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Welcome, Liv!
Thanks for the crockpot cobbler recipe, Stella! It's apple season here so I look forward to trying it out!
School started last week so the past two weeks have been crazy. I've dropped the ball on bringing my lunch to work on a few days, but got back on track yesterday with a big green salad complete with cherry tomatoes and green pepper from our garden. I hard boiled a dozen eggs the other day so have those in the refrigerator. An egg made for easy protein to go with the salad. I normally keep peanut butter, honey, and rice cakes in my desk drawer for those times when I don't bring lunch from home, but finished off the jar of peanut butter and forgot to bring more so ended up having to buy lunch one day. Not my most frugal (or healthy) moment! I have been very good about bringing tea with me every day, though. So consistently that my students actually razz me for it!
When I started this new job back in May I was aching to buy some new clothes, but have managed to continue to talk myself out of that frivolous (and, truly, it would be frivolous) purchase for almost four months now. I have to give credit to the fact that I am just lazy and don't really enjoy shopping, but also I have just been diligent about keeping non-essential spending to a minimum.
We had a few hot, humid days, but now the weather has broken and we're enjoying having the windows open and no A/C running! Got the electric bill for last month: $8.33. Hooray for solar panels!!!
We picked the last of our blackberries and I cooked them down, added them to some homemade applesauce, and then put the concoction in the dehydrator to make fruit leather. Haven't tasted it yet this morning, but it looks pretty good! Hooray for cheap treats! Our apple trees are loaded right now so it should be a good apple-picking season. Not that I have any idea what going to do with all of them!!!
My dearly beloved helped out and made a big batch of corn chowder this week and we froze a bunch for quick and easy meals this winter.
Not much else to report, really. I know we have places that we could cut expenses further, but they would take some effort and we're just not there, mentally, right now. But I do feel like things have been improving so perhaps as we move into the fall we'll be able to make some more progress.
I do love reading about everyone else's successes, so please keep posting -- you are helping to keep me motivated!!!
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Thanks for the reminder about hard boiled eggs, cdttmm . . . I am also falling short on the food front lately and that could be a good cheap way to have protein ready to go for lots of things - on a salad, on its yummy own, in an egg salad . . .mmmmm.
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Not a particularly frugal week. Again. I was having some eye issues and it cost me $95 to find out it is simply an ocular migraine that cannot be treated. Though I am greatly relieved it was nothing more serious - that's a lot of money!
I am down to 1 pair of work pants so I got 2 new pairs at Kohl's. I tried on many different kinds until I found the ones that I really liked the fit. I spent more money than I wanted even on sale & with the 30% discount code. But I have looked and looked at Goodwill and haven't found any that I really liked the fit. Hopefully these will last a good long time. These are Lee Perfect Fit and they are stretchy enough that I can do my job comfortably.
Today I ordered my nieces wedding gift from her Kohl's registry. The wedding isn't til October 26th but I ordered today because the items were on sale & I had a 30% coupon code. I think I saved $68. Granted the stuff was over-priced to begin with. But I'll take it! And now all I have to do is find a nice card & gift bag and I'm all set. I also got her shower gift & the 2 shower game prizes I am supposed to provide this week. They were on clearance at work, plus my work & red card discounts. I will get the shower food on payday.
We went to watch Tyler march yesterday. It was such a beautiful Autumn day. Admission is only $5 each and we had dinner at the dining hall with T. There is a new policy that says parents eat free! Awesome! Got to see T in his element being greeted by friends right & left. It confirms to us yet again that while it isn't cheap - this really is the right school for him. At this time in his life, anyways.
Brought my lunches from home all week. Except for Wednesday when I made the emergency trip to the eye dr. I stopped at Wendy's on the way back to work :|(
But this is a new week & I will try much much harder to be frugal!
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It's been a no spend day - returned 3 items to 3 different stores but mapped it out so I didn't backtrack. Went to a consignment store and emptied out 5 items (brought home 5 but some were Christmas that they will accept in October). Bagged up for donation the summer clothes I never wore. When DH got home we bagged home many, many items that he hasn't worn. Got in touch with a former coworker who makes/sells jewelry to give her jewelry display pieces that another coworker no longer used and gave to me (who has no use for them) so as of tomorrow, they are out of my house. Still working on house painting - scraped and primed 4 windows today - painting tomorrow.
Do have to take my car in tomorrow AM because I have a slow leak in a tire - otherwise I anticipate another quiet day.
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Not so frugal week here. Our car is in the shop again, second time in as many weeks. And both times have resulted in us needing to rent a car for a week. We're not accustomed to that because for so many years we both worked from home so being down one car for a few days was inconvenient, but not impossible. Now a second car is pretty much a necessity. I feel like a wuss for saying that, but the solutions for getting along without two cars for several days or a week are pretty extreme. As in, one of us taking unpaid vacation time from an already less-than-secure job situation or me biking 54 miles roundtrip to work every day for a week. Okay, rant over.
