Fall & Winter Clothes Shopping Extravaganza

I mentioned a few posts back that we'd done our major fall and winter clothes shopping expedition and I promised I would fill you in with the details soon, so here, at last, is the lowdown on our clothing purchases.

The bulk of our purchases were made at a 50% off day at Value Village:

 4 long sleeve shirts and a turtleneck (3 for my younger son, one shirt and the turtleneck for my older son)

 slightly dressy top for me

 Black turtleneck sweater for me

 

 5 pairs of pants for my older son

 
On the same trip, we also got a pair of sneakers for each boy (not pictured as they happened to be off wearing them during my photo taking session). Miraculously, we found a pair of brand-new looking Airwalk sneakers that perfectly fit my younger son (he had been determined that he absolutely wanted this brand of sneakers, which are very popular with the boys in his social circle). For my older son, we found a pair of New Balance sneakers in excellent condition.

My younger son desperately needed pants, and unfortunately we weren't able to find anything that fit him at our Value Village trip. We ended up going to Walmart and buying what I think might be his first ever pairs of brand new pants :) Since he is now fitting into mens' sized pants, the prices at Value Village are not always that great of a deal compared to the sale prices at Walmart. The pants we were looking at at VV were priced about $10-12 each, and some of them weren't even in that great of condition. We ended up getting Nathan 2 pairs of brand new jeans on sale for $15 each. They were the exact style he wanted and fit him well, so I feel it was definitely worth the extra couple of bucks per pair.

We ended up going back to Value Village a few days after the 50% off sale to see if we could find any more pants (the racks tend to be better stocked when it's not a sale day!)

We did find Nathan one more pair of pants; they will need hemming length-wise but otherwise fit him well.

We were also on the lookout for winter jackets as both my boys have outgrown the ones they've been wearing for the past 2-3 years. We checked out the jacket selection on 50% off day and I thought it was curious that there weren't any winter jackets on the racks. When we went back a few days later, there was a rack full of winter jackets, so apparently they don't put out winter outerwear for the sale. I thought that was a little sneaky of them, but we did find a good jacket for Nathan during our second visit:

I am really pleased with this find as it appears to be a good quality jacket and it has a METAL ZIPPER!! I can't tell you how thrilled I am about THAT, as I've had way too many plastic zippers break on my boys' winter coats over the years when the coat otherwise had lots of life left in it.

We spent a total of $85.59 between the two Value Village trips, and another $33.90 on two pairs of jeans plus a belt for Nathan. We spent another $49.72 stocking up on sale-priced socks and undies for everyone, plus a clearance pair of sandals for my older son Noah as the flip flops he'd started the summer with suffered a fatal breakdown.

That brings the grand total for our fall and winter clothes shopping spree to $169.21. I think the only items we are still in need of are a winter coat for Noah and winter gloves for both boys.

So far this year, we've spent $525.13 on clothing. 

Other than the aforementioned coat and gloves, I don't foresee that we'll need to buy much more prior to the end of the year. Still, we are going to be significantly over our typical clothing budget of $300 per year. Now that the boys are getting bigger, it's getting more difficult to always find suitable second-hand options for them. They are also both at rapid-growth stages, so they had outgrown most of the clothes they wore last year.

I'm curious to know how much other frugal-minded families spent per year on clothing, especially if you have teenage boys. How much does your family spent on clothing annually?