If you’re having trouble getting inspired to declutter your home, here’s one potential motivator. Think about all of the money you can save! If nothing else gets you going, maybe that will. When I started decluttering back in the winter, it was because I had had enough. I was done with all the stuff in my surroundings clogging up my physical and mental space. What I didn’t know and have come to quickly find out was how much money I would save as a result. And I’m not even done yet! 

Because living abundantly through being frugal is so important to me, if I’d thought about it in this way earlier, it might have motivated me to do it sooner. If the same is true for you, I hope what I’ve learned will help you.

You Can Find What You Need When You Need It

This is no small thing! I’ve kept a tally. I’ve been at this for several months and have easily already saved well over $150 on things I didn’t buy. These were things I thought I needed simply because I couldn’t find what I needed when I needed them because they were hidden under piles of other stuff. 

The dumbbell that I was getting ready to replace because I hadn’t been able to find it? Found! Underneath old pillows in the floor of my closet that I’d hung on to because I thought I might need them some day. In reality, no one would ever sleep on those old, dirty things and they were just keeping me from seeing what I really needed to see. 

The gift bags and tissue paper that I knew I had plenty of somewhere but couldn’t see where they should have been? Found! Underneath the old rolls of wrapping paper that had remnants left on them but wouldn’t have been able to wrap anything. 

The spices I was getting ready to buy AGAIN even though I knew I had bought them fairly recently? Found! Behind jars of other spices that I had duplicates of because I kept replacing them when I couldn’t find what I needed!  

You get the point…

You May Be Able to Sell Things That You’re Not Using

Decluttering your home is different than organizing. Decluttering is getting rid of things that you don’t use or need. Organizing is putting the things that you do have in an order that makes them easier to find and use. If you’re truly decluttering, the things that you’re getting rid of may no longer be useful to you, but they may be useful to someone else. That means that selling them through Craig’s List, Facebook Marketplace or in a good old-fashioned yard sale might be an option. 

If You Have a Clutter-Free Outlook, You Probably Won’t Be Buying as Much

While decluttering doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll become a minimalist, you will probably figure out fairly quickly that less can be more. As you declutter your home, I feel certain that you will start looking more critically at the things that you’re considering bringing into the house in the first place. That doesn’t mean that you won’t ever buy something again just because you want it, but it will become more of the exception than the rule. For this, your wallet will thank you! 

Decluttering Your Kitchen May Encourage You to Cook at Home More

If opening your pantry or a kitchen cabinet door makes you feel so queasy from the mess that you immediately call for take-out, it’s time to declutter. Getting rid of that mess can make cooking enjoyable again and something that you may want to do more often. Not only is this better for your bank account, but it will be better for your health as well.

Decluttering May Prevent You from Having to Buy a Bigger Home

Talk about a money saver! This sounds pretty extreme, but it is a possibility. In fact, I would strongly suggest the next time that you get dissatisfied with the space that you have in your current home, that you clean out a closet. If your satisfaction level doesn’t start going up, then begin taking it room by room. After you’ve decluttered pretty much your entire house, if you still feel like you need more space, it might be time to start looking. My prediction is that you may realize that you don’t need more space, you just need less stuff.

You May Find Money and/or Gift Cards That You Forgot About

The idea of finding money and/or gift cards may seem random, but I’m here to say that it can happen. I recently found money in old purses that I thought I couldn’t part with for one reason or another, and I found gift cards tucked away in drawers. I can’t promise it will happen every time, but certainly if the clutter has been building up, your chances are pretty good.  

Decluttering Can Prevent Costly Mistakes in Other Areas of Your Life

Decluttering is just that powerful! Have you ever left the house so frazzled in the morning that you ended up making a big mistake at work? Or has living in a cluttered house ever worn on you so much mentally that you treated other members of your family badly?  All of those mistakes can come with a steep price. Strained relationships, lost confidence in you at work, and poor mental health overall are serious and very real possible consequences of not learning to declutter. Again, I speak from experience here. It is amazing how much lighter and more together you can feel not having to wade through a bunch of needless stuff just to get to the dryer or to get to your shoes. 

Bottom Line on Decluttering Your Home

The fairly simple but often seemingly overwhelming act of decluttering your home won’t automatically make you a millionaire. But, it may very well make you feel like you’ve hit the jackpot. As we’ve seen here, decluttering can help you save money in quite a few ways, but most importantly it will allow you to simply make more space in your life for what truly matters. 

