Thrifty Cleaning Tips

Are you looking to clean your home on a dime and save? Cleaning your living spaces doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. Especially if you’re looking into cleaning your spaces with green, all natural cleaning products, the desire to be thrifty in your cleaning endeavours can be appealing.

Here’s a few helpful, easy tips to make it easier to clean and save money!

Create Your Own Cleaning Detergents

Making your own cleaning detergents can save some money in the long run. There’s lots of recipes online for creating your own, natural, safe cleaning products. Everything from kitchen and bathroom cleaners to laundry detergent.

The trick about creating your own cleaners is that it doesn’t appear to save money up front. But that’s typically because we buy the ingredients in bulk. For instance, buying a gallon of  castile soap costs roughly $55-57 on Amazon.com (remember, it’s a concentrate of castile soap).

For the sake of easy math, let’s say we add about a tablespoon of concentrated soap to 16oz of water for our all natural, go-to cleaner. A premade bottle of natural cleaner at 16oz can cost $10 per bottle. But Bronner’s has 256 tablespoons in its gallon jug (i.e. 256 bottles of all natural cleaner just waiting to be made). It’s cheaper to buy a gallon of concentrate for $55 than to buy 256 bottles of premade cleaner for $2560 (give or take, depending on the price of the all natural brand being bought).

Buying the castile soap concentrate has saved you a little over $2500! That’s a lot of money saved.

And concentrated soaps like a gallon of castile soap can be used for so much more than just a house cleaner. It can be used for many different products (like hand soap, cleaning fresh fruits and veggies, cleaning the pets, washing our hair, etc.) Think of the many thousands of dollars that can be saved by using that concentrate alone.

What about all of the time spent in creating these cleaning products, you ask? They don’t have to be time consuming recipes. It takes only a few seconds to put a table spoon of the soap into 16 ounces of water. Give it a quick shake, and you’re ready to go!

Buy Your Cleaning Products in Bulk

If you have the space, buy your cleaning products in bulk. This is easy to do for things like sponges, scouring pads, soaps, rags, etc. It seems “expensive” up front, but you’re really saving money in the long run—as long as you’re actually using the products.

Places like Amazon, Costco, and Sam’s Club are great places to go to when you’re buying items in bulk.

Get to Know the Ins and Outs of Your Favourite, Go-To Store

What do we mean by this? Know the cycle of your favourite store’s sales, coupons, and money saving deals. A lot of popular stores regularly have sales or programs that allow you to save a little here and there. Some of them even have apps that make the job easier, or allow you to scan in the receipts to save a little extra $$ after all has been purchased. Some regularly have sales on particular items frequently. Look for those coupons!

Whatever store is your favourite go to, try to learn the ebb and flow of their sales. Do they put certain products on sale semi regularly? If so, waiting for those weeks when you know there will be a sale on the cleaning products you need is a great idea. Does the store “reward” you for buying multiple products in bulk by having a “by x amount and get a gift card”? Wait to buy those products around such a time, grab those products, and get yourself an extra gift card to boot! Think strategically about when you buy, how often you buy, etc.

What other money saving tricks do you have up your sleeve that you can apply to a thrifty cleaning plan? If you have any, please share them with us. We’d love to hear them!