How Being a “Crunchy Mama” Can Save You Money - Little Home on the Iowa Prairie

Do you want to provide your family with a more natural life but think it’s impossible to afford?

You’re in luck, because providing your family with better, more wholesome foods and less toxic products can actually save you money.

This isn’t to say that all natural products will save you money. Since many of these types of products are produced to adhere more to quality than cost (which we like!), they can often carry a higher sticker price than their conventional alternatives.

However, when it comes to many items on this list, you can DIY the foods or products for much less or your initial investment will pay itself back in the long run.

In this post, I will show you the 10 top things natural moms do, and that you can do it, that save money!

1. Cooking from Scratch

When you move to a more “whole foods” diet (a way of cooking, not the grocery store), it might seem more expensive to buy individual ingredients. This is especially true if you have to buy a whole package when you only need a tablespoon or two in a recipe.

This might seem like a bit of a shock when you’re first transitioning your kitchen over to more individual ingredients. However, with lots of ingredients, especially pantry staples, you won’t have to buy them again for every recipe or even every week. While you might have an initial bit of sticker shock when buying whole packages of different ingredients, they can often last you through multiple meals.

By buying ingredients in bulk and cooking food yourself, your overall price per meal can often be lower than if you were to buy a premade pizza or frozen entrée from the grocery store.

Cooking from scratch is also especially helpful because you will know what all is going into your food, and you won’t have to worry about random flavorings or preservatives that you would in most premade food.

It’s a win-win situation: healthier food that costs less!

2. Baking from Scratch

While there is an abundance of baked goods products at all price points available with better ingredients than conventional grocery store products, you can save so much money by making them for yourself at home.

If you are strapped for time, just had a baby, or don’t trust in your baking skills (yet!), these products can help you feed your family healthier foods without spending a lot of time cooking.

When you buy the ingredients in bulk (or even a 10lb bag of flour if you’re just starting out), homemade bread, whether it’s sourdough or yeast, can be made for just pennies a loaf compared to a store-bought whole wheat loaf you might get at a store.

If you have time and want to take your bread baking to the next level, you can also buy whole wheat berries and a grain mill and grind your own wheat to use in your baking.

Not confident enough in your baking skills yet to try bread? That’s fine! Here are a few simple baked goods that take no time to whip up, use good ingredients, and are just plain yummy!

3. Buying Less “Empty Calorie” Foods

When you start cooking with whole foods, including whole grains, meat, and full-fat dairy products, you might be surprised that you’ll feel fuller sooner, with less food, and that you can stay fuller longer.

This is because many processed foods you’d buy from your local grocery or convenience store have been stripped of many of their nutrients and substance, with only carbs and sugar to give you a quick blood sugar/energy boost that leave you crashed and hungry not long after.

When you eat foods that have more substance to them, especially those with protein and fiber, you’re less likely to be so hungry that you or your kids need multiple between-meal snacks.

This isn’t to say that kids, with all the energy they burn playing, will never need a snack between lunch and supper, but hopefully it will cut down on the frequency of their snack breaks.

Buying less snack food, in addition to making your own when you do have snacks, can save you lots of money. Need some ideas for snacks? Here are a few to try (in addition to the baked goods I linked to above):

Homemade Trail Mix
Smoothies
Fruit with (or without) dip
Fruit Salad
Veggies with (or without) dip

4. Using reusable products

Anything that can be reused over and over again has the potential to save you money.

This may not be the case if a certain product is lower quality and it wears out before it has “paid itself back”. But if you buy a good quality product, it will pay itself back long before it has reached the end of its usefulness.

By reusing a product enough times, the cost per use can be the same or sometimes even less then its disposable counterpart.

Some examples of reusable products and their disposable counterparts include:

Washcloths instead of paper towels
Cloth napkins instead of paper napkins
Glass containers instead of disposable plastic containers
Stainless steel or glass water cup instead of bottled water
Reusable/refillable single serve coffee inserts for coffee maker instead of individual coffee pads
Plates, cups, and silverware instead of their disposable versions
Glass or stoneware pan instead of Disposable aluminum baking dishes

While you’re replacing disposable products in your home (many of which are made from plastic since it’s cheap), check out my post on ways to reduce the amount of plastic in your house!

5. Cloth diapers

I purposely left this out of the above list of reusable products because I feel like it has saved my family enough money that it deserves its own spot on the list.

I have found out that, for me, buying disposable diapers without all the chlorine or synthetic fragrances in them would cost me upwards of $60/month. That’s $720 per year! Even if you buy cloth diapers brand new, they will pretty much have paid themselves back after only one year!

Considering that children are often in diapers for 2 to 2 1/2 years, you’re saving quite a bit of money even if you only use them for one kid. If you have multiple kids, that’s even more savings from one purchase!

Cloth diapering on a budget

I was blessed to have been given some pre-loved (clean) cloth diapers that just needed the elastic replaced. Since I already had elastic and thread, those diapers didn’t cost me a cent.

