Things we saved money on this week

This week I spent time painting the trim around a doorway and the door itself. Our house is filled with oak doors and we prefer all that trim and doors to be white. Instead of buying new doors and trim we decided to paint everything. The doors themselves are solid, so buying a new, white door, would really have been a downgrade in quality.

A new door and jamb kit would have been about $100. A gallon of paint and primer was about $65. Since each gallon of paint and primer covers 3-4 doors (at least) we are saving around $335 for every gallon we use. We have 10 total doors/doorways that will be getting paint so we are saving around $800 by doing this project ourselves over the next 3-4 weeks.

In a typical week, we order out about 2-3 times. This week we cut it down to once and saved about $30-$40 as a result.

We ordered a new Amazon Echo because ours was struggling to even play a song. We signed up for the trade-in program and will be getting a $30 gift card as a result!

I'm still holding onto my very very old cell phone which is saving us about $25 per month in payments.

Over the course of the pandemic, we have added a few premium channels through Amazon Prime so I'll be spending this week determining how "necessary" these channels still are. I'm hoping we can drop at least 2 of them and save $15 per month.

I also intend to plan our meals better to eliminate any food waste in our house. We have things we like to make and buy, but some weeks we just don't get around to having a salad for 2-3 meals (because we eat out on a whim). I think I can save us about $25-$50 on every grocery bill and about $50-$100 per month if I'm more thoughtful about our grocery orders.

We have also begun testing out some meal delivery options to help us eliminate the take-out so more to come on how that is working out and whether we have found a good/healthy way to save some money there.

In summary, we saved $60 this week by trading in our Echo and eating out less. We are also saving a ton of money by painting ourselves vs buying new.

Check back in next week to see what we saved on and how much we saved. I've got a list above that we need to execute upon. If we can make it happen we will save a ton over the next year.