5 easy ways to save money

July is the time when the hubby and I look over our finances and see what we need to change.  It just works best for us to do this in July, because that's the beginning of his fiscal year and so there's usually an increase to our income.  While crunching the numbers this year we wanted to try and save a little more than what we were, we just decided that we could do a little more to save some pennies. Here are a few things that we decided to do, that are really simple, and could be something that may help you too.

1. handwashing vs. running the dishwasher
While I hate to admit it, the dishwasher definitely uses more water than hand washing.  Now ours isn't super new, but it still has some ways to conserve on the water it uses, but that's still no match for hand washing.  I only know it uses more water, because we noticed our water bill increased in the last year and this last year I started using the dishwasher again as opposed to hand washing.  It really came down to convenience while doing daycare, but if I want to save some money this is one place to start.  Now, I have to say I only ever used it once a day, that was my limit, but even that added up, so if you're one that uses it 2x a day or even after each meal, try and conserve by skipping one time and see how much it saves next month's water bill.

2. turn temp up (in the summer) turn temp down (in the winter)
Both my husband and I love to have the windows open whenever we can. Not only because it conserves energy, but because we like the fresh air.  Unfortunately we don't live in a climate that allows us to have them open all year long (is there such a climate?), so the times we do need to run the heat or air we try to keep it at a constant rather than open windows and then make it work hard to get the temp back up or down at the end of the day.  With that we just turned the air up a couple degrees and the heat down a couple degrees.  It's amazing what a couple degrees can do. You can always start with just 1 degree and work your way up or down to the desired temp over time.

3. Cable/Netflix/Amazon Prime/Hulu
I don't know about your family, but awhile back we switched from cable to Netflix.  That was a big savings switch which was nice, I mean we didn't really watch TV as much after our first was born and so we figured why pay for the 1-2 hours we watched a week.  Recently, we realized that most of the shows we watch on Netflix, with exception of a couple, we own on DVD's, or we can check out at the library.  Now again we don't do the movie part of Netflix, so we're talking about 8.00/month, but take that and add it to the 2-3 dollars/month your saving on water, plus the $1.00/month for temp (these are all speculating) that's starting to add up. And if you have more than one of the show options that can be more savings.  Eliminating Amazon Prime and Netflix together save about $18.00/month alone.   

4. Turn off or unplug electronics/lights when not in use
While I feel we do a pretty good job of keeping lights off we don't use towards the evening or while we're away from the house, we can do better while we're at home during the day.  We also realized we have our printer on all the time.  Talk about wasteful energy and money.  Are there electronics in your house that are just constantly on due to convenience?

5. Showering every other day
Now this one might not be everyone's cup of tea, but you could start alternating shower days as opposed to taking one every day.  Want to still shower every day, but save some water, you could take the Suave's challenge I wrote about a while back.  Turn the water off while you shampoo and condition, it's just minutes, but again every little thing adds up. You can read the full post here.  Something you could do for the kiddos is use less bath water, baths are getting larger, but that means using more water, we've never filled the tub full for the girls, but they still don't even need it halfway.

Those are just 5 easy ways to can start saving some pennies around the house, and remember those pennies start to add up!  

How are ways you save around the house?  I'd love to hear some ideas!