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When it comes to food, there are very few of us who can say that our portion sizes are currently too small (except maybe when it comes to vegetables…). In fact, when we’re eating out, our average portion sizes have increased 2-3 times or more from where they were 20 yearsago¹. This, in turn, has played a big part in normalizing what we think of as a normal portion, whether we’re eating at home or eating out. So, for most of us, when it comes to saving money while eating healthier, reducing our portion size is one of the easiest and healthiest things that we can do. 

Portion Size vs. Serving Size

According to the National Institutes of Health, a portion is the amount of food that we choose to eat for a meal or snack². In other words, it’s completely up to us how big or small our portion sizes are. 

Portions often get confused with serving sizes. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics says that a serving is a standardized or measured amount of food³. It may be stated in tablespoons, ounces or cups but is a standard amount that can easily be measured. 

Take for instance a 16-ounce bag of chips. I could easily eat half the bag in one sitting on a really stressful day. In that case, half the bag or 8 ounces would be my portion size. On the other hand, the bag’s nutrition label says that there are about 16 servings in the bag or 1 ounce or about 11 chips per serving. So, if I eat half the bag, I’ve eaten 8 servings and an outrageous number of chips. Hmmm…. 

As another example, if I have an 8-ounce box of pasta, and I fix half the box as one serving, I’ve had a 4-ounce portion of pasta. If you look at this amount compared to what you get for a dinner serving in many restaurants, it’s about the same. The catch though is that the nutrition label on my box of pasta tells me that 2 ounces is a serving size, so I now have to double all of the values listed. Ouch! 

This is where the National Institutes of Health’s idea of “portion distortion¹” comes in. If you want an interesting look at how portion sizes have increased over the past 20 years, be sure and check out their interactive quizzes on that here.

Benefits of Reducing Portion Size

Given the increase in the size of portions over the years, when we talk about reducing them, we’re not talking about unhealthy food restriction. We’re talking about getting back to a healthier way of looking at the amount of food we eat. In general, we simply do not need as much food as many of us are currently consuming. Two of the most significant benefits to reducing our portion sizes come in terms of saving our health and our money.

Health benefits

Regularly eating portions that are larger than what our bodies need takes its toll on our health over time. That’s due in large part because consuming more calories than we burn causes the excess calories to be stored as fat. In turn, too much body fat may cause us to become overweight or obese⁴. In addition, too many simple carbs and too much sugar can wreak havoc on our blood sugar levels, also resulting in many health problems⁵. Here are just some of the risks associated with being overweight, obese or simply eating more food than we need. 

• Eating too much food requires your organs to work harder⁴. 
• Type 2 diabetes⁶
• High blood pressure⁶
• Heart disease and strokes⁶
• Certain types of cancer⁶
• Fatty liver disease⁶

While reducing portion size won’t prevent all of these issues, it will go a long way toward making sure that we’re not needlessly overloading our bodies with food it really doesn’t need or want. It will also enable us to eat a reasonable amount of something that’s not-so-healthy if that’s what we want while at the same time leaving plenty of room for healthy food. 

Money saving benefits

This one is fairly straightforward. If we eat less, our food bill isn’t as high. Again, the idea here isn’t to starve ourselves by any means. That is absolutely not the point. But, if we get back to eating reasonable amounts of food, we can stretch our food budget even further or invest in healthy foods that we might have otherwise thought were too expensive.

Take my bag of chips. What would have been two servings on a couple of really tough days or even 4-5 servings in amounts that many of us would regularly eat, could actually be up to 16 servings. That means that instead of going through a bag of chips a week, one bag may last two weeks. 

The same holds true with my pasta. If you go by the serving size listed on the box, instead of needing two boxes to feed four people, you only need one box to feed four. That’s half the cost in both cases. 

How to Limit Portion Size

The concept of reducing portion sizes is fairly easy. Putting it into practice is where things can get more challenging. Here are some ideas to help get you started.

• Learn how much of the healthiest foods to eat at different calorie levels by following the  NIH Guidelines.
• Weigh and/or measure your food at least in the beginning until you learn what an appropriate portion looks like. 
• Learn what a reasonable serving size looks like without measuring cups or a scale by following the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s Serving Size Card.
• Drink water about an hour to half hour before you eat. Water is something that most of us need more of, and it will make you feel more full while you’re eating. 
• Don’t eat from the bag. Set out a serving size or a serving and a half if that seems like a more reasonable amount and put the bag away.
• Eat healthy snacks at regular intervals throughout the day so that you’re not ravenous  when you sit down for a meal. 
• Go by the nutrition labels on packages. 
• If you’re making a recipe from a blog, follow the recommended serving sizes that are usually included. Most blog recipe creators are home cooks. You can normally rely on them to include very reasonable serving sizes as well as the associated nutrition information. 