If you find someone who is done using cloth diapers or you’re willing to put in some work to fix some up, you can save quite a bit of money compared to buying them brand new.

Cloth wipes

Another diapering item you can convert to cloth is wipes. While you can buy cloth wipes from a cloth diaper company, they’re really easy to make yourself.All you need is some soft fabric and some pinking shears to cut them into wipe-sized squares or rectangles. Alternatively, you can also buy baby washcloths and use them as wipes.

I personally just wet the wipes down with water, so you don’t necessarily even need to bother with fancy wipe solutions.

Cloth pads? Yes, really.

If you don’t have children, or your children are past the diapering stage, you don’t have to miss out.

Another reusable product for women is reusable cloth pads. While I haven’t personally used them yet because I’m still nursing my son and haven’t needed them, one of my favorite mom bloggers has a post on them! If you use cloth diapers, you can just toss them in the same wet bag and then into the washer really long side your diaper laundry.

Wow, okay that section got long. Can you tell I’m passionate about cloth diapers? If you have a baby and are looking for more ways to save money on baby stuff, check out this post.

6. Line Drying Clothes

To me there’s just something about using the sun and the wind to dry your clothes and diapers that just makes me feel like I’ve reached peak “natural mom” status. It makes me feel like my great-grandmother back before they had all the fancy electric household appliances.

I know it can take more time and effort to hang laundry on the clothesline instead of dumping it into the dryer, but it doesn’t take long. If there’s sun and a slight breeze, your clothes can be dry in approximately the same amount of time as it would take in the dryer.

Hanging you clothes on the line can save you maybe a couple dollars a month depending on how much you pay for electricity and how many loads of laundry you do per week.

It might not be much, but it can add up over time and is a good way to use less electricity, get some fresh air, and soak in some sunshine all at once.

7. Homemade Cleaning Products

There are lots of options for “green” cleaning products on the market today, and I still use some of them, such as Young Living’s Thieves Household Cleaner.

However, you don’t need to buy any premade cleaning products, and not doing so can save you money.

How do you not buy cleaning products?

Well, just take a look in your kitchen. In your pantry and fridge, I’m sure you have lots of things that can be used to get your house sparklingly clean. These include:

Vinegar
Baking Soda
Lemon Juice
Essential Oils
And more!

How do you use these? Just search “homemade natural window cleaner” or “homemade natural tub scrub” or whatever type of cleaner you’d like to make.

Chances are, you’ll find one that you already have the ingredients for that will be just as effective, cheaper, and way less toxic that buy cleaning products from the store!

8. Gardening

Whether you have a back porch and some pots, a large yard, or an acreage, you can start a garden.

Plants like herbs, tomatoes, and peppers don’t need much space to grow in and you only have to pay for one plant to get pounds of produce if it grows well.

While it does take a little money to get started gardening, chances are you’ll make that amount back in savings if your garden is at least semi-successful.

No matter what you choose to grow, it will almost definitely be cheaper than buying the imported produce found in stores, saving you money for only a little extra work. In fact, there are so many ways gardening can save you money, I wrote a whole post on it. Go check it out!

9. Preserving

So, you have a garden. Now what? A summer garden will only save you money on the summer’s grocery bill if you don’t have a way to preserve it for later use.

And while saving money even just a couple months out of the year is still money back in your pockets, preserving the summer’s bounty can help you continue saving you money year round.

There are many options for preserving, including drying, freezing, canning, fermenting, and storing in things in a cool location.

While that last option works best for root vegetables and not very well for most other types of vegetables, and some methods work better for certain fruits and vegetables than others, you’re bound to find a method that work for you and tastes great.

If you want some great resources for preserving your harvest, talk to your local library or extension office to see what they have to offer, or check out these resources.

10. Homesteading

If you’re like me, you think about “homesteading” and your mind immediately goes to living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, raising animals, and growing all your own food.

While that might be some people’s dream, and it definitely is part of mine, it might not be for others. It might not be practical for you to raise chickens or have a really large garden might now be practical depending on your location or station in life.

But if you dream of being more self-sufficient, you can start in smaller ways, back porch, back yard, acreage, or none of the above.

Whether you have a small porch garden and bake your own bread, or you go all out and buy a farm to raise chickens, cows, and wheat, moving toward raising or making your own for things you would normally buy can save you money.

Just make sure you don’t overcomplicate it or spend a ton of money to get started and never follow through.

As with any of these ways to save money as a natural mom, it’s easiest to start small. Get one thing under your belt, then move to the next. Perfect one recipe before moving to the next. Switch out one household or personal care product as your old ones run out.

You don’t have to start all at once, and often it;’s better to ease yourself into something so you have time to get used to it. Pick one thing that interests you the most or that currently costs you the most money. Then move to the next.

Pretty soon you’ll look back and see how far you’ve come, how much you’ve changed, and your body (and wallet) will thank you.