Creative Counterpart

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It is no secret, our household is on a tight budget. With cutbacks in hours at my husband’s job and the recent purchase of our home, we’ve been forced to scale down on luxeries and get creative with our money. It’s a good thing I stumbled upon a copy of the Tightwad Gazette at the local library, and have been devouring it ever since.

Here are thirteen tightwad things we plan to try:

1. Cut back the cell phone plan. Last month I did some looking at the minutes we were using on our cell phone plan and determined we were paying for way more than we need. My husband called the company this evening and reduced our plan. We’ll keep track of the minutes we’ve used mid-month and save around $30 a month.
2. Check freecycle, craigslist, & our local partyline often. All of these are sources of free and cheap stuff.
3. Bake our own Bread. I am currently trying to “start” my own sourdough starter. You can, too with Candy’s easy instructions.
4. Make homemade deoderant, dishwashing detergent, & laundry detergent. Candy has great recipes for these as well.
5. Start a price book. I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile now. If anyone has good ideas for a less tedious method, let me know!
6. Line dry clothes. My husband is in the process of making me an indoor clothesline in our mudroom. A perfect spot because the windows can b opened to let a breeze in, and I can even line dry in the winter. I plan to dry blanket, towels, etc on the line.
7. Ditch cable/sattelite TV. I haven’t convinced my husband yet. I’ll admit it, we’re spoiled.
8. Use cloth diapers. We have been users of Miracle diapers on and off in the past, and plan to use it again. Hopefully any future babies will have a nice stash to call their own.
9. Plan ahead by making homemade gifts for Christmas this year. You and I will both be glad we did.
10. Save everything and find a use for it. Tubs from butter, sour cream, etc can be used as tupperware. Ziploc bags can be washed and reused. Milk jugs can become anything from a pooper scooper to a scoop game for kids. Have fun coming up with new uses for everyday items. You’ll wonder why you ever wasted money throwing those things away!
11. Cut out Convenience foods. Substitute with homemade cookies, muffins, jello, pudding, etc.
12. Scrutinize spending and use what we have. This one’s tough, but essential to a tightwad lifestyle. We’re more content to do this when we find a way to achieve the same result with things we already have. Creativity is the key.
13. “Put out the word”  If you are in need of something or just casually looking, let people know! “Hey Jan, if you know of anyone that has a stroller they don’t use, let them know I”m looking for one.” That person might have been waiting to find someone who could put it to good use.

I’m going to cheat and add #14. I think the most important thing to living a frugal lifestyle is trusting in God. It’s easy to become bitter in tough times if we are not relying on the Lord for our strength and to meet our needs. He is sufficient and he is able.

—Psalm 37:3-6

This morning, my son picked up off of the ground in our backyard what appeared to be unripe mullberries. My husband and I thought, “Well, they couldn’t be mullberries, those grow on a bush.”; Or so we thought. Our friendly neighbor (who loves to garden and has a beautiful backyard and garden which I must admit I envy) said she would take a leaf from the tree and look it up for us. This evening, just before we sat down to supper, she told my husband that she had looked it up and it was in fact a mullberry tree. The tree is probably near 100 years old.

So, I have been looking around online and am excited to know that we can use the berries for all kinds of things like dried fruit, jelly, jam and even wine. For the frugal, I must say I am delighted that we have this bonus on our property. Now I need to get a dehydrator and canning jars and learn to make jam! I already wanted to get a dehydrator to dry some of our garden peas. I want to try some dry and some frozen. I suppose we could also freeze the berries If I cannot make jam right away.

Tonight I am making up the menu for our camping trip this weekend, hoping the weather will be favorable. My husband has been out in the garage this afternoon putting together his new propane grill. Yesterday he spent a lot of time in the garage putting up bike hooks and organizing the garage. It looks nice now, and we can actually walk around in it! Our next project will be to finally get most of the boxes that we’ve shoved in the spare bedroom downstairs put away, and clear off the other side of the desk once and for good so I can set up my sewing station! Maybe I’ll get around to making more sewing projects if I have a permanent place for my sewing machine and supplies. It was such a hassle pulling everything out and then putting everything away again at our old place.

Well, I’m off to join my family outside!

Maybe it was the “girls online” discussing their many recent sewing projects that made me feel guilty, but I have caught the sewing bug again. Yes, my hobbies rotate quite frequently, but it keeps life interesting. So when I came across this free pattern for a “boppy”-style nursing pillow, I thought “why not?”. I have been meaning to make or buy one for this baby anyway, and the only reason I hadn’t done so already is because I really didn’t feel like shelling out $20 some dollars for a pillow!

Really, you should make one of these if you have a baby on the way, are nursing, or just learning to sew. They make great gifts for new and expecting mothers, and the best thing is it’s so cheap to sew your own! I made mine from some fabric I already had lying around. My only regret is not stuffing it a little more, which would be an easy fix.

Before you head to the store this week, plan your meals around fresh fruits and vegetables that are currently in season, and get the best deals.

