The Frugal Five: #72

 The Frugal Five: #72

With inflation on the rise and salaries not increasing, our ability to make ends meet keeps going down.    Therefore, we must be more careful with our money.   The Frugal Five is a series where we celebrate the daily or weekly activities that help us live a frugal life.    

1- Resist buying drinks and snacks out

Beverages and snacks can increase your grocery bill by quite a bit, but buying a single drink or snack from a convenience store, vending machine or restaurant is even more expensive.    My husband found himself buying a soda on a semi-regular basis from his work’s vending machine at $1.75 per drink→ WOW!    When soda goes on sale, we pick up several cases for him to keep in the car and he takes one can in per day to keep in the refrigerator.    In addition, we pick up one snack item a week and place it in smaller bags.  Then we take the individual snacks and soda and/or water bottles to swim meets, work, activities, etc.   This helps us to resist buying snacks and drinks while we are away from the house.   

2- Utilize your Resources 

Being a good steward of your resources is important because a little creativity and restraint will help to save you a lot of money.   For example, last year, we needed to remove a tree and trim several other older trees to protect our home.    The wood that this produced was a lot and although the tree company offered to remove it at no additional cost to us, we decided to keep it.    Wood needs to be seasoned for at least one year to safely burn it in a fireplace, so we chopped it and stored it in a log stand which allowed the wood to have air circulation.  This year, we will not need to purchase seasoned wood to burn.     

Another example is using up the food you already purchased.    My son didn’t eat his bananas last week and now they are ripe and he will not eat them for breakfast.   However, if I make banana chip muffins, they will be gone in two days.      To prevent throwing away food and stretching what we already have, so we do not need to take a trip to the grocery store so quickly, I made muffins.    

3- Soup and Chili 

This week we made chili and soup to use up the bits and pieces of vegetables left over in the refrigerator.     This was very helpful in cleaning out the refrigerator and eliminating potential kitchen waste.     As a huge bonus, it provided a quick, easy, and frugal meal from the food we already purchased.      

     

4- Winterizing our home for the Winter

We purchased an older home that needs to be winterized each year.   We make sure our fireplace is swept and our furnace is checked out each year.    Now this is not a guarantee that the boiler will not have issues, but it is important to maintain your equipment each year.    In addition, we open the doors to our bedrooms at night because of the way the heat circulates and use draft dodgers at the base of our outside doors.  Finally, we use curtains to keep the heat in.   If you have any other ideas on what we can do, please leave a comment below. 

5- Keeping Warm 

We are not sure what is going on with our boiler pump and called our maintenance service provider to check it out, but it was the weekend, my husband traveled this week, and the weather is not that cold.    Therefore, we are waiting until next week to schedule the appointment and will keep warm by running the downstairs heating, layering up, using blankets, and building a fire in the fireplace.    Since we keep the doors to our bedrooms open at night, the downstairs heat does rise and keeps us warm at night.   We are grateful for having a variety of ways to stay warm when life happens.  

What Free-bees have you been able to pick up this year?    My September free-bee haul knocked it out of the park!    Hopefully, October will pick up soon, because it is looking a lot like my August haul.      

Here is my list: 

Do you want to see what we did last week?   

Just click on the picture for the link. 

Please leave a comment below with your ways of saving money this week.