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Huge frugal for me this month! My brother is opening a restaurant in Minneapolis and I wanted to fly there for the grand opening. Only problem...flights were $1000. I'm a college professor so I can't really just extend my stay in an attempt to get cheaper flights. Totally lucked out and was able to use frequent flier miles to get a ticket for the exact flights I wanted for a whopping $5.00 booking fee!!! Non-stop flights both directions to boot! And, Delta gives you the option to buy additional miles when you book a flight. Of course, you can technically buy miles any time, but it is less expensive to buy them when you are booking a flight. I did the math and realized that buying 6000 miles (the most I could buy at the discount) would ultimately mean that my next ticket using purchased frequent flier miles would still be half the price of a retail ticket. I rarely fly anywhere except to and from MN to see my family and Delta is almost always the best option since MSP is a Delta hub. So total frugal win today...I was really thinking I was going to have to pony up the $1000 for this trip and it would have pained me greatly.
For those of you in the Twin Cities, here is my shameless plug. His restaurant is called Heyday and it's in Uptown (27th and Lyndale, I think). It opens April 22nd. :D
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wow, cdttmm, I think those $5 flights were the biggest frugal I've seen here - very impressive! Have fun at the restaurant opening, I'm sure it will mean a lot that you're there.
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Got my dwarf peach tree ordered when it went on end of the season sale. I've been haunting the Stark Bros web site knowing it was almost time for the trees to go on sale. I was hoping they wouldn't run out of my variety before the sale started. Finally went on sale yesterday and I snapped it up. The tree was marked down 8 bucks and the shipping was 7.95 so it's like I got free shipping. Hooray! Also by ordering this late I get it delivered at the perfect planting time for my region instead of a month earlier and having to hold it over. Every mail order nursery I've ever dealt with thinks that early March is perfect planting time here...NOT!
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Cdttmm, that is so exciting! I will put that on my list of places to try. Great deal on the tickets, too!
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April 05
--making two large batches of gnocchi one with mash potato flakes that need to be used and one with
sweet potatoes bought really cheap last week. Will be supper tonight and lots to freeze. Ds visiting next
week and it will make a great addition to Sat. supper
--picked up books from Library (entailment free) and combined trip to bank at the same time
--the fellow that was suppose to take down one tree and trim the rest last summer finally came this week...because he was late (you think...lol)
and because the trees were easier to cut with no leaves he charged me less
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Hi all,
Looks like your bro's restaurant is getting a fair amount of buzz, cdttmm! Good for him! Looking forward to trying it at some point.
I am taking a break from working on an online course to get my SLF on. :) Man, my academic brain is really shot after a few years away from this kind of work. Plus, it's just so much more fun to get ready for a baby. :) Anyway, I'm pounding through and almost done. I even pulled out my old trick of leaving home and going to a coffee shop, but I chose a new one to try and it's really too loud to focus well. I'll stick with my old standard next time I need to use this trick - it's always quiet there. They did have a good iced mocha, but definitely not frugal!!
So my latest frugal adventure is this group I got added to on FB. I think I posted about it already, it's a neighborhood garage-style group. OMG. I need to limit myself in the time I spend on there, it feels like there are hundreds of items a day!! We have picked up a good little stroller for $5 and a changing pad (brand new) for $7. The really good stuff gets snapped up right away, though. I am hopeful that it will be a good way to sell some of the items we have tried in the past on CL, but haven't gone that well, because the geographical area is a lot tighter. There are over 1000 people on the group!! I think 99% of them are women!! Lots of kids items and women's clothing.
DH has been working hard on our basement remodel, saving us a lot of $$ over hiring out the work. He's not the fastest, but he's learning a lot and enjoying himself, so that's good. Today he made us some risers for the baby's cosleeper out of blocks of wood. It was too short to attach to our tall bed and now it can function more as intended. To order leg extensions would have been about $25 and they didn't get good reviews anyway.
We returned about $150 worth of stuff from our baby showers. I am still floored by people's generosity. Some of it was from Walmart, and we don't go there often, so we spent that up right away on other items while we were at the store, but have saved the Target money for a rainy day.
That's about all for right now!! I am headed home to work on sewing some cloth wipes out of old tshirts. :)
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Spent $5 cover charge for a "Clean Comedy" night with 3 different comics. Hilarious, everyone in the audience laughing all the way through. Fun and frugal entertainment for a Saturday night.
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I posted elsewhere about DH and I getting Fitbits. While it remains to be seen whether or not this was a good investment or a useless expenditure, I did get DH's for a great deal. They go for $100. We had enough points on a credit card for a $50. gift card to LL Bean, and LL Bean is also running a special where you get a $10 gift card if you spend $50. or more. So we bout the Fitbit from LL Bean and our out of pocket was $50. instead of $100, with the potential to save another $10. if there is something we NEED from LL Bean before the $10 card expires in late May. If the $10 prompts us to buy something we don't need, then I recognize that won't be a deal at all!
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Laundry on the line, car not leaving the driveway today (a very rare occurrence!) and cleaning/repairing things to sell is on the agenda for this afternoon. That's about as good as it gets for this past week...
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April 13
--Ds and Ddil for the weekend believe it or not we only just got together to exchange Christmas gifts.
1. really good reason to stop and just give people gifts when and if we want when we see them
2. will be discussing this when we next get together something I have wanted to do for a long time
3. we all have enough and they all have more then enough
4. very hard to buy things any of us need.
So this will be a major frugal this Christmas...
--made really nice meals with help from Dd that were good/mostly healthy and frugal
--bread in the bread machine
--took Ddil to store she wanted to see that was going out of business and I didn't buy anything.