An easy way to save on fruits and vegetables is to buy what’s in season. Here’s a guide to help you identify the best produce deals month-by-month:

So, this is probably just the beginning of a stack of toothpaste in my cupboards. I went ahead and did the Crest prohealth deal with my $.50/1 coupons today, and whenever my coupon friend calls me we plan to do it more with the $1/1 coupons. So, today was not as great a deal (I paid about $6.62 for 10 tubes of toothpaste and got $20 in RRs); But when we do it again we should pay nothing or only tax.

Wasteful, you ask? I don’t think so. After I have purchased my supply of toothpaste, I will be looking into my stock and determining who and what charitable organizations would benefit the best from some of my stockpile. That’s my goal (to have a family supply and then donate to charity), and I’m sticking to it.

If you are a coupon shopper like me, and also visit Walmart.. you will appreciate this google document. It provides a list of things that are cheap/free at Walmart right now with coupons. It states where the coupon is found (what insert or if it’s online) and when the deal/coupon expires. This is a great idea for those who do grocery shopping at Walmart. You can add more items to the list that you know of and visit the original starting place of the list on this thread at Hot Coupon World.

I am excited about this week’s deals. Today I finally made it to Walgreens and Walmart to do a few deals to warm up for Grocery shopping and the Walgreens Crest Pro Health deal this week … I’ll explain in just a moment.

At Walgreens today I got:

Venus Embrace razor  $9.99  (-$4 man. coupon from 5/4 insert) + $6 back in *Register Rewards = Free

Venus Breeze razor $5 (-$4 coupon) = $1

Total out of pocket: $7 something with tax                   Total after RR: about $1

At Walmart:

4 Ortega Taco Seasoning packets $.50 each  (- (2) $.75/2 man. coupons) = $.25 for 2

Zantac 150 cool mint tablets $4.28 each (- $5 printable coupon) = Overage!

Dr. Pepper , $1.28

Total: $1.28 All I paid for was my pop, and I didn’t even pay tax for that!

So, tomorrow or Thursday I need to make up my 2 week menu and plan my grocery list and coupons. Also, the Walgreens truck is supposed to come in on Thursday with my friend Amy’s order of Crest pro health toothpaste. The deal on that is:

Crest Pro Health 2/$5  ( $1 each with easy saver coupon) ( -$1/1 man. coupon) = Free

Buy 9 P&G products, get $20 RR back!  So, we are making $20 on every 9 (must buy 10 with $3/2 coupons) toothpastes we “buy” for free. The store it paying us $20. I plan on doing this deal for at least 20 toothpastes, giving me 20 free tubes of toothpaste and $40 to buy more at Walgreens. If this deal goes off without a hitch (which it has been for everyone else!), I’ll be so excited. This will be my biggest deal so far, and it’s all thanx to my friend Amy!

“Load up the pantry” as advised by the Wall Street Journal (and Wendy Jeub)
Friday, April 25th, 2008

As Wendy and I prepare for another presentation of “Cheaper by the Baker’s Dozen,” we are tempted to rename the presentation “Hurry Up and Stock Up the Pantry.” News item after news item is validating what we have been saying ever since oil began its rapid increase of prices. Add the minimum wage increase, growing demand in Asia, and government environmental policies for biofuels, you’ve got a recipe for expensive food!

The Wall Street Journal came out with an incredibly persuasive article on stocking up the pantry. Columnist Brett Arends lists the reasons with logical analysis in his article “Load up the pantry“:

Food is a global economy, so economic food prices in Asia does effect us in America.
Inflation in 2007: Flour up 13%; dairy up 10%; eggs up 30%; poultry up 5.4%. Compare that to the average money market fund (2.5%).
Food companies are no longer absorbing costs for raw materials (e.g. wheat has tripled in three years).
There aren’t “starving children in China” anymore, as a rising middle class is demanding more food (same in India).
Now, I just want to note that I was NOT one of those alarmists freaking out about Y2K. Back then I thought the claims of food shortages and riots were greatly inflated. You remember, computers would all collapse and ships would stop shipping food and chaos would consume. I remember thinking, “If that happens, I’m going hunting,” and I let others stock up on food and candle wax.

Also note, however, that the Y2K fears were not based on economics: they were based on technological opinions that no one fully understood. As I claim in Cheaper by the Baker’s Dozen, “Economics is as sure as gravity.” You can always count on it to work out, for the better or for the worse.

What should you do? Our third Principle of Frugal Living listed in the presentation states, “Frugal living requires creative solutions to economic realities.” Notice we didn’t say “economic problems” or “catastrophes.” There is really no such thing. Economics is amoral and simply a “reality” that we must deal with. The ideas Wendy and I come up with are simply ways we have dealt with the reality for 17 years of our marriage raising 14 kids.

Wendy’s Love in the Kitchen cookbook has a section in it called “Stock your shelves.” No kidding: nearly the exact same title as today’s Wall Street Journal article. She explains how she frugally keeps a tight reign on our family budget and how you can too. It isn’t computer engineering; much of it is simply understanding the family economic unit. Really, the advice she gives is worth much more than the price of the cookbook.

Could you do us a favor? Cut-and-paste the content of this post and send it to your friends. We’re onto something here, and you can help. Spread the word, for I believe our cookbook and CD ROM are rightly timed to serve a growing need out there. Thanks!

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