I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘frugality’ Category

So it has been a week of the plastic bag challenge – for me,  to reduce the number of plastic grocery bags I have from 60 to 10.  I am excited by all the suggestions and tips I received in the first post, and I am compiling all of them into a list for the end of August.

As far as how I did, as I mentioned in the comments on the initial post, I made an error and didn’t bring my reusable bag into Walgreens with me, so I collected another plastic bag.  That was technically in July, but since it added to the number I had on August 1st I think it counts.  So, 61.  But I did find a new use for the ones I have that I hadn’t already been doing.  My son is in the midst of potty training and without going into gross details, the bags have come in handy disposing of some accidents.  That is (hopefully!) not a continual source of disposal but I think it may get rid of a few more than I would like.  Combined with the ways I was already using the bags (trash liners, diaper pail liner for my daughter, raw meat transport from the store) this has helped me get my overall count down to 55.  Which is not on pace to get to 10 by August 31st, but I am making progress.  The key is not to bring any new ones into the house, which I am doing okay at.

So if you are eliminating plastic bags from your stash, how are you doing?  How much progress have you made?  Have you found any new uses for them?   Share in the comments!

I am, basically, a coupon failure.  This always happens to me – I try to use coupons and it seems like it is going fine, and then I get into my coupon groove and suddenly I am spending way more than I ever intended to.  Learn from my mistakes – here are five mistakes I’ve made and how not to make them yourself.  Hopefully this week I can improve by heeding my own words.

1.  Don’t buy things just because you have a coupon.  This is common sense but I can’t repeat it enough.    I start out with the best of intentions, but then I find myself clipping coupons for items I hardly ever buy, or for much more expensive name brands versus my usual store brand (and not amazing coupons, either).  Twenty-five cents off an item that is generally $2 more than its generic equivalent will rarely do you any good.

2.  Pair coupons with sales.  There are websites such as Coupon Mom and The Grocery Game that do this for you if you are so inclined, and I may try one eventually.  You can do this yourself as well by watching circulars and keeping all your coupons handy when you shop.

3.  Read the coupons carefully and make sure you’re buying the correct item.  Some coupons can be rather specific – and if you buy the 20 ounce item and the coupon is for the 15 ounce one, you are out of luck.  or, like me, you can mix up brands – you can’t use a coupon for Pillsbury cake frosting on the Betty Crocker one that’s on sale, even if it was an honest mistake.

4.  Don’t stock up it you can’t use it – or if you’ve already stocked up.  There will always be another sale.  Okay… almost always, at least.  When you already have 8 tubes of toothpaste at home – think carefully about adding another.  There is always more to buy!  Endless stocking up defeats the purpose of saving money, because you will never spend less.

5.  Don’t be afraid to walk away at the register.   If you’ve misread a coupon, or the store won’t accept it for some reason, tell the cashier you don’t want the item.  Don’t buy what you don’t want out of a sense of obligation or guilt.

Good luck with your couponing!  And this week I vow to improve upon my $140 disaster last week.  Everything may have been great buys, but seriously.  There has to be a limit, and I have again reached mine.

Our house has two wooden barrel-like buckets in front, one on either side of the end of our front walk.  Last year I tried growing some ecologically-friendly wildflowers in them, and it kind of looked like I was growing weeds.  Which, I sort of was.  So this year I decided I was going to do something different.  In late spring, I bought two young tomato plants for ~$3 each at Aldi.  One was the Roma variety and one was a Beefsteak.   Those buckets have always looked to me like tomato plants belonged in them.  I planted one in each bucket, added extra potting soil, and watered them every non-rainy day.    A few weeks ago I reported on my progress, and said that some of the tomatoes were shiny and about to turn red.

Well, it took them a little longer than I expected from that day, but yesterday I harvested the very first Roma tomatoes.  I picked one and cut it in half, and it looked ripe inside and out, so I picked the other two from that bunch.  And ripe they were, and tasty too!  We had tomato and onion salad as well as some slices just plain.  It was so exciting!

About 4 more tomatoes have turned mostly red and should be ready to pick in the next day or so.  The Roma plant, in total, has approximately 35 tomatoes, the rest still green but bigger by the day.  The Beefsteak is not doing anywhere near as well, but does have 12 green tomatoes of varying sizes right now.

Tomatoes this week at my grocery store were $2.49/lb.  So if I harvest 2.5 lbs of tomatoes, I will more than cover the cost of the original plants, and since the potting soil was left here by the house’s previous owners, that cost me nothing.  I don’t know how much an individual tomato weighs, and I was too impatient to eat these to find out.  But my spouse has a food scale on the way to help him with his ongoing food plan, so I will start using that once it arrives to record my crop.  No more buying tomatoes this summer for us!  And hopefully I’ll have enough for some homemade tomato sauce by the end of the summer.

