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Frugal living - money saving tips

33K views 239 replies 33 participants last post by  Horseychick87 
#1 ·
Last winter proved very hard on the wallet due to it's length and severity. My usual winter plowing bill jumped from $200 to $600. We also had to deal with the usual increases in home heating, gasoline, etc. Many of us have had a cool wet summer which means a reduction in available hay which results in sometimes large increases. I've been in contact with SouthernTrails and the mods will make this a sticky whereby people can post ideas on how to shave our costs as the meteorologists are telling us we are in for another winter like last.
I will start it off. If good clean oat straw is available, one flake per horse per day provides needed roughage and will stretch the hay. No more than one flake per day should be fed. As soon as oats are being harvested, that is the time to pick up the straw. It is often cheaper if you can pick up off the field.
 
#33 ·
I buy winter hay ahead. I only buy high quality horse hay, feed 3 times a day, and weigh each and ever meal. In the long run, it saves a lot, is more consistent and helps keep dietary record.

I keep both injectable and oral banamine on hand. It isn't cheap, per se, and you many never need it, but the one and only time I did not have it, it cost me over $500 in an emergency vet visit that banamine would have otherwise taken care of as it ordinarily does with colic.

If you pay to watch TV, don't. :) It is useless.

Zone heating reduces one's heating bill and allows them to stay comfy.

Prioritize discretionary spending, e.g., eating out is at the bottom of my "discretionary spending" list. I really prefer to know what goes in to my food and how it was prepared.

Recognize and buy quality, if that means buying it second hand, then it is a better use of money than buying new junk. Kids really exemplify how expensive the inability to recognize quality can be. Turn a 9-10 year old loose in a mall, and they will way over pay for stuff they not only wont want in 6 months, but that is mostly junk. Turn a 13-14 yo loose, and they will overpay for what is "in", and if any of their purchases is quality, it is purely by accident. In both cases quality wasn't in the equation. Turn an 18 yo that has gone to my marching school loose in a mall, and if the cost of an article they have purchased is not commensurate with the quality, it should be and will be returned. :)
 
#34 ·
Agreed about eating at restaurants. NOW, I try to eat out only on days that I have a Notary Signing Agent closing, so that I can use the bill as a tax write off. We have a Monicals Pizza 10 minutes from our house and the franchise owner initiated a Monday night special, large pizza (one the menu) + family salad + drinks for ~$25.00. It feeds 4 people easily. I write this meal off most of the time. If it's just two of us, then I have lunch for the next day.
I know that it sounds like a job to keep track, but it becomes a habit like anything else. I scan the receipts, staple it to my work orders, and have it ready, in the case of an audit.
The four of us ate recently on a Sunday at the Outback bc I had a closing scheduled later that day at my office. $65.00 for an $85.00 (short) closing, BUT, it became a business expense.
USUALLY, I just grab two dollar burgers and a one dollar drink for lunch and just write that off. That doesn't break the bank, and still gives me a good profit.
You don't have to give up eating out, BUT, DH and I have gone months without eating out. He already eats out 2x/week, one is a business group the meets on Tuesdays and the other is "Lawyer's Lunch", on Wednesdays, that is profitable bc of county politics. BUT, I stay at the office or home for those two lunches. THAT becomes a habit, too.
Start listening to Dave Ramsey to learn how to budget your money. He is always giving good advice to people who aren't aware that their money is leaking like a sieve bc of casual, not-budgeted spending, like eating out bc you are too tired to make something at home. If you're too tired to cook, make a sandwich. We ALWAYS have bread and Peanut Butter, which keeps a really long time. Soup is cheap and keeps a long time in a can.
Also, there is a local grocery store that grinds up their unsold steaks at the end of the day and sells them as hamburger at $2.99/lb
Usually it's better than their other hamburger, and we are ALL eating much more hamburger lately than steak!
I have been pinching my pennies so long that they try to hide when they see me coming.
I even bought a Gardenia tree on clearance with a jar of coins--It cost $16.35 and I had $22.00 in change, and since my mother gave me the filled jar, I bought it for the magic price of FREE.
 
#37 ·
Everyone has a hose that leaks. Instead of throwing it out, cut it up into two inch lengths. Slip as many as you need, one per post, and you have free insulators, providing the posts are wood. The large staples straddle them nicely and the wire can slide back and forth. Less chance of these letting go of the post than the plastic insulators.
 
