Historically Handy Money-Saving Skills

"In this country, we are apt to let children romp away their existence, till they get to be thirteen or fourteen. This is not well. It is not well for the purses and patience of parents; and it has a still worse effect on the morals and habits of the children. Begin early is the great maxim for everything in education. A child of six years old can be made useful; and should be taught to consider every day lost in which some little thing has not been done to assist others."

– Lydia M. Child, The American Frugal Housewife (1832)

      I am proud to say I romped away my existence as a child and learned some pretty handy tidbits that would help me in the future thanks to my mother.  Here are just five of the dozens of historically handy skills to know that will help you save money in your household.

Cooking and Baking

      An old saying tells us that “the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” and I really think my husband arrives home from work happiest when he’s greeted with the smell of dinner cooking in the kitchen.  The ability to cook and bake are probably the biggest money-saving skills you can possess, and also the most overlooked.  Think about how much it costs to eat out three times a day, even if it’s on the dollar menu at a fast food chain, not to mention a sit-down restaurant.  Multiple that by 365 days and you’ll see just how much money someone can save when they can cook and bake.  Everything from baking bread and desserts to making a salad or stir-fry that never saw a box saves money, and just think of the money you’ll save if you don’t have to go out for Valentine’s Day, birthdays and anniversaries (unless you completely want to because neither of you really want to do the dishes, then we all understand). 

      And, most importantly cooking and baking isn’t just a skill for women to know, because mothers one day your son will move out of your house and unless he wants to live on fast food and Raman noodles, he’d better know how to cook!  (Thank you to my mother-in-law, among the many things she’s done, for introducing my husband to the oven, sink, washing machine, dryer, iron, vacuum, mop and broom long before we met.  I’m fortunate that he can do all of these things just as good, if not better, than I can due to her training.)  

Gardening

    

     I thank my lucky stars that my mother told me to go play in the dirt when I was a kid.  What better way for a child to experience life than get their hands dirty!?  Even living in town, my mother loved to play in the flower beds, weeding and transplanting flowers that had grown out of their proper places.  Play is what she called it, which probably made it all the more fun for a kid with her own personal shovel, bucket and watering can. 

      In college, containers filled with flowers, herbs and vegetables decorated mine and later my future-husband’s first apartment balconies.  And believe it or not, you can grow a lot in a few square feet of balcony!  (See Container Vegetable Garden)  Once we got married and got some actual ground to dig into, an in ground garden took root of our hearts and now we save hundreds of dollars each year on our grocery bill.   (See Vegetable Garden)

Canning

  

      Canning is not for the faint of heart, especially come August-September when grapes, peaches, apples and tomatoes ALL decide to make their appearance at the same time, after you just came off of berry season where you were pulling your hair out with red, blue and purple stained fingers.  Yup, it’s hard work, but it’s so very rewarding!  When you pop open a can of peach pie filling in the middle of winter with snow flying outside, and it smells like a warm August night with fireflies dancing on the breeze as bullfrogs croak from the marshy recesses of the field’s edge across the road while the crickets provide a proper melody…  (Oh, how I miss summer right now.)  And, your pocket book thanks you when a half bushel of apples for $3.00 manages to make you sixteen quart jars of unsweetened all-natural applesauce. 

Hunting

      We don’t eat beef, we eat venison.  Now, that’s not saying we don’t like beef (we actually love beef).  It’s a choice that we made when we got married and needed to trim up the grocery bill.  Beef went off of the grocery list, and my husband went off to hunt each deer season on his family’s farm.  We invested in a meat grinder, got a butcher kit for our wedding, and learned how to make our own sausage, bologna and jerky.  Now, our deep freeze (which is also a great investment) is packed full of ground venison, steaks, stew cubes, maple breakfast sausage, country sausage, Italian sausage, snack sticks, bologna, salami, summer sausage, and pepperoni, all made from venison.  Learning how to cook with venison was a challenge at first – it is an acquired taste – but once you get the hang of it and learn the best seasonings for the job, you can hardly tell the difference between the two.  Besides, I’d much rather pay less than $1.00 a pound for ground venison (including all “processing fees” such as a hunting license, doe tags, equipment, storage bags, etc.) than the $4.00+ a pound for the 93% lean ground beef at the grocery store.

Sewing

      And now since everyone is feeling full with all that talk about food, it’s time to work off some of those imaginary calories at the sewing machine!  Sewing, like gardening, was something my mother taught me.  When I was around six, my mother taught me how to sew.  Perhaps one day I had seen her at her sewing pile of all the clothing I wore out and that needed patched and wanted to learn, or perhaps she had an ulterior motive.  You see, in some ways that sewing pile became the “outgrow it pile” because she never did enjoy sewing (even as a child herself), although the most important mending would always get done.  When I was in college, she finally cleaned out her sewing kit, to find Barbie doll clothing that needed a snap or two put back on that I had long outgrown.  But, even with her dislike of sewing, my mother taught me a very valuable skill as a child (and made me some pretty awesome toys like the ragdoll to the right).

      Almost all the curtains in our home are sewn, either by hand or on the sewing machine.  Our place-mats are hand-stitched and our potholders crocheted (another skill mom taught me).  The decorative pillows in our living room, family room and bedrooms are all hand or machine-stitched.  A tiny hand-stitched decorative quilt graces my husband’s old childhood rocking chair, and a new quilt for our bed is still in the works.  Sewing (not to mention mending clothing) saves money.  I can get exactly what I want for a reasonable price.  Although my present sewing project list is long, very long, in the end you not only enjoy having saved money, but see your worth-while creation every day. 

What skills do you use to save money?