Organization – Family Friendly Frugality

What Is Cozi Family Calendar & How To Use The Cozi Family Calendar To Make Life Easier For Your Whole Family!

I think you will agree with me that sometimes getting your whole family on the same page feels like a never ending battle that we can never ever win. For years, I struggled with the fact that I could talk until I was blue in the face, but my family consistently acted like I was giving them brand new information every single time.

“I told you, we have that meeting today”.

“What?! You never told me that!”.

Cue exasperated groan and questioning why I ever even open my mouth if nobody will bother to listen!

Okay, in reality, I am making it sound MUCH worse than it really was, but to be fair…I could just sense it was going to continue getting even more difficult to communicate the goings on in our lives the older the kids got (because we all know, the older the kids get, the busier the whole family becomes!).

Thankfully, I had a friend YEARS ago that told me about Cozi Family Calendar!

I attempted Cozi Calendar once before when my children were small. Honestly, we just didn’t really have enough going on at the time for me to need to keep up with it. It wasn’t until years later (and a few failed attempts with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and a few other calendar apps) that my friend’s advice came back to me.

I downloaded Cozi Calendar on my phone (it is also web based), and pretty immediately subscribed to Cozi Gold (Cozi Gold is NOT necessary, but we think it is worth it for our needs and our family. More on that later.).

Now, we have been using (and paying for…although this is NOT a sponsored post, but there are affiliate links in this post) Cozi for well over a year now and we just love it. (My favorite feature? Using Cozi for CHORES! Read on to see why.)

Here’s a quick testimonial from my husband:

“A little work in Cozi can go a long way. With just a few entries, suddenly everyone in the family had an easy reference point to remind ourselves of the kids’ baskebetball schedules. No need to ask each other or go digging around in old emails to see what time the next game is. The shared Lists feature is also pretty handy. Aside from keeping track of your own to-do lists you can easily see what the family has left on theirs. Great way to keep each other accountable or to see if anybody needs some help.”

I highly recommend Cozi Calendar for any busy family and here is why:

What Is Cozi Calendar?

Cozi is the must-have organizer for families. It helps coordinate and communicate everyone’s schedules and activities, track grocery lists, manage to do lists, plan ahead for dinner, and keep the whole family on the same page.

For us, this looks like our shared calendar, color coded for each family member and synced on everyone’s devices. My daughter does not yet have an actual phone with a data plan yet, but she uses an old iPhone of mine here at home with WiFi. If she did not have a device, she would also have the option to access Cozi Calendar from one of our computers.

This looks like to-do lists for every member of our family AND shopping lists for all of the stores we frequent that anybody can add to.

This also *could* look like our grocery list and meal plan, but at the moment I am using the app Paprika for this (I am planning to transition all of my recipes over to Cozi, but it is going to be a pretty big undertaking, so for now, I don’t mind not using this feature of Cozi Calendar. Paprika is a great app too.).

How to Share Cozi Calendar With Your Family

With Cozi calendar, you have a shared password for everyone in your family.

To add family members, sign into your account from Cozi on the web or from your Cozi mobile app, click Settings, and add names and email addresses. Once you enter names and email addresses for your family members, they will be able to access the account by signing in with their own email address and the shared password

Cozi is meant to be shared as a family, so if you are wanting a personal calendar that your family does not see (maybe for your workday, you don’t necessarily need your family seeing every scheduled conference call!), you might want to keep that on a separate Google Calendar.

How to Use Cozi for Family Scheduling

Using the Cozi Calendar for family scheduling is SUPER easy. You just click to add an event and then you can input as much or as little info as you want!

You can even specify which family members need to be reminded about this event so that not everyone needs to be reminded about your upcoming Well Woman’s visit (but like I said earlier, they will still see this appointment if they go in and look, they just won’t be notified by reminders!).

With Cozi Gold, you can even add additional reminders so if you are the type of person that needs a reminder the night before, the morning of and 10 minutes before, you can totally do that with Cozi Gold!

