Neighborhood savings idea's

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Here are a few ways to get together with your neighbors and help one another save money.

Summer Camp- All of the children ages three and over attend a rotating day camp at the different houses of their parents. Each week, one set of parents uses a week of vacation to host the camp at their house, and watches all of the kids while finding fun activities for them. If daycare costs $100 a week per child that you have and you have two children, this can save $2,600 over a thirteen week summer.

Shared Food- If you have a gardening neighbor, agree to grow different things in your garden and share equally. For example, I know many techniques for growing tomatoes, so I might offer to grow a large number of tomato plants and share them with several neighbors in exchange for some of their produce.

Buying Bulk-Talk to several families about purchasing a fully butchered and packaged head of cattle. Quite often, you can get this far cheaper than sticker price if you get ahold of a meat locker. Sell shares of it and split up the meat so that you don’t overload your own freezer. You can basically do this with any very large bulk purchase to save a lot of money over the long run.

Reciprocal babysitting- Offer to watch a neighbor’s children one Saturday night a month in exchange for them watching your kids one Saturday night a month. This makes for what amounts to free babysitting one night a month for both of you. This can be especially valuable near Christmastime - my parents and their neighbors used to do this in order to get the children out of the house so that presents could be bought and wrapped.
Neighborhood Meals-Get several of your neighbors together and have rotating meals - once every other week or so, one family cooks for everyone. This works well for cooking something simple: hamburgers on the grill with vegetables, boiled sweet corn, or a giant cajun feast (lots of stuff boiled together).

Shared Equipment- Look into buying a lawnmower with your neighbor. Or an edger. Or other such expensive equipment. This saves for all of you - for just a few hundred dollars, you can wind up with many years of use of a top-quality riding lawnmower and only have to bear a small fraction of the maintenance effort and expense.

If you are wondering how you could possibly start something like this in your area, well here is a great idea. Invite your neighbors over for dinner one couple at a time. Just to get to know them. After a short time you will see that talking to everyone about this great idea will be very easy and everyone will most likely be very open to the possibilities this can offer everyone involved.