Tips and Tricks on Saving Money – Lisa From Tasmania’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 rock our budgets this year.

~Mavis

This week we are featuring our old friend, Lisa from Tasmania! You’re going to love hearing about all the ways she saves:

Hello! Saving money is great! Not to necessarily to squirrel it away – but to spend it in other more fun areas – like travel!

We (husband, Jeff, and myself) are not the conventional family. No kids, one cat, ten chickens.

We used to live in Canberra (Capital of Australia) where my husband worked as an RN and I ran a retail business. We moved to Tasmania 4 years ago to slow down and try to live a more simple lifestyle, even though we are not of retiring age (both mid 40’s). I didn’t take up a normal paid job and Jeff works part time nights at the local private hospital. AND we took on our first mortgage. Mad?

Not really…our mortgage was barely more than the rent we paid in Canberra, we cut down from two cars to one – not to mention the registration costs were less in this state – and we started putting in a garden for food, and chickens for eggs and a few extra $ in egg sales.

Lots of learning curves and a lot of fun trying new ways to save and entertain ourselves on the cheap.

How do we keep our food budget in check? I confess I don’t have a formal budget. But I am fairly careful about where the money goes at the supermarket. (Bulk specials and such) We take advantage of the local supermarket reward system by swiping a loyalty card each time we shop. The points are tallied at the end of the year and we get about $50 in vouchers to spend at Christmas which is a nice bonus for doing nothing more than shopping where I would have shopped anyway!

Never buy laundry liquid or powder. Make it and other cleaners!

Find substitutes – For example – I couldn’t find buttermilk recently and googled a substitute, (mix some lemon juice in normal milk) and found a much more cost effective product!

The other big saver is meat – if you can source buying a beast locally – do it! Even share with friends/family if you can’t take a whole beast at once. We bought a second, second-hand deep freezer for produce and meat. We just stocked up on beef by buying half a beast from a cousins property at less than $7 per kilo. Considering that here, the cheap cuts are around $12/kg in the supermarket its a massive saving. There is also a bonus saving if you have a pet – especially like a dog as you can get a heap of bones as part of it all!

A word of advice for novices to this – a lot of meat takes time to freeze properly. Do yourself a favour and take it back out after a day before its all fully frozen and separate to make life easier for yourself later. Otherwise it will be like us, earlier today at ‘amateur – hour’ with a hammer and big screwdriver chiseling all the lumps of meat apart! Total pain in the rear!!!

While it is a big outlay at once, you can plan for it. I make jams, relishes, and sauces from my garden produce and sell them at the local market. I do a little paid gardening work for Ruby. We sell our excess eggs. We occasionally take in paid guests. All this cash is set aside until we need something like the beef and then it is paid for out of what the property has produced, rather than Jeff’s wage.

And of course the garden. The garden is a huge supplement to our food budget. Going out to pick dinner is a wonderful thing as many of you know. Usually our potato harvest will last us 6 months. Eating in season. Swapping with family and locals. Every little bit helps.

Entertainment? We love the movies. Its expensive here – about $16.50 per show and a couple of dollars more for 3D. We have taken to buying books of ten tickets at once. That saves us $25 in one go. Also something as silly as keeping your 3D glasses will save you a couple of dollars extra per movie!

We have always taken advantage of our local area wherever we have lived. Our entertainment is more along the lines of hiking, exploring new areas, collecting rocks/shells/driftwood etc, gold panning (while we get lots of flakes we are still looking for a sizable nugget!)

There are often free events going on – you just have to take notice of what is going on in your local area.

There was a great weekend of music not so long ago called ‘The Acoustic Life of Sheds’ here, where people drove to several properties throughout the day to listen to different musicians perform in sheds! It was amazing, fun and FREE!

I am not qualified to advise anyone on any aspect of clothes – if you saw my haphazard way to bother dressing you would understand. The last piece of clothing I bought was 2 years ago – a pair of ¾ pants. So I am brilliant at a clothes budget savings, but wouldn’t apply to most normal people! 🙂

Line dry!! I know for some unfathomable reason this is not so easy in the States as someone, somewhere along the line decided that house prices would plummet in the area if you could see your neighbours knickers waving in the breeze. The excuse of “I don’t like the way clothes feel’ when they are line dried is also amazing to me. That we are so wealthy that we can squander precious money and energy to dry our clothes because of the way things look or feel is not one of our major achievements. (I do understand the convenience factor when you have a huge family of kids and a million socks and undies to dry – sanity can say – chuck them in the dryer!!)

Its a substantial savings on your energy bill – why not try it for a bill cycle and see how it goes? Its lovely standing out in the sun hanging clothes and it smells so good snuggling down to bed in fresh sun-dried sheets!

I have never had a dryer and used either the line outside or a clothes rack in front of whatever heating device we are using. There are actually very few times when a dryer would have been truly handy, so we don’t miss that convenience, and benefit from not having to spend the money on either the machine or the running costs.

And while on the subject of the sun – think about solar energy. Our bills have dropped considerably and I like using less coal based energy.