You can view your calendar in day/week/month format. I love this list view!

You might also like – School Morning Routine Hacks – Get Out the Door with a Smile (and On Time!)

How to Use Cozi For Chores!!!

Okay, right here is my favorite Cozi feature! My kids might not admit it, but even they love using Cozi for chores.

Why would my kids love using Cozi for chores? I have found that giving my children a list of chores/responsibilities takes away from the emotion of the “ask”.

Let me elaborate:

“Could you please empty the dishwasher.”

Finishes emptying the dishwasher. Kid thinks he is done and moves on to something else (fun).

“Okay, now I need you to bring down your laundry”.

Kid brings down laundry. Starts another (fun) task.

“Okay, now please feed the dog.”

Kid feeds dog and then hides from you for the rest of the night.

It’s funny because it is TRUE! I actually remember doing this as a kid myself!

With Cozi calendar, you can create chore lists in the app and either tell your kids to look in the app for their chore list or you can even text their list to them! Then, as they complete tasks, they check them off. Which is not only satisfying for them, but also satisfying for ME as their mom!

I find my kids do great with lists, and they are also obsessed with getting their lists cleared.

My daughter will even add to her list sometimes. Look at her adorable addition to her Cozi Chore list (Cookie is our dog):

How To Use the Cozi App for Meal Planning

Like I said before, I don’t really use Cozi for meal planning. I reverse menu plan and have been saving recipes to the app Paprika for a long time. While it would be nice to have our meal plan and recipes on Cozi, I have known it would be a big task to transfer everything over. I might get to it one day though, and if I do, I will definitely update this section!

You might also like: How To Become A Better Cook – Learn To Cook Better At Home To Save More Money!

Other Perks of Using Cozi Family Calendar

Shopping Lists – I have different shopping lists for all of our favorite stores and anybody can add to them at anytime. My daughter is a strawberry FIEND, and if we run out of strawberries, she can easily go in and add them to our HEB calendar.

Whoever finds themselves in an HEB for whatever reason will quickly pull up the shopping list and see what we might need.

You can also add to your shopping list via Alexa!!

Journal – We have not done much with this (but I am currently using the 1 second everyday app and that is super cool), but I want to get better about it. You can keep a journal/photo journal of your family in Cozi! It’s a great way to preserve those special memories and you can even share your journal with family and friends if you choose to! It’s a neat feature that our family definitely under utilizes.

Cozi Calendar vs Google Calendar

Why did we choose Cozi Calendar vs Google Calendar? Well, to be honest it has a lot to do with simplicity.

Google calendar is robust and there is a lot you can do with it. You can also subscribe to the Google Calendars for your school district, your PTA, your favorite baseball team, etc. Honestly, it ends up getting super cluttered and it is just a lot of noise.

My husband uses Google Calendar for work, and it is best if he keeps his Google Calendar dedicated to his work. The Cozi calendar interface is just so family friendly and easy enough that our kids can do absolutely everything on it without us even needing to show them.

It just works well for our family and is a one stop shop to help us keep our lives in order.

Is Cozi Gold Worth It?

For us, Cozi Gold is worth it. The additional reminders are lovely and that alone makes it worth it to me.

I enjoy that it is an ad free experience, I like the month view on the calendar and the ability to change the theme. The best part is that you just pay ONE Cozi Gold fee for your whole family.

You can grab a 14 day Cozi Gold trial for FREE to see if it suits the needs of your family.

Sign up for Cozi Calendar here.

I have been wanting to write a post about Cozi Calendar for awhile. Whether you use the free version of Cozi or Cozi Gold, I think you will find that Cozi Calendar is the best calendar/meal planning/chore app out there to get your family all on the same page and to keep them there!

Do you have any more questions about Cozi Calendar? Do you have any tips/hacks that I don’t know about for Cozi Calendar! Comment below and let me know!

