A Frugal Challenge

I've mentioned it on this blog before, but I follow another blog called Frugal Girl. She has cooking recipes (we used one of her jam recipes and I'm thinking about trying my hand at homemade yogurt) as well as other tips in being frugal. You can check her out here: http://www.thefrugalgirl.com/

One thing she said recently was that if you let people know you're willing to take hand-me-downs or left over items, you will be surprised at how much you can get.

As Ian and I think about living on one income, we're having lots of conversations about being frugal. In fact, that's one of the reasons we're not going to find out the gender of our baby. We would prefer that people give us items that we need instead of pink frilly dresses or baseball gloves. Not that those aren't great and we would certainly love either of those; we just lean more on the practical side of diaper genies and crib bumpers. So, we're letting it be known - if you've got kid stuff you don't want, we'll take it!

I saw this in action recently with another matter all together - peaches. A few months ago, we met a couple at church who live in our neighborhood and have a peach tree. In one short conversation, I was my usual excited self upon hearing they had peach tree, and four months later, she called me to say she was going out of town and did I want to come pick all her peaches for the next three weeks. Did I? You better believe it! As of yesterday, Sarah and I have already made three jars of peach jam, with plans for more jam and perhaps some canning. And there will be a peach pie in there somewhere too.

Anyway, on to the point of this post. Sheesh, I'm so verbose today. =) Anyway, as Ian and I talk about how we can save money, I gave myself this challenge:

Use up every bottle of hair product I have before buying anything new. For some of you, that may be no big deal. But I love to experiment with hair products, and since I sometimes do my hair curly and sometimes do it straight...you get the idea.

I started that challenge about two weeks ago (though I haven't actually bought any hair products (except for shampoo and conditioner* for several months) and already, I've made my way through two bottles. I have so many bottles that are about 1/3 full.

See?
So my goal is to use all of these, regardless of whether I like how they work or not, and not buy anything new until they are gone. So brace yourself for some bad hair days! But I'm betting I can make it until at least October on just what I have in there. Which is probably over $100 worth of hair products! Wish me luck! (And don't make fun of my bad hair days.)

*It's probably a good thing that no boys read this blog (at least, to my knowledge), except my husband. Because they would probably be thinking, "What other hair products are there besides shampoo and conditioner?" Ahh, if only they knew.