I made curtains for Charlie's room from fabric that I had. The most expensive part of the project was the rod which was $6 from Walmart. I am currently working on making curtains for all of our windows, but all in good time.
One of my favorite ways to save money is by using cloth diapers for Charlie. I don't know if people are just scared to try cloth diapers or since they are mainly sold online that people don't think to use cloth diapers, but I LOVE them!!! I am stating here and now that I will be using cloth diapers on all of my children and will be loving every moment of it! It is so EASY! The brand that we went with is Econobum. Let's do some quick math here. In the first year for a child diapering costs about $500 - $600. If the child potty trains at 2 years and you are done with diapers you spent about $1,000 - $1,200 of disposable diapers. EEK! That is a lot of money for one kid! I want at least 4 kids (if not more). If we used disposable diapers on all of them it would be about $4,000 - $4,800. And that is if they potty trained at 2 years old. For Charlie we started using cloth diapers at 5 months when we moved into our home. So lets say that we spent about $250 on disposable diapers, which I actually don't think it was that much since we used the Parent's Choice brand at Walmart which is half the price of practically any other brand (I think they actually did just as fine as other brands that we got for free from friends). But just to be on the safe side, lets say we spent $250 on Charlie. Plus the cost of the cloth diapers which was $100. It cost about $0.35 a week to wash and dry the cloth diapers. If Charlie potty trains at 2 years old he will have cost $377.30. If on three more kids we don't have to buy the cloth diapers again and so therefore only spend money on laundering and if we ever use disposable by chance lets say about 200 at $0.15 each. We would end up spending a grand total of $576.5 for 4 children. That is what it costs most parents to diaper one child for only a year and I will have diapered 4 kids for two years each!
Oh, one thing I also wanted to add was that with cloth diapers we NEVER have blow outs!!!!!!
One other little way that I am saving money is to rip the wipes into 8ths. For a wet diaper Charlie doesn't need an entire wipe! An 1/8 works fine. For a massive poopy I use a grand total of 1/2 of a wipe. Talk about stretching your dollar. As he grows older and as his poops become more "mature" I may need to use bigger wipe sizes but for now I am saving a bundle. I haven't had to buy more wipes since Charlie was born and I had 6 bags of 56 count wipes. Mind you that I didn't even start dividing wipes until after the first two bags were gone.
You may be wondering, what are Annette and Charles going to do with all the money that they save. Well, we are going to save more money with it by paying off our house early. Now THAT is a major money saver! Over the life of a home loan you can end up paying about 2 to 4 times as much as your home is worth!
No comments:
Post a Comment