As college students who have piles of homework not a lot of spare time or money to spend on entertainment, we love cheap and random date ideas. Going to the movies isn’t really our thing (unless it’s one that we have been looking forward to for a long time) and eating at a restaurant doesn’t fit into the budget, so we’ve tried to be creative and still intentionally have dates. So far we have 7 ideas, but we would love to have more! Let us know what you do for date night or for family fun, we’d love to add some more inexpensive ideas to our list.

1. VidAngel. We struggle SO MUCH when it comes to renting movies from the Family Video or RedBox. Our tastes in movies are night and day different… I like sappy, silly love movies (without too much love) and he likes shoot em up, blow em up, find and destroy everyone type movies. We don’t like too much swearing and are overall kind of picky with what we will actually spend money on, so when I heard about VidAngel and was very dubious. But we decided to give it a go and see what happened. Can I just say, WINNING!! Basically you “buy” a movie for $20, edit out the content that you don’t want to see (it is very specific with scenes and certain words that you can choose to leave in or take out) and then sell it back for $19 once you’ve watched it. So it ends up just being $1.00. Not only is it cheaper than Red Box, it also has an endless supply of new releases. No more long debates at the Red Box about which movie to get as a back up since the one we wanted is gone. I am pretty happy with how it has worked out so far. We have watched Fast and Furious 7, The Intern, Spectre and Silver Linings Playbook. We enabled a lot of the filters for Fast and Furious because we wanted to see how they all worked and then refined the filters to be more specific for the other movies. It has been so worth it to watch a movie for the story line and not get all the stuff we don’t want to see or hear.
2. Vacuum. A vacuum is a great source of free entertainment (assuming you already have a vacuum of course). We discovered the hilarity of vacuuming each others faces. Don’t judge until you try it.
3. Dance. I am awful at dancing and Xav doesn’t love it, but it is a fabulous form of entertainment and ever so amusing so we do it almost every day.
4. Puzzle! Sometimes we chat, sometimes we watch movie, sometimes we just stare at the puzzle trying to figure it out, but it is always free and we always feel like we are eighty years old 😉
5. Workout. Not the most fun entertainment, but it is very rewarding and not too pricey! I’ve been trying to workout more consistently because I’ve been inspired by Xavier (who does it every single day) and I just want to get my body moving after sitting at a desk all day. I don’t have a gym membership and I rarely use the apartment gym, but I have a little bench that I found at Goodwill and some small weights (all less than 20 pounds) and I just try to focus on a muscle group for half an hour to 45 minutes. Xav gives me the workouts and the music and we chat or watch Food Network Star while I do it. I didn’t love it at first, but I’m starting to really enjoy the feeling of being stronger and healthier.
6. Football. This is my favorite alternative to working out. For days when it is warm and sunny, we love to go out to our parking lot and play catch with the football.
7. Free blood pressure tests at Meijer. This is a rather recent discovery for us, but it has already provided plenty of amusement. I was at the pharmacy window and Xavier disappeared. After looking in all the isles, I found him at the higi blood pressure tester freaking out about his results. This is what free entertainment looks like people. To clarify: he was crying… I was laughing.

What types of dates do you go on?