Friday, March 25, 2016

Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

Well, overall I have to say that this week has gone pretty well on the money saving front.

1.  My husband went out last Saturday, when we were getting a lot of snow around here and went to help out his friend's father who is wiring his own garage.  He went to inspect it and made sure the wiring was being done right.  He kept refusing to let his friend's dad pay him, but he insisted on giving my husband something for the trouble so he gave him some meat from his freezer.  So we now have moose hot dogs, moose kielbasa and moose meat sticks in the freezer.  Always nice to get the gift of meat :).  The hot dogs will taste awesome on the grill this summer that's for sure!

2.  As I said we got about a foot of snow last Saturday and by Sunday it was nice and warm and sunny, so we went outside really fast to play in the snow before it melted on us.  My daughter and husband built a snowman while I was taking care of a very cold son who wanted to go inside and get warm and both my husband and I knew that we had to take a picture when it was done.  We don't really get snow up here that is good for packing snowballs or building snowmen.  Usually we get light and fluffy (read too cold to pack) snow, so it was a lot of fun messing around in the snow all morning with the weather nice and warm.  I made sure to clean up the photos of my daughter with the snowman and am thinking of printing some off and putting them in Christmas cards this year for relatives that live on the East Coast. 

3.  Once the kids were back in school I spent most of the week just recovering the house from having them home for an entire week during Spring Break, so at least I didn't spend a bunch of money running around to a bunch of different stores numerous days.

4.  I ordered a book my husband has been really wanting on Amazon for .01 (so, 4.00 after shipping).  I'm going to save the book for a couple of months and save it for our anniversary.

5.  I started sketching pattern pieces from our couch downstairs in the den so I can hopefully repair things that desperately need to be repaired with the cloth I found at the used store.  I'm hoping that I'll have enough material to make it all work well, so I'm hoping by making pattern pieces it'll help the cloth go further.  I went on Pinterest to get some ideas on what I wanted the final product on the couch to look.  I'm hoping to make the slip covers for the throw pillows tomorrow and then I'll start on some embroidery for them to make them a little bit fancier as I figure even if the repair job ends up being ugly at least I can distract the eye when people come in and look at the couch *laugh*.

6.  My husband and I have been having a lot of fun watching a series online.  It's a long series so we've been watching about two episodes a night (the episodes are only about 20 minutes long).  The best part about watching the series online is that we can watch it for a little bit once the kids are in bed but not quite asleep for the evening (it's subtitled so watching it with the kids awake gets to be really difficult).

7.  I mended a couple of shirts this week that had gotten little holes in them (I accidentally put a bra through the dryer...never ends well for me) and repaired a comforter that the quilting had given on.

8.  I used the crock pot a lot this week, which saved me time, energy (as I'm still really wiped out from the residuals with this cold) and really made dinner a lot more laid back since I didn't feel the need to have everything ready at the same time.  It worked out well since one night my husband got home late and then another night he wasn't hungry when he got home, so I just put the crock pot on warm and walked away and he still had a hot meal when he wanted it.

9.  We got our gas bill in the mail and turning the heat down at night and such has paid off yet again in a 50.00 reduction in our bill.  It felt good to get that bill in the mail, for a change.  The weather has warmed this last week as well (well it's starting to fall again today, but we won't count that) so I was able to actually open some windows for a little bit a few days and air out the house a little.  It's always so nice to be able to do that after a long winter, even if the warm snaps are still temporary.

10.  I have been saving some leftover school work papers that my daughter has brought home (weekly newsletter and such) and have been saving it for scrap paper at home and not just for writing things down.  The biggest thing I find it helps with is using it to scrub the extra fat out of a greasy pan and then throwing it away.  Better the paper than a paper towel.  I also use it normally for writing notes on the back of, of course, but I've been trying to expand paper's horizons a bit to recycle it just that one more time before throwing it away.

11.  I've been washing and reusing freezer bags for the first time in my life the last little bit.  I won't reuse things that housed meat (just too paranoid), but I've been reusing other bags after washing them out and drying them out really well.  It's really been helping to stretch my last box of freezer bags by a good margin.

So, there you go folks.  Some of the ways I saved money this week.  How did you do?

13 comments:

  1. It sounds like you had a great week of saving money. I am looking forward to things settling down so I can get back to my normal routine, as well.

    Our nephew fixed our very old red Camry. It has almost 300,000 miles on it, and was in a minor crash (someone backed into it when parked), and so the doors have been dented in for a long time. He replaced that driver's door so we could get in properly, and fixed some other problems. He only had us pay for part of the parts and did all the labor for free. Yesterday, Patsy and I took it to the car wash and used the vacuums to clean out the inside. It had been parked for so long that some mold was actually growing in there. We used a container of disinfectant wipes and cleaned, scrubbed and vacuumed. It is still a very old, run-down car, BUT it looks way better, it's not moldy inside, you can get in the drivers side without having someone lean over from the passenger's side to let you in, and it still runs. We hope that one of the older girls will use it to learn to drive, but in the meantime, it has been coming in handy as the van had to go into the shop for a fix.

    We were able to eat at home yesterday. The realtor who decided to show the house did it at a time that did not conflict with meals, and I made taco soup in the crock pot and left it on when we left.

    Saving money has been challenging lately. I'm glad there are quite a few things I do automatically, out of habit. Those help, even during times when it's not working out easily.

    I've only had moose one time, and I really liked it. I'm glad you got those meat items. I'll be surprised if they last until summer:) They look yummy.

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  2. That is so awesome your husband was paid with meat!!! I noticed it was packaged with a food saver, so it last longer in your freezer too. I've never tried moose meat (I'm not that adventurous when it comes to food), but I believe my husband has. It sounds like your family loves it though, which is perfect.

