Maybe this is compensation for buying a new mug and tea towels?
FUN, NOT FRUGAL
But, no regrets.
FRUGAL (ALSO NO REGRETS)
- I continue to do at-home manicures. Of course, the cheapest option would be to do nothing to my nails, but I genuinely love it (the finished result, not the actual painting my nails; I find that part tedious). Much like doing a box hair colour vs. a salon colour, nails are clearly an optional cosmetic decision, but the do-it-yourself version costs a fraction of the outsourced version. About an hour after I painted my nails, I got a compliment on my nail colour from a cashier at the grocery store!
- We contribute to a Registered Education Savings Plan for each of our kids. When you make contributions, the Canadian government will also toss a bit of money into the account. Yes, please! $84 of “free money” toward our kids education is $84. And that $84 will get invested, within the savings fund so it’s going to gain interest, etc. (If you live in Canada and don’t have RESPs for your kids and are interested in opening an account, let me know! We can each get $400.)
- Extra TP in the order. I set up a curbside grocery pickup and ordered three packages of toilet paper. It was on sale (win one), and then, for some reason, what I had ordered was substituted for a larger package of the same brand of toilet paper. I have… a lot of toilet paper in the house!
- We refill our water cooler bottles. After years of being able to access a free natural spring, we now have to refill our water cooler bottles at a refilling station. There are a few perks to the change, but the big drawback is cost. It’s $2 per refill instead of free. BUT, refilling our own bottles is significantly cheaper than buying new bottles of water each time.
- Packing lunchboxes. This is a necessary evil in my life. The kids mostly pack their own; I just need to make sure we have food items in the house they will take and eat. But it saves… a lot of money over buying prepackaged meals.
- Used old bananas. This is an oldie but a goodie that shows up a lot. I made a double batch of banana muffin batter and now have a stockpile of muffins in the freezer, which are perfect for adding to school lunchboxes.
- I stretched some cans of pumpkin into a big batch of soup. I bought two cans of pumpkin on sale a few weeks ago to make pumpkin soup, but I stretched that even further by adding some potatoes ($3.99 for a 10 lb bag) and carrots ($1.25 for a 3 lb bag). I also added a container of frozen chicken stock made from the carcass of a rotisserie chicken.
- I keep finding ways to save on curbside grocery pickup. When I do curbside grocery pickup, I always transfer any groceries that are in paper bags into my own reusable bins so I save the bag fee. Also, I have been able to use a $15-off deal FOUR times now (when you spend over $75). That really adds up over time.
- I earned bonus points on things I needed to buy anyway. I needed some eye drops and wanted to replenish our Magic Bag stockpile. Neither item was on sale, but I used a 20x-the-points coupon, which translates to dollars to spend on future purchases.
Your turn.
- Tell me some recent frugal wins in your world.
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Ooh these are fun because I’ve had a frugal day today. Used 7 old apples and turned them into apple sauce for roast pork I bought on super special this week, along with old veggies starting to go bad but rescued and used with the roast.
I also dye my hair out of the box, and Al cuts my hair. I buy chicken drumsticks which are so much cheaper than thigh or breast, and pork mince which is cheaper than beef. I’ve also started to make my own dips at home and they are tastier and a fraction of the price. Win!
These are great wins!
I especially love using up old fruit that people won’t want to consume raw! Which reminds me… I should go cut up all the oranges on the counter and put them in the fridge for an easy snack.
Also, Al cuts your hair?? That’s brilliant!
Nice frugal wins! Your manicure is lovely! I keep saying I’m going to give myself a manicure – and I keep putting it off. My frugal win is that someone harvested their tomato crop and gave me a bunch of them. They’re bursting with flavor!
Little is better to me fresh that straight-from-the-garden tomatoes. SO DELICIOUS.
Fun fact: vine tomatoes were my only true pregnancy craving!
We did the RESPs for our kids, and it really adds up. Glad to hear the federal government is still contributing. In a non-frugal note, I ordered pickleball shoes from a very legitimate-looking Canadian version of a big producer; I’m now pretty sure the site is phoney – grrrr… But I did get a very nice pair of Ugg fall boots for one of the little girls on FB Marketplace yesterday.
Oh no, Jan. What a hassle. I also have to admit I had no idea “pickleball shoes” were a thing! Now I’m curious what they look like. I’m assuming the grip is special in some way?
