the house behind

I get a lot of comments from readers saying my ideas are great but…it all that effort worth it? I take them to mean the time I spend making my own garden fertilizer or creating my own chicken stock.

The answer is?

It depends.

The factors involved in ‘it depends’ include:

1. Time. How much time do you have? If time is short, the answer is maybe not. Again, depending on time available.
2. Limitations. Is it something you have a thing about not overspending? I personally cannot stand the wild overpricing for cut up produce so no matter what, I am cutting up my own. Buying produce already prepped and cut up will cost you 20% to 50% more than if you spend a few minutes prepping your own for the week. For me, that’s a deal breaker. I will always pull out a knife, my trusty veggie chopper and my food processor to prep my own produce. Always.
3. Effort. I personally have a high level of tolerance for making an effort but some frugal maneuvers and the effort required are just not for everyone. Case in point, I found 10 pounds of chicken legs for just 8.77 at a local Walmart which means it cost $0.77 cents a pound. A bargain for sure. For me, the prep time and effort needed to process all that chicken made that price totally worth it. I roasted some of the legs and slow cooked others in the slow cooker. I then let all of the cooked legs cool off and spent rouhglyn30 minutes deboning all those legs. I threw the bones back into the slow cooker with vegetables, more water and spices and ended up with than nine cups of golden, savory chicken stock. Then, because I was on a roll, I meticulously hand-picked the bones over for the rest of the meat, netting an additional two-plus cups of chicken meat on top of t7.5 pounds of meat already harvested. Total time from me? About an hour but for me, totally worth it. For others, meticulously picking over the bones may be a frugal bridge too far for some but for me, that extra meat I’d paid for, so I was going to harvest it.
4. Patience. I have a lot of patience so saving all my fruit and vegetable scraps until I have enough, blending them and fertilizing my garden with the chunky liquid, it all takes patience. I then have to wait as my garden grows and thrives to view and measure the results. I also let the water I use to boil some veggies such as cabbage leaves or pineapple peels and then use the liquid to water my garden. Again, patience. Same goes for the whey I have left over after I drain my homemade yogurt. I try and use up everything in my kitchen that way, but it does take patience. For the scraps, I simply keep a large freezer bag in the freezer and take the bag out to store everything I have leftover that day including coffee grounds and eggshells. When the bag gets close to full, I defrost the scraps and process everything in the blender with water. Works out to be about every 10 days so not as often as one would think.
5. Determination. Accept your personal level of determination. If you are determined to save money and live a frugal lifestyle then you will find ways, creative new ways, to save money. Every day I challenge myself to find a new way to save money. Sometimes it is small and at other times, it can be substantial. For example, when I decided to cut my cable bill nearly in half, I thought it would mean making a huge sacrifice in my entertainment and thus my quality of life, but I decided to give it 90 days to see if there was anything I would truly miss. After 90 days, I was honestly able to say that I did not miss all the extra channels and cable perks. I was perfectly content with the stripped-down cable services I had chosen a few months prior and in fact, since I was watching far less television, I was spending far more quality time focusing on hobbies and other pursuits. Who knew a frankly frugal decision would actually increase my quality of life?

Since then, I’ve been on the hunt for additional creative ways to lower my monthly run rate and save money while not sacrificing the things I love. And I now ask another time and effort-bound question: Is it worth it? Normally, I’ll try out the idea first and then answer the question because as we know, I have high thresholds for effort, patience and determination.

So find your thresholds for saving money and make it happen. I promise you, nothing feels quite the same as saving money by personally making an effort.

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