With our attempts at trying to save money/pay off debt/just try to get by, we have really limited ourselves in our "fun" spending. We cut vacation out and instead of our yearly Florida trip we are going to visit a friend a few hours away. We have bought nothing for ourselves outside of food and necessity. There is a point where this gets very old and very tough.
Two things happened this week that made not spending money almost impossible... one is that we found out our baby-to-be in a girl and the second thing is that summer arrived in Pittsburgh and my growing belly does not accommodate any of my pre-pregnancy clothes.
So we needed to do some serious shopping! Ok, well I needed to do some shopping for myself and we just couldn't help ourselves with buying things for the baby!
First stop: Macy's. I am not a fan of Macy's. I don't shop there... ever. I think they are usually overpriced and I find it very hard to find anything for my age (too old for the junior section, too young for the adult stuff). Aside from dresses, shoes and purses, I am shopping elsewhere. However, no matter how many times I make this known, my mother-in-law gets me a Macy's gift card for every occasion. Part of me thinks she does it on purpose... but that's for another day... So here I am with $100 in Macy's gift cards. One thing you should know is that I'm a gift card hoarder. I hold on to those suckers for rainy days where I just NEED to shop and don't have any money to do so. I am also EXTREMELY frugal with gift cards. I know, completely opposite of how I am with our real, hard-earned money. I guess I just want my free money to go pretty far.
I found out through a friend that Motherhood Maternity has a shop inside Macy's and although you can't use Macy's coupons, you can use their gift cards. I promptly gave up my dreams of new bedding and went straight to the maternity section. I was able to get shorts, two tops and a bathing suit with my gift cards and still have $15 left over. All in all, I think I did pretty well and I was comfortably cool during our 87 degree day in my shorts and tank.
Problem number one taken care of.
Problem number two: I just NEEDED to buy things for little girl. This was much harder as we would actually have to PAY for these things. As luck would have it, there was a big consignment sale going on in our neighborhood. My husband and I agreed that $100 would be more than enough to satisfy the weekend and that was all we could spend.
Now I know what you're thinking... $100 is a lot of money for clothes! Well, it is but we were also looking for some things to keep at his mom's house for when we visit. She lives 2 hours away and I am not lugging everything for each visit.
We walked out of there with a bouncer for MIL's house, four pairs of shoes (excessive I know, but they were soooo cute!), a bathing suit for Disney, a book for me about being a mommy, and a bunch of little outfits and onsies. Total spent: $45. I was extremely thrilled with my purchases (I only bought name-brand clothes from Gap, Old Navy and Disney) and I felt like we got a lot for our money. Too bad I have to wait until October for her to get here!
Last but not least we stopped at the mall so Kevin could buy a new pair of shoes with his Dick's gift card. Due to our awesome savings at the baby sale, we had extra money left over to put toward the shoes he really wanted.
We ended the night with a stop at Bahama Breeze for dinner, making it feel like we had a great "vacation" day saving money and getting what we needed.
Sunday morning we got up early and took our dog to the local animal shelter for his annual rabies shot at their $10 clinic. MUCH cheaper than the local vet's office where we always seems to spend $200 for them to do an exam and shots and tell us he is healthy.
When we got home from our spending extravaganza weekend, we had $17 left in our pockets. All in all I think we had a great weekend on a very small budget!
PS that $17 went right into our Disney-saving fund :)
No comments:
Post a Comment