Y’all. My kids are home on yet another snow day (I’m writing this on Monday) and can I just say: I am over snow days. It’s only the middle of December and we’ve had FIVE, plus a 2-hour delayed start. All those days off and we’re about to head into over two weeks of holiday for Christmas break.
*Sigh*
I love my kids, but I love them even more when we all get some time apart.
Angsty diatribe over, let’s move on to talking about frugal things!
WASHING BAGS
This is 100% John, and I will admit that if it were left up to me, there would be little to no washing plastic bags in our household. Since I hand wash the majority of the dishes (meaning, anything that doesn’t go into the dishwasher), I was often sneaking plastic bags into the recycling because I hated washing them (it’s the rinsing and finding places to drip dry them I really despise).
Every good marriage requires compromise. I now wash a handful a month (when I feel like it), and we “save up” the rest inside a cupboard. We’re only reusing ones that have been used for dry goods, so they’re not wet/won’t get mouldy. When the pile gets big enough, John will wash a dozen or so at a time and then put them to dry over our air vents.
FROZEN VEGGIES
I have been cooking a lot with frozen veggies lately and it’s a great way to consume produce without exorbitant prices. Plus, I can stock up when things like broccoli are on sale and don’t have to worry about it spoiling in the fridge.
I SKIPPED THE DRY CLEANER
The bridesmaid dress Belle wore this summer had some dirty spots on it from the wedding reception and I was not inclined to take it to the dry cleaner, so I washed it on cold, air dried it, and it came out looking like new!
MARKER + PENCIL CRAYON REFRESH
I was about to get Indy a new set of sharpened (graphite) pencils, markers, and coloured pencils for Christmas. His current setup was all a mish-mash of markers that worked and others that had dried out or been used up; there were pencils that were dull or had no eraser. In other words, it was a mess.
One afternoon, when my dad stopped by for coffee, I sat at the table and tested ALL the markers, removed any pencils with no erasers (because the kids tend to avoid them), and sharpened all the pencils and coloured pencils. I figure that twenty minutes of busywork (while I was already engaged socially) saved me at least $10!
BUY NOTHING GROUP (FRIEND EDITION)
I have often lamented the fact I don’t belong to a formal buy-nothing group. I tried to join once, but it was pretty sub-par in our area and then eventually required a Facebook account (which I don’t have).
But for years Joy and I have run our own little buy nothing group. There is very little that would be off-limits for exchanging.
This week I was clearing out cupboards and texted her at least a dozen pictures of things I was hoping to re-home: she opted to take a bottle of nail polish I was no longer using, a half-eaten box of crackers, one fruit pouch (my kids don’t like this brand and usually I would just tell them to suck it up, buttercup… not really, but you catch my drift… but also we were down to one pouch and no one is eating it so why not just send it somewhere where it will be enjoyed?), some magnesium powder (I now take it in pill format), a clipboard, and a half of a roll of penguin wrapping paper (I have owned it for years and have never liked it; I don’t know why, but I loathe this paper and finally decided that it’s okay to pass it on to a new home and use wrapping paper I LIKE).
Another friend gave me a giant bag of high-protein waffle mix! Guess what we had for supper one night last week!
Oh, and our community school does a bazaar for students, so they can shop gently used items (for free) to wrap and take home for their family, so I donated some surplus items (mostly gifts we’ve received in the last year that I’ve set aside for this very purpose; nice things, but that we don’t want/need.)
BANANA BREAD
I know this is so classic it might not bear repeating, but I think most people who live in frugal(ish) mindsets are good at doing the classic, low-hanging fruit (pun intended) of thrifty things over and over again.
It would literally never cross my mind to throw out an overripe banana since I save all our bananas that have gone soft and brown and turn them into banana chocolate chip muffins. The kids will often use half a banana for something, and I just pop the remaining half into the freezer as is. They slip right out of the skins after defrosting. Easy, peasy, delicious, and a great way to reduce food waste.
I put the bananas into the base of the food processor, let them thaw and then make the batter right inside the food processor.
Okay, it’s your turn:
- What’s one frugal habit you swear by that others might find surprising?
