4 Ways I Buy Clothes On a Small Budget

For the last few years, our family has been on a pretty strict budget. My husband and my brother run their own business, and for the first couple of years money was really inconsistent, so we had to be REALLY consistent so we could make it through the lean months on the leftovers of the better months. Now that the business has grown, we can count on a consistent salary each month, but since we're still paying off student loans and just finished paying off our car, we've chosen to keep the budget tight. (As my friend recently said to me, "We're trying to Dave Ramsey the crap out of those loans.") All of which is to lead into the fact that I don't go on many shopping sprees.

Each month, we have a small amount of discretionary money set aside for each member of the family. Eric and I get $50 each, and the girls get $75 together (which covers D's diapers and wipes and then anything else they might need). That covers activities, gifts, splurges, etc. and though I've gotten pretty good at stretching it, it's not a huge amount. Occasionally when a family member has a dire need for something big like shoes or coats, we'll move the budget around, but those emergencies aren't frequent. A sale at my favorite store usually doesn't count as an emergency.

But the fact is, I do like to shop for clothes, and I like having something different to wear. I like buying my girls clothes for special occasions. Which means I pretty much never want to spend $50 on one item, ever, or I'm totally out for the month.

Here are some of the ways I stick to my budget and still manage to feel like I can dress nicely without getting totally bored of my clothes or missing out on the fun of putting my two girls in matching things. This probably won't ever be a fashion blog, but I can enjoy clothes and pay off and save at the same time.

• I'm not afraid to buy kid's clothes used. Kids grow out of things so fast, it's just never worth it to pay $30+ for their clothes, especially when you never know if they're about to have a growth spurt two seconds after you make a big purchase. Not to mention the fact that for the past year my older daughter has become SO opinionated about her clothes, and most days she spends the majority of the day in a dress up anyway. Kid-to-Kid and Just Between Friends have been my go-to when I've needed to fill in gaps in the hand-me-down stash. A coat here, some warm jammies there, a few pairs of shoes - I've found some great stuff for my kids at consignment stores. Last year at the Just Between Friends sale I found a little girl's dress I had wanted to buy about a year before but had passed up because it was $30. At JBF it still had the tags on it, but I paid $4. Win. D is getting it for Christmas, just before she grows into it.
  

  

  I got that Land's End coat at a consignment sale. I think it will last C for a couple of years and I'm guessing it will still be going when D is ready for it.

• I've embraced the online thrift store. This took me longer because thrift stores are just hard with little kids. However, I recently discovered Thredup when one of my friends posted it on facebook. I got $20 in my account to try it, and every time someone I refer uses it I get an extra $20, so I've gotten about $80 free and then have spent a little of my actual money here and there to get myself a couple of new dresses, shirts, sweaters, etc. They even have kids clothes, and I recently bought my girls some coats and dresses. The prices are higher than a thrift store, but the quality is mostly better, and it's really nice to be able to filter down your search by size, color, and category. (If you want to try thredup, you can use my referral link and get $20 to try it.) 

  
  

  
  
  
  
• I accept hand me downs for my girls - and myself. I don't think I bought more than about 3 pieces of maternity clothing until halfway through my second pregnancy, thanks to my sister-in-law and some stretchy shirts, and I've hardly bought anything for my oldest daughter thanks to baby showers and hand me downs from her cousin. (Of course, she's so dang tall that she's about to pass up the cousin who was giving the hand me downs, so we'll probably have to rethink that in the future - but it was really nice while it lasted.) The hard thing about this is not letting the hand me downs take over. Now that my second daughter is wearing them I've started going through them and tossing the things I don't love. Babies may be messy, but by the time they're a year old they aren't going through more than 2 outfits a day. 
• I wait. A few weeks ago I had some Old Navy Cash. I had something I wanted, but it wasn't in stores, and I didn't want to pay for shipping or buy $50 worth of stuff to get free shipping. Then, on the last day of Old Navy cash, when I'd pretty much decided to forget about it, I got a coupon for free shipping on $25, which apparently worked when the item was $25 even if it was much cheaper once the coupons applied. The dress was $12, free shipping. Bam. Plus, by the time I'd waited that long, I knew I really did want the dress. You might miss out on a few things by waiting, but buying on an impulse almost always leads to me spending more and regretting the purchase after, whereas I never regret the item I wanted at full price but for for $3 on the clearance rack a couple of months later. 

