Strategies To Cut Expenses On School Wear Socks

Once you’ve finished buying diapers, car seats and toys for your kids, you suddenly find yourself swamped with school levies and back-to-school shopping lists, which can amount to more than $500 annually (based on data from a 2013Back To School Spending Survey, by Heritage Bank). Such expenses can overwhelm even the most dedicated of parents. However, you can make use of some helpful strategies to lighten such a burden.

One often overlooked strategy involves cutting down on the expenses for uniform accessories, especially school wear socks. Although the costs of such accessories may seem minimal, neglecting proper management can lead to these costs piling up to huge sums of money.

Select The Right Fit

If you don’t select the right fit, you’ll soon find yourself back at the retailer buying more pairs of socks. The socks shouldn’t be too big or too small, but the exact fit. The best way to determine the exact fit of school socks is by checking with your child’s shoe size. Each sock size is related to a particular shoe size. Therefore, don’t go out shopping for socks without taking note of your child’s shoe size.

Good Quality Material

The type of material used to make school socks will determine how long it lasts and how well it fits on your child’s feet. Generally, the latter issue is resolved with the addition of nylon or lycra spandex synthetics during the manufacturing process. This helps to retain the shape of natural fiber, as well as creating a snug fit. However, the type of natural fiber will determine how long-lasting this school item is. This is best achieved with cotton fibers, which are quite strong and comfortable.

Good Padding

Socks normally have some form of padding on the balls of the feet, as well as the heels. This provides extra cushioning and protects your child’s feet. However, the greatest benefit to parents is that good padding will ensure slow wear of school socks, which means even less expenses in buying replacements. The only aspect you should consider when checking for good padding is whether the amount of padding will make your child’s shoe too tight. You need just enough padding to avoid unnecessary wear, but not excessive padding that causes discomfort while wearing shoes.

In case you already purchased poorly-padded socks, you might consider adding in some liner socks. These are specialized socks normally made of polyester synthetic material. The extra padding provided by these liners will help reduce wear on poorly-padded socks.

Look Out For Cost Savings

You have a variety of options to make considerable cost savings on school uniform accessories. These include; checking out for sales in retail stores, checking online for cheaper options and looking or asking for discounts from clothing retailers.

Parents who have serious financial issues can also take advantage of clothing pools within many schools. Setting up of clothing pools is a recommended policy by the New South Wales Department of Education and Training, aimed at assisting families in need by providing: low cost school garments through bulk purchases, loaned items, second-hand clothes and uniform exchange services.

Simply, by following these strategies, you are guaranteed of cutting down unnecessary costs on uniform accessories.