How to Save Money on Laundry Expenses

There are some expenses that we all know that we can cut when the budget is tight. Laundry, though, isn’t usually one of them. After all, we need clean clothes to wear. No matter how careful we try to avoid stains and spills, we still need to run clothes through the washing machine.

If you need to create some more wiggle room in your budget, cutting your laundry expenses just might give you what you need. By making a few easy changes, you can cut the cost of doing laundry for your entire family. Here are some methods that we use to keep our laundry expenses in check:

Use cold water whenever possible. With the exception of the load of laundry that includes our socks and white towels, I use cold water for every load of laundry we wash. None of our clothes really need the extra cleaning power of hot water, and we are able to save on our electric bill by not heating the water.

Wash large loads. One of the most wasteful ways to wash laundry is to wash two or three articles of clothing at a time. Instead, hold your laundry until you have a full load to wash. By washing fewer loads you’ll save on soap and water usage. With our 4 children, it is usually very easy for us to accomplish the goal.

Avoid buying clothes that require dry cleaning. Dry cleaning expenses can quickly eat up any laundry budget. I always check the care label on clothes before I purchase them to ensure that I don’t end up with clothes that need more care than I want to give them. In my pre-Mom days, I used to have quite a few clothing items that required dry cleaning and even back then it was pretty expensive to get my clothes cleaned.

Re-use dryer sheets. Most fabric softener sheets will work for at least two loads of laundry. Although I understand the importance of using dryer sheets in the winter, I still make an effort to get as much bang for my laundry buck as I can.

Pull clothes out of the dryer as soon as they are done. Sometimes, dryers have a wrinkle guard function that causes them to kick back on after a few minutes if no one turns them off. Other times, clothes become wrinkled after lying jumbled in the dryer for too long; then you turn the dryer back on for a few minutes to take the wrinkles back out. In either case, you use up a lot of extra energy simply because you didn’t pull the clothes out right away.

Re-use the same towel all week. A few years ago we were having a serious problem in our house where we were constantly running out of clean towels. Our solution was to buy everyone one towel that was “theirs” and then they would need to use that towel for the entire week. This is for bath towels only. Obviously, we still go through a few hand towels per week but nothing like we did previously. To help garner support for our plan, we even took the children to the store and let them each pick their own towel out. Now if one gets left on the floor or thrown in the hamper before the weekend, we know who is responsible! This has really cut down in the amount of laundry that we have to do each week.

• Clothes Drying Rack - An Easy Way To Air Out Savings
• Coupon Clipping? Get Your Kids on Board

• Money Saving Tips: 75 Ways to Survive Recession Regardless of how economists refer to this economy, recession or...
• Every Single One Of The Would-be Problems Inside A Residence From Water Are Huge We've all seen films of flood-damaged houses and businesses. crawl...

Tagged as: budget, clean clothes, cleaning power, clothes, cold water, doing laundry, dry cleaning, dryer sheets, fabric softener sheets, hot water, laundry, mom, Saving Money, soap and water, stains, towels, washing machine, water usage, water wash