December Frugals

Hello everyone,

We are going to be working on a few frugals today:

- Going to use a coupon and gift card to get a grandparents' memory book for Bryce's parents to fill in
- Planning some meals for Xmas, the week, and a freezer meal prep day. This will require a freezer inventory as there are quite a few items to get used up in there and they need to come out for the freezer meals to go in. Will probably order groceries from our delivery service.
- Wrapping gifts with reused bags
- Sanding and painting the dresser from my parents. We have all the paint leftover from other projects. I will probably buy new hardware but Menards has "project packs" for only $1.50 per pull.

We are trying to make Christmas decorations mainly out of stuff we have on hand or can use all year. Our tree this year is a small centerpiece tree from the dollar store on the fireplace mantle with candles on each side. On the hearth I have a big assortment of candles (real and LED) surrounded by garland from the dollar store with some tea lights in mason jars, and the presents in reuseable gift bags. I think it looks very festive and it only cost $2, a dollar each for the tree and garland.

I ordered new white solar string lights for the front yard that we'll use on the patio all year as soon at Christmas is over. The squirrels wrecked my old solar lights or we wouldn't have had to buy those again. I did use points from a credit card so the new solar lights didn't cost anything.

We stockpiled grocery items from the dollar store and our local warehouse store - items that were cheapest at the dollar store or on sale at the warehouse place.

For dinner we went out for Indian food with a buy one meal get one free coupon.

For gifts we are mainly giving gift cards and consumables.

We've been doing a little bit better recently. Exercising restraint on groceries and keeping out of other stores in general is helping to offset some of the heavy spending earlier in the month.

I mended two pairs of DH's underwear.

I'm bartering with my neighbor - I tutor her kids in English (they are from Japan) and she is helping with my landscaping. She is a very talented gardener. My neighbor on the other side has her nephew coming to do some heavy work, and I've hired him to do the digging for all the roses I'm putting in - he only charges $10 per hour.
Not that I'm saving money per se, but my house is going to look fantastic for very little cash. I'm transplanting roses from other parts of the garden and have had several other neighbors donate plants.
I LOVE my neighbors!

Also - we usually have a big New Year's Eve party (getting bigger every year - over 75 people at last count) but due to my inability to move (foot surgery) we are scaling that way back, which will save some money spent on beer, Asti, etc.

I'm also doing mending - bunch of dishcloths and towels will have a second life.

Sundays are free pool night at our local sports bar so we played pool for three hours. We did pay for drinks but it still was a fun, cheap date night.

Today we went to a local botanical garden and bought an annual membership pass. That is my Christmas gift from DH. The garden is part of the American Horticultural Society, North American Reciprocal Museum Association and the Reciprocal Museum Association. So we'll get free entry into many of the major gardens and museums in California and any other states we travel to for the rest of the year. Plus the membership was tax deductible, includes guests and guest passes, and we got a discount on Christmas presents we bought at the gift shop.

The AHA, NARM and ROAM passes are great deals and it was way cool to find one garden with a membership in all three. Combined with the free library passes for local attractions we'll have fun outings every week at no extra cost besides the one garden membership. I think this was my favorite frugal find of the year.

Trytobefrugal: That sounds like a wonderful gift! I should look into something like that. Enjoy!

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Originally Posted by rosarugosa

Trytobefrugal: That sounds like a wonderful gift! I should look into something like that. Enjoy!

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Thanks! We are looking forward to using the reciprocal passes for the coming year. We lowered our monthly entertainment budget when DH left his salaried job, and I wasn't sure at first how that was going to work out. But the interesting thing has been with more free time to do research, we keep finding different fun free things to do, so we have been able to keep pretty busy without spending a lot of money.

I sold 5 DVDs back to Amazon for gift cards and walked to the post office to mail them. We stopped at the grocery store on the way home and I bought a turkey breast, dandelion greens and kale on sale for half off.

Yesterday we went out for Christmas dinner. On the way out the host at the front desk gave us $60 in gift certificates for free as a Christmas gift. I thought they were going to be something like spend $50 get $10 off coupons but when I looked them over they were just flat out gift certificates. That was a nice surprise.

I had some restaurant.com gift certificates left over for restaurants we decided we didn't like or didn't want to use so I had just forgot about them. The restaurants dropped out of the program this year so restaurants.com sent us $100 in new gift certificates for free to use at the restaurants of our choice. That was an unexpected surprise, too.

This past week I worked on completing stock trades and debit card purchases for some Capital One and Sharebuilder Black Friday bonuses sign ups. They had bonuses from $75 - $125 each for opening checking accounts, saving accounts, referring friends, and trading stocks. I opened some new accounts and referred my husband and kids. All totaled we should get almost $1,000 in bonus money by the end of next month. I still have a few debit card transactions to do and then I will have met all their requirements on all the various accounts.

I remembered to bring my own shopping bags the last time we did our big grocery shopping for a 5 cents a bag discount.

Christmas was a fairly frugal affair. I went to MN for a few days to visit my family. We didn't do much in the way of gift exchange so that only ran me about $40. I did break down and buy 2 pairs of winter running pants at REI while I was there. $170, yikes! But they will be used regularly and for years to come so I think of it as an investment in my exercise habit! Now I'm off from work until January 2nd or whenever after that I want to go back (hourly job so I won't get paid until I show up again). I figure I will probably be ready to go back for at least a few hours on the 2nd. Between now and then life will be pretty frugal. We'll eat up some leftovers, clean the house, go to the gym, snowshoe or ski if it snows some more, and generally just relax. Aaahhhh...