- What’s your go-to recipe for using up overripe bananas?
- Which of your frugal ways do you think saves the most money over time?
Discover more from The Optimistic Musings of a Pessimist
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Life is too short to wash plastic bags.. I’ll reuse them- I put bags that had dry stuff in them up on a shelf for another non-food use. However, I just set a kid to check all the markers that had collected at his sister’s desk. So many were useless, and now the area is neat.
I think the temperature we set our house to would be surprising for many. Overnight the heat is 59°F. Daytime 65°F. But I really don’t do anything extreme to save money. Living simply overall works best.
Marrying my husband is my best frugal win- he’ll do home maintenance, renovations, car repair, system administration, etc – he likes to be thrifty and learn new things. YouTube and instruction manuals get him pretty far.
Banana muffins are my kids’ favorite way to eat bananas. It’s strange how some of my kids love the fruit and others won’t touch them until they’ve been converted into dessert bread.
I think it’s the eyes on the penguins that makes the paper unattractive. I tend to buy more generic patterns ( stripe or snowflake for example) so the paper can use throughout the year.
The worst year for snow days , we had 11 of them. It was mostly due to extreme cold. So frustrating. However, I still had to work most of those days, so I had an excuse to leave the house. I hope your weather improves!
I could not agree with you more: I have a lot better things to do with my time that wash plastic bags. John thinks otherwise, so the right compromise has been to let him handle it since it’s important to him!
Yay for clearing out old markers.
Living simply overall is the simplest, easiest way to be frugal. And usually, in that case, it’s a way of life that comes very naturally.
John is quite frugal and we never disagree about spending, but neither of us is any good at DIY. That is one place we lose frugally…but we’re good in other areas so it all works out. (He is very tech-savvy, though, so we save a LOT of money in that way. We never, ever have to take things in to Staples to be repaired, for example. He builds custom computers from second-hand parts, etc).
I have had that paper for years and I’m not convinced I even bought it?? Regardless, it has now moved on to another home and I am so glad!
I loved this whole round-up! The washing-bag compromise is perfect. A happy marriage in a nutshell!
Our household version is the very classic toothpaste tube. Kai loses patience with the last bit and opens a new one. I put (hide) the new tube away, squeeze every final drop out of the old one, and even prep his toothbrush for the rest of the week. He’s happy, I’m happy, and the tube gets properly honoured.
Maybe it’s less about the money and more about the deep satisfaction of using it up, ha!
I’m trying to think who cares the most about emptying the toothpaste. I’d say John again?? I hate fighting for the last little bit. I do it, but not to an extreme degree! Your situation sounds like a win all around! And Kai gets a free ride in terms of getting toothpaste on his brush.
There is something SO satisfying about using something up. I love finishing things.
I love frugality posts. Around here brown bananas get saved for smoothies, as we have a kid in braces who also needs extra calories, so he gets a fruit and veggie-packed smoothie most nights. I use yogurt and milk in it, and sometimes frozen broccoli! A cheaper green than fresh spinach.
One frugal thing I’ve done for literally years is cut my family’s hair. My husband asked me to cut his hair for the first time a couple of weeks before our wedding. I was reading the Tightwad Gazette, and commented about the small article about home haircuts, and he perked up and asked if I would do that for him. He loathed going to the barber’s or a salon; he didn’t like having a stranger hover around him. I only had a pair of kitchen shears, but I did it, and he loved it. So I’ve been cutting his hair for 26 years, and my kids’ hair all their lives. I have no real idea what I’ve saved over the years, but I know that this year alone, with four boys and a husband needing haircuts nearly every month, I’ve saved about $1200 USD. I figure this justifies me getting my hair cut at Great Clips every six weeks. 😉
Frozen broccoli in smoothies?! That is a first for me!
I cut John’s hair (he hasn’t been to a barber in over a decade), but I cannot cut Indy’s. He has SO many cowlicks and so much hair. Plus, it’s $17 (with tip) for his haircut where we go; money I VERY happily spend. Belle goes 1-2x a year and I trim her hair at home in between.
