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Think back this week.

Have your “Wants” driven your buying choices?

One of the reasons I love living an “80% off Lifestyle” is that the day to day, intentional financial choices that we make, eventually leaves room in the budget to splurge on a “want” now and then. But that means Splurge once every dollar has been given a job. 

My 5 Frugal Things series is a very unedited, this is how I do life, glimpse into small daily choices. Every day I have things like this to share, but I rarely get them up on the blog. I’ve included my periscope (live video streaming app for phone – find me at @beautyandbedlam) from a few weeks ago where I talk through all of these five things in detail and take you into my family room. 🙂

And because it’s live video where I interact with people and talk back and forth, it’s a very “Real life” feel. It become very “live” when I can’t remember a quote I share ALL the time and had a complete brain freeze, but you’ll have to watch it to experience it. 😉

Here are my 5 Frugal Things (and I can’t wait to read yours in the comments): 

  1. Get out your crockpot

Our food budget is the #1 way we can slash money from our budget (even without cutting a coupon). I’ve written about it endlessly over the last many years and you can browse my category for ideas.

When our busy schedules invade the rest of life, then the crockpot is the way to go because we can dump and forget about it; meaning some great frugal meals for the week and avoiding the drive through.

Start with this Easy BBQ Chicken in the crockpot and have three varying meals from this one recipe.

       2. Simple Make Up Tip

I believe in investing in some good skin care and a few quality make up products, but sometimes the Dollar Store does the trick. I love playing with color and products on my eyes and lips, but a lot of money can be lost when you try it and it just doesn’t work with your skin tone. (Do you know the colors for your skin tone? It’s really important!)

Often, I buy $1 – 2 lipsticks and eye shadows at the dollar store or drug store to find shades I like before I want to invest in a better quality product. What I’ve found is that if I use a good primer on my eye lids, then typically I can get away with a cheaper eye shadow. Same with lipstick. Dab a bit of primer or foundation on your lips first and it will extend the wear time by hours. Now I am about to splurge on some great eye shadow. I’ll let you know if I love it with the higher price tag.

I found this older posts that still stands true: Beauty Tips: Beautiful Eye Make Up for Less.

Frugal Make Up Ideas

      3. Buy a Hair Clippers

I’ll have to write a whole post on this, but we have saved thousands of dollars over the years by cutting our kids hair ourselves. My husband also gets his hair cut at home. With You Tube, you can learn all the tips to give boys stylish cuts and that may sound so scary, but if you start when they’re young, you can get any mistakes out of the way when they won’t remember it. haha

For ladies, investing in ourself with a great cut and color is a gift that you should give yourself, but there are other ways to save money too.

Hair Cut

Here is a very unedited, I never planned on posting this here, picture of two days ago (Don’t tell these two. They never read my blog anyhow ;)). Our 18 year old son has been growing his hair out for awhile, but decided enough was enough and he trusted his sister to completely give him a short, styled cut. She did an amazing job!! (And just a glimpse of our messy, wall paper half torn off the walls master bathroom just to make you all feel better about yours. ;))

     4. Buy ahead at thrift stores for Holiday Decor and repurpose

There is a lot of the traditional fall decor you can find second hand, but if you want to go with the neutral pallet that is popular right now, start painting those pumpkins. Did you see what I did with these ugly 25 cent plastic pumpkins?

Ugly pumpkin before

Click through to see the AFTER HERE, it’s amazing what you can do with a little paint.

     5. Table cloth Hack and my fall decor and mantle

I aways buy gorgeous linens and tablecloths second hand. For the holiday ones, I might buy them the during the day after sale when things are marked to 50%, but then you’re at the mercy of the sizes that are left over.

Whenever I have tablecloths that are too large, I solve that dilemma by gathering up each corner into a “puff” and then wrapping a rubber band around it to make it decorative. It always looks classy and allows me to use all kind of discounted tablecloths that didn’t really fit our exact table dimensions. You can see what I am talking about on the video.

I’ll get some pictures up of my mantel. It’s very festive in a traditional look and it was created around the little “Barbie” bunting our daughter made.

So, those are the five things I did today.

What did you do this week to save you money?

I LOVE hearing everyone’s ideas. It just encourages us all on the journey of small, day to day choices that make a big difference in the long run.

Watch the video below. If you can’t see it, you will need to click through to the blog to watch.