My favorite way to use old bananas is to cook them with a little butter in a saucepan, until they’re really soupy (sounds gross) with a touch of salt, then add my oatmeal and liquid to cook them together until the oatmeal is done. Tastes a little like banana bread, in oatmeal form.
Aldi is my new favorite frugal win. When we realized the Aldi closest to us is bikeable AND near a Goodwill we couldn’t resist. They have many of the food items we need, and the quality is just as good! On our last trip we saved 35% over what we would have spent on the exact same items at Kroger. DH calculates that by using Aldi as much as we can, we will save about $500 on our food bill per month. We feed six people, and all our meals are eaten at home.
I was happy to find green tea, decaf black tea and a seasonal pumpkin spice tea at Aldi–along with a jar of instant coffee that I like for a treat once in a while. Maybe it’s not essential, but I start craving it as the weather turns colder. And it’s much cheaper than going out for coffee or tea.
Sometimes a frugal win is rediscovering something you already own. Our family likes to play a game or watch something during dinner, and DH went through our stash of Playstation games (many purchased at Half Price Books, eons ago, or refurbished at Game Stop) and found a very old Scrabble game, made back when there were no Playstations 2, 3 OR 4. He tried it out on our refurbished Playstation 3 and it worked! Very old school, but we had actually never played it before so it was fun.
I have never, in my life, heard of someone cooking bananas like that. I am intrigued!!!
Oh how I wish we had an Aldi near us. The prices can’t be beat and they have some great store-brand products! And $500 savings each month?? That’s amazing!
And nothing is cheaper than free, so re-discovering things you already own is an awesome turn of events!
Last night I realized we were almost out of cat food, so I ran out to the store… and discovered the $20 bag of food was BOGO free!!! I was also getting seltzer, and that was a BOGO. I had to get grape because our favorite flavors were already sold out, but I’ll take grape for half the price! I love it when things I’m about to buy anyway are a BOGO.
Jenny, I smiled SO BIG when I heard about the BOGO. There is something extra special (it almost feels like a bigger savings in a way?) when it’s something you need and then you happen to discover it’s on sale. Like “I’d buy it anyway, AND it happens to be on sale.”
Hooray for seltzer at half price!
You need to add your soup recipe to this post!! Don’t you love the valley in the fall?!
So I’ve been cringing a bit when you do your frugal posts because as you know we are in the midst of Reno’s, Bleeding money!! Although this morning I have realized how much we’ve saved doing a lot of these jobs ourselves .
Laying floors, finishing floors, painting and I am currently staining window trim. One more thing that saved us money is knowing stock sizes of nice window treatments. It’s one of the things clients forget about. And custom blinds can sometimes be more expensive than the windows themselves. I was able to order all my new windows in sizes I knew would have off the shelf curtain sizes. Sounds a bit backwards to order windows for curtains, but in the end saved us thousands.
I needed a coffee break and a read. Thanks for sharing and I hope you have a wonderful day!
I don’t follow a recipe (true for so many things I cook). It’s just pumpkin, some spices (a sprinkle of cloves, sage, cayenne, smoked paprika, maybe a bit of curry powder… whatever I grab and feel like), potato, and then I puree it!
ORDERING WINDOWS IN STOCK SIZE = such a brilliant hack. I would never have imagined this in a million years, but it seems so obvious once you point it out.
As you know, we are hopeless with renos (coming from the woman who needed you to come over and paint her baby barn!), and I can confirm being able to do these things yourself saves an absolute TON of money. And you have such incredible taste. It’s going to look… amazing!
Yay for the toilet-paper jackpot! There are worse things to have too much of in the house!
But I have to ask about the lunchbox photo… are those French fries in the upper right corner? I hardly think so, but they look like it!
We just got home from Germany, and because things are cheaper there, we had a carload full of toilet paper and groceries…. there’s a limit on how much you can bring over the border, we stuck to it but it’s still quite a lot!
They’re pretzels, but I agree they DO look like french fries 🙂
Cross-border deals for the win. When we went to Tallin, people were taking the ferry back/forth JUST to get cheaper products. They had wagons and trollies. It’s was quite hilarious and interesting. Gotta love a good deal (though it does take a full day, basically, to accomplish this shopping, so it’s definitely an event!)
I’ve not been very frugal this week, but I am going to make jacket potatoes for my work lunches this week which is the cheapest thing I have found that I like – we’ve always got potatoes in and I then have them with onions, mushrooms and lots of cheese. I take it all to work on the first day so then I can’t forget it the following days! Luckily we have a fridge and microwave at the office.
