How My Husband and I Continue to Survive the Suffering Economy

It's no secret that in these tough economic times, that many people (even those who considered themselves to be well off) are struggling to keep their heads above water. Money talks, but when you are running out, it dulls to a faint whisper. People are starting to get creative on how to make their dollar stretch. My husband and I have definitely come up with a few ideas of our own.

First of all, since we're living with my family for the time being, we don't have a lot of money to pay for groceries anyway. However, if you do, this idea very may well work for you, as well. We make grocery/other items list, and write down absolutely everything we need, and if we want something, we add that, as well. Then, we sit down and list everything into four categories: high importance, medium importance, low importance, and items we just happen to want. We then have a set budget for these things. We start with the high importance items first, of course. If we still haven't reached our spending limit, we go on to the medium, and so on and so forth until we do reach the limit. This keeps us on track with what we spend and what we buy, leaving little or no room to buy things we don't need, or won't use or consume after we buy them.

Secondly, we don't obsess over laundry. As a neat freak, I used to have to do laundry one or two times a week, as well as sometimes washing one item that I really wanted to wear. Now, I make sure that there's a full load (or sometimes two) before doing the wash. This helps cut down on water usage, electricity usage, as well as having to buy detergent, fabric softener, and bleach all the time. As far as buying those things, I have switched from regular detergent to the concentrated kind, which yields more washes. This is not only money-saving in tough economic times, but it's also being nicer to the planet.

Next, we addressed the need to eat out all the time. Sometimes, we would go out two or three times a week, just out of boredom. We finally realized we didn't have the money to do it, so we decided to cut it down to once a week. Instead, we make sure we find things at the supermarket that we like, and that we might possibly could find similar to some of the things we can find in our favorite restaurants. As stated above, we budget for eating out once a week, and usually, that's going to Sheetz for breakfast before church on Sunday mornings.

As for entertainment, we did not cut it out all together. We scaled back pricey activities, and found ones that are cheap or free. We are very involved in our church and the local LGBT community as straight allies. Recently, we have found ourselves at many activities involving these two things, such as Gay Awareness Week at Randolph College. This event, in particular, has produced free admission drag shows with $1.50 cocktails, as well as homosexuality and Christianity discussion panels, both of which interest us. Also, we go to and help out with a once-a-month coffee house hangout for all of our friends, at another church in our community.

Other cheap entertainment for us, includes renting movies for $1.00 plus tax, for one night, from Redbox. This paired with a few boxes of $1.00 candy, some cans of soda, and microwavable popcorn, makes for a cozy night. This saves us a lot of money, because movie tickets can go as high as $9.00 here, and I don't even want to mention the ungodly prices for concessions.

Likely Page BreakLastly, gas prices have eased up on us. The going price for gas right now is about $1.99 in our part of Virginia. However, we pay less. We retreived a free Shell Saver Card from a local Shell gas station. The card we got, was activated online, and linked with our checking card. Whenever we use the Shell Saver Card at a Shell station, it pulls the money from our checking account (usually within two days,) and we save five cents on every gallon.

I'm not saying that all these adjustments have allowed us to live the way we used to, spending money pretty much carelessly. However, I am saying that these things that we have come up with, have helped us to stay afloat, and even save a little bit of money, as crazy as that sounds. I just know that the more brain power we use, the more creative ideas we can come up with to save a little bit more money.