Finding more money in the Budget and Inventorying

Last week is a blur and I didn’t post as often as I wanted to post.  Here are some updates on our budget and saving more money each month.  Back in April I quit getting my nails done and finally after 3 months, my nails are strong, healthy and grown to a perfect length.  My nails are just at the tips of my fingers which is a perfect length.  I had been wearing acrylic nails for 12 1/2 years and it was time for my real nails to see the light of day.  Savings is $50 a month. 

Today I decided that I would cancel my membership at the Curves fitness center.  Savings will be $36 a month.  I made this decision after pondering it for several weeks and I decided that with my schedule and their limited hours that it was getting harder to get there to work out.  Also I am finding that walking outside and lifting weights at home is doing just as good a job of keeping me in shape.

I downgraded our Netflix account to 2 dvd’s being sent in a month.  We used to have unlimited dvd’s mailed in a month, but frankly I find a lot of dvd’s at the local library so I wasn’t getting my money’s worth from Netflix.  One time I had a dvd sitting on my kitchen counter for almost a month before I watched it.  We will be keeping the unlimited streaming of Netflix as that is something we seem to use.  The savings will be $3.00.  Okay, $3.00 big deal right?  Pennies add up and so do dollars.  In time I will probably cancel having the dvd’s mailed to us altogether for an $8.00 per month savings. 

We are also looking at our cell phone bill.  We have a shared plan.  After reviewing some recent monthly bills we have realized that we are not using the amount of gigabytes that we are paying for.  By reducing this to what we are actually using we will save around $20 a month. 

Total amount of savings for the above is $109 per month. 

So, little things add up and inventorying our resources has really added up to a big list.  I was going to post what I have in my pantry but I want to delay that until the next post.  Instead I am listing what I have stored away for toiletries, paper, laundry and hair care products. 

As with everything that I have inventoried, all products were bought on sale.  However,  it is in the following categories that I used the most coupons teamed with sales. That is why I have so much laundry soap.  When there is a sale for $2.00 a jug of liquid laundry soap and you have $1.00 off coupons, you stock up.  In one case there was a major sale in which I bought laundry soap for 88 cents a jug.  It was that sale that really grew my stockpile. 

Here we go:

Toiletries

 Bar Soap – 36 bars of ivory soap, 144 bars of bath soap, 8 bars of Oil of Olay, 15 bars of Dove and 4 bars of Castile soap.

I also have 2 bottles of men’s and 8 bottles of women’s body wash.

Lotion – 8 bottles

Shampoo – 13 bottles

Conditioner – 6 bottles

Ladies Razors – 36 razors

Deoderant – 28 sticks

Toothpaste – 4 tubes

Paper Products

Paper Towels – 62 rolls

Toilet paper – 276 double rolls and 56 single rolls

Kleenex – 2 boxes

Laundry Items

Octagon Laundry and cleaning soap – 7 bars

Fels Naptha – 3 bars

Laundry Detergent (jugs) – 59 jugs – 50 oz size.

Laundry Detergent (powder) – 15 boxes

Softener, Sheets – 5 boxes

Softener, Bottles – 6 bottles

Purex Laundry Crystals – 5 bottles

Borax – 1/2 box

Shout Pre-Wash – 2 bottles

Tide Boost – 1/2 bottle and 1/2 box of powder

Bleach – 1 jug

There is some measure of pride and comfort in knowing that I can provide for my family through sales, stockpiling and inventorying to make sure that everything is managed and stretched in order to save more money.  It is a skill that I have learned and probably is right up there with being one of the most important skills I have ever learned.