Tips and Tricks on Saving Money – Jessica’s Personal Saving Story

A big THANK YOU to everyone who has sent in their Personal Savings Stories and photographs.  I hope by sharing other people’s money savings tips here on One Hundred Dollars a Month we can all find new ways to save rock our budgets this year. ~Mavis

This week we are featuring Jessica from East Tennessee.

Hello, Mavis!
This is Jessica.  I’ve written to you before about the Moby Dick painting that I made for my boys’ room. ​I live in East Tennessee with my husband and three children and blog at jollydaysatshadynook.  I thought I’d share some of the fun ways that we have found to save money.

​I’m enjoying learning to garden.  I love starting seeds with my kids.  I’m still not great at getting my garden to produce tons of food, but I feel like we are heading in the right direction.  I also have enjoyed learning to can.  Our garden hasn’t produced enough tomatoes to satisfy my canning urge, so I love to buy a couple of boxes of local tomatoes when they are in season and mix in my few tomatoes with them, so at least I can say I’m canning some of the food that I grew.

I am part of an amazing Moms group at my church that is so encouraging and has saved me hundreds of dollars, I’m sure.  Twice a month we meet for demonstrations (anything from winter gardening to cake decorating to cutting your own kid’s hair), Bible study, and – my personal favorite – the give-away tables.

Everyone brings in everything they would normally be donating to Goodwill and arranges it on folding tables and we all shop for free.  It helps me declutter and keep my kids’ clothes and toys from piling up because I love seeing where our stuff goes, and I know how much I appreciate the clothes and other goodies I bring home each week.  It is like yard-saling for free!

Another of my favorite ways that we save money has to do with our weekly date nights.  We rarely splurge on a babysitter, but every Wednesday night while our three kids are at a great children’s program at  church, my husband and I slip away for a quick date.  It is so much fun to have one night a week where I don’t have to plan a supper, and eating at a restaurant, just the two of us, is such a treat!

We save money by not spending much on gifts for our kids.  They have such generous grandparents and aunts and uncles, that there’s rarely anything left in the way of toys that they could possibly need at Christmas and birthdays, so we can get creative.  For our boys’ first birthdays, we gave them apple trees.  They have the best time hanging bird feeders in them and helping to take care of them.

​Now here is the coolest way that we have saved money lately!  My husband runs an Etsy shop, etsy.com/shop/ampoids, that was outgrowing our spare bedroom – also, we had another baby, so that bedroom wasn’t quite so ‘spare’ anymore.

We were looking at building an addition to our house, when my dad stumbled upon this treasure and asked us if we would be interested in a shop made of logs.  The owner of this log home from the 1860’s was in the process of tearing it down to burn it.  He was happy to sell the logs to my husband.  We did the math and discovered that it would be cheaper and way more interesting than the addition that we had been considering.

​So the next thing I knew, this pile of logs was living in our backyard, and let me tell you, I had my doubts that anything great could come of it.

​It took a year, countless hours of watching how-to Youtube videos, and lots of hard work, but in the end, we have a shop that costs 2/3 of the price of our boring addition and is such a fun space.  And we saved a little piece of history.  Love it!

​I love reading your blog for all things money-saving, gardening, canning, and cooking!

Thanks for all you do!

~ Jessica

If you would like to have your Personal Savings Story featured on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I would love to feature it on the blog. Just answer 5-7 {or all if you really want to} of the questions listed in the original Personal Savings Story post and submit 3-5 QUALITY photos to go along with them.

Send submissions via email to onehundreddollarsamonth @ gmail.com {remove the spaces} and be sure and put Personal Saving Stories in the subject line.

If I feature your pictures and the stories behind them on One Hundred Dollars a Month, I will send you a $20.00 gift card to the greatest store in the world: Amazon.com. It’s that easy.