“Stop Throwing Money Away On These Day-to-Day Items! (Plus Cheaper Alternatives)” is a collaborative post and includes affiliate links. Please see the disclosure page for more information. Disclaimer – always verify medical information with your doctor or a professional and follow all laws for your location.
It’s time to stop throwing money away on day-to-day items! When you think about how much time and effort you sacrifice in exchange for money, you realize how precious it is. You also understand that wasting it is a terrible idea. What you are really losing are your freedom and well-being. Unfortunately, the society we live in is set up to market and sell items to us on a day to day basis that we rarely genuinely need.
The good news is here is a list what some of these items are and how to replace them with more economical options below.
Ready-made lunches
There is no doubt that getting up half an hour earlier each day and making a packed lunch for yourself and the rest of the family doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. However, just take a minute to add up how many dollars it would cost you if you didn’t? In fact, many families end up spending hundreds of dollars a month on lunches. That’s money that could be put to much better use.
Fortunately, there are cheaper and easier alternatives. The first is to take a few hours at the weekend to meal prep lunches for everyone for the whole week. Alternatively, why not create a lunch station filled with pre-packed food and let everyone pick a certain number of items a day. It will be cheaper and won’t mean any extra work for parents!
Bottled water
The amount of money spent on bottled water every year is phenomenal. Yes, that’s right – these companies take water, the thing that we pay to get piped to our homes, put it in a plastic bottle that is awful for the environment, and then charge us for the privilege! Are we cray-cray?
Instead, invest in a reusable, portable water bottle that can be filled before you leave the house. It’s also a great idea to install a water filter in your refrigerator and change it out for a new filter regularly. You will then always have clean, healthy cold water in the fridge. Something that means there will be no excuse to go buy the bottled kind!
Soup
It amazes me that in this day and age people buy cans, tubs and packets of soup. Soup is literally the cheapest and easiest thing to make possible. In fact, you don’t even need to buy any specific ingredient if you don’t want to. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you might have read about “Trash Soup”(aka leftover veggies soup)
Instead, invest in a slow cooker, and at the end of each week put all the viable vegetables that you would otherwise throw away before grocery shopping into it. Add some stock and seasoning and leave to simmer and you will have plenty of soup for next week’s lunches (see the section above). You can even freeze this soup and have it whenever you want, all for literal cents!
Cleaning cloths
Microfiber and dust attracting are all very well and good. However, shelling out for extensive cleaning supplies when you have materials that would work just as well at home. I’m talking here about old clothes that would go in the garbage such as t-shirts, old towels, and other old clothes. All you need to do is wash them, cut them up and use them in places of cleaning clothes to save a significant amount of money over the year!
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Paper Napkins
During the pandemic, we ran out of paper towels and paper napkins, and they were no where to be found in stores in our area. I had forgotten about some cloth napkins that were buried in the back of a cabinet in our kitchen and we started using them instead. That made me realize that we were literally just buying something that we were going to turn into more trash to put in the landfills. Don’t get me wrong though if we are having lots of people over like for a birthday party I like to splurge because birthday napkins or just so much fun. Or the time I found paper napkins that had dinner conversation starter questions for families, I couldn’t resist. But in the long run I love saving money on simple things like cloth napkins. You can also search thrift stores for cloth napkins. I recently was in a Goodwill Outlet and found a stack of 20 cloth napkins and a bunch of these were Crate & Barrel. You can even make your own cloth napkins with leftover fabric or leftover heavy clothing good. Just cut them into squares and hem around the edges either by hand or with a sewing machine.
These are just some ways to stop throwing out money away on these day-to-day items. Not only will you be saving money but you will also help keep things out of the landfill that can still be useful. It’s great for the environment and for your wallet!
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[…] items can impact your daily expenses. If you are looking to save more and enjoy a more frugal life, stop spending money on these items and think about how to use those already in your house. With the whole declutterring movement at […]