#40 ·
We got serious about it and, when the time came to build our own house, built a passive-solar strawbale house with off-grid solar power, rainwater harvesting, compost toilets, a small wood heater with inbuilt oven and a ******* for the solar hot water, and a gas cooker/oven connected up to camping gas. We now pay $22 every 6 weeks for a camping bottle of gas and that's all, as far as external utility bills go. Our nutrients get recycled and our greywater is re-used on the garden for watering when required. It was all done on a mortgage significantly lower than average.

Our house naturally stays between 19 and 24 degrees the vast majority of the time, while external temperatures range from freezing to 42 degrees Celsius. On maybe one day, at the most two, a week in winter, we light our small wood heater for half a day, mostly to backup boost the hot water. (Our neighbours are usually running their heaters around the clock at this point.) In summer, we put on the ceiling fan. We're 85% done now and expect that once we actually install curtains, our thermal performance will improve even further.

We wish that, with all the knowledge out there on building great houses like this, more thought went into building the average house. It would save households so much money, keep people blissfully comfortable in their homes with almost no effort or expenditure, and reduce the overwhelming pressure on natural resources and the environment in general. Unfortunately, uptake on this kind of design is usually only characteristics of owner builds like ours. The professional building companies usually don't offer this kind of thing.
 
#41 ·
I am out of town for three days every week for work. The company pays for travel and motel. Meals are mine to manage.

The motel where I am staying is now getting used to seeing me. This week the manager and morning clerk told me I was welcome to an extra helping from breakfast. What a score!

I was bringing meals I had frozen at home and just eating a granola bar and/or piece of fruit while on the run for lunch. While I don't plan to increase my daily calories (I'm at a good level now), I can make a little sandwich of some sort for a midday snack and stop bringing fruit and snacks from home.
 
#42 ·
The fellow who used my trailer left two bales of oat straw in it. I threw some in the barn and the horses enjoy picking at it, which means the hay will last a little longer. I make my own probiotics (tibicos). The horses got a 1/2 quart added to their drinking water. They don't get the culture, just the resulting liquid.
 
#43 ·
Someone may have mentioned something along these lines already - I have yet to read everything here - but one of the biggest incidental money savers we've found is taking our own drink bottles everywhere.

Even if you only bought one 600mL carton of iced coffee every day, at $4 a pop that's $120 a month. A lot of small things like that - drinks, snacks etc - add up to phenomenal amounts very quickly with repetition. The bought drinks are unexceptional nutritionally and taste-wise as well. We make our own iced coffee / chocolate and use more actual coffee or cocoa, and less than half the sugar of commercial drinks.

We use the screw-top 700mL glass jars that Italian tomato puree comes in (shaped a bit like the traditional glass milk bottles but with a slightly wider neck) as our standard drink bottles - easy to spoon the dry ingredients into, and easy to drink from. We don't like plastic drink bottles and after years of trying to find ones made from a guaranteed healthy material that was also easy to clean, this seemed the obvious answer staring us in the face all along - and fits neatly into the car drink bottle holders - and even the bicycle drink bottle holders (although you'll need to stop to drink when using glass). Equally great to carry juice and water. We love cranberry juice, buy it in bulk, then 50:50 dilute with water to make it less sugary and more refreshing for on-the-go.

Snacks: We keep the glove box in the car (and a desk drawer at work) stocked with good-quality nut bars bought in bulk, along with ziplock bags of almonds, cashews, dried fruit etc bought in bulk, and carry mandarins and other easy-to-eat fruit, so that a snack attack will not result in lapses in the budget or the quality of our nutrition.

Work lunches and snacks are brought from home; we cook large quantities of soups and stews loaded with healthy and tasty ingredients, and excess is refrigerated or frozen in take-away containers for imminent or future work days. We make cakes with wholemeal flour, nut meal, and around 25% of the sugar of commercial cake, or apple/blueberry strudels etc, and slices of those go along for tea breaks. It doesn't take four times as long, nor use four times the gas/electricity, to make four times as much volume in the one session, and you only have one cleanup to do, and the spare food is so handy. People at work are always ogling at our lunches because they're so gourmet, but they're also less pricey than bought standard lunch fare. Win-win.

All our food is made from scratch - healthier, tastier, more economical. For anyone just starting out on DIY good nutrition, or wanting new ideas, Jamie Oliver just put out a really good recipe book called Save With Jamie which is all about saving time and money while creating wonderfully healthy and tasty food in your own home. I learnt a new strategy from him through that, of making one large roast (chicken, beef, pork, whatever) a week and super-sizing it for plenty of leftover meats for which he then has really zingy, 10 minute follow-up recipes that take the flavours in entirely different directions. This cuts down on hassle while keeping things interesting.
 
