Steph's Weekly Low Buy Spending Recap #16

2013 called and I am answering!

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Previous recaps: #1 | #2 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10 | #11 | #12 | #13 | #14 | #15

What a week!

Weeks like this make me chuckle because they look so expensive on paper, but the behind-the-scenes reality is that I spent most of this week laid out on the couch or in bed 😅

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, and if you’re just finding me through this post you definitely won’t know, but I’ve been dealing with various chronic illness issues for over 15 years. This past week I had a bit of a flareup, both in crippling fatigue and also pain… I guess that’s one way to save money, sort of?

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!

That said, this is why I think it’s so important to have low-key interests! Not that all of your interests need to be low-key, but you never know what your capacity is going to be and how even the outside world and what’s going on around us can affect our capacity.

Having interests and hobbies that you can engage with at home, that don’t cost a lot or don’t require a lot of supplies, and also they don’t require a lot of energy… Well I think that’s at least the bread-and-butter of dealing with chronic illness while not losing your mind 😅 It means that on weeks like this I can still look back and pick out good bits and things I enjoyed!

Also…. remember my dilemma from last week? I’M GOING!!!! AND I’M EXCITED!!!! More on that further down.

she’s a little messy this week but we’re still here

Tuesday was definitely the day that was responsible for making our total weekly spend look a lot more astronomical than it actually was. We paid rent! At least all the time I spent at home this week meant that I was definitely making good use of our rent money 🤣

I also want to share a bit of a cautionary tale with you!

My husband has an electric scooter that he uses to get to and from train stations to get to work, it’s been an absolute godsend and I actually really highly recommend electric scooters as a transport investment. It’s actually faster for him to use his electric scooter to ride to our local train station rather than to drive by car, but the electric scooter is significantly cheaper to own and maintain.

However! He does work in the city and while his actual workplace is very secure, if he needs to go anywhere on the way home he has to lock his scooter up out the front. He’s had the scooter for over a year now with no issues, but on Tuesday we discovered that not all bike looks are as secure as they look! It turns out that these types of bike clocks pictured below that have the wire inside it are actually incredibly easy to cut through.

Thankfully, Matt came back out from the store that he was in very quickly and caught the thief in the act and was able to prevent his scooter from actually being stolen - also a shoutout to Segway Ninebot scooters - some have a feature on them that locks the scooter to the app, so it can’t actually be turned on without the app and code. It’s a great feature!

So, we spent just under $30 buying a new bike lock and we went with a really heavy duty chain one. It’s a little on the heavy side as far as a bike lock goes, but it seems to be the least likely to be broken into.

I spent most of the day on the couch like I mentioned earlier, but Matt and I finally made the trip to Costco on Wednesday evening! We’ve been procrastinating going to Costco basically for the entirety of this year, so we were well overdue. Usually we buy some everyday basics there and only there, and usually we spend about $100-$150 per Costco trip, but this time we spent significantly more!

I’ve been talking a little bit more about this on my YouTube channel, but we are working on getting our stock file looking a lot more healthy again. We started stock piling around five or six years ago, nothing hugely crazy just having a couple extra of things put by, but with everything that is happening in the world right now and with the potential for prices to rise at least temporarily, I wanted to finally get a lot more intentional about it again. This is something again that I’ve been putting off doing for quite a while, and wasn’t really going to do last year when we knew we would be moving.

So we spent $424.99 at Costco! I’ll be uploading a haul to my YouTube channel probably this week if you want to see what we got. I am not being as conservative with our grocery budget at the moment, for the sake of building up our stockpile.

I’m definitely not panic buying, just buying one or two extra of things when we go to the shops so that the shelves are definitely not there when I leave the shops, but I do think it’s wise to be prepared in general, not just for times like we are currently facing. If you’d like me to write a little bit more about this kind of thing, let me know. 😊

I think that there is a way to be prepared without panicking, but I also think that there are ways to be prepared that makes sense and then there are some ways that just don’t make sense for a lot of people!

A budget-friendly activity I did on Wednesday was redecorating my kindle! I’ve actually done something like this for my husband’s phone before when he couldn’t find a case he wanted, but I’d never thought to do it with my kindle… turns out there’s a bunch of free kindle inserts that you can find on Pinterest!

I printed out a few for the sake of variety, it’ll be fun to change them up. Love that this didn’t involve buying stickers - as much as I love stickers they’re kinda expensive for what they are.

Thursday was budget day, which does tend to mean a couple more purchases than normal. If we think of something that we need to buy in the two weeks after budget day, I add those to my budget spreadsheet and factor to them into the next budget and that was the case with our purchases on Thursday!

I also had to pay for a therapy appointment that I had forgotten to pay for, so that just came from a regular budget.

