Small Cuts Save Big Money! – How It Adds Up II
Most of you have seen our original How It Adds Up article, where we looked at how small purchases add up and how cutting various small things from our daily spending can add up to a lot of money each year. Today, I’ll look at how wasting a little here and a little there can cost you big money over time.
I keep saying you can save on groceries before you even leave to go to the store and one of those ways is to stop wasting the food you do buy. Today I’m going to share are a few examples to illustrate how those little things that our families don’t eat and end up throwing out add up. These are estimates and when there the price of an item varies, I generally estimated using the less expensive amount.
Here are a few examples of commonly wasted items in a typical home:
Juice – If each member of a family of 4 leaves 1/2 a glass of juice in the glass a day, that family wastes 10 cans of juice per month. That works out to $20 per month or $240 per year that gets thrown away.
Peanut Butter – If 2 kids leave 1/2 a sandwich uneaten, it adds up to 2 jars of peanut butter a month. At $2.00 per jar, this works out to $4.00 per month or $48 per year. This doesn’t factor in the wasted bread.
Apples – If 2 kids leave 1/2 apple a day uneaten, it works out to 3 bags of apples a month. At about $3 per bag, that works out to $9 per month or $108 per year.
Milk – If 2 kids leave 1/2 cup of milk in a glass or a cereal bowl twice a day, 1 gallon of milk gets wasted per week. This works out to $3 per week, $13 per month or $156 per year of wasted milk.
When we total the waste on just these four items, it works out to $46 per month or $552 per year that is wasted and simply gets thrown away.
Note that these figures only consider families where 2 children leave just 1/2 a sandwich per day or leave 1/2 a glass of juice or milk per day. The reality is that most kids toss that much per meal 3 times or more per day so, in most cases, those figures could be easily doubled bringing the total to $1104 per year.
I calculated these numbers based on a family with two children, but if you have more, then these numbers would be higher.
Note that I used just 4 food items as examples. How many other things are thrown out like wasted veggies, potatoes, meat, cookies on and on? And not only that, there are the stale chips and other things that get wasted because they’re not stored properly or they get lost in a disorganized pantry until they go bad.
Think of your food in this way: If my kids leave half a sandwich a day, not only am I throwing out that much peanut butter but I am also throwing out a couple of loaves of bread each month.
None of us would dream of going to the store, buying two loaves of bread, bringing them home and throwing them in the trash but that is exactly what we do. We just do it with small amounts daily.
You can save $46 a month preventing waste with just the four items listed above. If you start counting bread from the uneaten sandwiches, cereal left in the bowls each morning, stale chips and cookies, you could instantly increase your savings to $100 a month (and probably more) without changing one thing about your spending (coupons, clearance items, sale items) at the store.
Open your eyes and really notice what is happening with your food in your home.
-Jill
photo by: U-g-g-B-o-y-(-Photograp h-World-Sense-)
Does anyone have a ‘small-cut’ way to deal with a slow shower drain?
You can try pouring baking soda down and then follow with vinegar. If that doesn’t work then take a wire and manually pull out the hair that’s clogging it.
Thanks, Tawra! Did exactly that, and it worked wonders. It did take a few tries, but it works great. Another good reason to keep several boxes of baking soda and several bottles of white vinegar around.
BTW, my mom says she once tried this with lemon juice (the kind that comes in those plastic lemon bottles). Works just as well.
If you have a vacume cleaner with a blower put the hose on blow and wrap a towel around the hose and drain to stop it blowing into the air.
run it for about 20 seconds. add water and then if it is still slow do it again.
Mr. Plumber that drain cleaner is basically doing the same thing for a lot more money.
I do this about once a month in my kitchen drain and it has worked for my mother for many years.
To make it even better my husband laughed at me when I told him how I clean drains.
So I proved it to him. That was such a sweet success and now he unclogs drains for me without the powerful chemicals which rot the pipes sooner than they should rot.