#46 ·
Just go to the grocery store and see what vegetables are sold frozen. YES, cauliflower can be frozen. Okra is the easiest to freeze bc you just rinse, cut and bag and put in the freezer--done. Other vegetables require blanching. When I bought some delicious sweet corn this summer, I decided to freeze it, but I hadn't ever done this before. I blanched it (directions for this everywhere on the I'Net) and then froze. DD accidentally grabbed a bag for dinner and it was delicious!
Once you blanch you know how to, and it's not hard. Vegetables can sit in the freezer for a very long time, even years, and still be edible.
I'm about to harvest the carrots I planted with my tomatoes this year, and I'll be blanching and freezing those, too.
 
#48 ·
I picked my bumper 2013 crop of beets--18 quarts worth. I even did it WRONG, canning them in straight vinegar with sugar, instead of mixing the vinegar with water. Know what? Tastes GREAT!!! We rinse it, then cook the beets in water and they are best picked beets ever!
Picking preserves vegetables and you also ingest some vinegar, which is very healthy for your digestive system. =D
The only thing I did wrong was to put them in quarts instead of pints.
 
#52 ·
I imagine the really organized do, but we don't. We pretty much know what meals we "like", and the required ingredients and just stock accordingly. Obviously, a lot of the same ingredients go in different meals. I am a vegetarian of sorts (e.g., I eat turkey), DH is not. This "method" works best if everyone eats the same things - which is just a minor detail. :wink:
 
#55 ·
I don't plan my meals ahead or make a list unless I'm planning on trying a new recipe that contains something I normally don't buy. I tend to keep a good stock of basics on hand so even if I forget something I can make do with something else.
 
#56 ·
It's not possible to shop once/month for ME, but I make lists and plan my shopping to take me past several places on one trip. My business has me driving, so I can justify the gas.
I use cash to buy groceries. It's harder to part with cash, and you are very aware of budgeting when you avoid paying with plastic. =D
 
#57 ·
Shopping once a month is great if you have a productive vegetable garden, and possibly a cow (unless you like UHT), but if you don't, then how will you get really fresh vegetables? So in that case, maybe you could shop for items with a long shelf life once a month (preferably at a catering supply place, where you can buy in bulk), but pop into your local farmers market for fresh supplies weekly.

Planning all meals ahead in my opinion is tedious, boring and inflexible - kind of like voluntary boarding school meal-wise. You tend to feel like foods that you actually need at a particular time (not counting addictions! ;-)) and so it also cuts out that mechanism. It's better to have your pantry and freezer well stocked with essentials that allow a whole variety of meals to be made. One of the best explanations for new foodies of how to make that work that I've read lately is in Jamie Oliver's Save With Jamie cooking for less / healthy recipes book.
 
#58 ·
To save on a lot of gas I shop once weekly, banking, etc. and too many times the grocery list was on the desk, at home. Duh! I'd inevitably forget a few things. Finally wised up and now the list is in my cell phone which is conjoined to me. Never have to look for pen and paper. My bro had an Apple iphone and ipad. He puts the grocery list on the ipad and if he happens to go into the grocery store, he'll phone his ipad which puts it on his iphone.
 
#59 ·
I went to Kroger the other day, and had read to look for manager special meat. I went to the meat section, and behold, hit the jackpot! We bought around 3 weeks worth of meat, along with mamy other grocery items and spent 200$ Considering what we were spending eating out everyday, we just cut our food bill by half at least. Me and the hubby went hunting yesterday afternoon and on the way home he asked if I wanted tostop and get dinner. iI told him nope, we got plenty of food at home. I was proud of myself. We also ran out of freezer room, so I took out all of last years game meat and am on the process of making it all into jerky, hopefully we can fill it back up with fresh game luck willing.
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#60 ·
I started dehydrating veggies to add to soups, which I make often, nice and thick. This is the only way I could buy fresh veggies with a short shelf life and that don't freeze well. A huge money saver is making the annual gift list on New Year's day. As I shop I keep an eye out for bargains as retailers set out the new inventory and drastically mark down the old. Because I'm not under pressure I've gotten some excellent buys, always staying within my budget for a particular person and I am frugal. A gift should be a token of appreciation to say Thank you for being in my life.
 
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