The first thing we bought was something for our NAS server. It’s something to do with the power… I couldn’t tell you the actual technical name for it off the top of my head right now (especially not with brain fog) but it means that if we lose power for up to half an hour our NAS and Wi-Fi router will remain on. It’s basically backup power, for a short amount of time. If you’re not sure what a NAS server is, click here for a brief explanation… We love our server!

And then a bit more exciting, I bought some boots!

I hunted and hunted for boots like this, and just could not find exactly what I wanted until I found these. I’ve been wanting boots like these for yeaaaars, I used to have some over 10 years ago and I absolutely wore them into the ground so I know that these will be well used and well loved! 😍

Conveniently, they have arrived today at time of writing so I can give you a real life photo!

Because we’re doing the Coles four week spend offer I’ve been doing our groceries in person, but because I’ve had a flareup this week I reaaally wasn’t able to go out on Friday like I usually would. Matt ended up going on Saturday morning for us and went to both Coles and Woolworths!

I didn’t actually need a lot for our meal plan, so much of the hole was dedicated to growing our stock pile. You can see the haul above. 😊

I think I mentioned in last weeks post that I had just discovered that Mumford & Sons is touring here in April! I would have absolutely loved to go to a Mumford & Sons concert back in 2013 or 2015, but there was no way I would’ve been able to afford it then.

I went back-and-forth a lot on whether to spend the money on this right now as we’ve got some other things we’re also considering spending some money on, and in the end I had almost decided not to go ahead with it… But Matt collaborated with my mother and she put some money towards the tickets as a very early birthday present for me! So we’re going to Mumford & Sons! And I will definitely be wearing my cute new boots 🤣

I also needed to buy a filter for our robot vacuum order empty station.

It’s the dumbest thing, most robot vacuum consumable parts can be purchased on eBay and Amazon, much more cheaper than you can buy them through the actual store… But for some reason the filters for this order empty station aren’t available anywhere other than the actual Ecovacs store. They’re having a little bit of a sale at the moment and I have been putting off buying these filters for about six months, so I took advantage of the sale and placed the order.

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And that’s it for us spending this week!

Like I said, we’re considering spending money on a couple of other things at the moment, the main things that we’re considering an extra freezer (I think I mentioned that last week) and putting a little bit more money towards our stock pile.

Our stockpile is almost complete so to speak, not that a stock pile is ever probably fully complete, but it’s almost up to where I’m hoping to get it too, mostly because we were already shopping in a way that makes stockpiling quite easy, it was just a case of increasing what we had a little bit.

But we ARE struggling for freezer space. We have almost a year worth of beef mince in our extra freezer, and our extra freezer that we have is only a bar fridge size. It’s been great for as long as we’ve had it, and it was free when we got it so it’s been absolutely amazing considering that, but we do need a little bit of extra space.

A lot of the advice out there is to buy canned vegetables because they last longer, but sensory preference wise we need to go more with frozen vegetables. I also just generally prefer frozen vegetables (over fresh) because they’re less likely to go off, so even when we buy fresh vegetables, I tend to prep and freeze them because in our neurodivergent household that’s the best way to ensure we’re not wasting things. 🤣 I love having a stock of grated carrot and zucchini on hand to sneak into things.

I still have about 10 kg of chicken that we got from Costco that I need to put in the freezer and I think once we do that we will actually be out of freezer space… And that is not ideal - especially when you consider that we like to freeze leftovers! We’re considering buying a small chest freezer. I’d really love to find one on Facebook marketplace secondhand, but I’m not really finding anything that significantly cheaper than just buying it online.

There is one I’ve been eyeing off on appliances online that would be about $300 delivered, so that’s probably what we will go with if we choose to buy something new. But I’m still kind of hoping that I’ll be able to maybe get another free freezer, even if it’s just a small bath fridge size sized one. That would be amazing!

Whatever we do, I do think we need to make a decision on that in the next week or so, so I’ll keep you updated on what we end up deciding. We did toy with the idea of putting the finances into gardening supplies instead, but that feels like too much of a risk for us. I’d love to be gardener girl buuuuuut I don’t think I have a green thumb haha. I’ve tried growing things multiple times but I always get teeny tiny mini produce and then it never grows past that.

Again, if you want me to talk a little bit more about being prepared for the future, why we’re stockpiling and why we we're doing it even before all the craziness… Let me know and I can make a separate post on it! I like to think that our approach to stockpiling is very relaxed as well, no panic or fear involved.

With all of that said, I’m also happy to report a milestone!

We finally have our emergency fund fully funded again!! 🥳

And our savings on top of that are looking quite good as well. I’m on track to be able to responsibly purchase my iMac when I hit my goal of being monetised on YouTube which feels really really good. I’m really proud of our progress and how we’re managing our finances, I feel like we’re balancing really well between enjoying life and not depriving ourselves of things that mean a lot to us, well also still keeping in mind our overall life goals and priorities.

I hope you have an amazing week and I’ll catch you back here same time next week.

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