My Best Summer Saving Tips • Kath Eats

Stressed by summer expenses? I’m sharing my tried and true summer savings tips to help keep your finances from dwindling.

As we prepared for our home renovation, the theme this year (and actually most of last year) was “try not to spend unnecessary dollars.” While we didn’t want or need to reduce our lifestyle to zero, the goal was to maximize dollars for the renovation, a reserve budget in case we went overboard, and a few things we’ll need to buy eventually (electric blinds are $$! ).

Have we still traveled? YEAH. Thanks to the wonderful world of travel rewards. And of course I find the occasional date night or concert necessary for mental health/marriage building reasons.

Here are some of my summer savings tips, followed by ways we’ve cut costs during our renovation.

My best tips for saving in the summer

1. Make a plan for every dollar

I consider myself a PhD level budgeter!!! i love to wear YNAB to manage our money. (Here’s a blog post I did about it.) My brother-in-law and I have regular talks about YNAB and budgets. And if you want to geek at the highest level, listen to the Budget Nerds Podcast (It’s put on by the YNAB employees who make me laugh at how nerdy we all are).

Using budgeting software makes me feel super organized and give every dollar at work. I also manage all the invoices we have to pay related to the renovation through YNAB, so it has also been easy to keep track of where the money is going for the subcontractors.

2. Summer expenses prorated throughout the year

In the summer we always have our summer pool payment, a trip to the beach that I can’t use the travel rewards for, and summer camps for the kids. Prorating summer expenses has really helped me even out my months. I apportion all from our annual auto and liability insurance to birthday and Christmas season categories. Divide the annual costs by 12 months, and then set aside that amount each month so you never have unexpected expenses.

3. Learn to travel for free

Summer is the travel season! I’ve shared our travel rewards credit card strategy and have an email course if you want to learn to start. When we visited the Inn at Willow Grove last month, I paid for it with our Capital One Venture X card and then used the points I had there to wipe out almost the entire stay. If you could turn a $350 hotel stay into a $100 one, that’s the best of luxury living and saving money all rolled into one.

4. Pick your own fruit!

sponsored segment

My friend Larissa has a cherry tree in her front yard that was FULL of fresh cherries! I went one night and she cut a branch for me, and I picked 100 cherries. We have been eating them like crazy! I was a bit worried about Birch and the pits, but he just eats around them.

aquapure He sent me his product purifier which not only cleans his products but also makes them last longer. These cherries were the perfect fruit to try it on! Add a pinch of salt and soak the device in water with your fresh produce, and it will naturally kill up to 99% of pesticides and bacteria in your food, making it safer and helping it last longer in the fridge. If you choose a lot in summer, check it out. here!

5. Commercial Services

A great way to save money is to trade services with a friend or neighbor. If you travel a lot, trading pet care with neighbors can save you both hundreds of dollars. My parents traded cat sitters with our neighbor Susan for decades. There are so many creative ways to trade your skills with others, we should all do this more! (Share if you make any exchanges in the comments).

And if trading isn’t an option, maybe there are ways to change your habits so you at least pay less for the things you already use (like why I joined Beautycounter to save 25% on my skincare!) fur!).

• Beautycounter just launched a 20% discount sitewide sale todayso it’s a good week to stock up and save $$! Another way to save money is to add the rewards program for $10 and you will get free shipping and a free full-size welcome gift!

How we have reduced costs during our home renovation

1. Pay yourself

One advantage of doing our renewal is that we can put many of the expenses on credit cards (which we pay in full each month with the high-interest money market that holds our reindeer funds). This means we’re racking up a lot of points right now! While we have taken a few small trips (like the Inn at Willow Grove) and have used travel rewards to help cover those costs, we won’t be doing any big trips in the near future.

So I’ve been using Chase’s Pay Yourself Back feature to get money back this summer. One of my business cards had a shipping promotion for 25% more return, and grocery stores and gas stations have been a category of Chase Sapphire. I have given us about $1500 in cash! If you want to know more about all this, get on my email list and/or enroll in the free travel app that will teach you a lot!

2. Moving = Lower Bills

One big benefit of moving out of our house is that our water, gas, and electric bills have been SO LOW! I didn’t even think about this until we started receiving them. A typical water bill in the summer is about $150 and last month it was $28. That’s a nice saving!

3. We paused our Peloton membership

This is a small but not insignificant ~$150 savings for the 3 month break I took. I miss riding the Peloton so much, but that room is too messy and chaotic to ride right now. We didn’t even have electricity in the house for a while.

4. We sold things

I’m still using some of the cash we received from the sale of our old gas range and hood, and the $250 worth of copper pipe Thomas found in our old kitchen ceiling and sold at the junkyard. I love that our kitchen has paid for a nanny’s time 🙂

5. We have modified our meal plan

I have looked through the meal kits to take advantage of some of the promotions they have for $100-200 in free meals. I’ve done Hello Fresh, Home Chef and a repeat blue apron. We also reduced our meals per week from 3 to 2 to save a little money. I’m still doing a “cook once, eat twice” cadence, but we’re planning a super easy, inexpensive, kid-friendly meal as our third cookout of the week.

6. We enroll in fewer kids’ camps

Every week we don’t do camp we save almost $1,000. That’s a little hard to believe! My kids will be home the week of the 4th of July (because their camps never happen on the 4th anyway), so we’ll have a week of family fun that week. And we’re not going to do any August camp either because we’re staying with my parents for two weeks! Thanks to mom and dad for being unofficial camp counselors with me 🙂

August’s vacation

Speaking of not taking care of children, I am planning to take the month of August off! I’ll share more about this in a post in July, but with our trips to North Carolina, moving out of our rental, moving into our new house, and no childcare for the month, I’m going to be taking my first year off. in 16 years of blogging!! It’s going to be a crazy 6 weeks, and when I thought about how I would fit into normal work with the kids at home and the move, I realized that I should stop producing anything new until the dust settles, literally! So stay tuned for announcements related to that!

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