Welcome to the new year everyone. As I promised in the past my intent this year is to restart my savings and hopefully stash some for the future. You probably notice a banner on my right side with a little piggy bank - it's a link to Precious website. She's the one who's starting this challenge. Now my participation will not be as drastic as hers. While I understand that she's nervous about future and constant raise of prices I don't really think that penny pinching to the point of restricting yourself on everything is in my agenda. In my view that will only make me miserable. I've done enough penny pinching in the past few years and had to refuse myself anything other than basic necessities in order to pay off debts that I took on from Mom. While that tactic worked on paper balance it nearly drove me insane. I can no longer live that way. So I will try to save but within reason. My areas of savings are going to be:
•Growing as many veggies as I can fit into my garden to supplement our food source.
•Using farmer markets and local farms to get organic protein sources like meat and seafood.
•Use natural resources whenever possible to reduce bills - solar for energy and natural light to do most things around the house eliminating the need for extra use of lights at night.
•using home made cleaners whenever possible.
•Minimizing extra spending on eating out and entertainment.
This doesn't look like too many things but in reality this is what i need to focus on this year. I know that in the past year we've spent way too much on eating out, travel and out of pocket expenses. I hope to minimize that damage. What I really need to do is to save at least $10K in the next year so I can get a new (used) car. Hopefully my current one will last that long. Since I was not able to sell it because it's really not worth what I wanted for it I had no choice but to keep it for now. So my target is to save enough to pay the new one in cash. I also have secondary target - additional $5000 for future savings. Ambitious plan but hopefully it will work - one step at the time.
First step - update my hydroponic with fresh nutrient mix and get new set of seeds for salads. This week I've picked the last of the greens from the cold-frame and it's too cold now to replant in the coldframe. I also brought several containers into the addition kitchen where I can place them on the counters and plant my herbs. It's cooler than our main house but it will work best for such things like parsley and salads. Just in case you haven't been in a store lately a head of salad is now $2.99 and since I eat alot of it then I'd better get on with seeds. Thankfully salad grows very fast :)
Glad to have you aboard the challenge. Everyone in the challenge will do their saving differently. You take the tips you can use and leave the ones that don't fit your liefstyle. :-)
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