Yum! Not only frugal, delicious and a great time saver to have lunches prepped for the week!
Curiosity compels me to ask why you need bottled water? Is your water from a messed up well? We have a treatment machine on our house because our neighborhood system uses so much chlorine. Someone once told me that chlorine is the number one cause of cancer. . . who knows? Clean water is good, but can we dial it back a little, please, you Overregulators?
There’s a lot of chlorine in our water and it just doesn’t taste very good!!
I wrote a comment this morning, but the Internet are it… Oh well!
I stocked up on dishwasher tablets, as they were buy 1, get 2 free! I got 6 big packs, that should last us quite a while.
I also sold some stuff on vinted, but then I used it to buy my husband ski pants. He doesn’t have any, he does not like snow, or cold, but given that we’re going to Norway over Christmas, he’s going to need them.
Other than that, it’s been the usual cooking at home etc. We did go to the wedding last Friday, and then went for dinner at an all you can eat place. Not cheap, but drinks were included in the price. Also they had quite a good dessert buffet, and my youngest has now declared this to be her favourite restaurant ever as I said she could eat whatever she wanted. Turns out that was dessert and sushi 😂
I just stocked up on dishwasher tabs; it feels good to have some of those everyday household items well supplied for the foreseeable future.
Norway at Christmas will be beautiful!
Dessert and sushi… hard to beat that combo, especially when you get to choose what you want.
Free money FTW!!! Nothing beats that!
Ironically I have spent more money this year than ever before, but I continue to not spend money on things that I do not value. That means taking an extra close look at what I’m buying from Amazon and Costco, and then enjoying the things that I do spend money on (setting up my own house and travel).
Travel pays dividends, too! Of the memory sort. And you travel very economically and have seen SO MUCH in the last year. It truly is an inspiration.
A recent frugal win- we finally caught up on Catherine’s RESP matching. We couldn’t open her account until she was 2 because of how long it took her citizenship papers to be processed (should have been five months – it’s a stupid simple thing, she was born outside of Canada to a Canadian citizen – it took two years…) You can catch up on the matching from the government but there’s only a certain amount you can catch up each year. As of last week she is all caught up!
Another frugal win starts out with a mistake – letting the two year old near a bottle of maple syrup. Long story short about a cup of maple syrup and a couple tablespoons of yogurt got mixed together. Not gonna waste that! Found a chocolate cake recipe and made it. Wasn’t the beta cake I’ve ever made but it was better than tossing a cup of maple syrup!
There are some “tricks” with the RESP. Unfortunately, we won’t be able to max out Belle’s government contributions before she ages out of the RESP, but every little bit helps (and we contribute more now than we did when she was little). I’m sorry it took so long to get things sorted, but gold stars for doing it!
Haha. We have a family story about a toddler left within reach of a syrup bottle. Chocolate cake is always a good thing, in my books 🙂
Thank you! And as you know if you need any use of my gifts/skills I’m more than happy to help. Or maybe I should hold out on that offer till you get me a soup recipe….😆💛
I’d say coffee at home out of a pretty mug > coffee shop coffee and home manicures > professional manicures are definitely frugal wins and I am on board with those!
LOOOVE the nail polish colour, and it means we’re twinning with our nails. Can I claim that you’re mani-matching with my wine night too? *wink
I really need to get better at frugal wins and being more conscious of the purchases I’m making. Legit just had an argument with my husband last night because he was concerned that the costs of our holiday were adding up. He quickly backtracked on that once I pointed out that everything I’d purchased was needed anyway (for example, I haven’t bought new swimwear since losing weight, and I very much need that for summer too). But he made a fair point in that we’d bought a lot of stuff recently. I was just proud that for once I was able to confidently say they were all considered purchases.
Isn’t it such a pretty colour??? I have it on again this week. It feels very festive and fall-like, too!
Money can be… so stressful! I hope the holiday is fabulous and hooray for new swimwear that fits!
I love these posts.
This week’s frugal win: I had to shoot some recipes from the clinics kitchen and got to eat the remains afterward. Yeah! Some grain pumpkin bowl, chocolate porridge and a chocolate pear cake. And then someone bought me a coffee.
All of those options sound amazing! What a fun (and delicious) perk of this particular job.