Stretching our dollars

Part of being able to build a house, especially when trying to be as debt-free as possible, is either making a lot of money or else being able to stretch the dollars that you have. Rachel is stretching our dollars and she has surprised me with the extent of her success.

Without even a lot of experience at it, on her first attempt, we saved over 60% on a visit to the grocery store. On a second trip to the store, just to buy a few things, I didn't pay attention to what her savings would be, and just pulled my credit card out to pay when we reached the cashier. The cashier looked at me funny, and then ran the charge. The charge was for something like $2.75. We had around $30 of stuff that we were buying, and I didn't realize how much savings we had. And this wasn't even counting some of the rebates on items we purchased.

We've had times where we bought items that in the end, we were getting paid about a dollar to walk out of the store with the item. This is really a good thing. It's stretching our dollars on things that we were going to buy anyway, leaving these dollars to purchase other things that we need.

We usually watch our budget and are careful not to get crazy eating out very often. We don't want to get in the mode of wasting money the way we did a few years ago. We do work hard and need to treat ourselves from time to time, so when we go out to eat, we order one of the huge meals, and then split it between the two of us. It ends up being more than enough food, and we are buying one meal instead of two. So we treat ourselves, but we are limiting our spending.
The big savings on eating out though, is in drinking water instead of tea or soda. It's amazing how you don't realize that they are charging close to 2 bucks on a drink, when you're just as well off having water for free.

So we're budgeting ourselves, but not killing ourselves in the process. We feel that this savings is helping us to have a little extra money for the tools and/or materials we need in building the house.