Our FI Nest

My current limbo has been dragging me down a bit. I'm trying to stay positive and keep myself productive so I can feel like I'm accomplishing something with my days and not wasting my time checking and rechecking various social media. Bonus most of these things are some frugal wins... Planted my garden this weekend. Hoping that these tiny plants will provide lots of fresh produce over the summer. Less frugal was having to buy some fencing to go around them as the bunnies have been eating all my plants. Spent $80 on the netting and stakes but should be able to use it again over the next couple years.  Planted lots of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce, green beans, carrots and beets. I did go out and buy a few few seedlings ($30) after the plants I grew were looking pretty sad and wind battered. Getting creative with our leftovers instead of succumbing to the desire to get take out. Had some leftover spaghetti sauce and pulled chicken I'd made earlier in t...

Catching up on old projects. Made this one March 2018. My son loved this Spiderman T-shirt that had gotten too small and had a few holes. Most of his old clothes are passed on to his cousin, but I thought I could upcycle this one using the Vanguard Kit from Love Notions. It is perfect for panels and well, saving too small shirts. For the second colour I used this larger shirt I'd picked up at a second hand store. The shirt came together very quickly and easily. I used some better quality cotton lycra for the neckband and salvaged the cuffs from the orange shirt for the cuffs on the new ones. Bonus for using 2nd hand shirts? Didn't need to hem it as I kept the hem off the orange shirt. I love how the shirt came out, and was able to add some much needed long sleeves to my son's wardrobe. However, mental note for next time... he's refused to wear it because he doesn't like the seaming on the sleeves. Either I'll leave this off next time, or topstitc...

My husband has been bugging me to get some bar stools since we moved into our house. We sold our old ones with our house before moving cross-county so have been bar stool-less since moving in. Really it comes down to the fact that I haven't found any that I really love and I don't want to buy something just to fill the void. Much to my husband's chagrin, I noticed some neighbours put some stools out for large item pick up day I went and grabbed them (well after they sat there for a day or so because I was a little embarrassed to do so. I eventually got over it and got them before the truck came round). They were in rough shape and were obviously put out due to the cracking pealing fake leather. This got worse with time as it took me awhile to get around to making some covers. I finally did that this week. One of the things that makes my frugal and environmental soul sing is that I was able use fabric salvaged from hemming our curtains. I had about 12 inches that I cut off...

If your employer offers a health spending and wellness accounts, it's very tempting to make sure you have some money in the wellness account side so you can cash that money out for various sporting activities or other equipment that we love, however there is a better way to take advantage of that money. Any money that you put into the Wellness account is taxed at your marginal tax rate. So if you get $500 a year, you are going to pay at least $100 in taxes (likely more!). If you put it in your Health Spending Account (HSA) all that money remains tax free so you have access to the full $500. However there are more restrictions on what you can use that money on; it has to be medically related and on your insurance's approved list. One tip that I recently learned is that you can submit your payments for the insurance plan as Health Spending Account expenses, which allows you to get back all of that money tax free (unless of course you are one of the lucky ones that your employer...

I've always enjoyed cooking and have looked for ways to cut costs on our grocery bills. As time has gone on I've gone to greater extreems to save a few dollars, but it all adds up and doesn't really take that much extra time. Just planning. Baking Bread : Probably the most labour intensive, but gets a pretty good return and I quite like the taste. See my post for more details . Saves about $6/week Making Yogurt: I've been making homemade yogurt in my instant pot for about 2 years now. Saves about half the price of the cheapest yogurt I can find. I've been using "This Old Gal's" recipe. Costs about $5 (cost of 4 L of milk here) to make 4 Kg of yogurt (costing about $16 for plain store bought), or 3 kg of Greek yogurt ($11-12 at Costco). This saves roughly $8 per the two week period that the yogurt lasts us. Dried Beans instead of Canned : Since getting my instant pot this is so quick and can be done while I'm preparing the rest of dinner if...

My kids, like most kids are tough on their pants and usually put a hole or two in the knees before they out grow them. We had accumulated quite a few pairs, so in an effort to check a few easy projects off the to do list and to be ready for warmer weather (wishful thinking in the middle of a January deep freeze) I cut them off and hemmed them make a few bike shorts for my daughter to wear under her dresses and a pair of shorts (not shown in the before picture) for my son.   Ta-da!  5 pairs of shorts for my daughter and 1 for my son. Done is less than 30 minutes and a 1.5 m moved out of the stash ( I included these tasks/recycling projects as 0.25 m each in the stash to feel like I'm making a dent in it). Little less so as I added 3 m recenly for a couple sweater projects when I found some fabric I'd been lusting after and was suddenly 70% off. I'm trying to be mindful of any purchases I make to ensure that I'll really love what I make out of it and craft I w...

Last fall I started baking my own bread and realized it was actually pretty easy. I worked my way slowly into it, beginning by just dumping the ingredients into the bread machine. The bread was ok, but if this was going to become our main source of bread, I'd need to get a bit better at it. Then I started just using the dough function and baking the loaves in the oven. That improved the density of the bread (most of the time), but I was needing to bake twice a week to get the roughly 4 loaves my family goes through. Around the same time my bread machine broke, my stand mixer (a lower end model) did too, so I took advantage of a Costco sale on the KitchenAid Stand mixers and decided if I was going to spend $300 on an appliance I better use it for more than just cupcakes! I bought 2 more loaf pans and increased my recipe a bit so I could get away with making bread just once a week. Since then I've challenged myself to not buy bread and have been curious how much it saves on...

It's cold season over here and we've been going through Kleenex like mad. I had previously sewn up some flannel scraps to use as re-usuable tissues but many seem to have disappeared over the years. Using some leftover fabric from some PJs I made my eldest I made about 30 mini-hankerchiefs. This definitely isn't huge savings or a big environmental win, but little things can add up. The other things that make me happy about this: Kids are excited to blow their nose now and run off to grab one from the drawer. They are much softer than Kleenex so less nose irritation Reduce the waste from the leftovers and reduce some disposible products in our life My favourite benefit is fewer (hopefully none) kleenex going through the wash and disintegrating into a million little pieces. If these get forgotten, I just pull them out and put them in the dirty laundry pile to re-wash properly.  The mini-hankies and small amount of leftover waste.  Stash busting notes :  0.5...