Thrifty Days - How I am Saving Money {& New Ways We Are Earning}

I wanted to start sharing some of journey in how we have been saving money here since I know that many of you love to hear ideas and are encouraged when you here about others who are trying to stay within their budgets.

Just a little background here before we begin--we are a family of 11 and the Lord has blessed my husband with a good job over the years. It has helped us to keeping our goals for me to be a stay-at-home mom, raise, and homeschool our children, which is something I never want to take that lightly as I feel that it is a gift from God to be able to do so and I don't want to take that for granted! I do help a little on the side which I share more about at the bottom of this post in case you might be interested.

Lately, I feel like we have been making some big financial decisions lately to save money now and in the long run so I thought I would share some of it with you:

1. VEHICLES- We bought a "new-to-us" 12 passenger van last week.

It was truly answered prayer and I am so grateful. We could have chosen to get a more expensive vehicle but chose to stay in our budget of what we could afford comfortably. Also, this vehicle met all our needs and the dealer took several thousand off before selling it to us for the final price. What an answered prayer--we are so grateful to God for leading us to this van!

2. HOME- We were also going to buy a new home this summer and have been actively house hunting for the last month.

But honestly the more I looked, the more I think I just wanted to stay in my home. So I proposed to my husband to just add an extra bedroom and finish our basement as a project this year. This would save money thousands in moving costs right now and also help us to bring more value to our home (and space right now) for when we do decide to possibly move next year.


3. FOOD BUDGET - Switching to shopping mainly at Aldi has saved us $200-300 a month.

Once I made the change to shop mainly at Aldi I noticed the difference immediately and I was hooked. I still need to get a few things at the regular store but I love that I can save so much there when I want to. If you have an Aldi, you should definitely check them out! They even have a good line of gluten-free products and organic products.

4. CLOTHING- I took the younger kiddos to a consignment shop this week to get a few things, they were happy and I was too! Even though we aren't big into brand names we got a bunch of clothes that were for a fraction of the price.


A NEW WAY WE ARE EARNING


Now that I have shared a few ways we have saved, I wanted to quickly share how I have earned this past month as well. I just redeemed some points over at Swagbucks which is new for us . You can turn it into money through gift cards or cash through Paypal too. There are plenty of people out there who are earning from them as well (and paying off bills and covering all their Christmas expenses with it) and doing it from home for free on their laptops and phones. What an easy way to earn if you have the time to put into it. If you are interested in signing up and earning through Swagbucks you can do it through my referral link HERE. 

We also still earn a good supplemental income through blogging with our favorite affiliates (we actually surprisingly earned over $1,100+ just through Amazon recently which is a milestone for us--you can find out how we did it and learn how to HERE), being a brand ambassador with partner companies, & sharing our love of Lilla Rose and a few other things we do online. Again, I am SO grateful for these opportunities to work from home and being able to watch the children grow up. It has taken a bit of patience to learn how to balance this time with home life, but we seem to have figured out what works best for our family right now and try to be flexible when the seasons change.


I should also mention that a big thing that has also helped that some of the high school children have gotten jobs within the last year--so a total of five of them work all together  (the two adult children work full-time and the 3 teens part-time) and are able to purchase their own clothes and other odds and ends as they'd like. Some already have their own vehicles and others are saving for them.

This has helped our budget immensely even though I am a little sad that they are growing so quickly, it is nice to watch them grow into young adults and learn how to be responsible with what they earn.


So how are *you* saving money this week?

Please share them in the comments below! We'd love to hear about them!

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