Frugal Friday: Money Saving Weekly Recap

Be prepared for getting two posts today.  I'll post up my Shopping Goals for the month later today, I hope, so that I have everything written down.  It's been crazy and haywire around here.  Between the termination dust creeping down the mountains (it's an Alaskan early warning system that we have letting us know winter is coming...the snow starts coming down the mountains in the distance from higher elevations.  Once it hits the tree line you are pretty much assured winter is imminent), the colder weather setting in and PFD's coming in this month...it's been a crazy rush to get things done around here. 

I don't know what follows qualifies as "frugal", since I spent more money last week than I have in years (well kinda..this was the first year in forever where we could decide where the money got to be spent versus having to just slap all of it onto a chunk of dental bills and just being immediately broke again) and gave myself nervous hives doing it (no seriously, I broke out...I have issues spending money anymore, I really do...I've been driving my husband a bit batty obsessing about it this last week).

As previously mentioned it was dividend time this last week.  They came in late last week and while not as much as we should have had (darned governor and legislature), it was still enough to pay off the one chunk of dental bills we had (the spacers and the one tooth my husband got capped last year), pay the dishwasher off (plus a little extra) on the Sears card and with the sleep center gone as well...it feels good to have that accomplished!  I was even able to pay for the next session of swimming lessons for the kids (they are both doing so well we just couldn't bring ourselves to quit...Armina is finally starting to have fun in swimming and Alvah is so close to swimming on his own now.  I think the husband enjoys helping in the pool as well).  I'm hoping to roll the money over that I'm saving each month from paying off the sleep center and the care credit onto the Sears card first, which should pay off the remainder of the bill in a few months and then I want to continue to roll that money over onto the house account to start to pay that bill down.  I'm really hoping, for a change, the Good Lord will be okay with us having some forward momentum and we can start actually improving financially versus being in a near constant state of panic about finances.  That would be a nice change of pace versus how it has been for years now.

I then dragged my husband to the store that morning, as soon as I paid the bills that we wanted to pay, and we got groceries and pantry items (I'll list that stuff on the Monthly Shopping Goals as I still have a few small things to get yet), being careful to just buy what I NEEDED versus what I thought looked good or what I thought we MIGHT need later on (okay, so I bought one container of the Pillsbury limited edition Pumpkin Spice sweet rolls to try, but that's it).  We loaded up the truck with some of the bigger trash that was in storage and/or around the yard (old mattresses and box springs for the most part that had been accumulating for years as we didn't have the money to haul them away before now) and took that to the dump.  I worked on making sure that I could put everything in the pantry that I had bought, all the while trying to be careful to try not to over clutter the pantry so that the cats had free reign in there as much as possible to keep the mice away.

Between that and the kids being sick with allergies or other issues most of the week, I spent most of the weekend running around the house like mad trying to get the housework caught up.   And then yesterday we had the daughter's first concert of the year for orchestra (which they are doing great so far!  I was really impressed :). 

I'm not really sure what kind of money saving things I can list this week, honestly.  We mainly spent money on paying bills.  Frugal, I suppose, but for satellite projects I didn't get much done.  But, I'll list the few things I did do :).

1.  We had fondue one night last week for fun.  I used a cheap cut of beef and sliced it super thin, which worked well for dipping and also made it tender enough to eat.  I also saved the end pieces from the loaves of home made bread I made, staled them (husband's suggestion) and we used those as dipping bread pieces as well.  It was fun, yummy, and actually a pretty cheap (and balanced) meal when it was all said and done.

2.  Instead of doing the majority of my PFD shopping at the bulk store or Amazon, I went to the actual store and if the items were close in price to Amazon (and I knew I couldn't get them way cheaper at the bulk store) I just bought the items there.  This will hopefully save me some trips to the postal annex (last year it started getting nuts come October, so we want to keep trips to a minimal this year if possible), help support local businesses and, most importantly, we got the fuel rewards for shopping there so my husband was able to get a tank of decently cheap gas.  Nice benefit :).