As a result of the car repairs/car rental expenses, I'm going to do my best to tighten my belt even further. Not sure exactly what that will entail except for no longer buying an almost daily snack from the vending machine or cafe at work. It's generally been less than $2 a day, but right now that is $2 a day that we do not have. Not to mention, I could definitely go without eating a totally unhealthy snack every day!
I think I will also take the time to inventory the deep freezer and see what we can actually eat up over the next several days/weeks. I found a few containers of soup and corn chowder in there this week that we've consumed so it makes me wonder what else is lurking in there! A few freezer meals would definitely save a few bucks over the last minute trips to the grocery store that we seem to make with regularity these days.
The weather is supposed to be beautiful for the next few days so I'll also challenge myself to get some laundry out of the clothesline in the morning before I go to work so that we don't need to use the dryer for every load.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what else I can do this week (and every week!) to cut back, but this thread always gives me great inspiration so keep up the great work everyone and keep posted about your successes!
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Put a load of laundry on the line this morning, and I have one out now for tomorrow. I have a blanket in the washer that I'll hang out before work tomorrow. Been taking lunch, but I'm buying at a fund-raiser tomorrow. $3 for lunch including a beverage, so it's still a pretty cheap lunch. cdttmm, I feel for ya about the car. We just ended up buying a new one. Thankfully, I was able to borrow DD's when I needed. Been gathering stale stuff from where-ever (Mom, co-workers) to supplement the chicken's diet. They aren't laying at the moment so it sort of feels wrong to buy more chicken feed, lol. And they like scratch.
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I was proud of hubs and myself last night--we were both tired and looking toward an evening of processing a batch of our burgeoning tomato harvest, so ... he looked at me and said, "Just wanna go out to Sabor Mexicano for dinner?"
Instead, we chopped up some leftover chicken, added celery, onion and made chicken salad, threw it on some lettuce leaves, steamed some of our last green beans, and of course, some tomato slices. Voila! Cheap, fast dinner and it was all in the kitchen already. Probably saved at least $15.
Got the tomatoes finished by 8 p.m. Still had time for my hobby.
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No drive and little out of pocket personal spending, we ordered out once, but we did have a new roof with the wood under the flashing replaced since the roof was done wrong at one point. The flashing and gutters were replaced with the protective mesh that keeps the gutters clear from debris. So this was a huge expense.
Happily though we used someone from Angie's list who got all A's from many customer reviews and they did a fantastic job and cleaned up very well too. The house looks great and now we won't have to worry about rotting wood and what that could work out costing us in the long run....
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It doesn't feel like there have been many frugals lately, but I haven't posted for a while so there ought to be some:
- I am refinancing my mom's place (rental property). I wasn't planning to, but I learned I didn't need to bring DW's short sale and my (ha) income as a photographer into it. Closing costs will be bundled into the refi -- not the most frugal but I can think of better things to do with that cash right now -- and that and another $50 or so a month on the note will cut ten years off the mortgage.
- Shopping sales for treats and making sure the groceries we buy get used. This is working out quite well. I can't remember the last time I had to empty the fridge of science projects that started out as leftovers and raw vegetables.
- Got my Airvoice SIM card so I can try them out before we depart from postpaid cellular service. My locked phone so far won't unlock, so I'm waiting for yet another unlock code so I can give it another shot (more accurately, so T-Mobile can give it another shot. If they mess it up and brick the phone, it's their mess, not mine). One month -- 250 talk minutes or 500 text messages (two texts [in or out] count as a "minute") and 6.6 cents per MB of data (I use about 25 MB a month over the air; the rest is on Wi-Fi) -- is $10, no taxes. If the network coverage is there, it'll be great when it works.
- I made a list of the items I needed for my window-painting project. Turns out half of what I need was already in the house (woot!). No need to spend $$ on those things.
- Our stupid car passed 100,000 miles last week (while getting 51 mpg). I had promised myself I'd take it in to get it detailed (almost makes the car look brand new). I'm waffling now and wondering if I can (or will) DIY for less money. Or maybe have them do the interior, which has suffered for carrying stuff as if the car were a pickup truck, and I do the rest. Hmm...
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Steve, a quick Groupon search turned up six local deals for detailing. Something to think about - you can get your treat but get it cheap . . .
We held out on some cosmeticky kind of work on DH's car, but the reality was that I was starting to entertain fantasies about replacing it, because it looked/felt junky. Once we fixed up all those, I haven't had those thoughts. So maybe a detailing isn't so unfrugal after all, if it can keep the consumerist beast from rearing its ugly head . . .
