Episode Summary:
In this week’s episode, we share ideas and tips for saving money on toiletries and personal care items such as make-up, toilet paper, and medicine. We discuss how much people are spending in this category and share our best ideas and tips for saving money. We encourage everyone to take a minimalist approach, focusing on quality over quantity, buy generic and store brands, and consider making some products yourself at home.
Episode Notes:
The average family spends hundreds, and some thousands, per year on toiletries and personal care items. These are often the items that are part of a trip to Target, the grocery store, or a quick Amazon purchase; you likely don’t realize how much you’re spending as it adds up quickly.
Many products fit into the categories we’re talking about:
- Personal maintenance items such as shampoo, deodorant, and facial products.
- Make-up, nail care, and bath/spa products.
- Medicine, vitamins, and supplements.
- Cleaning supplies for your home.
- Personal care staples like toilet paper, hand soap, dishwasher soap, etc.
We talk through ideas and tips for how to save money on toiletries and personal care items:
- Be a personal care minimalist. Consider what you really need.
- Focus on being intentional and values-based in your purchase decisions. Focus on quality over quantity. Also, consider when quality matters versus does not.
- Use up what you already have, even if it’s not your favorite product. For example, use up old toothpaste, shampoo, etc., before you restock on things. Don’t allow yourself to stock back up or buy some new product you’ve wanted until you use up what you already have.
- Use less of the product each time you use it. For example, you don’t need as much toothpaste or toilet paper as most people use.
- Ensure you use up all of the product before recycling the packaging. Cut things open if you have to.
- Consider what stores you’re buying things from. Walgreens is expensive for some items but also has a great store brand. Sams Club and Costco can sometimes be a good price.
- Do you really need it? Consider getting to the root cause of why you need some products. For example, something like Kleenex is costly; consider using toilet paper instead.
- Buy generic and store brand items. The ingredients are often identical.
- Re-fill items with generic items. If you like a nice or special-looking soap container in your bathroom, consider keeping and reusing that container and refilling it with Aldi’s antibacterial hand soap; it’s 25% the cost of some other brands.
- Seek out tried and true classics vs. fancy marketing machines. For example, CeraVe lotion is highly recommended by all dermatologists, is a quality product, and has a fair, reasonable price. I could instead find many overpriced and overly marketed lotions when CeraVa is arguably a better product.
- Minimize your makeup and consider if/when you really need to wear makeup.
- Make your own! Mike makes his soap. Maggie makes her household cleaning products.
- Don’t get pulled into multi-level marketing MLM product schemes. These products are often much higher priced, and the quality is often not better.
- Use coupons and look for things on sale. The Flipp app helps find sales and deals on specific products.
- Take care of yourself naturally, and you need less of all of these products. For example, if you’re exercising, eating healthy, getting enough sleep, meditating, and so many other things, you’ll need less medicine and “personal care” items.
Top 3 takeaways:
- Be more thoughtful about your decisions for your wallet and the environment.
- You probably only need a quarter of what you usually buy out of habit.
- Test and learn. Stop using some things for a short time, use less, or switch products. You might learn a lot.
