Steph's Weekly Low Buy Spending Recap #17
If you've had a rough week, this one is for you ❤️
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Hello there! How are you holding up?
I’ve had quite the week, but it turns out I haven’t been the only one if other comments on social media are anything to go by!
Between dealing with a virus and some less than cheerful moments in my personal life, I’ve been feeling a bit down in the dumps. It’s so easy in those moments to get really isolated in your mind and feel like you’re the only person going through it.
But I think a lot of people at the moment are really feeling some heavy feelings, especially with everything that’s going on in the world a large at the moment. It’s a heavy time to be a human!
As usual, this post is just too full of goodness for email, so make sure you click above and head to the app/website to read to its full potential!
Before we get into everything that we spent this week, I just want to take a second to remind you that it’s okay to be human. It’s okay to have feelings, and for those feelings to be complicated or difficult.
Be kind and gentle with yourself! Try and focus on the things that truly make you feel better as a human. It’s easy during times like this to get lost in doom scrolling especially, which ironically really makes things worse when the new cycles are extra scary and intense like they are at the moment. It’s easy to overspend without any thought, it’s easy to try and grasp at metaphorical straws to find some kind of way to feel less heavy and less sad.
Those feelings are so valid and makes so much sense, I just want to be a gentle voice to remind you that any happy feelings that you buy (through impulse purchasing and doom scrolling)… Those feelings don’t tend to last very long. But there are things that you can still do in your life, like spending more time with friends or getting outside for a walk, or listening to some music that makes you really happy… Those things tend to contribute to your positive feelings tank in a lasting way!
But also, if you do end up perhaps scrolling more than you would like to or spending more than you really meant to, don’t let yourself sit in guilt. Perhaps, if you have the mental capacity, take a second to acknowledge or figure out where that blip of spending/scrolling came from, but don’t dwell on that and let yourself sit and shame. We’re all human and we’re all doing our best. Tomorrow is another day and next week is a completely new week and life keeps going. Nothing is ever really as urgent as it feels, and most things aren’t as permanent as they feel either.
Our spending was quite boring this week - nothing wrong with that though. I guess that’s the bonus of not feeling very well, I don’t tend to spend much other than possibly a little bit more on vitamins and health related things than I usually would!
Thank goodness for acupuncture! It definitely helped me feel a little bit better this week. I also had my Amazon subscription for my hair dye come out today, the price fluctuates but it’s really cheap at the moment which is a bonus! A grand total of $12.59 spent to dye my hair… Not bad at all!
If you’re curious, I use the mango copper colour from L’Oreal and I love it, I also like that it comes with the conditioner because it means that I saved a little bit of money in conditioner but also I find the conditioner makes my hair feel great as well!
This week is our final week of our Coles four weeks spend and honestly, I’m kind of glad it’s over! It’s been a really good eye-opening few weeks. I’ve been getting my groceries delivered all of this year and while I was fairly sure it was making a positive difference in my life, it’s always nice to have that really solidified. Going in store and needing to go to multiple stores to get groceries over the last few weeks has highlighted to me just how valuable having that extra time back from going in store to the groceries has been this year. Well worth the $15 a month membership fee to get my groceries delivered every week from Woolworths! I’m happily going back to that this coming week.
As we did last week, we spent a little bit extra this week to continue to build our stock pile. We’re not spending drastically over our budget, usually we were spending roughly $130 a week on groceries and this week we spent around $220 in total. So definitely an increase, but not too drastic. I think I’ll be starting to lower this back down again soon, because my goal with this has always just been to get a good stock pile behind us and then continue on our usual habits.
You can check out my grocery haul below!
We got our car serviced this day! Thankfully (especially at times like this) we don’t drive a lot, we only do around 10,000 km a year if that. We also drive a really affordable car (by design of course) so our service costs and fuel costs tend to be quite minimal compared to most people. We paid a grand total of $255.20 for our car service, which was just for a basic oil change style service. We go to this little hole in the wall place that isn’t even listed on Google, but they’re so good they’re booked out five months in advance. 🤣
The head mechanic there is an absolute legend - even though my windshield wipers are a little bit noisy he didn’t replace them because they’re still clearing the windshield just fine from a safety perspective and they cost $100 to replace. He told me on the phone that he went with not replacing them this time because of the cost, but if I do want to replace them, obviously I can just go and do that. He’s always a good one for not getting customers to spend more than they need to.
