Cheap As Dirt

Hola Todos,

Hey GuYs! How are you? Well, after this week Anna and I only have 5 more weeks of teaching! Crazy! We are looking forward to going home, eating lots of American food, and seeing you all, but we are sad to see that we have so little time left. That said, there are a couple of things we won´t miss! One of them is being VERY frugal. Yeah yeah, I know what you are probably thinking "But you guys have traveled!" Yes, we were blessed to do a bit of traveling, but while we have lived here in Copiapó we have lived off what the Chilean Gov.-United Nations has given us (which isn´t much!!!). I think when we crunched the numbers we found out that we make something like 2 dollars an hour :). Here are a few ways we try to save money to make it to the end of the month.

Laundry in the Tub

This sure isn´t glamorous work! We live in a great location (inbetween our schools and close to a Supermarket), but there is no laundrymat near us. So, instead of hauling all our heavy laundry across town we clean it in the tub and then hang dry it. It is time consuming, back breaking, and no fun but it saves us money!

Pepper Mill

Ok, so Anna had this great idea to poke a hole in our plastic pepper mill and refill it to save a little money. It is cheaper to buy the pepper corns and refill our old mill than buy a new one each time. We could of course buy ground pepper, but fresh ground tastes better. So, with Anna´s bright idea we get cheap fresh pepper!

A close up of the hole Anna made.

So, as you guys can see we do what we can to try and save money. The end of each month is a pain and we barely scrape buy, but in case you are worried we don´t suffer. Anna is a great cook and makes each meal super yummy and in our budget we get 10,000 pesos each as an allowance(about 18 or 19 dollars). Of course, that personal money goes super quick since it is only about 4-5 dollars a month to spend. Oh, and we have a "Fun Money Envelope" for weekend fun to do internet, get ice cream, rent a movie, etc. But, all that said we are looking forward to getting jobs that pay more and not being so tight on funds each month.

Other Fun FREE Things We Do:

-Check out Spanish books from the School Library

-Go hiking in the hills behind our house

-Hang out with Chilean Friends

-Play with our three kitties

-Watch programs like "The Amazing Race" (S. American Version), etc.

-Run

-etc.

Ok, well I hope you guys are doing well and will talk to you later! Chao!