Towards the beginning of every year, I review our monthly recurrent expenses from the previous year to see if there are places we can cut back. This is something I started doing when my husband and I were poor graduate students many years ago and that practice has stuck. Personally, I think our "poor graduate student" phase (which was 5 years) was the strongest and best influence on our financial practices as a couple and a family.
Back to the story...as I was reviewing last year's expenses I realized that having someone clean the house is a larger expense for us and that it seems to be the only "unnecessary" recurrent expense in the budget. In light of the fact that we are thinking about joining a country club (albeit unnecessary, it will be fun!) for both social & extracurricular reasons, and that I'm a big believer in "if you add an expense, you cut back somewhere else" I'm trying to work all the cleaning into my schedule so that we can remove the house cleaning expense from our budget.
So, I pondered a few ideas over a couple of days and realized that my most productive time is in the morning. Both my husband and I are very much, "early to bed, early to rise" people. Therefore, I divided up the cleaning over 3 days during the week with some things to do on the weekends. Except for Monday (which is the day I'm home with the kids), each task only takes about 30 minutes which I do from about 5:30am - 6:00am. I am able to get my workouts in on those mornings as well. I've tried it this week and it's working well so far. I still haven't made the decision to let go of my cleaning person yet, but I think we probably will over the next few months. Below is my schedule.
Monday: clean downstairs (fit this in between naps, errands, workouts, etc)
Tuesday AM: mop/clean upstairs bathrooms from 5:30am - 6AM
Wednesday: clean upstairs 5:30AM - 6AM
Thurs: off
Friday: off
Sat/Sun: laundry & sheets, project time (closets, garage, yard, etc)
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