A word on the postal annex since I've had a few questions about it.  I'm not sure about the rest of the state, but in a lot of areas around where I live in Alaska we have a few lock boxes for packages, but no curb side drop off for postal service.  So, if a package is above a small box size it gets kept at your local "postal hub".  This can be your local post office if you live in a city center, or if you live outside of the city limits (which is a LOT of areas around here) your packages get kept at the postal annex...which is basically a big warehouse with postal packages in it.  Combine a lot of people getting routed to the postal hubs for packages everywhere around here and the fact that Alaska depends on a TON of stuff getting shipped in (like say, Christmas gifts) and you end up with a two hour line to wait for packages from Halloween till probably about February (because people use their gift cards after Christmas too), if not sooner (which Amazon started shipping more and more through USPS versus UPS starting last year, so the lines at the postal annex got even longer than normal and even sooner than normal).  So, yeah, I try to get shopping and waiting done before the end of October for the sake of my sanity.

3.  I don't use many checks, but was down to one check in my checkbook and I knew I was going to have to get another book of a checks after writing the check for the kid's swimming lessons.  I decided to look through my desk to see if I could find one more book of checks instead of having to order a new box.  I managed to find one book of checks that was duplicate numbers (the bank messed up years ago when they were reordering checks for me) from a previous book, but since I use so few checks I knew the out of order numbers weren't going to matter.  So, I saved myself the price of having to buy another box of checks this way.  If the previous book is any indication, I should be good for another five years or so with this book *laugh*.

4.  I was thankful for recipe sources like Pinterest and All Recipes and things the last few weeks.  I just plain didn't have any time to sit down and figure out anything resembling a menu plan, so scrambling and going online to figure out something to eat for dinner was saved by having those sources at my fingertips.

5.  While the son was taking therapy I was able to find enough time to get some embroidery worked on, which was a nice, and relaxing way to pass the time.

6.  The husband and I went to Sears while the son was in therapy one morning last week and, after a mess of a time getting accounts figured out (turns out we have two Shop Your Way accounts due to me having started mine back when they used to have a kid's club and the husband starting a Craftsman's Club account a few years back before they terminated the kid's club and rolled it into a regular account...long story, like everything with Shop Your Way it seems), where I ended up going online on my phone, looking up the account I had, figuring out my pin all the while the guy who didn't really understand English too well tried to communicate with my husband over the phone, we were finally able to redeem some of the points we had to spend this month.  We got the husband two pairs of jeans and a screwdriver that my husband wanted, all for free.  We still have some points left (free cash points and things kicked in when we checked out, which messed up the total I thought we had, so we still have like 18.00 to spend), but we're not sure what we'll spend them on yet.  We'll figure it out.  Glad we were able to get jeans in the husband's size, though.  So, yeah, we got through the experience and everyone lived ;).

7.  We bought a couple more favorite programs of the son in digital format.  I bought the programs in SD versus HD and saved more than a few bucks in some cases.  I always tell my daughter about watching programs on the old black and white analog controlled TV when I was a kid and tell her so long as she can tell who is talking, what is going on and there aren't lots of lines going across the screen, the kids will survive just fine watching things in SD format.  So far the kids haven't complained *laugh*.

8.  My husband and I were exploring Prime video and found that they have some Rifftrax movies on Prime that we can watch as part of our Prime membership for free.  It's actually been entertaining to watch the movies without having to worry about purchasing them separately through Rifftrax and we've watched some movies we never would have purchased, but that we ended up watching an enjoying just  by exploring what we could watch for free.  It's kind of fun :).

9.  I had to renew the virus scan/internet security program for our computers.  I like buying the program this late in the year because I end up spending 30.00 versus 80.00 for a virus scan key code.  We really like the program we've had the last three years, so double bonus is that we just input the keycode and don't have to worry about re-downloading the program.  When I renewed the program, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the program we use have now started to roll over the time you had left on your subscription onto your renewal, so I was able to gain seven days onto next year's subscription by them doing that.

I'm sure there was more, but I'm going to call it good there as my mind is going blank I'm so tired.  So, how did you do last week?