Friday Frugal Tips and Accomplishments, January 9

I am starting a new series for myself. Yep...me. I am recommitting myself to more of my frugal goals and money saving ways   as we start this new year. My husband and I have come so far in reaching some of our financial goals, that we can see the end in sight and after the holidays,and the excess and extra spending of the last few months, I want to really commit to marking financial goals off our to do list.

By sharing on Fridays, I want to hold myself accountable to see if I did as much as I could to save money in the week and to share them so that if any of you are looking to become more frugal, you might gain some tips from my listing of our frugal accomplishments. So welcome, and let's share good money saving tips so we can all benefit.

Week ending Jan. 9th

We need to replenish some of our savings as December is a very expensive month for us with not only Christmas and two birthdays, but property taxes and homeowner's insurance both due.

1. Stayed home except necessary driving and a trip to the park with my littlest. Staying home is the number one way to not spend money.

2. A trip to Target was my only shopping. I am staying out of that store because I tend to spend way too much in there. I now am trying to only make one trip a month to Target to stock up on toiletries and household supplies I find the cheapest there. I keep a list running and take it with me.

3. All meals have been made at home except one take out meal that we had a gift card for. We still have $5 left for a future trip.

4. Making sure to cook up all left over and expiring food so as to not throw any of it away. Have you noticed how high food prices are these days? Gas is coming down so do you think food prices will since that is the reason many food prices were raised? I think not. Grocery stores will gain huge profits by leaving food prices high and spending half as much on fuel costs. Sadly, you never see food prices go lower do you? One can hope.

5. Temps here have been mild. Warm during day and cool at night so we have not had to run our heater.

6. I shopped around for lower auto insurance but have found that with our two young drivers, no one can offer us a more competitive rate than our current carrier. Oh well, at least I know for sure I am doing the best I can on our auto insurance. I will call our insurance company and see if anything can be changed to lower our rate with them. Two of our three cars are over ten years old so it may be time to just carry liability. I will find this out.

7. Found out we only have four payments left on our third car. Once this is paid off we will have no car payments on our three cars. We maintain our cars and believe it is cheaper to maintain an older car than to buy a new one and be saddled with car payments, however we do have aging vehicles. We will continue to save that last car payment and designate it a vehicle account for repairs or toward a newer used car when the need arises.  Because car insurance is expensive here, we believe it to be cheaper to drive older cars.

What have you done this week to achieve your financial goals?

You can follow my Money Saving Ideas page on Pinterest for more inspiration.