And we all can learn ways to save a little dough. What works for our family may not work for yours but just might lead you to think of things you can start skipping. We read Young House Love’s Skip It post and some things that work for them (like giving up fabric softener, no thanks) are not things that would work for us but made us realize that our family has it’s own skip it list. 🙂
- Cable/Dish – We gave this up several years ago and never looked back. It was the smartest skip it decision that we have made. We subscribe to Hulu and Netflix, each $7.99 a month for a total of $16 versus $60 – $70 a month for dish/cable. Very wise decision.
- Dry Cleaning. Wash, dry, wear – that is our philosophy. No dry cleaning bills for these fam!
- $7.50 – $12.00/per person movie ticket – We’ll pass thank you. We will take the kiddos to the $2.50 movie theater on occasion but our whole family can do that for the price of one ticket at the big movie theater. We like our money way too much to hand over $60 for our family of 5 to see a movie. Especially if we wait a few months we can see it for a 1/4 of that price. There are rare occasions where we will splurge but it is so rare I can’t even tell you the last time we did it.
- Paying full price. This is an obvious one if you know us but we had to put it in the list. We use coupons, sales, thrift stores, consignment sales, basically anyway to avoid paying full price we do it. This also includes eating at restaurants and entertainment. We use coupons and/or special deals to save money whenever we can. Last summer we went to Six Flags for less than $50 for our family of 5. Amaze-balls I tell you! 🙂
Cornerstone Consignment Sale is where we find great name-brand clothes for our kids for super cheap. It starts this Thursday! Click picture for more details.
- Car Repair Shops. This one is hard to avoid unless you have a handy dandy person in your family like we do. Chris does all of our car repairs which saves us a ton!
- Gym Memberships. We have tried before when they were offering major promos but we just can’t fork over that kind of money each month. We use videos, walking around our neighborhood and chasing after our kids for exercise.
- Manis/pedis. Unless we are going somewhere fancy schmancy the girls in the family do their own nails.
- Haircuts. Well, we don’t actually skip haircuts but we do save a ton of money on them. Chris does his own hair and most of the time the boys. Melissa gets about one haircut a year and Lydia about the same. Lydia’s latest haircut cost a whole $10 and it was the best haircut she has ever gotten!
Lydia’s $10 haircut!
- Excessive driving. We always try to maximize our adventures into town and not make multiple trips. If we have an hour or two wait in between activities then we head to the library instead of driving all the way back home.
- Pet Grooming. Chris has become a pro at grooming our long-haired Chihuahua, Abby. No paying someone else what we can do for free!
Ty and Abby
- Family Pictures. We have in the past paid someone to take photos for us but we have gotten pretty good at taking our own now.
Our Christmas photo taken by….us! 🙂
- A cup of Joe. No $5 latte’s for us.
- Newspaper/Magazine subscriptions – thanks to the internet we can find all we need to know online.
- Expensive Vacations. We love traveling and visiting new places but we aren’t going to do it unless it fits our budget. Thanks to Groupon, Half Off Depot, Living Social, multifamily vacations and camping we can still enjoy vacations without breaking the bank or maxing out a credit card.
- Fresh Flowers. Don’t get us wrong we love to look at them and will cut our own flowers to make an arrangement but we never spend money them. We have been married 11 years and can count on one hand how many times we have had store/flower shop flowers in our house. That $50 can be used elsewhere. 🙂
So there you go, that’s our skip it list. If we thought about it we could probably come up with at least 10 more but these are the biggies.
So what is on your family’s skip it list?
CaMpHoTeL 