I bet you’ve saved a lot more than that! When you factor in tips, gas money to get there, etc.
Incredible # of snow days – before the holidays, especially! And for sure secondhand clothing shopping – I’m sure I’ve saved tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars over 50 or so years of buying almost all our clothes in thrift shops. And it’s so much fun! I’m so happy that the young mothers in our family are also thrifters, especially re kids clothes. Happy holidays, Elisabeth – see you in 2026!
So many snow days!
I hope my kids maintain their thrifty ways. Both mine like going to thrift stores for clothes (they basically own zero new clothes). It’s a great way to save a lot of money and it’s much friendlier to the environment, too!
Frozen veggies FTW! For funsies maybe I will start tracking the number of packages of frozen broccoli that we buy from Costco this year. It’s quite cheap, very high quality, and amazing when roasted in the airfryer. That alone justifies our Costco membership.
I’ve had very good luck with washing dry clean only clothes. I wouldn’t do it for something like a suit, but for the most part I think it’s fine.
We use the “throw it in the freezer” trick for bananas. Our #1 go to is chocolate chip banana bread muffins. During the pandemic when we were all home the boys were eating bananas like crazy, so we weren’t getting any overripe bananas. I had to institute a “banana bread quarantine” in order to get our overripe banana stash built up again.
I opted for asking for an Instant Pot for Christmas this year but I think this makes it official that next year it has to be an air fryer!
Oh, the plastic bags. I do wash them, and it’s more because I feel bad about throwing them away- i just feel like I should be reusing them as many times as possible. The only time I don’t wash them is if they had something really messy and oily in them that makes it hard to clean. My husband does complain about them! I leave them to dry in the dish drying rack.
I have heard that most “dry clean” only clothes don’t really need to be dry cleaned! I’ve definitely hand washed some and they’ve always been fine.
I’m too lazy for anything other than washing machine washes. I do use mesh bags, now, but if anything is too precious, I have to donate it to someone who is willing to take time to care for delicate clothes! I am NOT a delicate girl 😉
At first in that blender pic, I thought you were blending up the banana skins! I was so confused! We freeze leftover bananas, too, but I take them out of the skin first – then I can fit more in a container in the freezer. But we rarely have any to freeze because we make banana pancakes for Paul each week since it’s one of the (short list of) foods he will happily eat!
We do use plastic bags but sparingly and I bought some compostable ones recently which I feel better about. But we have nice re-usable bags, too. I just don’t trust to send them to school with my children who are prone to losing things. So the compostable bag is the best approach for us. Luckily we have composting through our city and it can handle things like compostable bags! I am not sure that would work in a backyard DIY type of compost set up!
I love banana pancakes and haven’t made any in a while! Thanks for the reminder.
I definitely do NOT blend up the rinds!
I do the same thing with bananas– everyone always loves the muffins! And the same things with markers and pencils– it’s a lovely meditative practice, and the result is always a delight for all.
Banana muffins are so good. Belle in general doesn’t love fruit but add some sugar and flour and she’s in 😉
Please forgive and satisfy my California ignorance: why can’t kids go to school when it snows? Grownups have to go to work when it snows, don’t they?
A cabin neighbor was grousing about all the ziplock baggies accumulating in her husband’s cabin (she has only come twice in 30 years) and said, “No one should even be using plastic bags!” Say what? I wonder what she uses for leftovers. . . maybe there are no little snacks or leftovers or lunches to go in her life.
When I started my quest to get out of the pre-diabetic category, I stopped buying bananas. I miss them, along with smoothies and banana bread and eating them sliced into yogurt (homemade, of course) and on peanut butter sandwiches and as a snack (with peanut butter of course). Sigh.
Not eating out saves us a boatload of money. Not messing with haircolor, frequent cuts, manicures, eyelashes, and the rest of that stuff saves another boatload. Not using shopping as recreation saves a boatload of money. (Why don’t I have some boats full of money sitting in my driveway??)
The roads can be very dangerous and it takes A LOT of work to get everything clear at schools. Where we live, because there are a lot of rural routes, the roads are often not clear/passable. I just wish they cancelled on a school-by-school basis and not across the whole region. Oh well.
