If you’re familiar with our story, you’ll know that there was a point in our lives when we were new parents making just over minimum wage. Things were very tight and we made do with the basics. Slowly but surely, we got better paying jobs and our income increased. While we generally do our best to fight lifestyle creep, we have found ways to add convenience to our lives. Like many of you, most of our waking hours are spent at our fulltime jobs and caring for our small children. Our evenings are precious to us, as it is often the only time we have to relax and pursue other endeavors (including writing this blog). The last thing we want to fill our evenings with is housework.
These appliances save us time and in some cases – money. In this post, we list our top five most lifechanging “luxury” appliances, when and how we bought them (Hint: They were all were bought using gift cards or other “free money”.) and why we love them so much. Keep in mind that we hate accumulating stuff and are not gadget people. We only buy new things after hearing/reading countless great reviews and when we know we have the money and space for it.
We rank our favorite gadgets from most to least transformative in the list below.
- Dishwasher. Bought mostly with BuyMe in 2021, this is absolutely our most revolutionary life-upgrade by far. Not only does it save us time, it also saves our hands, and even saves water. We estimate that our dishwasher saves us four hours of standing over our sink each week.
- Standing Freezer. This was our first life-upgrade appliance, purchased in 2017 after completing the 52-week money challenge. Throughout that year, we had many discussions about how our 1,378 shekels would be best spent. We concluded that an extra freezer would do wonders for us, as it would allow us to cook in bulk and freeze portions for future meals. We could also buy in bulk and “shop” in our freezer instead of running out to the supermarket. Not only do we save time, but we also have less chance of impulse buys, and by not needing to do a weekly pre-Shabbat shop, we avoid the supermarkets on their most bustling days of the week. The ability to cook and shop less saves us at least two hours per week.
- Dryer (and larger washing machine). After surviving the newborn stage without a dryer twice (in the winter – twice), we finally upgraded our 5 kilo washing machine to an 8 kilo model and purchased our first dryer with the money we received from our US COVID checks in 2021. Our larger washing machine enables us to use less water because we run fewer loads (even though it still feels like we’re always doing laundry) and while we still do hang some larger things to dry, especially in the summer, most of our laundry goes in the dryer. We’d say our new setup saves us about three hours of laundry time per week.
- Standing mixer. We are big bakers in this house and make lots of cakes, pizza, cookies, and challah. We finally used BuyMe to purchase grown-up fancy mixer in 2022, which among other things functions similarly to a bread-maker (minus the baking part). This allows us to throw in the ingredients in no particular order and then not get our hands dirty until after the dough has been kneaded, finished rising, and is ready to be shaped and baked. Depending on what we’re making, bread-baking now takes between 5-25 minutes of hands-on time, saving us about one hour per week.
- Robovac. Another BuyMe purchase from 2023. We wish we could have ranked this one a little higher, but our Xiomi robot vacuum (affectionately dubbed Niki* McClean) is hella stupid and chokes on just about any small object in its path (sock, figurine, or otherwise) and tends to get itself stuck under our shoe rack. This means that we don’t trust it to run when we’re not home and have to do an impeccable pick up and decluttering job (which we probably should be doing anyway) before we let it go. For this reason we usually only run it once or twice a week. Once we’ve prepped for it, it does a great job cleaning and our floors shine. On average, this saves us about one hour of vacuuming per week.
We are grateful for every one of these life upgrades, and as much as they might not save us (much) money, they do save us time, which is equally if not more important.
What are your most life-changing appliances? What life-changing appliance would you add to our list?
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*’Nikayon’ is Hebrew for cleanliness or cleanup.
Chasing the Fionist Dream 
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