As I mentioned earlier, I have definitely been having a bit of an average week mental health wise though and I’ve found that my autism has been… More obvious than usual? My symptoms have been stronger than usual? Honestly I don’t really know the verbiage here… If you’re new here or haven’t seen me mention it before I got diagnosed last year. Obviously I’ve been experiencing symptoms all my life, and now I’m learning the words to describe it all. But either way, one of my big symptoms revolves around food. We had leftovers available for dinner this night but I just could not stomach the idea of them, and one of the only things that sounded good to me for some strange reason was KFC. I say some strange reason… It’s absolutely because I was presented with a KFC ad when scrolling social media and I’m very open to suggestion when it comes to those kinds of things. 😅
Anyway, we’ve really been doing very well in the takeaway department recently so I didn’t feel bad getting KFC. They have their large snack packs available at the moment so we only spent $13.90 for the two of us for dinner.
I’ve also been eyeing off fussy deodorant for quite a while and finally pulled the trigger on that!
If you haven’t heard of fussy deodorant they are a refillable deodorant company similar to wild, but they - unlike Wild - haven’t been bought out by Unilever and their ingredients are 100% natural. I also just like the aesthetics better, the case is more of a pebble sort of shape and it’s just something that I prefer. I was very very pleasantly surprised and impressed that the international shipping was still only eight dollars! They have a limited edition spring case available at the moment (they rarely do special edition cases) and that was enough to make me finally pull the trigger. I’ll give you a review when I have tried it out, but I’m fairly confident that I’m gonna be happy with this purchase.
We like to host games nights every month or two, and this day was game night… Day. Wow, what a sentence. There was a couple of things that we forgot to get at the grocery store, or weren’t able to get because of stock issues, so we went and did that and I’m really glad we did because we decided to do some sausages on the barbecue for a cheap dinner for everyone, and if we hadn’t gone and gotten another packet earlier in the day we definitely would have run out of food!
We finally had to bite the bullet and put fuel in the car. We decided to fill up before it gets more expensive… here’s hoping it doesn’t but there’s definitely a chance. Again, shout out to our car being a really affordable car! Even with the crazy prices and with less than a quarter of a tank of fuel to start with, we still managed to get away with only spending $94.51 on fuel. Thankfully, my husband Matt has an electric scooter and gets the train in to work so between those two things I think we’ll be able to avoid too much driving around. The only real driving that we do is if we go somewhere on the weekend, or when I have acupuncture appointments. Even as far as errands in the nearby area goes, Matt can always use his electric scooter if he needs to. Or I suppose I could… I don’t know how well that would go though. 🤣
I also finally reorganised our pantry this week and we needed a couple containers so we popped into Kmart to get those. I also have a collaboration I’m working on for my short form content that required me to head in store and make some purchases so we did that as well. That will mostly be covered as part of the fees for that collaboration but for the moment it’s something I paid for so I included it in the spending tracker for the week!
And there we have it, another week has come to an end and with it we are basically at the end of March!
The sun is setting earlier and the weather is finally cooling down more consistently. While the world is definitely quite up in the air at the moment, I’m still personally breathing a little bit of a sigh of relief even just because of those things.
Obviously, I’m writing this on Monday and so a new week has already started and I’m really excited to write next week’s post already just based on what’s happened today! We’ve hit a milestone today that I will tell you about next week, bring your party hats because I’m definitely celebrating!
I hope wherever you are in the world that you’re doing okay. And if you’re feeling a bit down, I hope you’re able to find something that can bring a smile to your face or cheer you up a little bit.
In case you’re struggling with that, here is a really funny video I like to revisit when I need a laugh!
If you’ve got a favourite funny video you’d like to share, please do put it in the comments! I think we need funny videos and cat memes now more than ever.
On that note, I’m actually even considering doing a “live like it’s 2002“ type challenge with Matt. As much as going analog has been a trend that’s had a lot of varied opinions around it, I do think it can be eye-opening to lessen our screen use… But not only that, it feels like a fun way to mix things up and make life feel a bit different and new and fresh without spending much money. I’m pretty sure we even have a couple of iPod nanos somewhere that I might try and dig out and revive. Fun fact, I actually washed one of my iPod nanos in the washing machine when I was a teenager and it just kept on working… They really don’t make technology like they used to. 🤣
I’ll also take this moment to wish you a happy April ahead! I’m looking forward to this month, we’re going to Mumford & Sons and it’s my husband‘s birthday so he’ll be taking some time off and we have some family coming to visit as well so lots of things to look forward to. What are you looking forward to this month?
As always, thank you so much for reading and being here in this little corner of the Internet that I call my own. I’ll see you next week!
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I haven't used Wild for about a year now because I forgot to buy refills and then it was just easier to go back to the supermarket... but they've been bought by Unilever?! Ugh, yeah, no thanks. I'll check out Fussy!