    We've been enjoying a milder winter this year. I'm glad it is reflected in your gas bill and your kids got to enjoy some outdoor fun because of it as well. I agree, there is nothing quite like opening the windows for the first time after being closed up for so long over winter.:)

    We have been washing out freezer bags and reusing them for maybe a year now. My mother really fights me on it, but I am finding it is really saving a lot of money on those darned things. I don't feel so guilty when I throw out a bag that contained meat if I know it was already reused at least once. I also keep a few bread bags to reuse when I make homemade bread.

    Great job on all the savings this week, Erika!!!

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    1. *Laugh* oddly enough we haven't had moose that much. Our first year of marriage when my husband got sick and we were REALLY broke my husband's cousin was awesome enough to give us things from her freezer when she was cleaning it out for the current year's hunting trips (she only eats meat she shoots and fishes all winter long), so we got packages of halibut and moose meat. The moose she'd gotten was older so it was pretty gamey tasting so I ended up doing a lot of brining with it, but it worked out okay, but the meat wasn't our favorite by any stretch. The last roast we ate from that bounty she gave us was, no joke, seven years later when I unearthed the last moose roast from the bottom of the freezer as I was cleaning out our little block freezer to give away (my husband had gotten me a big standing freezer for Mother's Day so I didn't need it anymore). She had vacuum sealed it in her food saver like the rest of her meat (most hunters up here do that since there's just SO much meat on a moose), so I figured it was worth a shot to cook it and see what happened.

      I wrote to Food Saver on that experience as the roast was still perfectly fine. After seven years! I was amazed. Now mind you, I don't make a point of repeating that experience *laugh*.

      I think this moose meat will taste just fine even if the moose was gamey as the meat is processed into things like hot dogs. In my experience, no matter the meat (caribou or whatever) if the meat is processed it all tastes pretty good when done :). A lot of hunters will actually process the majority of their meat, whether it be moose or caribou, into processed sausages and such as they find it to be the most user friendly to cook later.

      My favorite game meats have to be venison and rabbit. My husband and I helped a friend of ours process about seven deer one year (our friend, his dad and his uncle went on a hunting trip with a guide and such) and to repay us for our help we got some venison, including some venison hamburger. That made, hands down, the BEST lasagna I've ever had in my life. We had it for Christmas that year and it was spectacular :).

      With the freezer bags, yeah, I'm doing the same thing. I try to use the used bags for meat as I know I'll be throwing that bag out afterwards.

      I hadn't thought to save bread bags for...you know...bread *laugh*, but I'll definitely try to do that from now on. I was just using freezer bags and then washing them out really quick after I'd used the bread. Thanks for the tip!

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  3. Sounds like a great week.

    I grew up in a house that washed out ziplock bags and also saved bread bags for homemade bread, etc., so I've always done that. I can't even imagine how much money it's saved us over the years. (Like you, we didn't reuse them for meat.)

    Additionally, it's one of those things that is simultaneously better for the pocketbook and better for the environment - win, win.

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    1. That's true. I never thought of it that way, honestly. I was more thinking, "Yay, this saves money" *laugh*, but it is a nice thought that it's better for the environment too. Like you said, win win :).

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  4. I won't reuse a bag for meat either. I hear the argument of well, you wash your knife and then use it for non meat....but I just don't feel like a baggie can get as clean. So I'll try to put meat in used bags first if I have a choice.

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    1. Yeah, that's my problem too. I've heard the argument that if you wash the bag it is clean, but there are SO many knooks and crannies in a ziploc bag that you plain can't really get to that I don't want to take that chance.

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  5. Great tip on the scrap paper. I use mine for notes but will be taking a page out of your book so to speak! ;)

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    1. *Laugh* I'll let you know if I come up with anything else to use scrap paper for from day to day. I figure the more times I use it the more justified it is to put it in the trash instead of just tossing it and taking it to the dump :).

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  6. Here is how I manage to reuse Ziplocs after they have held meat or poultry---before I put the meat into the Ziploc, I throw it into some other plastic bag, like a bread bag. I squeeze out the air and put the chicken into the Ziploc. When I need to defrost, I take out the meat (which comes out easily because it is in the cheap plastic bag) and the Ziploc is still clean. I rinse it out just to take care of dust and such, but my Ziplocs are untouched by meat juices unless the inner bag ruptured before freezing. Taking it out to thaw also insure that if there was a rupture of the inner bag after freezing, that no juices are leaked into the Ziploc during thawing. (I always put thawing stuff on a plate anyway.) I once calculated it (a long time ago) and reusing a Ziploc four times brought the cost of each bag down to about 2 cents. Not reusing it coast about 35 cents, although prices have changed so this might not be true now. But what is true is that if you can reuse Ziplocs four times before they get too worn out, then you have gotten four times as many bags as you paid for.

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    1. Thanks for the tip on the Ziplocs and meat. That's a great way to do it! I'll have to see what I can find for cheap bag alternatives :).

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  7. P.S. Great idea about using the paper to wipe up grease from a pan. I use newspaper. I also use newspaper under one square of paper towel when I am draining bacon. It keeps the bacon from touching the newsprint but all the extra grease is absorbed by the newspaper. When we had a wood stove, I used to save waded up bacon grease newspapers and use them as fire starters. Worked beautifully, although I had to put them in a high place after our dog ate a bunch of the fire starters while we were sleeping!

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    1. I'd use newspaper but it's been years since I subscribed to one. I always end up reading the papers online for free instead *laugh*. I loved washing windows with leftover newspaper. A spray of vinegar and the newspaper really cleaned the windows wonderfully with no streaks :).

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