FREE Editable Google Drive Schedule For Distance Learning!!!

Suddenly find yourself overwhelmed with Distance Learning? With one kid in elementary school and one kid in Junior High, I initially looked at all of the assignments coming in and immediately felt completely overwhelmed! My kids (the junior high one specifically) felt the same.

My kids are not used to getting a week’s worth of work and then figuring out how to pace themselves through it all on their own!

So here’s what we did…I created a quick Google Drive schedule for both kids and then sat down with them and broke things down day by day.

We do not have times on our schedule because honestly, we are not trying to mimic the regular school day here.

When they finish, they finish.

This week the workload was rather light while the school district figured out how to streamline everything, but I can already tell, next week will be more rigorous and the plan is to do more than just review old content, but also to introduce new content.

This is why I think having a plan is SO important.

I decided to share this schedule with everyone because it was honestly such a lifeline for us this week. Distance Learning was NOT stressful for us because we had it all mapped out!

I hope you can use this schedule and adapt it to your own needs!

A few tips:

First, you’ll need to make a copy of this on your own google drive to edit it. You could also download it and open it in excel, but I’m not making any promises that the formatting won’t be wonky!
Next, you can edit this spreadsheet however you need to! Make it work for you and your family! I just threw some random “assigments” in there so you can see what it looks like when it is all filled out.
If you choose to print (I printed for both of my kids!), I have found that highlighting JUST the schedule itself and then printing “current selection” on landscape produces the best looking printed copy.

I hope this helps y’all out!

A Southern Mom: Clothing Organization for Back to School

Over on A Southern Mom today, I share my new way to organize my kids clothes for the school week!

It’s a great tip for back to school.

An Organization Station for Back to School

Like it? Pin it!

I’m quite possibly the most scatterbrained person I know.

Some would say I hide it well (many would say I don’t).

This flightiness is not something I’m proud of and something I’m constantly trying to overcome.

Every school year I start off with the BEST of intentions of keeping things organized.

I was pretty proud of myself last year. My son had his first year of Kindergarten AND I was his room mom and I think I stayed fairly organized throughout the entire school year.

This year is likely going to be even more involved though, AND we are in a new home so the old routines and systems won’t necessarily work this year.

We are pretty good with our morning routine, it’s just keeping up with everything that comes home AFTER school that can get overwhelming.

I think I have a set up that will work though. Each child has their own “milk crate” (I bought these at Walmart. I let the kids choose the color they wanted. If it’s fun and something they chose, they are so much more likely to use it) where their backpack, lunch kit and anything else that needs to go to and from school will be held.

Then above the milk crates is a large cork board. I have it sectioned so they each have a dedicated area to hang important notices, calendars, etc and than the third portion is for family stuff. This is all in the small hall out to the garage (we go in and out of the garage), so we’ll have to pass this area every day.

I hope it works out! I will report back and let you know.

How do you keep things organized?

Make Your Own Freezer Containers in a Pinch

I’m a big fan of making double batches of freezer friendly meals. We eat one that night and I freeze the other.

It works out great because even on nights when time is of the essence, I can still deliver a home cooked meal to my family (not to say we never grab a bite out or order take out, because we TOTALLY do).

A few months back, I found myself without a disposable pan to store a freezer meal in though. It was too late to turn back and make just one dinner’s worth of food and it was too gross outside (rainy and cold) to run to the grocery store.

I adapted.

I grabbed my foil and lined a casserole dish with it being careful that the foil covered every nook and cranny. I put the entire covered dish in the freezer and called it a success.

Until the next time I needed that EXACT casserole dish. Oops.

Luckily for me, I found I could easily lift the now frozen meal out of the casserole dish and place it in the freezer just in it’s frozen foil “packet”!

Now, I do this all the time. I can often get aluminum foil for super cheap, so now I make my own freezer containers (not always, I still buy disposable containers sometimes).