My dress: Thredup (free with credits)
D: Hand-me-downs, heed to toe
C: Hand-me-down
E: Sweater bought in the after Christmas sale last year.

How about you? Do you have any tricks for refreshing your wardrobe and keeping your family clothed without breaking the bank? 

When Plans Fall Through: How a Miscommunication Shaped My Adult Life

When I was a senior in high school, I'd been accepted to my university of choice and was figuring out all of the logistics of moving 60 miles away for school. My best friend from Junior High had been living in Las Vegas during our high school years, but she was going to be attending the same school and we planned to live together. We were supposed to sign up for the dorms on a certain day, so we made plans to do so.

For reasons I no longer remember or understand, I thought we were supposed to sign up at the same time from our respective computers. I don't know why we couldn't just write in our request for a roommate whenever we filled out the application, but I do remember calling her house frantically for hours trying to find out when she was going to sign up so we could do it at the same time. I finally got in touch with her several hours later, and she'd already sent in her application without me. I submitted mine, but received a letter saying the dorms were full and I would be put on a wait list but should look for alternate housing.

A girl I knew a little from  my high school choir choir and a few other classes got the same letter, so we decided to look for housing together. We picked an apartment, signed a lease, bought coordinating bedspreads - then got letters saying that if we wanted to stay in the dorms we could. Whoops.

So that began three years of living in an apartment complex that was not really as nice as the model apartment made it look, but one full of wonderful and fulfilling experiences and relationships, many of which I've carried with me ever since. My roommates and other friends who lived across the hall during those years taught me so much. They taught me how to wear makeup. They taught me how to be more spontaneous. They taught me how to flirt with cute boys. They wallowed with me to get over stupid boys. They helped me to have more confidence in myself. They went with me to plays and movies. They told me it was okay to go to plays and movies by myself. They encouraged me to follow my dreams, to apply for that study abroad to England, to submit that grad school application. They helped me realize that I cared about politics, that I loved rock concerts, that chopsticks are not impossible to use, that loving someone like a sister is possible even if you don't have any sisters. They taught me that loving a friend can be so hard you want to quit being friends with anyone ever again, and that remembering why you loved someone can be so beautiful that you want to be friends with everyone you meet.

One of the groups I lived with at the time

At a reunion this summer with those who could make it.

I'm not saying these things wouldn't have happened if I'd ended up living with my dear friend as planned. Many wonderful people would have entered my life either way, I'm sure. But some of the people I met because that plan fell through started this blog with me. Many of them were some of the first people I told when I got into grad school, when I got engaged, when I found out I was pregnant. Those people still have such a huge influence on my life that I can't imagine who I would be without them - and if I hadn't been confused about how to apply for dorms, I probably wouldn't have met any of them.

So whenever something doesn't work out the way I plan, I try to remember that some of the people who had and still have the biggest influence on my life are only in it because of something that started out as a huge disappointment and a communication error, and I try to figure out what amazing things are going to happen because my plans fell through.

How I Threw Out 30 Bags of Stuff and Started Loving My House

So like two years ago I started a post on decluttering that I never finished. Because I never decluttered. This is what I wrote: 

I have a clutter problem.
I think it stems from three main sources.
1) I like shop when I have nothing in particular in mind that I need - just to browse around and look at things and imagine them in my house. Most of the time I'm pretty good at not buying them, but every once in awhile, I buy something even when I have no idea where I will put it. And then it has to go somewhere.
2) I have a problem throwing things out - particularly things that have been given to me by someone - so I hang onto it and it takes up space in the open or takes up storage space in one of the many, many boxes I have stored at my parents' house.
3) When faced with a pile of clutter of any sort, even when that clutter is a pile of mail, I have a paralyzing mental block and I just stare at it and push it aside into a tidier pile instead of, you know, doing something about it.
I have some friends who have the most glorious, clutter-free houses. I have a mom who has a house with lots of knick-knacky stuff in it, but stuff that stays relatively organized so the effect is cozy and inviting rather than stifling. Somehow, I have managed to fail to achieve either of these ends of the spectrum.
This cannot continue.

I thought it was a really good beginning of a post, but alas, because of the above problems, I didn't ever finish it because I had NO IDEA what to do about it.

Then a few weeks ago I saw The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo in a friend's Instagram feed and I really wanted to read it. So naturally I bought it for my husband for Easter. (He is always pushing for less stuff, so he wasn't sad about it - and I think he was excited that I was ready to undergo a major project of this sort.)