Another energy based idea that most of you are going to hate is stop-start showers. To be honest it is tedious but when you are at a point where every $ counts, its not a bad idea. We had to have them over the summer period as we have been on extremely limited tank water so conserving water has been high on our list. We turn on the water to get nice and soppy wet, turn it off, soap up, wash hair and all the other bits, then rinse off. I may turn the water off and on a few times – as I said – a bit tedious but I noticed a significant drop in the hot water part of our bill during that time. So we were saving water AND energy costs AND keeping nice and clean! 🙂

Since our move to Tasmania we have had scores of friends, family and travellers come and stay with us. (looking though our guest book, its over 50 guests not including multiple visits from some people! Time to install that revolving door!!) Mostly people get fed out of the garden produce and sent home again with home made sauces/jams as a memento! We have beautiful local areas so we don’t need to spend a lot of money on entertaining guests.

Some of our travellers earn their keep by working in the garden and kitchen, and some pay a few dollars for accommodation and sightseeing. This has worked really well… making the property earn money for us. There are various online options now like AirBnB and WWOOFing. We haven’t had to officially join any organization yet, but its a thought if we ever run out of guests! 🙂

To vacation or not?? Definitely take that holiday! (I know a great place in Tasmania to go to!! haha) Unless you have a large income you need to accept you cannot do everything all at once. Decide what is important to you and work towards it. Travel expands your world! You learn new things and meet amazing people.

Our most recent trip was a 4 week backpacking holiday around Japan. We spent 2 years saving – had an account aside to put a bit in every payday that was strictly left untouched. We got our flights for less than $1500 (for the both of us return!!) and had $5000 spending money to get us around. With planning we managed very comfortably on our budget, had a completely brilliant time and came home owing nothing.

Making extra dollars – it hasn’t been too hard to sell excess produce for me. We have local markets often on the go and people love to buy fresh fruit and veggies as well as home made jams, sauces and relishes. (Buying at local markets will also save you $$)

If you have a craft (I knit) you can add those things to the stall for extra $$ and all these items make excellent presents instead of going to the shop to buy more ‘stuff’.

I guess it depends on where you are, but I generally make around $150 at a market – not a bad trade off for a Sunday sleep in. The market before Christmas I raked in $260 which was a bit more exciting!! OK – its not high finance, but it certainly helps!

If you can get chickens, they pay their own way in eggs and recycle scraps into poo for your garden. Keep aside all money you get from the egg sales and use it for something special – We have had between 6 and 12 chickens over the last 4 years. We sell our spare eggs for $4/doz. I put those coins aside for 2 years and then used the approx $800 to put screens and screen doors on our home! Its amazing how the little bits add up.

Also now you may have noticed “Online Parties” that run through Facebook. My friend became a consultant for a business that sell necklaces and charms so I did a three day party as a host to help her and was pretty amazed at how easy it was and because a few people liked and bought the products I was lucky enough to be rewarded with over $100 of shopping value, to which I managed to secure Christmas and Birthday presents… all for just three days of interacting with friends on Facebook. Dead easy! (and FREE)

Recycle, reuse. Jars, containers, bottles. If you are busy in a garden or even just starting one – keep these things, don’t buy new! And fix things where possible.

Save seeds, let plants self seed and grow plants from cuttings. Its so easy and saves a bundle.

This season I bought one tomato from a ‘real’ shop (for about $3) and used the laterals to grow about 6 more. Two other tomato plants I bought from the markets for a grand total of $2.50. I have also transplanted tomatoes that have just sprung up here and there. I now have over 20 well established tomato plants growing!! Very frugal.

Try to do things yourself. As Mavis says, goods and services drive our countries, but sometimes taking the plunge and going DIY is going to be much kinder on your wallet.

We have a large upstairs room that is a great space, but was an empty shell. I got a quote to line each side of the room with cupboards and nearly fell over when the price came back at $6000!!! So finally we got brave, went to the local hardware shop, picked up boards, drew some plans and got into it. Okay – maybe it’s not professional level, or display home worthy, but it does the job nicely and at only $800 in materials it was a massive savings on the quote we got! We just get in and try things ourselves and figure if we REALLY stuff something up, then we will call the professionals!

Pallets are another great thing you can pick up cheap or free and turn into all manner of useful items. Pinterest is your friend here!

Jeff has made me tables for the hothouse and a wood storage box, as well as our compost bin. The pallets that are too far gone are used for kindling, and we have a couple propped up against the back fence so we can safely scramble over the barbed wire!

Aaaand if you’re not too proud you can pick up some really great bargains at the local tip (dump) to use, especially if you have a working property and you like making stuff!

Five things I do without?

Mobile phone (just no need for us and our lifestyle. When we are out we don’t want to be on the phone. There is just no point for us to spend the money on them. So far we haven’t missed them)
Dryer (For all above reasons)
Hairdressers (I trim my own hair when I think its necessary – Jeff shaves his head. Its quite a savings and we don’t look too tragic!!)
Eating Out (We are not very close to lots of restaurants and the budget says its one good way to save. We do eat out, but rarely so its a real treat when we do)
Pay TV (We have several free-to-air channels but we generally make use of our DVD collection so we watch what we want, when we want. Essential with a shift worker. We are not huge TV fans anyway, but will buy series that take our fancy to enjoy watching at our leisure.)

Well I hope someone somewhere finds some of that useful!

Grow food, save money, live healthy!

Cheers Lisa 🙂

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