Clutter costs money simply in the acquisition of it, and that’s the way I often think about it.  Stop acquiring things you don’t need (or even, upon reflection, want) and you’ll stop wasting so much money.  However, just hanging on to clutter costs money as well.  In more obvious ways, like the cost of storing all the clutter – be it a storage unit or simply a bigger home.  But also in less obvious ways, and that’s what I’ve been combating in my own house in earnest lately.  The abundance of clutter simply hides the actual useful things I have, and makes it so that I think I need things I actually already have.

When we moved to our house about a year and a half ago, I had the best of intentions for taming our clutter.  I was going to go through everything, get rid of what we didn’t need, and only pack what was really useful to us.  But the reality of moving while taking care of a 2 year old and a newborn caught up with me, and in fact, much of what I packed and moved was literally dumping drawers into boxes and carting them here.  When I unpacked, I did do some major decluttering but I also didn’t think too hard about it, and kept a lot of things I really didn’t need to, especially in my clothes closet.   My clothes closet is what I’ve been tackling this weekend.

Much of what was in my closet was there for sentimental reasons.  Not just the typical idea of things that didn’t fit anymore but I hung on to anyway (although there was a little of that)  but things I keep for sentimental reasons but don’t wear any more, mostly because they’re in bad condition yet I haven’t thrown them away.   This is not to say that I think nothing should be kept for sentimental reasons, but a closet full of sentiment hides the clothes I can actually wear.

So this weekend, I completely emptied my closet of clothes, and actually sorted it all.  I kept a few things I know I probably won’t wear, like the first concert t-shirt I ever bought, but all the ripped, torn, and stained items went away.  And what I found was although I seem to wear the same 4 or 5 shirts every week because I thought I didn’t have any others, I actually have 8 or 9 other shirts I could be wearing, but were hidden by the massive clutter of ripped up superbowl shirts and clothes I’ve spilled things down the front of and never got completely out.

Now I don’t need to go shopping for some new short sleeved shirts.   And I can actually see everything in my closet.  If only I could do such a good job sorting my childrens’ closets…

Yesterday on the Festival of Frugality blog, I wrote my frugal tip about playing the Drugstore Game.  The Drugstore Game is basically using coupons and saver programs at Walgreens, Rite Aid, and/or CVS to get items you need at very low cost, free, or even effectively get paid to buy them.  I do not have a Rite Aid in my area, but we do have CVS and Walgreens.  In the past, I have used CVS’s Extra Care program to save money on diapers, batteries, toothpaste, and other toiletries.  I am not very skilled at the Drugstore Game at CVS though, and have only really managed to get great deals a few times.  I can usually get excellent toothpaste deals for some reason, but nothing else can I do consistently.  Part of the problem is that anything that has a lot of Extra Care bucks back is sold out the very first day of the sale, and I can’t manage to get there before it is.  So although I know that great savings can be had, I still merely dabble in CVS shopping.

This week I decided to give Walgreens a try.  I bought a Sunday newspaper this week in hopes of starting to better utilize coupons in my shopping, and in doing so got circulars for many stores, including Walgreens.  There were many things in the circular on sale that we actually need, and I also had a few coupons I could match with sales.  So off to Walgreens I went to learn about their EasySaver program.

The EasySaver program is actually a rebate program, not a store membership.  There is an EasySaver catalog, and in it are a number of rebates each month for items in the store.  As well as all the sales I was shopping that week, I found three items in the EasySaver catalog I could get rebates on and matched with my coupons, got the items either significantly discounted, or for two of them, actually free.  But I hate rebates.  So I investigated further.  I could actually submit the rebates online through a code on my receipt, and get back through the mail a Walgreens gift card with a 10% bonus.  This would be $8.80 on a gift card total for this shopping trip.  This made me excited, so I went through with it and bought the items.     Once I have a gift card, I can actually get it refilled with new rebates every month online.

So I bought the items, as well as a number of sale items using coupons from the weekly circular (including packages of mechanical pencils for 5 cents per pack!) and then once I got home, I submitted the rebiate online through the Walgreens website.  It was very easy – I had to register online and create an account, which took about 3 minutes, and then filling out the form took another 5 minutes.  In about 2 weeks, I should get a gift card for $8.80 from Walgreens, and even if I decide not to keep going with the Walgreens EasySaver program, we get my spouse’s Advair prescription filled each month at Walgreens so I can use the gift card money for that.  But I am going to give the program a try, and see if I can get enough rebates to not have to spend any money other than gift card money at Walgreens each month.

We’ll see.  But I am happy with this week’s trial, at least.