I tend to use containers for leftovers (as much as possible, glass not plastic for the added win of it being able to go in the dishwasher), but some things really do need to be in baggies.
Send a boat my way, Jana!
I know this is not the point of the post but I am blown away by how many snow days you have in the maritimes! Here in Québec, I feel like 3 ALL WINTER is standard, and we get a fair amount of winter weather (snow, ice, rain, etc). I have questions: is your weather worse, are you more rural, is the criteria different. Anyways probably not something either one of us will spend our time researching, but wow!
I think it’s a combination of the second two. Our weather is not particularly bad, but about a decade ago some busses went off the road and they have dramatically changed the regulations.
Also, we are rural and most schools draw from very rural areas where the roads are delayed in getting ploughed and so busses can’t safely get students to school. I do wish it was cancelled on a school-by-school basis or even, as tends to be the standard in urban places, the schools are open for anyone who can get to school. (My kids could almost always get to school because we could walk).
Sometimes it is truly ridiculous (like a sunny day that had a forecast for some bad weather). That said, so far this year, most of the days have made sense. Yesterday was definitely miserable out and deserved to be a snow day, but there will definitely be days ahead where schools should be open.
The biggest challenge is people finding childcare. It’s an absolute nightmare for family with small children 🙁
Melting the bananas in the blender is brilliant!!!
We don’t buy garbage bags. Our stores don’t sell plastic bags at checkout anymore, so we accept batches of gathered bags from my in-laws. They live in a different state, but we go through them fairly slowly, as much of our kitchen waste goes in the compost. Works for our little family of 3!
Yes, we don’t get plastic bags at stores anymore, but we have a stash of old ones that we go through soooooo slowly as garbage can liners. Instead of throwing the bags away, unless it’s really dirty at some point we just empty the garbage cans into the big bag for trash day and reuse the same bag liner over and over!
There’s a frugal thing I can blog about 😉
I think the most frugal thing we do is not eating out. Because we cook all our meals and pack all our lunches, our food costs are undeniably low compared to other people. Our grocery bill is huge, of course, but I just can’t imagine what our food costs would be if we ate out!
YES! Regardless of how expensive groceries get, it is almost always significantly cheaper to cook at home!!
Funny! I just finished making banana muffins with our mushy bananas! I always use the pinch of yum recipe because I have it memorized and you make it using a blender, so it’s really easy to clean up.
I used that Pinch of Yum recipe for years. Belle doesn’t like banana muffins with just oatmeal, so in the last 6 months, I’ve pivoted and make a slightly different recipe that has some regular flour and some oatmeal (along with flax and chia seeds)!
I use frozen bananas to make ice cream in the summer. It’s basically just the bananas in a processor, but you can add things to it. I use 1/3 of the amount of sugar recipes call for, so that’s a savings in bags of sugar (though I’m doing it for health reasons, not to be frugal). Nobody can ever tell the difference! I use my facebook buy nothing group quite often. This year, I received a free oversized velvet stocking, a microwave cover, some wooden spoons and spatulas, some children’s books and some puzzles and card games for my grandkids. Also, a big bag of craft beads. And I’ve gotten rid of stuff I didn’t need (the kids’ graduation gowns, my parents’ bowling shoes/balls, a ton of perfume and lotion from my mom’s house)
Indy LOVES banana ice cream and asks me to make it regularly. So easy and so delicious. It’s incredible how creamer it gets.
I also use WAYYY less sugar. I can never really tell.
Those are some great finds on Buy Nothing and wonderful to know that items you no longer want or need are wanted/needed elsewhere and make it into the right hands.
I tried to do the washing plastic bags thing and it just icks me out so much. I went to mini tupperware for lunches and beeswax wrappers, which are okay to wash. Yes on the bananas always going to muffins. We had those bazaars for the kids at my kids’ school and they were such a great idea, even though they took a ton of work on the other side. I loved doing the wrapping, the kids were always so excited.
We have a great buy-nothing group, but on the flip side, our thrift stores kind of suck, so you probably come out ahead. I love sorting through the markers and pencils – so satisfying!
