Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

Well, be prepared folks.  This is going to be a short list.  Between two windstorms, getting through that, and then the husband not getting well and having to go back to the doctors for another round of medicine and then getting our gas and electric bills for some of the really cold weather we've had this winter...well... it's been hard to concentrate on frugal anything around here as we have been sending more money than I'd like out the door for sure.  We are counting down the days till payday, let's just put it that way.

Anyway, enough of that depressing subject.  Let's get to what we did that was frugal the last few weeks!

1.  I was floored, as I knew I would be, by my electric bill for the month.  I went and compared my consumption last year to this year and found that the periods between meter reads were 34 days versus 28 last year and, most importantly, the temperature was 12 degrees lower on average by the day than last year.  And it wasn't exactly warm last year.  I used the tools  I had to teach my daughter about electric consumption and differences between bills and things and showed her how to compare so that you stay informed.  It was a good life lesson to learn and just cost me my time to show her.

2.  I sat down and wrote out my goals for the next month to month and a half.  Writing things down gives me things to cross off and keeps me more motivated.  I've already marked a few things off of my list for this month, which makes me feel pretty good (more on that in another post :).

3.  Our local stores are out of a LOT of stuff of late, it seems.  When I wasn't able to find dissolvable Zyrtec for the son, I went and checked online and ordered some through Amazon, which turned out to be a really good idea as they had a coupon for 25% off of your subscribe and save order.  I ordered one box regular price to get it here when I needed it, but ordered one for later at a really good price (10.00 for a box of 24), which beat local prices by a long shot.

4.  My husband and I have been watching a few things online that we've been wanting to see for a long time and by checking different sites (Roku, YouTube, etc) we were able to watch them for free instead of having to pay to watch them through Amazon Prime Video.

5.  Rifftrax.com gave out a 10.00 credit to people again this year as a Christmas gift.  I have to say this is one of the nicest Christmas things a company has ever put out in my experience.  We claimed our 10.00 gift card and my husband and I went through all kinds of movies when there was a sale for New Years and found a movie we wanted to get.  With the 10.00 credit we were able to purchase the movie we wanted for no money out of pocket and got a ton of laughs from the movie, which was worth its weight in gold :).

6.  I spent a lot of time the last couple of weeks cleaning.  I am behind on the New Years cleaning I wanted to get done due to the Windageddon, so I figured better late than never.  I started with a few different areas, but have been focusing a lot of time on the kitchen this last week.  I pulled the knobs off of the oven and deep cleaned EVERYTHING.  I still have some baked on grease on the oven window but between a lot of scrubbing and a thirty minute self clean cycle on the oven (I don't do the full 4 hours on the self cleaning cycle...small kitchen...lots of smoke...worries about setting things on fire...warnings online about self cleaning cycles killing ovens...just kind of an anxiety building exercise for me), it is a LOT better than it was.

7.  I pulled out and washed a bunch of pint jars to get ready for canning up a bunch of stuff.  Now I can just throw them in the dishwasher and sanitize them to get them good and hot when I am ready to can stuff (hopefully starting that tomorrow...so I've said for the past week, but I'll get there anyway).

8.  I decided to start decorating for Spring.  Yes, I know it is WAY off yet, but the sunlight is slowly coming back, Christmas is over and I really am jiving for Spring.  So, I took down winter themed decorations and put up more Spring like themes for the sake of lifting our moods around here.

In a quick side note, if you are looking for decorating options that don't cost very much, that you can trade out whenever you feel a whim and gives you a decent amount of themes to choose from, might I suggest getting a postcard book (basically a bound packet of postcards) that you can just hang up different ones when you want?  I got a postcard book of Monet's works through Amazon at the beginning of the school year to "decorate" the school space a bit with the passing of seasons and I just hang them up on the fridge so we can look at them from the table as we are working on schoolwork.  It has been wonderful and I've been able to put up three to four postcards at the same time with various themes to change up the house a bit.  My son really gets a kick out of it and was thrilled when I took down the winter themed postcards and put up new ones *laugh*.  My current postcards I just put up are seen up top.

9.  I found and used up some things in the freezer and pantry I ran into that needed to be used.  I also pulled out some things that I can make and freeze for later out of the pantry so I can make them here soon (like pancake mix) and put those on my "to do" list.

And there you go folks.  My short list of things I've done the last couple of weeks.  It isn't much, but at least I did get some things done around here :).

Hope things are going well for you and yours.