As an accountant, I have a love of numbers that most people find odd including making as much as I can homemade because it saves me money.
I have no problem looking at our budgeting sheets every day to “forecast” our savings balance each month because I like to learn how to make things cheaper.
I play a game with myself to see if I can “beat the price.”
Essentially, I look at things we buy to see if I can make it for less.
I spoke about this topic on my Savings Segment on Fox. Watch the replay video here:
So far I've found a TON of items throughout our home.
These 5 are my favorites because they have the most drastic savings.
I'll show you how to make homemade whipped cream and other delights so you can save money too.
With my DIY foaming hand soap with essential oils recipe, you'll be saving money right from the start.
And with this DIY Febreze fabric refresher, you'll be getting the stink out for less.
Let me give you 5 items you can make yourself for cheaper than you can buy them at the store! Let's get to it!
1. Make Your Own Foaming Soap
Hand soap can get expensive when you have a large family. We have 6 people and 3 bathrooms… in other words, we use a LOT of hand soap!
So when I had to learn how to make things cheaper, this was my first item.
This is such an DIY foaming hand soap with essential oils recipe that will allow you to spend around $20 per YEAR on hand soap for your family.
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- 1 Tablespoon of my DIY Liquid Castile Soap or Dr. Bronner's concentrated soap (making the DIY Liquid Castile Soap will be cheaper)
- 1/2 teaspoon Fractionated Coconut Oil (I use one from Young Living, but I prefer the Amazon one because it has a pump)
- 10-15 drops Essential Oils (Lavender and Tea Tree Oils have antiseptic cleaning properties so those make a good choice to help make your soap antibacterial. I use Lavender mostly, and I always use Young Living Oils, but it's only for making your hand soap smell good, so you could really buy cheaper ones.)
- 1 drop (NOT TWO) Food Coloring if you want to make it look like a traditional hand soap 🙂 (I've used green, blue, or red or red/blue (for purple) and they look nice, and it does NOT stain your hands! Two drops doesn't seem to mix well for me and then I end up with some streaks on my hands. The entire mixture is so cheap, you can experiment though!)
Pour ingredients into your jar and fill the rest of the way with water (try to use distilled water if you have it so that the soap never gets slimy).
If you don't have an extra foaming soap dispenser around, just purchase these foaming soap dispenser lids that fit on mason jars. Not only do they look cute, but they work great!
Shake! That'll mix all the ingredients together nicely and you'll have a great foaming hand soap!
Watch This Facebook Live Video To See How Easy It Is To Make These Items:
2. Glass Jars Are Free Drinking Glasses
Mason Jars are all the rage to use as drinking glasses. But they cost a pretty penny when you buy them as drinking glasses.
Instead, you can save a bunch of money by choosing to buy other products that are already packaged inside a Mason Jar and then simply wash it out and use it as your drinking glass!
Win-Win!
My favorite jars are the Classico Pasta Sauce jars. Almost all of them have measurements on the side, which makes them really valuable for measuring liquids when making a recipe.
Also, when you use the square jars, then they fit nice and snug inside your cabinet just like a store shelf. That's an organizational bonus!
I'll show you how to make homemade whipped cream and other delights in these jars too! Read on!
3. Homemade Febreze Spray
My boys play lots of sports and my daughter played volleyball and now coaches two teams of volleyball girls.
That means we have a lot of stinky sports equipment and bags. And you can't really wash backpacks and duffle bags each week.
But you CAN spray the stank right outta them! So I had to make a DIY Febreze fabric refresher right away!
Plus, you probably already have these ingredients on hand!
Most of the recipes you'll find online use baking soda mixed with water and while that seems like it would be a good choice, I found that no matter how well I dissolved the baking soda, it still left a residue on our items. Once I started using Rubbing Alcohol we never had a problem with spots and it dried quickly taking the smell with it.
You need just 3 ingredients and a spray bottle to make this recipe:
- Fill bottle half way with Rubbing Alcohol (you could also use Vodka as both dry quickly and have antibacterial, anti-fungal properties)
- Fill rest of bottle with water (try to use distilled water if you have it so that the spray is guaranteed not to get slimy)
- 10-15 drops Essential Oils (I use Peppermint and Purification because those varieties already have smell removing properties so they get rid of the smell almost instantly. I always use Young Living Oils because of their SeedToSeal Promise.
You can make a big batch of your DIY Febreze fabric refresher in these glass spray bottles and keep one in your car for when those stinky sports smells linger in your car fabrics.
Simply shake it up and then tuck it in your kids sports bag and it'll be ready to spray on their knee pads or backpack after they leave their game or practice. Stank be gone!
4. Homemade Whipped Cream
Reddi-Whip is expensive! Plus, when you buy it… it gets eaten usually before you even get a chance to pull out the dessert it was meant to go on!
So now you get to learn how to make homemade whipped cream and other delights!
All the recipes I found to make this required that you use a frozen metal bowl, or at least require whipping the cream using a bowl put in ice. I found that if you use a hand blender to make it, then it whips up so quickly there is no need for the ice at all, which saves some aggravation!
BONUS DOWNLOAD
Stop Paying So Much For Cleaning Products!
Download this FREE sheet of 10 DIY Cleaning Supply Recipes to make your own cleaners in just a few minutes, with ingredients you probably already have on hand.
You need just 3 ingredients and a hand blender with a whip attachment to make this recipe:
- 1/2 Cup Heavy Cream
- 1 Teaspoon Vanilla
- 1 Tablespoon Sweetener (I use Trim Healthy Mama's “Gentle Sweet” Sweetener, which is a 1:1 replacement for sugar)
Simply use the whisk attachment and whip the cream until it thickens and forms soft peaks. This takes about 1 minute.
When you learn how to make things cheaper, you are saving yourself money for a lifetime!
5. The Cheapest Bug Repellent Ever
I live in Florida and that means that we have these little annoying bugs called gnats. We also have oak trees and for some reason that brings lots of mosquitoes. And we LOVE to go to the Drive-In to watch movies because it's less expensive than going to the theater (plus you get to see two movies instead of only one).
My son Cammy has some extra protein in his blood that attracts mosquitoes more than the average person. Like two or three times the attraction (lucky him). When we go to the drive-in and wear long sleeves and long pants, the rest of us will get 3-4 bites, while Cammy will get 35-40! It's so sad!
We tried using Off! and Skin-So-Soft, but none had the success as this simple remedy we learned from an Eagle Scout: Bounce Dryer Sheets.
All you have to do is pull one out and either wipe it on your clothes (and hair) or simply tuck half of it in your shirt pocket or pant pocket (I like to have part of it hanging out to show the bugs). The bugs will steer clear of you and you'll have no static cling! As soon as I get the box I cut them in half so they are immediately ready to use.
NOTE: you have to choose the “Original” variety of Bounce. We've tried the other ones and they didn't work. This is the article with the scientific reasoning behind using Bounce to repel gnats and mosquitoes.
There are simple ways to save money by incorporating some of these tips into your routine on how to make things cheaper.
When you learn how to make homemade whipped cream and other delights so you can save big money each month.
Plus, with my DIY foaming hand soap with essential oils recipe, you'll be saving money right from the start.
And with this DIY Febreze fabric refresher, you'll be getting the stink out for less.
When you save money on the things listed above you'll have money left over for the necessary things in life that you can't avoid like your mortgage.
Think about things you use regularly and then do a quick search to see if you could make it cheaper than it would cost to buy at the store!.
I bet there are some quick and easy solutions right in front of you to learn how to make things cheaper!