The KonMari method has a couple of major points that really worked for me. 1) You have to go through all of your stuff and throw a lot of it away before you reorganize it. If you just keep reorganizing all of your stuff, it's always going to be a mess again soon. 2) You decide whether you want to keep things or not with one simple question, and that question is not, "Have I used this in a year?" or "Does this still work?" That question is, "Does this item bring me joy?"

I don't know why this worked so much better for me than anything else I'd ever tried to do, but I suddenly felt released from all of the stuff that for some reason I felt obligated to keep because it was still good or I might use it sometime or it seemed like a waste to junk it. "Does it give me joy?" made me go, "Nope. Toss it," to a lot of stuff that was filling up my little apartment. So each night we've been choosing a category and going through things and sending garbage bags filled with stuff we just didn't like that much to the donation pile or the garbage.

You guys. Why was I hanging onto some of that junk? I had shoes I hadn't worn in years that had cracked soles. I had stacks of notes from college and text books sitting on my shelf that I haven't looked at in 7 years except to pack them to haul them from one place to the next. I had kitchen appliances that I had used maybe once since we got married taking up huge amounts of space in my pantry. I threw away probably 20 pairs of cheap earrings from Claire's I'd had since Junior High when I got my ears pierced. It. Was. Ridiculous.

Here's the amazing thing about throwing stuff out. Suddenly you realize that it is not your room's fault that you don't like it. It's YOURS for filling it with a comforter you don't terribly love, cheap tv stands standing in as night stands, all the pictures you didn't feel like putting in the living room where people will see them, and two bookcases full of books you don't care about. In one night we donated an entire bookcase full of books, got a headboard with shelf space so we could junk the ugly space-sucking night stands, donated the bedding set that we picked when we got married because my husband was talking about how everything at Bed Bath and Beyond was too girly (I realized after about a year that I didn't love it, but it was a nice compromise until it started pilling) and replaced it with one that we both love, etc. We tossed out two-thirds of the contents of our closet so it became a beautiful and easily organized space, and now it's my favorite room.

This is my new favorite spot. The baby is a nice bonus.

Suddenly I don't just buy stuff because it's cheap and fills the need. I wait a little longer and pay a few dollars more and get something I really love.  I don't need more stuff. A few things that give me joy are so much better for me than a bunch of stuff that makes me feel blah. Because yes, stuff doesn't really bring you joy in the deep spiritual sense, but your things should give you some pleasure - otherwise why have them? A clean, organized space is bringing me SO much more joy than all of that stuff I've thrown out. I don't even remember what half of it was already.

Sleep it off

Amy Poehler's new memoir Yes, Please is full of fantastic advice. One piece of advice that especially resonated with me, a sleep deprived mother of an infant:

"One good night's sleep can help you realize that you shouldn't break up with someone, or you are being too hard on your friend, or you actually will win the race or the game or get the job. Sleep helps you win at life. "

It's true, though. I'll never forget the first few weeks of Samuel's life. Newborns are exhausting, but a newborn plus a three year old, plus a five year old? I was beyond exhausted. I was destroyed. My dear friend Cori and her husband called one morning when Sam was about three weeks old and asked if they could take the girls for the morning. My mom was gone, my husband was back at work, and I'd been the sole caregiver for the majority of the days for nearly a week and I don't even know how I was functioning at that point other than divine help. 

I quickly took them up on their offer and as soon as they picked up the girls I went to my bed, laid Sam on my chest (because that was the only way HE would sleep), and fell asleep. I want to say I slept for eight hours straight but that would be a lie. It was more like three hours. And then I folded some laundry. But it FELT like eight hours. It was exactly what my body needed. 

In fact, that moment was the turning point for me. I woke up from that nap thinking, "I can totally do this. I can totally do three kids!" From then on, I was able to conquer many situations that had previously brought me to my knees. 

I'm looking forward to paying Cori back in a couple months when she has her third baby. 

If you are anything like me, sleep can be the best friend that you take for granted at night, and then can't let go of in the morning. My kids are early risers, and I like to take advantage of my "me time" in the evenings. I need to stop watching so much Netflix and start enjoying more recreational sleep time. 

The Mayo Clinic has seven suggestions for getting better sleep:

1) Stick to a schedule
2) Pay attention to what you eat and drink
3) Create a bedtime ritual
4) Get comfortable
5) Limit daytime naps
6) Include physical activity in your daily routine
7) Manage stress

So if you are ever facing a mountain that needs climbing just tell yourself everything is going to be alright. 
Cause a players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, and Taylor's gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.

