Frugal Things That We Have Been Doing

These are the things we have been doing lately:

– My granddaughter is a history buff. She just soaks up everything she reads. Right now she is reading about WWII by borrowing books at her library. Hubby and I had a WWII book that we inherited from Hubby’s mother. But we thought we had donated it to our library in Arizona when we moved to NY.
I was thrilled when I found it in our basement bookcase this week. The book is 68 years old. The binding was coming off the book so Hubby researched online how to fix it. He followed the instructions on how to glue it, did it and let it dry. It is as good as new. We probably could have looked for a bookbinder but they are far and few in between since the internet. So we saved some money by doing it ourselves. My granddaughter will love it. 

– I made a mandarin chicken teriyaki stir fry for dinner one night. We had almost enough leftover for dinner the second night. It had plenty of chicken but needed more veggies. So I sauteed more peppers and onions and added them to the heated chicken dish.That gave us more than enough for our second dinner.

– We are now exclusively using our Eco egg for our laundry. Every drop of laundry soap is out of our home. The egg is doing a great job cleaning our clothes. 

– Our cellphone wouldn’t work. I kept getting what some people were saying was the “black screen of death”. Hubby tried to fix it by taking the battery out for a few minutes and then putting it back in. It would work until you turned the phone off and then I would get the black screen again. It was useless. I talked to my son and he said, let me bring an old phone out and perhaps we can switch the sim card. 
When he came out this weekend, he decided to do some research on the bad phone. He found that the peel on the phone had been updated recently by Sprint and that a lot of people were saying to uninstall it. That the update was causing a lot of problems with the cellphones. He tried to uninstall it and it wouldn’t. So he disabled the peel and made sure that no update on it would pop up again so that Hubby nor I would accidentally install an update on it. The cellphone is now working perfectly. Yeah!  We thought we might have to buy a new one and the cost was between $600.- $800. when you are not renewing a plan. We still have 5 months left on the contract. Yikes! 


– We are eating from our stockpile and have been for a couple of months. Right now we are trying to eat up everything in the fridge. It is pretty full. There is way too much cream cheese. I will have to get some bagels today at Panera Bread because they are discounted on Tuesdays. I still have a lot of money on our Panera gift cards that I purchased 2 years ago. So I will just have the $6.99 cost taken off one of the cards. If anyone else knows how to use up cream cheese or has a good recipe to do it, please share in comments. 

– It is so hot and humid here that we have had the A/C on almost non-stop(only a day here and a day there that it was off). Our electric bills this summer were running $25. more per month than last summer. I am doing my best to keep the shades and blinds closed as the sun moves around the house. We hardly use our stove and oven. I can’t wait until we can turn it off permanently.


– I sprayed the entire perimeter of the house for bugs again since we had heavy rain. The spiders are liking to come in since it got a little colder at night. 


– Our favorite local garage keeps e-mailing Hubby saying it is time to bring the car in for an oil change. Hubby checked his paperwork to see what the mileage was last time and checked the mileage on the SUV now. We still have many miles to go before it needs to be done. I am glad he didn’t take their word for it. They have no idea how little we drive every month. 


– Our John Deere riding lawn mower was giving Hubby a little trouble last time he mowed. It just shut off by itself while he was doing it. He checked and it looks like it needs the filter changed. So rather than have the John Deere place do it, Hubby will do it himself. He found the best price on the one it needed at Amazon. It was only $ 4.51+tax. 

– I had my yearly mammogram and my every other year bone density scan last week. Both were good.  Make sure all of you women get yours done when they are due. Your health is your most precious asset!  Take good care of it!


Please feel free to tell us about your frugal endeavors in the comments.