Easy Money Saving Tip- Part 2

In case you missed my first easy money saving tip post, you can get caught up here.

I promise all my tips are not food related.  This is simply the order that my family discovered the little things that we can cut to save money in the long run.

My second tip is......

Yummy and super sweet- sugar.  We discovered that our family loved Kool Aid.  We would drink a rather large pitcher that used 2 Kool Aid packets to fill it up every day.  That not only meant that we had to buy the Kool Aid packets but we were going through a 5 lb bag of sugar every week- just in Kool Aid- Yikes!!  And that is when sugar was $2 for a 5 lb bag.  So, I ran the numbers...

$2- Kool Aid packets for the week

$2- Bag of sugar for the week

$4/ week

$4 a week doesn't seem like a lot. 

I then took the 4/week X 4 weeks= $16 a month

$16/month X 12 months= $192- WHAT!!!  I was spending $192 just in Kool Aid and sugar. 

But we decided to take things just one step futher.  Since we were taking away something the kids loved, we thought it was only fair to take away one of our guilty pleasures- Soda.

Michael and I could drink a 12 pack a week each.  And I thought I was doing great buying it on sale.  So, I ran the numbers just to prove to myself that our little soda habit didn't cost that much.

$3 for a 12pk soda X 2 people= $6 week

$6/week X 4 weeks= $24 month- see we were only spending about $20 month- no biggie

$24/month X 12 months= $288 a year on soda- Oh my- that was an awful lot of money.

If you combine the $192 in Kool Aid and sugar and add it to the $288 in soda we were spending- that equals $480 a year in sugar.  That is a whole lot of sugar and a whole lot of money.  Not to mention the mention the money we would save on dental bills if we gave up our sugar habit. 

So, we bit the bullet and decided to try just drinking water during day and I was shocked at how much we don't miss all that sugar.  And we were able to put the almost $500 we were spending towards a bill:) 

Give it a try- run your numbers and see what you are spending in Kool Aid and soda and see if you come close to my numbers.  And then think about all the different things you could do with that sweet money........

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