One of the bloggers I’m following, Katie of The Non-Consumer Advocate, does a regular post about her frugal doings. As I work on our spending plan and focused budget challenges, I thought I would share weekly the big and little frugal doings.
5 frugal things
- Cancel Spotify: We had a family membership for Spotify for $16.99/month. We elected to get a membership to avoid listening to ads and be able to skip songs whenever. Spotify also offers 15 hours monthly of audiobooks for the account holder of the Premium membership. And then, they increased the membership to $19.99. With an additional budget challenge this year, I decided to eliminate some of the wants from our budget. $19.99 seems small, however, it adds up to $239.88 yearly. I’ll revisit this choice next summer.
- Reactivate my ibotta account: For September, I decided to focus my grocery saving strategy on Aldi’s, CVS, and Kroger and use Fetch to collect points for gift cards. I’m also using the ibotta app for cashback (if you’re interested in signing up, here’s my referral link.) Given that we don’t buy a lot of processed foods or name brands, I don’t anticipate earning lots of money through ibotta. However, why leave money on the table? I scanned my first receipt this week for Kroger and received $1.50. If all goes well, I’ll add more cash with my Kroger trip tomorrow.
- Turned off auto-renewal on Costco membership: This is not an immediate savings. Our membership is up for renewal in April 2025. We have the Executive membership which has paid for itself with the rewards check on top of the cash back through the Costco credit card. However, I’m not sure we’ll make the $120 cost by April with the changes I’m making to our grocery spending. I decided to stop auto-renewal, and re-evaluate the membership level next April. Another option is to switch to Sam’s Club which is much closer. However, my husband loves the quality of meat at Costco. We’ve also combined trips to Costco with taking one of my children back and forth to college in Pennsylvania.
- Question whether needs are really needs, or just wants: Do we really need to pay for 4 streaming tv services or can we cut back on some of them? Or, how about rotate through the services each month if there’s no financial penalty for a one-month membership? Or, the Starbucks drinks my daughter loves to buy? Let’s try making some at home.
- Deposit coins at my bank: This is something I did 2 weeks ago for my son; I’ll be doing it for myself next week. Our bank has a coin machine in the lobby! My son deposited over $80 in quarters for free. I thought we would have to take the coins to Coinstar and put the money in a gift card. I really wanted to deposit the coins in our bank accounts.
2 dogs and a house 
Leave a comment