But you're going to sleep. Sleep it off. 

Teaching Kindness

Remember that time when I wrote about how my husband and I went to San Francisco and our rental car got broken into and it was okay because we sat and thought about things to be grateful for?

Well. Apparently we should never go on vacation. I've decided when we go on vacation we either have to have vomiting kids or car trouble of some sort, because or last few vacations have gone as follows: San Diego - clutch goes out on the car on Christmas Eve; Texas - CB gets carsick in the middle of the night and vomits all over twice; San Francisco - the aforementioned car getting broken into; Tucson - CB gets some kind of horrible stomach bug and starts throwing up right as we pull up to a hotel and then throws up all night; Texas again - parts go shooting out of our engine 3 hours from our destination and our car is totally trashed.

This last one was extra special because we'd only just bought the car about six months before, we had two kids in the car, and it was the beginning of our vacation after a year of not seeing my husband's mom. We'd decided to stop for the night just three hours out because we didn't see any point in driving until 4 am, and about two miles down the road the next morning we heard a horrible knocking that rapidly turned into a loud clang and smoke.

I could write another list about all of the things I thought of to be grateful for this time around, because I was shockingly calm about the whole thing and noticed lots of reasons that we were really lucky. (My husband had a harder time getting to that point, since he'd done a TON of research before he bought the car and felt pretty mad about it going out on us, but he got there eventually.) However, what really stuck out to me was how kind people were. At least 5 cars stopped in the hour we were sitting on the side of the road on a highway that wasn't all that busy. Some of them just slowed down to ask if we needed water or snacks until the tow truck came. Some told us they would pray for us. Some offered rides and advice. One family on their way to a funeral stopped and asked if we needed anything, then CAME BACK a few minutes later because they'd noticed there was a truck stop just over the hill and thought it would be a better place to wait with two babies. They totally rearranged everything in their truck to cram us and our car seats and our essentials in, and it was so much better to wait near a bathroom in the truck stop restaurant eating spaghetti and chicken strips and coloring than it would have been to wait by the side of the road for 3 hours for my brother in law to come and get us. (And, by the way, my incredibly kind brother-in-law ended up driving 7 hours for us that day, which I'm sure is not how he was hoping to spend his Saturday.)

When we got back from Texas, my two and a half year old had a few days where she was just royally grumpy and trying, (and this after a week of mixed interactions with her cousins, some wonderful and lovely, some of which resulted in hitting and crying in pursuit of possession of the coolest toys at Grancy's house). She was having potty accidents and wasn't listening and wasn't being very nice (a friend of mine calls it re-entry sickness - that craziness kids get adjusting to normal life after vacation), and I was just at my wit's end. Her favorite thing in the whole world right now is dressing up in princess dresses, and suddenly in the middle of another uncharacteristic fit I had an inspiration. "You know sweetie, princesses are always kind and nice. If you aren't kind, I don't think you can be a princess. It's fun to dress up, but it's more important to be kind and nice to people."

This totally struck a chord with her, and over the two months that we've been home from Texas. I have occasionally taken princess dress privileges away for periods of time until she can show me that she's being kind. My husband and I talk to her about being "nice and kind" daily. Sometimes hourly. As with most things, it seems to be getting easier for her with practice. She routinely points out unkind behavior to me when she sees it in a movie or at the playground and says things like, "[Blank] is being mean! That's not very good!" When I point out to her that her behavior isn't kind she is quick to tell me, "But I am nice and kind!" and then we talk about what we can do that would be better - what would be kinder. I make a big deal about it when she shares with her little sister without being asked, when she shows she is thinking about other people, when she thanks me for the yummy dinner even though she hasn't actually tried it yet and might not.

It's easy to think about yourself. It's especially easy for a preschooler to only think about herself, because her brain just hasn't developed all the way yet and she just hasn't developed that much empathy yet, and it's easy to just ignore children's inability to be kind and assume that they'll just grow out of it - which I suppose to some extent they probably will. But the more I talk to my daughter about kindness, the more I realize that how important it is, and how effective it is even though I know some things will come better with age. She talks better and better each day. She's starting to recognize letters. She's getting stronger and more agile and more beautiful every day. But the thing that matters most to me is that she's also getting better at being kind. I can see a difference already, and she has so much time to learn to be really kind and wonderful. Maybe someday she'll be the one stopping to help someone broken down by the side of the road, reminding them that even though things are bad right now, it will be okay - because people are kind.