Developing good household habits is just as important as developing good personal and professional habits for every adult. Good household habits ensure that you are able to maintain a good work-life balance and spend your hard-earned money efficiently.
You would be surprised what a significant difference good household habits can make in your monthly budget. Good household habits can also ensure that you can complete household duties in a timely manner to leave sufficient time for personal development.
1. Learn to use basic tools for maintenance
Every adult should own a basic tool set and know how to use those tools for basic maintenance and upkeep in the household. It is your passage into adulthood. Each major department store carries a beginner-friendly tool set. Buy one for yourself and find someone in your family that is great with the tools to teach you the basics. Don’t know anyone? Youtube is your friend. There are tutorials for every tool.
Ultimately, developing these household habits will save you a ton of money in the long run. No longer will you need to call a guy every time something goes wrong in your house. You will gain the confidence to be able to fix small plumbing issues or damaged furniture with help from internet resources. You will have the option to opt for a piece of furniture at a garage sale that needs a quick fix or a fresh coat of paint instead of always buying brand new.
2. Meal Prepping and Meal Planning
Having your meals planned for the week and sorted is one of the luxuries that can make your weekdays and weekends stress-free. When you plan and prep your meals ahead of time, you have a much better control over what you are putting in your body.
You are going to shock yourself with the amount of money you will save and the food waste you will prevent. All you will need to do is spend a couple of hours on Sunday prepping for the following week.
The most efficient way to do this is MEAL PREP for LUNCH and MEAL PLAN for .DINNER
Meal prepping for lunch
When you work a corporate job, every minute of the morning before work is very precious. It’s important to be efficient in the morning to ensure you start the work day on time. The more you can do to lessen the workload in the morning the better for your mental health and punctuality.
When you have your lunch for the day ready to go and packed, it makes the mornings much easier to get through. This way, you can truly focus on parts of your morning routine that you truly cherish such as having a healthy breakfast, exercising, meditating, or having a cup of coffee in peace with no rush.
The meals you prep for lunch are dishes that you truly love and can have every day of the week without getting tired of them. This is something you want to take out an hour on Sunday to batch cook for 3-5 lunches. Some of the recipes I meal prep for lunch are:
- stuffed shell pasta,
- enchiladas,
- chipotle-style burrito bowls,
- Beans salads,
- and much more.
I rotate these recipes every 5-6 weeks, so by the time it’s a particular recipe’s turn, I am actually very eager and excited to make it.
Click here for the Complete Guide to Meal Prepping for Lunch.
You don’t need to eat the same meal for all days of the week. You can meal prep twice a week as well. Alternatively, here’s a method that works best for my preference:
Meal Planning for Dinner
At least one of your meals for the day should be warm, freshly made, and nourishing. For dinner, you just want to ensure that you plan the meals, and grocery shop accordingly ahead of time. Generally, the planning process doesn’t take more than 5 minutes.
Look at what you already have in the fridge and any other groceries that need to be used up. That will be your meal for Sunday or Monday night. Now, open the sale AD for your favorite grocery shop. Plan the rest of your meals around what is on sale and in season.
EXTRA TIP: I keep a running master list of all recipes I have made for dinner. When I can’t think of meals, I look at that list for ideas. Sometimes, my habit of taking pictures of meals also helps me look back to old pictures for meal inspiration.
Click here for Complete Guide to Meal Planning for Dinner.
3. Buy Non-Perishable Household Items in Bulk
I want to first emphasize here that having the space to store items bought in bulk is a luxury in itself. Not everyone has enough space to take advantage of this money-saving household habit.
However, if you do have enough storage to be able to store groceries in bulk, you have got to take advantage of that space.
You should know the sale price for all the non-perishable items you use in your household on a daily basis. By “sale price”, I mean the cheapest price you have seen those items at throughout the year. Now, you are not going to be an instant expert at this. Getting the hang of knowing the RIGHT price takes time.
If you are a beginner, make an effort to be cognizant of how prices for things change throughout the year. Be more observant of prices when you are grocery shopping. A good indicator of something being a good price is when it is one of the first 10 items advertised on the first page of a grocery store AD.
Now, whenever you see any non-perishables that you use every day at the sale price or at least close to that price, you buy in bulk. You buy enough of that item to last you until it expires. For example, I have enough dishwashing liquids stocked up to last me 4 years. I once saw them on clearance and bought them in bulk.
Never do I find myself running out of non-perishables. I always have enough to last me until the next sale.
The amount of money you save on these items can be anywhere from 30-40% off the retail price. That is a HUGE help for your grocery and household budget.
Here are some of the household and grocery items I always stock up on:
- Canned goods
- Pasta, rice, lentils, beans, etc…
- Cleaning supplies
- Laundry items (detergent, softeners, dryer sheets, etc)pr
- Frozen items
4. Have a cleaning schedule for Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly, and Yearly cleaning tasks
Do you find yourself cleaning things in your house after they have already gotten to a point where they absolutely have to be cleaned? Does cleaning just ever feel never-ending? The amount of cleaning that is left to do might even feel overwhelming.