Bottom Line on Reducing Portion Size

The bottom line on reducing portion size is that we’re not talking about depravation here. We’re talking about eating more intentionally and intuitively as to what your body needs to nourish it. That’s opposed to what your emotions may be making you think they want as well as what may just be habit or conditioned eating. When it comes to portion size, you’re in the driver’s seat, and you’re the one in control. Let that be empowering for you – whatever you decide to eat. 

Sources

1. National Institutes of Health. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/wecan/eat-right/portion-distortion.htm
2. National Institutes of Health. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/educational/wecan/eat-right/distortion.htm
3. Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Eat Right. Serving Size vs Portion Size is There a Difference. https://www.eatright.org/food/nutrition/nutrition-facts-and-food-labels/serving-size-vs-portion-size-is-there-a-difference
4. The University of Texas. MD Anderson Cancer Center. What Happens When You Overeat? https://www.mdanderson.org/publications/focused-on-health/What-happens-when-you-overeat.h23Z1592202.html
5. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Carbohydrates and Blood Sugar. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/carbohydrates/carbohydrates-and-blood-sugar/
6. National Institutes of Health. National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Health Risks of Being Overweight. https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/weight-management/health-risks-overweight

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Most Common Types of Herbs Used in the Kitchen

Some of the most common types of herbs used in cooking include the following:

• Basil
• Parsley
• Cilantro
• Mint
• Rosemary
• Thyme
• Sage
• Chives
• Dill
• Oregano

Fortunately, growing all of these herbs at home is very easy to do. 

Growing Herbs

Growing herbs can be done inside, outside, in containers or in the ground. It mainly depends on the amount that you need and the space that you have available to you. If you decide to grow them anywhere but in the ground, you’ll also want to make sure that they’re in a nice sunny spot. Some types actually do fine in partial or indirect sunlight, so these are the best for growing indoors or as I do, on my screened-in porch. 

From a cost benefit perspective, it’s important to know that some herbs are perennials² and will come back each year. These include Chives, Mint, Oregano, Rosemary, Sage and Thyme. Keep them alive and your one-time cash outlay will definitely give you a fantastic return on investment. 

Financial Benefits of Growing Herbs

If you buy fresh organic herbs in the grocery store, they can cost anywhere from $1.50-$5 for a bunch or a package, depending on the type that you’re buying. That’s for one bunch, that unless you’ve planned a couple of recipes for the week around that herb, you may or may not use all of it. 

Growing herbs is such a money-saver because a packet of organic seeds can cost anywhere from $3.25 – $10 for a pack. Most are on the lower end and usually come in packs of 500-700 seeds. 

The best part – if you don’t use all of them, you can store them, and they’ll stay viable for 1-5 years. Johnny’s Selected Seeds recommends that you store them in a sealed jar in the refrigerator. You can check out the company’s chart for average storage life for specific types of seeds here.

This type of storage life means that even if you’re using annuals, you can probably get at least two years of plantings, if not more, out of one packet of seeds. 

If you decide to use starter plants for herbs, the cost for a season or year’s worth of herbs is equivalent to buying 2-3 bunches in the grocery store. When I’ve bought them as starter plants, I’ve paid $3-$4 for each plant. 

You can also dry your herbs or store them in other ways so that they last anywhere from 3 months to a year or more. Here are a couple of great resources for that:

• Iowa State University Extension and Outreach
• Adams Fairacre Farms

Resources for Growing Herbs

The following are resources for organic herb seeds that I would highly recommend. 

• Seeds of Change
• Seed Savers
• Grow Organic
• Burpee
• Johnny’s Selected Seeds
• Etsy – Yes, Etsy. Just go to their main website and search for organic herb seeds. 

Growing herbs does require the upfront cost of investing in some pots or other types of containers and potting soil if you’re growing them inside or on a porch, but those costs are quickly recouped if you cook with herbs often. The ability to only cut as much as you need when you need it and to dry or otherwise store what you don’t use makes this an easy money saving strategy in my book. 

Sources

1. T Alan Jiang, Health Benefits of Culinary Herbs and Spices, Journal of AOAC INTERNATIONAL, Volume 102, Issue 2, 1 March 2019, Pages 395–411, https://doi.org/10.5740/jaoacint.18-0418
2. Iowa State University Extension and Outreach; https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/2008/aug/060101.htm

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Budget Benefits of Taking Your Lunch

If you’re not sure whether it will really be cheaper to take your lunch, try tracking what you’re spending on eating lunch out for a month. Visa’s free Lunch Tracker app for iOS can easily help you do this. The app was developed after Visa’s 2015 Lunch Survey found that on average, Americans eat lunch out about 2 times per week and spend $20 per week or $1,043 per year on eating lunch out. Remember that’s only for eating lunch twice a week.

