that donate generously to one of our local thrift stores, so I make lots of little scrap quilts.  Our local Ben Franklin's has an open house a couple times a year, and they also give you a discount for spending so much money.  When the sale comes around, I will use the discount to buy some of my yarn and also, they have nice things for Christmas presents.  I get 50% off. I use it to stock up on yarn, when I need larger quantities, for sweaters and shawls and such. I recently finished this shawl:

This is a sontag type shawl and the pattern is in the Fall 2021 Piecework magazine. Here's the back:

I don't know why that last picture turned out so weird.  I was trying to crop out the curtain all bunched up. Anyway, I spend less than $10 a month on my hobbies. There's a lot of lovely designers on the internet that offer free patterns.  Bless them!  Every once in a while, I try to buy something from them as a "thank you". In other words, hobbies don't have to be expensive.  And if you like to sew, get creative!  There's pretty tablecloths and sheets that can be used for fabric, instead of paying the high prices at fabric stores.  I've made the nicest skirts and petticoats from vintage linen tablecloths purchased for a few dollars at estate sales!  Right now, I'm looking for a red flannel sheet to make a petticoat.  Did I mention I dress strangely?  Probably not too many people wear petticoats these days.  When at home, I like to wear denim prairie skirts.  They are so comfortable. 

Speaking of knitting, here's some of the Advent mittens that I knitted a few years bag from this free pattern:

Well, this post is getting long!  I hope it was helpful to someone.  I know a lot of you already know these things, but as I am always getting new readers, sometimes things need to be repeated.  If you have any questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment and ask me.  

Hugs

Jane