Well, people who always have clean homes actually regularly clean everything so they never have to spend hours and hours deep cleaning every month. Their homes are always looking effortlessly clean. I really just want to emphasize that difference here: homes that are always clean vs. homes with corners that are clean for a short time after deep cleaning and arent’ cleaned again until they get pretty bad.
The easiest and most manageable solution is to schedule EACH AND EVERY cleaning task. This way, you will only spend 15-30 minutes each day in cleaning. And your home will always look clean. Developing a household habit like this will pay dividends for your mental health and self-confidence.
Use a calendar that will allow you to automatically schedule periodically repeating tasks. So far, I have only ever used google calendar. It allows me to not only schedule repeating tasks but also assign them to different individuals in my household.
There might be better solutions out there for making this habit even more efficient. Here are some examples of the tasks that are automatically scheduled and assigned in my household:
Daily:
- Load the dishwasher,
- clean the kitchen tops,
- clean the sink,
- clean the dining table,
- Sweep and mop the kitchen floor
Weekly:
- Sweep and mop the whole house,
- clean bathroom,
- clean out the fridge,
- dusting shelves in the kitchen,
- laundry
I have monthly and yearly tasks as well. All these tasks are distributed evenly throughout all days of the year. This avoids overcrowding any particular day or week.
5. Freeze, Freeze, Freeze!!!
A recent study showed that Americans are freezing food at record rates as of 2022. During the pandemic, many people in fact bought an extra chest freezer. I was one of those people.
Utilizing your freezer to its fullest capacity can prove to be very economical and ecological over time. Freezing food at the right time can mean:
- Not paying astronomic prices for out-of-season fruits and veggies
- Not wasting food
- Having ready to warm up and eat healthy meals for convenience
- Being able to buy groceries in bulk at an affordable price
If you are an adult just starting to develop good household habits, freezing can be one of the most basic habits to master. You can freeze almost everything. Do your research on how long things last in the freezer. Do research on what is the best method to freeze a particular food.
Some veggies are best frozen chopped up, some pureed, some cooked. All foods freeze differently and they stay fresh in the freezer for different lengths of time.
The most important part about freezing is to accurately label the container. Whenever you freeze something, label it with the date it was frozen and what it contains.
Most importantly, don’t forget to use the foods that you freeze. It shouldn’t be an out-of-site, out-of-mind scenario. This is one issue that most people face. They forget what they have in the freezer. They keep buying new foods and never end up using the foods they froze.
The best thing to do is dedicate particular days of the week to only eating meals from the freezer. This actually does work. I had a habit of freezing leftover pizza sauce, but I would always forget to thaw it. I would then keep opening new jars and freezing the leftover. Terrible!! I KNOW!!
Eventually, I had to resort to taking a vow not to buy a single container of pizza sauce until I had not even a drop of pizza sauce left in my household. IT WORKED. Household habits for the win!!
6. Plan your domestic life as you do your work life
Many people are pros at scheduling and performing their work tasks, however, they are a hot mess in their personal life. It’s a certain mindset that keeps us from treating personal responsibilities the same as work responsibilities. People think that personal responsibilities are supposed to be casual, and non-committal, thus not being given a lot of importance.
At the end of a workday full of worrying about getting things done on time, who wants to do the same thing at home? That mindset is completely understandable in theory. It is totally understandable that people do not want the burden of being perfect all the time.
However, you would be surprised how much load is actually taken off your mind by scheduling your personal life. You no longer have to burden your mind with remembering the tasks you have to do. You just find a dedicated time period in your free time to knock off everything from your personal tasks list. Performing your personal responsibilities with the efficiency as your work responsibilities actually frees up so much of your time. It also saves you a lot of money in the process. You are much less likely to pay unnecessary fees or lose out on opportunities because you didn’t act on your responsibilities in a timely manner.
7. Have a Kickass Mail Sorting System
One of the most important household duties that can be detrimental to your finances if not done right is mail/email correspondence. Many important household responsibilities are tied to mail/email correspondence such as paying bills, renewing insurance, renewing memberships, government communications, etc.
Having a mail/email organization system is essential to ensure you never miss an important task. Emails are much easier to sort and correspond to. Mails, on the other hand, are much harder to deal with. They can clutter your home very easily if not dealt with in a timely manner.
Create a system that requires you to separate out your malis into the following categories every day: throw, save, act on. And have a dedicated day during the week to address and correspond to the “Act ON” pile. This method will ensure you never miss any tasks related to your mails.
If you find yourself constantly losing mails you need to save, scan them as a backup. It is an extra effort, but you can have peace of mind that way.
I truly hope you found this article to be useful and enlightening! These are all things I practice regularly. I want everyone to be able to rip benefits of household habits that have drastically improved my life.