5 Important Frugal Tips for 2023 to Make Your Life Easier

1. Trying new recipes

The first thing that we're going to do is to try some new things with home cooking. We are also going to try making our tortillas. Tortillas are pretty expensive, especially gluten-free.

My husband is gluten-free. I'm also going to try to start making my coffee creamer. So we're going to think more along that line. What can we make at home that we're purchasing? I'm trying to make things at home instead of buying ready-made products.

2. Use a heated blanket

My son got me a heated blanket throw for Christmas. I'm always cold. I'm in an office with many windows, and my house overall is a drafty old farmhouse.

We don't like to turn up the heat and use a lot of resources, so I'm going to use my heated blanket to keep me from turning up the heat. I will save some money that way.

3. Create a cellar

When I grew up, my grandma had a cellar, and so did my family. This property doesn't have one, so we are going to use our back bedroom as a cellar.

We don't heat it, so it's cold all the time. I've used that room as an actual refrigerator around the holidays when we've had extra food left over, and it's been about 35 degrees back there. Maybe this is something you could think about too.

I will start trying to stock up on things when I find them on sale here. I'm going to mainly look at carrots, potatoes, apples, and sweet potatoes. I'm going to start with some things like that if I can catch them on sale and bulk up.

Yes, it will get warm back there in the summer, but I've got several months left that I could stock up and use throughout the winter.

4. Eat out once a month

We already have it built into our budget to eat out once a month. That's all we eat out. We don't always eat out then, but I have it budgeted. I'm going to try to eat out when I have Fetch Rewards to get a restaurant gift certificate or a gift card through Fetch.

This year, everything's gone up, even in restaurants, because food costs have increased. I can't see spending much money this year on takeaway. We live an hour each way from the city, so eating out is something special that we do.

If I save up my Fetch points, then we can go out, and we don't have to pay anything to eat out.

5. Getting on the same page

Then the last tip I have is we're going to try to be more on the same page. My husband and I are already on the same page for the most part. I mean, we work hard together to keep things shut off, keep things unplugged, and use up leftovers.

All these different things are what we do to save money. We've switched the way we do many things, and he's been so adaptive. Cloth napkins, not using paper towels, and using bar soap instead of soft soap are some ways we've changed our habits over the last couple of years, and he's been super cooperative.

Even though he wasn't raised quite as frugally as I was because his parents are probably about 20 years younger than mine, he works to be frugal with me.

We had to call someone to repair a broken pipe around Christmas when we had COVID. We were shutting off our hot water, turning it back on when we needed it, and shutting it back off, and we could hear the water leaking.

We knew the leak in the pipe was getting bigger, but we couldn't have anybody come out because I was still pretty sick, and we didn't want them exposed. Once I was better, we had the plumber come out.

Before he came out, I was impressed with my husband's attitude toward saving money. My husband said we must be careful not to talk to the plumber while he's working because they charge by the hour. I agree that is very true.

I've thought of that before, but I was so happy for him to communicate that with me. I was happy to hear that he is totally into this frugality thing.

So anytime one of us started to say anything chatty to the plumber, the other would give a little sign to quit talking, and we would quickly get out of the room and let him finish working. So just getting on the same page with your spouse or the people you live with is huge.

I know not everybody is always agreeable to everything you suggest, but if you can get them thinking that way and get them moving in that direction on some things, they'll get excited just like you and maybe even help you to come up with some other ideas.

Frugal tips for 2023

I hope these frugal tips for 2023 were helpful to you today. I get excited when I come up with new ideas for how to live more frugally. Share your frugal living tips in the comments below so we can live as frugally as possible while still enjoying our lives.