Indy was so excited to come home with gifts yesterday! Belle doesn’t have one at high school…but since she’s babysitting now, she can spend her own money on gifts (which we did last weekend).
I’m not willing to wash plastic bags. I use plastic containers instead of bags whenever I can, and I use them until they’re warped, stained, and cracked. I’m also a fan of the beeswax bowl covers. What frugal habit would surprise others? I’ve cut my own hair since 2020! I’m not a big banana fan, so I don’t need to worry about leftovers. What has saved me the most money over time? Probably not eating out.
You cut your own hair! That’s very impressive. I know two other women who do this and it amazes me! Kudos. And that definitely saves you plenty of money!
I don’t wash bags either but I will reuse them for small trash bags, cleaning cat box, food waste for compost. And cereal bags I reuse for chicken bones in freezer to later use for broth. My mom used to wash them and they just looked pathetic drying, so I just can’t.
Haha. They DO look pathetic drying!
I don’t reuse cereal bags but it is such a waste; the chicken bone idea is great. They’re very sturdy bags…I’ve never really thought about finding a use for them until you mentioned it.
Wow, washing a dry clean dress takes balls, Elisabeth! Eeep! It worked so well but I would have been so nervous. I don’t have any dry clean things anymore but I once did wash a skirt and obviously I did it wrong and it shrunk. I was so upset, this was back in my early working days and I didn’t have much money – and basically I wrecked a suit skirt!
My mom always reuses ziploc bags, washing them until they fall apart and my job as a kid was to dry the dishes, including trying to dry the damn bags. Two things have resulted: I do not reuse ziploc bags and I don’t dry dishes. I AM AN ADULT NOW. But I don’t like throwing plastic away willy-nilly so my solution is that I bought silicone bags to use instead. There is an exception, and that exception is meat. Often I will buy a beef roast at Costco and it usually comes in a pack of two, so I split those and put them in ziploc bags. But. There is no amount of washing that would get rid of the ick for me. I would have to turn into Lady Macbeth. Those I throw out. But that’s like maybe one a quarter so I feel like I can deal with that kind of “waste.”
My mom also reuses AND DRIES bags and it’s the worst. I feel like we go through a dozen a quarter, probably and only throw out 1. So we are mostly washing and reusing them over and over. As much as I can, I use glass dishes, etc…but I have to admit that sometimes Ziplocs are tremendously convenient!
I hope your run of Snow Days slows down quickly! I can’t imagine being locked in the house with the kids, for so many days in a row. I get it.
I rarely wash plastic zipper bags, but I do reuse them if they’ve been used for something dry, or I save them for when we travel and I need one for dog food. My dogs don’t care if it’s used! Generally, we don’t use many plastic bags at all. I love my Tupperware (Pyrex?) plastic and glass pieces, with great lids.
I have washed dry-clean-only items too!
I freeze extra or old bananas too; they’re great in my smoothies!
It is rainy and +13C today so NO snow day. And then the kids are off for 2+ weeks. Let the holiday craziness (at home) begin.
I do not wash plastic bags (I tried that once and it’s way too annoying)… but I try to limit my use of plastic bags and use reusable containers instead whenever possible. Buying frozen produce is a great frugal habit (often the veggies are cheaper and they can’t spoil! Win-win!).
I think one of the most frugal things is to meal plan and to buy what you eat. While our grocery bill is not particularly low, I feel good about having almost ZERO food waste.
I definitely agree with you that is a great money saver and you have to factor in your time and transportation costs as well. I cut my husband’s hair and trim his beard for him about every 6 weeks or so. My hair is long, to my elbows and my husband trims my long hair about every three months or so. Men’s haircuts are about $35 and women’s are $80 plus the long hair extra charge in our area. I used to give my son and my daughter their haircuts when they were young and my husband had given haircuts to his children as well. My husband also braids my hair for me and I get compliments on my hair all the time. A couple close friends of mine asked my permission to let my husband trim their long hair for them, as they have had bad experiences at the salon getting their hair cut too short. So I definitely have it good when my friends ask me to share my stylist.