How To: Have an Inexpensive (but still awesome) Saturday!

Being in a single income is not easy.  You have to really budget and often times you have to pass on doing fun things for financial reasons.  One thing I used to find that Saturday was our most expensive day of the week.

It was like we were celebrating it was Saturday by going to fancy ice cream shops or spending money like crazy at the mall.  Because we had all this free time, we would go to local attractions as if we were tourists and eat at a restaurant on the way home.

There's nothing wrong with all of those things. In fact, we did that for years and it was pretty awesome.

Lately when money became a little tighter, I decided to re-evaluate our Saturday regime and come up with something a little more affordable.  This was the best decision I have ever made!

Without further ado, here is a list of some of the superfun awesome things we do on Saturdays:

Get free swag!
Stores like to have events on weekends where they know you are going to drag your kids in to have fun and hopefully spend a lot of money in the meantime.  A few Saturdays ago, we left a local shopping plaza with all of this free stuff:

Toys R Us: Captain America Lego, Nintendo lanyard and key chain  Home Depot: Rio 2 Bird Feeder

We started at Toys R Us where they had a Lego event going on (these happen multiple times a month.  You can see the calendar for Toys R Us events in Canada here: http://www.toysrus.ca/shop/index.jsp?categoryId=3373022 ).  Toys R Us also had a lovely Nintendo representative in the games department that day who taught us about the new Yoshi game and gave us some super cool Nintendo swag!  I had to pick up a birthday present and I also earned Air Miles.  So all of this free stuff just for doing something I had to do anyway.

Home Depot has kids workshops every second Saturday of the month.  We love going to these!  Not only does my son get to learn how to build various items, he gets to take the project home.  When the project is completed, the kids get a little pin and a certificate. 

He even gave my grandparents a napkin holder he made himself at Home Depot as a Christmas gift.  Grannies love homemade gifts and this one was a big hit!

Explore Your City!
I grew up in this city.  I feel like I know my way around town - but every weekend we've been taking different paths and visiting areas we don't frequent very often.  We have found some amazing parks and some beautiful views that I didn't even know existed.   We usually don't even take our car.

For extra fun, I let EVILBOY decide which way we are going to go sometimes.  It's interesting to see where we end up - usually at an ice cream place - but it's actually a lot of fun letting him make the decisions sometimes.

Sometimes we even bring along a GPS or use the Nike Plus app on my iphone to track how far we've gone.


Be Creative!
I love Saturdays because I always find time to get back to the work I've been looking at and avoiding all week.  I'm kind of  on crunch time with some cosplay projects so I've been cheating and working on my balcony in the dark this week, but usually Saturdays are a good day to catch up.

EVILBOY recently has begun working with clay.  I buy it at the dollar store so it's really cheap. Unfortunately his projects always fall apart...even when we reinforce them with toothpicks.  Either we're not doing something right or we may have to get a better quality of clay.

Paper mache is also very inexpensive and very easy to work with.   Once I realized you could make bases for paper mache projects out of cardboard and not just balloons, paper mache became a great source of enjoyment for me.  Click here for a tutorial of some paper mache candies I made recently.

Local Events
Keep an eye on local newspapers, websites and social media accounts for events at libraries or local festivals that may be happening!