Re-purpose

Do you use store-bought baby food for your child?  I do!  I tried to go au naturel and make my own stuff at home... but guess what little stinker REFUSED to eat the stuff I made?  Yes, it was Hailey.  So it was back to the store-bought for us.  Since we started giving her the stuff at 5 months I have been collecting baby food jars.  I have not kept all of them (gosh that would be ridiculous) but I do have about 50! (okay that is ridiculous too).  I had a plan to do 'something' cute and crafty with them. and I have been using a few of them to store colour-coordinated buttons and ribbons.  I just haven't finished making them pretty to show you.  (not yet at least)

I have, however, almost completed another use for them.  Ever heard of "Till Debt do us Part"?  I think Gail is brilliant working with these crazy overspending families to get their debt down and save some money.  Check out her personal website here!  It has all the instructions and budgeting forms you will need.

Now we aren't one of those crazy over-spenders but we also haven't made much effort to save some money.  So Ian and I decided to try out her cash budget plan. We have been going for almost a month now on cash only.  I am surprised that it isn't as inconvenient as I thought it would be.  We started with a smaller budget than we had normally been spending so we were saving money from the start and we still had leftover cash at the end of each week.  It is surprising how easy it was to spend 250$ at the grocery store each week.... now we have only a 150$ grocery budget to get what we need... The whole experiment has been very exciting for me as I was never a good 'saver'.

Well this post is supposed to be about something I made... and I am finally getting to it.

For the budget plan you need jars to put your cash in.  Here comes the baby food jars.  Now these ones are a bit small for it but bills fit just barely into a Gerber jar.  You need 6 for the categories: Food, Clothing/Gifts, Transportation, Entertainment, Other and Savings.

 I painted the lids black.... still waiting for them to dry to get you the final pic!

Used my vinyl cutter to make the words on the jars...

And will be putting these pictures on the tops of the lids so they are quick to identify.

All in all a quick easy project that is proving very useful for our weekly budgeting.  I wonder how much we will save if we do this for a whole year?


So if you have a stash of jars, and want to save some money too try the cash budget plan.  Also there are so many other things you can do with baby food jars.

This is what my button jars will become when they are done.  With different colours though...

And these magnetic spice jars are pretty cute too

See what you can re-purpose in your house!