Here’s how I do it:

All you need is foil and a casserole dish

Be sure to cover the whole pan with foil. Reinforce your makeshift container by laying foil both ways. Make sure there is overhang on all 4 sides.

You want to be sure you have some overhang.

Lay foil on top and fold up the sides so the food is fully covered on all sides/top/bottom.

Once the food is fully frozen (I usually wait until I need the casserole dish or more room in the freezer!) Remove your foil “packet” from the dish and place it back in the freezer!

When it’s time to defrost/reheat your casserole, just put the foil meal back into the original casserole dish to defrost/heat and eat!

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Something super neat is the Possessions category. You can keep track of an inventory. This would be GREAT for any of you who have a rather massive stockpile!

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You can sign up for AboutOne right here. It is still in beta, but it’s also totally free so I signed up!

Take Charge Of Your Facebook News Feed!

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Recently, I noticed that my Facebook News Feed was all of a sudden showing me all the pages I’ve liked for the first time in a long time!

This is great news!

As both a page owner AND a Facebook user, it was incredibly frustrating to know that Facebook was filtering out content that I really wanted to see.

That said, I apparently like a lot of pages!

Several of these pages are no longer relevant to me though, so I headed over to the page to “unlike” them.

NOTE: PLEASE go to the page to unlike. Don’t hide and don’t mark as spam. If a page isn’t relevant to you, do the page owner and yourself a favor and just unlike the page. The reason hiding isn’t a good idea is because Facebook rates pages based on how engaged their followers are. If you hide their updates, you are no longer engaged. This brings their overall total of engaged users down and in turn keeps their engagement to post ratio low. If you think you want to hide the updates of the page, what’s the point in liking them any longer?

When I went to hit the “unlike” button an interesting drop down showed.

Here’s what the drop down looks like:

(You will likely not have any lists here if you haven’t done this before. These lists seem to fall under “interests” and don’t fall under your normal List categories)

Here’s the thing I love…you can STOP the page from showing in your news feed! AND…in the same move, you can create a list specifically for that blog to show up on.

Here, I created this list: Family Friendly Frugality Only

It’s a public list and it only shows Family Friendly Frugality in “News Feed” format. I love it!

Now, if I wanted to, I could filter Family Friendly Frugality out of my news feed entirely. (I don’t want to, but there are plenty of other pages I DO want to filter out of my news feed, but still follow on a regular basis)

Here’s how you can do this:

First you’ll click New List after you click the “unlike/like” button. (NOTE: You can add all your pages/interests/friends to your list on the next screen, but you might have to go to all of their pages to uncheck Show in News Feed. Otherwise, you’ll still see these items in your news feed)

Then this screen will pop up where you can add more of your pages/subscriptions/friends if you choose.

Now you can choose the visibility of this list. Do you want this list to be Public? Only your friends? Or for your eyes only?

I made this list public for those of you that want a dedicated list with JUST Family Friendly Frugality posts.

Now you’ll see your lists down here under Interests.

Click on the little pen looking icon to add it to your favorites and voila! You can remove a page from your news feed and add it to a dedicated list or a list of like pages/topics in one quick move!

Follow the Family Friendly Frugality only list here if you like! It’s a public list so you should be able to subscribe to it.

Enjoy!

Tell me, will you take most of the pages out of your news feed and put them into lists? Will this help streamline Facebook for you and make it a happier place?

Do Frugality and Clutter Go Hand in Hand?

Take a look at any frugal blog and you’ll see advice on de-cluttering, living simple and streamlining life in general. Why?

Does frugality lend itself to clutter?

In a way, I think it does.

