Trim the Fat Tuesday: The Milk

I'm not sure if this one will be helpful to anyone else or not, but we've started looking at our spending on groceries, and found an easy way to save cash by

Stopping our weekly milk delivery and buying it at the store instead.

You read that correctly: We had a milk man bring our milk to us once a week in a lovely, old-fashioned kind of way. It was fun, and the milk was delicious, which I attribute to the glass bottles:

It's also not ultra-pasteurized, so you could use it to make cheese and yogurt and get better results than with milk that is pasteurized to travel greater distances and sit on store shelves for longer periods. (The downside of this is that the expiration date is for real, and almost uncannily accurate.)

So we loved this milk, and if you want to give home delivery from a local dairy a try, Catamount Farms is a great way to go. 

But.

It's expensive for people in the middle of trimming their expenses, and it turned out to be a no-brainer area to cut back on. After all, we can get much cheaper milk at the grocery store, right?

True. But it's also true that we can still get excellent, local milk from the grocery store as well.

The local part is the whole reason we started the delivery in the first place. I did some poking around, and we can pick up milk from Richardson's Dairy at Tendercrop for just $3.99 a gallon. And Richardson's is actually a much closer local dairy for us — just 20 miles away.

The only drawback is that it comes in dumb old plastic bottles, which may offend our delicate tastebuds now that we're not used to it any more.

The good news, though, is the money we'll be saving. We had previously been paying $3.99 for a half gallon of milk (and that's not even counting the bottle deposit), so this is a permanent half-price sale for us. Six gallons of milk per month used to be $47.88, plus the weekly delivery charge of $3.85 (multiplied by four weeks per month) was a grand total of $63.28 per month on milk.

Now, six gallons of milk at $3.99 per gallon is just $23.94 per month. That works out to pretty decent savings for ever-so-slightly downgrading a luxury item.

Savings per month: $39