Homemade Laundry Detergent

My main goal for 2012 is to save money. I want to build our emergency fund to a much higher level, and I want to save for a GOOD down payment on a house. So I've been looking at my spending even more than I did before (which may I just say...I am already very frugal). It's bothered me since I moved out here that we don't have a CVS. And to make matters worse, we don't have Publix or really any stores that do BOGO with coupons! I've increased my grocery budget and household cleaning budget drastically.

So this week I decided it was time to cut some things out. The first thing I'm going to try and make less expensive is household cleaning items. I decided to start with laundry detergent. I'm about out and I really didn't want to go hand over 15 bucks to Costco again, only to soon run out of detergent and have to give them another 15 bucks. Then I saw a friend had recently made her own, and I was completely inspired to do this!

I spent all morning looking up homemade detergents on Pinterest. Oh how I love that site! I decided to go for a powdered mix since I really didn't have time to do all that boiling and stirring. Wow was it easy! And it was so affordable! All you do is mix 1 cup of borax, 1 cup of washing soda, and 1 cup of grated soap. The hardest part was grating the soap! Then I stirred for about 5 minutes, and then put it in my container. I only made that exact batch (which you will see is pretty small) because I wanted to make sure my clothes did okay with the powdered formula.

The Cost

Borax: $3.89

Washing Soda: $2.89

Soap: $1.06

From my research, this soap costs about 3 cents a load. Um, that's pretty good savings! Seeing that I do an average of 7 loads a week! That's 21 cents a week people! So 21 cents times 52 weeks equals $10.92 a year! Wow, I'll be thinking about that when I make that big down payment for the house of my dreams one day :).