In contrast, those who packed a lunch or ate at home an average of 5 times per week spent $32.76 per week or $1,704 per year. That’s for 3 days more per week of lunches.

Here’s more proof of how realistic it is to take your lunch less expensively than it is to eat out. On average, I spend about $27 for 7 days of incredibly healthy lunches. That’s about $3.85 per lunch. Even if you ate the cheapest fast food possible – for around $3 per lunch – that’s still $21 per week on lunches that will without a doubt come back to bite you (pun intended) with extremely high health costs in the long run.

Health Benefits of Taking Your Lunch

Here’s a look at just some of the health benefits of taking your lunch.  

• You’re in control of what you eat.
• You don’t spend time waiting on your food in a restaurant or going through a drive-thru. You can use the extra time instead to sit outside and enjoy your lunch in a much more healthy and relaxing way or you can even have time to take a walk or move a little after you eat.
• Spending less is healthier because it causes less stress over money.

Things to Keep in Mind

There are several things to keep in mind to make taking a lunch do-able and healthy.

• Use reusable food storage bags. I highly recommend silicone bags (Affiliate Link) for making sure that chemicals don’t leach into food.
• Use glass food storage containers or  Stainless steel lunch containers (Affiliate Link)
• Batch prepare your lunches on the weekend or days off.
• Be sure and take your own reusable water bottle. Going to all of the trouble of packing your lunch is diluted if you have to spend a fortune on buying a drink from a vending machine. Even water in a vending machine is expensive and comes in unhealthy plastic bottles.

If you need some inspiration to get you going in taking your lunch, be sure and check out my 5 Healthy Lunch Ideas for Busy Women.

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Single Use Bags are a Waste

If I’m being completely honest, my family could easily go through a box of 32 quart-size freezer bags every two to two-and-a-half weeks. We use them for everything! The problem is that much of what we use them for is only for a few hours, a day or a couple of days at most and then we throw them away after we’re finished with them. What a waste! One or two reusable bags could easily do what 5-10 single use bags do in a week – at least in my house. 

Things to Keep in Mind

There are several primary things to keep in mind when buying reusable food storage bags.

• Make sure that they are freezer-friendly. You need them to be multi-use to be worth the investment. They should be able to hold sandwiches to pack in a lunch and store soup or other leftovers in the freezer. 
• Make sure they have a slider for sealing. Again, you need to be able to use these for anything, and you want to make sure that they’re sealed properly and won’t leak. 
• Buy silicone bags. They will be slightly more expensive but they are the best at making sure that chemicals don’t leach into food. Most reusable bags say that they don’t contain BPA, but some do contain phthalates and Bisphenol S (BPS). These chemicals are also being called into question as endocrine-disruptors that are as potentially harmful as BPA.^(1,2,3)  While there are some studies that indicate that there could be some chemical leaching with silicone that contains liquids⁴ and if the food being stored has a high fat content,⁵ I believe that silicone is still the best option out there when it comes to reusable bags for food storage. Just make sure that the bags are made from food-grade silicone. 
• If you know that washing the bags by hand every day if needed is going to be an issue for your family, buy bags that indicate that they are dishwasher safe. 
• Buy at least two sizes of bags. These should be as close to quart and freezer size as possible. If your set comes with other sizes, that’s great, but these are the two sizes that are most commonly used, so you’ll want to make sure that you at least have them. 

Saving Money with Reusable Food Storage Bags

You can easily find multi-packs of 3-7 silicone bags for between $20-$30. I recommend starting with one set of 5-7 bags to see what your patterns are for using them. If you find that you need more, you can always purchase another set. 

Since the quart-size single use bags that I had always bought cost $3.99-$4.30 for a box of 35, and we were going through a box every few weeks (or less), my bags paid for themselves in 3-4 months. If you need to buy another set, you double that amount of time, but still… paying for themselves in 6-8 months versus the many years of use that you’ll get out of them seems like easy math to me. Better yet, put them on your birthday or holiday wish list, and let someone else make the investment for you. 

