The Frugal Five: #74

 The Frugal Five: #74

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- Gas Shopping

In my area, gas prices vary with an average range of $0.05 per gallon and sometimes as much as $0.30 per gallon.     By watching what the base price is and then adding my gas discounts, I was able to save $0.80 per gallon or $8.00 this week.  Although this doesn’t seem like a lot, it does add up for the year. 

2- Planning for Leftovers

This week a whole turkey was on the menu for Thanksgiving, so I planned three days of meals around this bird.    We are having a turkey pot pie and hot turkey sandwiches this week.   In addition, I planned to place some of the meat in the freezer for another time.    

3- Choose a Simple Cooking Style

Holiday cooking tends to elaborate and uses a lot of ingredients.    Each time we choose to make a more complicated dish with many ingredients, the price of our meal goes up.   I have chosen to make a simpler meal this year for Thanksgiving.    However, we do enjoy one side dish which takes several ingredients, but since we have simplified the rest of them, our cost is not excessive. 

     

4- Take Advantage of Free Items

I earned several side dishes from IBOTTA this holiday week, so I will pick them up.    I have already shopped for Thanksgiving based on the sales, so the items I pick up will be rotated into my pantry for future meals.    In addition, at my school, there was a box of individually packaged baked Cheetos available for staff to take, so I picked up several bags to use as rewards for my students.   

5- Growing Herbs

I either have herb houseplants or dried herbs from the community garden this summer.   This helps me to reduce the cost of cooking many meals.    For example, I am roasting vegetables this year for Thanksgiving, so I will need some herbs to add to the oil mix.    Luckily, I have several herbs either dried from the garden or fresh that will go nicely with the vegetables.   

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.