Here’s why:

Scenario #1-I’ll Re-Use This Later

You just threw a birthday party/baby shower/some gift giving shindig at your home and you begin the process of tidying up and finding homes for your new gadgets/gizmos/toys. You start throwing away the gift bags, but stop yourself when you realize how wasteful it is to trash a perfectly good gift bag! So you add it to your ever growing assortment of gift bags, tissue paper, bows, gift tags, ribbons, etc in your closet. You are being frugal and not wasteful and that’s something to be proud of. However, this can get out of control quickly. If you have children, they will receive gifts multiple times throughout the year. Usually windfall style! Think about your gift giving though. Do you generally give out THAT many presents each year? Probably not!

Scenario #2-I Know I Can Re-Purpose This!

While you are hunting through the household closets during spring cleaning, you start setting aside clothing and shoes that don’t fit. Some articles are set aside for donation. Still, others are saved for younger children or nieces and nephews. Then there are those items that really should go into the trash, but give you pause. “Look at these perfectly good buttons.” you say. “I can use these for that project XYZ I have planned!”. So you save that shirt (no time to remove the buttons now, we’re closet cleaning not button removing!), and maybe you also save a pair of pants that you consider turning into shorts or that baby blanket that is tattered and stained that will make an excellent square for your quilt….

Scenario #3-There Is Nothing Broken That I Can’t Fix!

You are walking down the hallway and you bump into the wall with the laundry basket. Oh no! The picture frames fall off the wall and several are cracked and broken. Rather then throwing these items out, you set them aside convinced that you and super glue can make those picture frames shiny as new (not right now though, you need to get this load of laundry in the wash!).

It seems foolish and wasteful to throw out perfectly good gift bags, shirts with great buttons or picture frames that might just need a little TLC. Our lives are busy though! Not every project can take center stage as soon as we think of it.

With the best of intentions, we set things aside to complete at a later date. We set items we might be able to re-use aside in an effort to avoid wastefulness.

What about when these things pile up though?

What good do those buttons do you when they are sitting in a basket covered by the pants to turn into shorts, that purse with the broken zipper and that baby blanket that is meant to be a quilt?

What about when your gift bags start overflowing their container?

When you go to move homes and you find that broken picture frame you meant to fix several years ago, and even though you still haven’t gotten to it, you can’t bear to throw it away so it moves along with you…again.

There has to be a balance between frugality and clutter. It can be hard for the frugal mind to wrap itself around throwing away items that could be perfectly useful with a bit of TLC, but if it starts creating a cluttered life, it will defeat it’s purpose.

Clutter is the enemy of living a frugal, simple life.

Now, I’m the first to admit that I have an issue with having too much clutter in my life. I was not born with the gift of neatness and I’m guilty of ALL 3 scenarios I spoke of above. However, I’ve been working on a few of my *ahem* clutter issues, and I have a few words of advice for my fellow frugal clutterbugs:

If you can’t fix it NOW…think about these 3 things: 1. How much would it cost for me to just buy a new one? 2. Do I really need this? 3. Realistically, when will I get to sit down and fix this? I’m just going to admit that often times, #1 stops me in my tracks. If something breaks that is expensive, I tend to fix it right away. If I decide to set it aside, it probably isn’t worth as much to me to fix (now this isn’t ALWAYS true…but the less important items are the items I tend to forget I had the intention of fixing!).

Want to salvage the buttons from that shirt? Okay, if it means that much to you, do it now. Right now. Take the buttons off and put them in your button box. If not, you likely won’t make time for it soon so just let it go.

For items that you re-use (for example: gift bags, glass jars, pretty containers, etc) follow these 3 rules: 1. It either has to fulfill it’s purpose immediately (If that glass jar would be perfect for your collection of pens, go get your pens right now and place them in the jar) 2. It has to fit in a designated spot with a lid…if it doesn’t fit, it goes in the trash (this is especially true for those of you with fabric/yarn/scrap booking stashes…those can get out of hand quickly!) 3. If you won’t use it immediately OR it won’t fit in your designated container, consider donating it.

No need to clutter up your life just because you are trying to live frugally! Remember that there is such a thing as TOO cheap! 😉

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