Changing our habits to help save money

A few weeks ago I booked our holiday for Summer 2017 so that we could return to Florida for two weeks. We promised the girls that we would go back in 2017 and with the option to book the holiday for a low deposit and pay monthly by direct debit it was far too tempting to say no. However this does mean that I have a very large direct debit coming out of my bank account for the next 10 months and to top it all off I need to start saving for our spending money as well. This means that I am going to have to start changing some of our spending habits to help us to save money.

I am going back to basics to help save money and will be giving myself a weekly allowance which I can use to spend on groceries and anything else we need. I will also be going back to meal planning which not only helps with keeping our costs down but is also good for helping me to follow Slimming world. To get me started on this I have signed up for regular weekly grocery deliveries online with a recurring order that contains the basics we need in a week such as bread, ham, vegetables and fruit. Then each week I will add in the items we have run out off or are going to run out of that week. Hopefully, this will help us save money on our shopping bill as I won’t be tempted by all of the other things I pick up when visiting the supermarket.

I will also be banning us eating out (unless it is a review obviously) and will be packing picnics to take with us when we are on days out. Add to that my ban on buying bottles of water, something I am very bad at doing. We all have reusable water bottles so we should be using them instead of wasting money on something we can get for free. I can’t really downgrade any of our shopping as we don’t really buy name brand products anyway as we tend to make everything from scratch but I will certainly be cutting back on the number of treats we have in the house.

It really is crazy just how much of our money goes on food! As well as paying close attention to the food we will be buying I have also checked all of our bills to see if we can get a better deal. This has meant downgrading our tv package (after all the kids only really watch youtube) and switching gas and electricity supplier to one that is saving me £15 a month.

With all of these savings, I will be putting it all aside for our trip across the pond where we will be filling our days with even more amazing memories.