Make Your Money Buy More For Every Day And Preparedness 2

This post is a continuation of a post about saving money for every day as well as for preparedness. 

The next way to save money was laundry. I have already posted several times about doing laundry during and after a disaster. I will not repeat that information here, except to say that coin operated machines suck up a lot of your money. 


If you wash your laundry yourself, especially by hand, and stop using dryers, it will save you a lot of money. Saving money on laundry is possible if you have your own washer and dryer at home as well. Dryers do take a lot of money to operate. You may want to use it as little as possible or not at all.

Stop going to corner grocery stores and use the big cheap places as much as you can. Buy your food in bulk. If you can't eat that much before it spoils, find someone to split larger amounts with.

Either don't use convenience foods or make your own. I have posts about doing that as well. 

Saving money works best when you pick something that will add up over time. An example is the change to compact fluorescent bulbs. Every electric bill after switching to compact fluorescent bulbs was lower. 


That gave me money to use to buy other things that would help me save even more money. An example was buying a big enough bowl to mix my own convenience foods in and a container to store the convenience mix in. I was able to buy those with electric bill savings.

Even if you and your family are not vegetarians, you can use some vegetarian food to save on your food bill. The first one I am talking about is called, "textured vegetable protein", or TVP for short. You can add it to meat dishes to make them go farther. If you get TVP by mail in bulk, it is much cheaper than meat. 

It is a good idea to avoid serving an all meat dish that you plan to put TVP into very close to the time you serve the TVP. Your family, and you, are more likely to notice the difference that way. If you wait at least a week to put TVP into your chili, it will not be as noticeable. I chose spicy dishes to help hide the different taste of the TVP. 

TVP comes in different flavors such as beef, chicken, pork or fish or sausage, etc. It also comes in different shapes and sizes. The most common form is small hard pieces that are about the size of cooked ground beef. You can find this size and type of TVP in a lot of health food stores, to try it out and see if you will like it.


Since TVP comes in so many flavors and shapes, you can easily substitute it for meat in many of your favorite recipes. TVP is also a convenience food since you only need to add boiling water and soak it for five minutes to have it ready to use.


This post is too long so I will continue it in another post.