Sources:

1. Phtalates and diet: a review of the food monitoring and epidemiology data
2. Bisphenol S Induces Adipogenesis in Primary Human Preadipocytes From Female Donors
3. Bisphenol S and F: A Systematic Review and Comparison of the Hormonal Activity of Bisphenol A Substitutes
4. Zhang K, Wong JW, Begley TH, Hayward DG, Limm W. Determination of siloxanes in silicone products and potential migration to milk, formula and liquid simulants. Food Addit Contam Part A Chem Anal Control Expo Risk Assess. 2012;29(8):1311–1321. doi:10.1080/19440049.2012.684891; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22575024-determination-of-siloxanes-in-silicone-products-and-potential-migration-to-milk-formula-and-liquid-simulants/
5. Ruediger Helling, Anja Mieth, Stefan Altmann, Thomas Joachim Simat. Determination of the overall migration from silicone baking moulds into simulants and food using 1H-NMR techniques. Food Additives and Contaminants, 2009, 26 (03), pp.395-407. 10.1080/02652030802520852 . hal-00577342 ; https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00577342/document

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Holiday Gift Giving and Stress

Now that the holiday shopping season is here, it’s easy to get caught up in all of the “deals,” excitement, and checking things off your list. That’s certainly understandable, but one major cause of stress this time of year is overspending on gifts. Bankrate cites a recent report by The Harris Poll that shows “as much as 65 percent of Americans feel ‘anxious and stressed’ as we approach the holiday season due to inflation.”

Feeling this way for sustained periods isn’t healthy for us mentally or physically at any time of the year, but we definitely don’t want to do that to ourselves during the holidays. While there are many things that we can’t control this time of year, not putting ourselves in a bad position moneywise isn’t one of them.

5 Tips for Sticking With a Holiday Budget

Here are 5 tips to keep in mind as you shop this year:

Develop a holiday budget

Creating a holiday budget is best done in a spreadsheet. You’ll want to start by making a list of all of the people that you have to buy gifts for. Then make a list of all of the extra but predictable expenses that you need to plan on. These can include such things as decorating, extra food, and baking, special holiday events, etc. Next, determine the amount of money that seems reasonable and comfortable to spend on each item. Once you have your total, review it to make sure that it seems realistic and doable. If it’s not, go through and determine areas where the amounts can and should be less.

Be real, in a gentle way, with your kids

If your kids are asking for things that are beyond your budget, ask them to choose their top 1-3 items as long as those things fit within your limits. If they don’t, then ask them to narrow down more or honestly tell them that those things cost too much. You can tell them that your family is focusing on making sure that each person gets 1-2 really special things this year, and you’re limiting it at that. We have done a version of this with our boys and everyone was fine.

Even Santa has limits

In our house, even Santa had limits because we wanted to make sure that all the children were able to get something really special. It also sets the tone for helping them to understand what the holidays are really about for your family and that it’s not necessarily just a time to throw the doors wide open for them to get anything and everything they want. That’s an unrealistic expectation for any point in life, even for kids.

If you have young kids, consider buying gently used or secondhand items

There is absolutely nothing wrong with this and as long as the items are in good condition, your children are not going to even notice. This practice helps to keep you from going over budget and helps to extend the life of perfectly useful items that still have a lot of joy to give.

Focus on Intentional Gift Giving

Intentional gifts are creative and meaningful and help you to give joy while creating it for yourself as well. While you still have to keep your budget in mind, intentional gifts make sure that you’re actually putting some thought into the gift-giving process and are getting the most joyful bang for your buck.

Looking Ahead to Next Year’s Holiday Budget

If you really want to prevent money from factoring into your holiday stress, planning your holiday budget early is key. I’m talking about starting in January and setting aside money each month in savings. You simply determine what a reasonable total amount is that you think you’ll need to spend for the holidays the following year and divide that by 12. That gives you the amount that you will need to deposit into your holiday savings each month.

Having this money building up throughout the year not only prevents you from having to come up with a large amount in November and December but also gives you the flexibility to take advantage of deals as they happen at other times. In addition, it allows you to buy throughout the year if you see the perfect gift for someone on your list.

This process should ideally be done as you develop your larger annual budget. That way you know whether the amount that you’re planning on for your holiday budget is realistic or not. It also helps in making decisions about other larger purchases throughout the year since you know that you need to allow for the fixed holiday amount each month. If you do have to use your holiday money one month to pay for an unexpected, necessary expense, be sure to make it up the next month or divide the missed amount throughout the remaining months. The main thing is to try to not have to come up with the entire lump sum at the end of the year.

The Bottom Line on a Holiday Budget

Remember, extended times of stress are unhealthy. Holiday gift-giving shouldn’t add to that. The best gift that you can give others this holiday season is a healthy, happy you.

Great Gift Reminder!

Don’t forget that if you’re looking for an inexpensive, but thoughtful gift for the women over 40 in your life, be sure to consider a 6-month (or longer) membership to the Empowered Health and Wellness for Women Over 40 Facebook Group. If you have any questions about how it works, feel free to reach out to info@peppermint-tea.com.

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