Ok, I'm back from our vacation, and I'm back in frugal mode. Although our vacation was pretty frugal in and of itself, aside from the airplane tickets: we stayed with family and ate in-house mostly. Before that, frugal March went very well, so I'm super on board for frugal April.
What's been going well:
- We have basically stopped eating out entirely. And I miss it zero! Amazing. I literally have no desire to go out to eat, which is crazy because that used to be my number one treat yo-self activity.
- Added to this is my goal to have as close to zero food waste as possible. I cook what's there, don't throw away the less awesome parts of our CSA box, and generally just make do. So far, so good. Yesterday this meant I tried out a roasted cabbage wedge & garlic recipe that turned out awesome.
- I really dug in to curbing my cell phone data usage and just downgraded our plan to a lower one, saving $25/month. Now I have to talk DH into giving up his old phone in favor of the one work pays for (he uses that one 90% of the time for work and personal stuff, but can't pull the trigger to give up the other phone for some reason), which would save another $35/month.
- The nice weather will help in two ways: 1) I can ride my bike, which I can't do in ache-inducing cold weather, and 2) walking around outside is a huge mood booster, which keeps the treat-yo-self attitude at bay.
Anticipated expenses:
- The children just will not stop growing out of their clothes. I mean, come on, kids, what's with all this eating and being healthy and stuff? So, some clothes and shoes for them will need to happen. Also, a trip to the dentist, which is always a bunch of $.
- Food will be a bit more this month bc of Passover and guests coming over to have dinner.
But all in all, I think we have a good thing going, and I'm going to try to keep up the frugality!