January recap

I’ve been taking January off from some of my usual habits. I’ve said “no” to a lot of family/ friend get-togethers, put very little effort into promoting my etsy businesses, and have done zero craiglisting/ ebaying or other methods of selling off our outgrown kids stuff and other junk. In turn, I’ve made zero dollars from my side businesses/ selling stuff off. I was worried that without the extra bit of income we would be in a really tight place this month. However, I discovered that my time was more valuable spent in the home reducing how much we spend, particularly in the food department.

The biggest reduction in our food expenses came from a food prep day at the beginning of the month when I put together 16 slow-cooker freezer recipes from the 5-dollar dinner mom Costco Plan. It didn’t go as smoothly as I had envisioned, I’ll write another post about the experience, but it was awesome having half of the months dinners already assembled. Also, the recipes were each for 4 portions and since the boys are still small enough to share a portion, there was always a leftover serving for me to take to work.

I also started batch assembling breakfast sandwiches and freezing them so I could have easy breakfast on the go as I run out the door each morning. By doing the food prepping I essentially eliminated the need to get take-out this month which has always been a part of our budget that I knew was excessive.

Aside from freeing up my time to allow more for food prepping, I found that I was a lot less stressed out and in general made more thoughtful choices on where/ how much to spend. I had more time to think about where and when purchases needed to be made. I also found that with more time spent doing things that benefitted me, like sewing my own projects instead of things for other people, I felt less inclined to make splurge purchases with the “I deserve this” mentality.

Bottom line, I think I’m going to carry the attitude forward into February. I need to spend some serious thought exploring how much of my valuable time gets spent on my side businesses, this blog, and all the other things I heap on my to-do list. Hopefully another month of being a homebody and doing some inward focusing well offer some clarity on the rest of the stuff I try to tackle.