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...

Prior to leaving on our trip to Mexico I realized we had way too much food to eat in time. As one of my frugal goals this year has been to keep our food costs down I didn't want to waste a bunch before leaving. We were only going for a week so I could have chanced it and most of it probably would have been ok when we got back, but instead I got to doing a bit of batch freezer cooking to preserve the food.  Part of the problem was also taking out some meat I'd planned to cook for dinner, but we had car troubles that day so were were running around getting that sorted out and by the time we go home, everyone was starving. So I didn't end up making the sweet and sour pork I'd planned and ended up with ham and veggie omlette. With only 1 meal left to prepare for the week my fridge looked like this: One of the sour cream containers contained some chicken broth made the day before with left over chicken bones and the other home made yogurt. The cardboard box had som...

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...

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...