One of the side effects of my wife’s entrepreneurial adventures has been that we have a very unstable income on her side of the balance sheet. And part of how we’ve dealt with that is to try and save money in as many ways as we can. Frugality has become the modus operandi in our household.
Anyone with kids will tell you that there are certain things that you cannot go without. For example, kids need clothes, and lots of them. They’ll go through several outfits a day depending on the messiness of their meals and the level of dirt outside. Kids like to have toys too! And being frugal and buying your kids toys don’t always go together.
But, we found a site that helps us a little with both. It’s called swapmamas.com and it is pretty darn cool. In a nutshell, it is a social networking site for moms where they gather together and swap/barter for items. Say we have some formula left over after our youngest moves up to real food. We can list the sealed cans on swapmamas. Another mama comes along and uses that formula, and has some clothes that will fit one of our kids. Or some DVD movies that her kids no longer watch. She offers the trade to us, we accept and all that’s left is the shipping. We pay for the shipping for the formula, and the other mama pays for the shipping for whatever it is that she traded us for. She gets a can of formula that she can use and that would have done absolutely nothing for us except sit on a shelf and we get a new movie or some new(ish) clothes. Win Win.
Swapmamas.com is worth a look if you’ve got kids and want to try and be frugal as well. It might even be worthwhile if you don’t have kids. I can’t attest to that since I would have never known the site existed if it weren’t for having kids. 😉
Shane Ede is a business teacher and personal finance blogger. He holds dual Bachelors degrees in education and computer sciences, as well as a Masters Degree in educational technology. Shane is passionate about personal finance, literacy and helping others master their money. When he isn’t enjoying live music, Shane likes spending time with family, barbeque and meteorology.
