Month: June 2025

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Every Day

We Did It and Cost Cutting Continues

We got our first full electric and natural gas bill using the new smart meter. The bill was for 29 days and was $ 148.72. We used 19.6 therms which was for skillet cooking on the stove top, a couple of days of heat, and heating our water with our tankless water heater. Everything else was electric: sump pump, computers and those accessories, chest freezer, lighting, refrigerator and freezer, small appliances, microwave, air cleaner, televisions, cable box, and small 11 in 1 oven, etc. We used 387 KWH which I think is probably the lowest we have ever had. I was thrilled when I saw the bill this morning. It sure beat last month’s which was $ 225.23.

Last year’s bill for the same period was $ 176.60 for 29 days. We used 7.2 therms and 525 KWH.

We put our A/C on for the first time 2 days ago. We are having a heatwave here. We kept it off as long as we could. When the humidity got bad, we had to turn it on. However, we have bumped it up to 74 degrees.

We have been trying to cut costs where we can this week. I grocery shopped and purchased some ingredients for when my online friend, Chris, and her Hubby come to visit. I have menus made out so I was able to buy many things on sale for them including strip steaks which were on sale for $10.99 a lb.

My oldest son let me know he will be coming to visit soon also. We are very excited to have everyone here. We absolutely love Chris and her Hubby and have some things planned to do.

We have not seen our son since the end of December. We do not drive long distances anymore so he has to find the time to come to us. His work and business keep him pretty busy. I can’t wait to get a hug. I hope he is bringing Hotch, his dog. Eloise loves to play(torture) with him.

For those of you who have been with me since I started my first blog, do you all remember when we lived in Arizona and Alexa was born? Well, she is no baby any longer. She turned 18 yesterday. I don’t know where the years have gone.

Now I will tell you what we have been doing to cut costs. Every bit of money that is not spent during any particular month is invested to create passive income. We keep our costs low so that we can save as much as we can each month.

I have been actively looking for rebates on the things that we purchase. For example, I have sent in a number of rebates for liquor and beer that we have stockpiled for company. If it doesn’t have a rebate, I don’t buy it.

I broke another whiskey glass when I was putting it in the dishwasher the other night. We were down to 2 glasses. So I found a set of 4 marked down and then applied my cash back in my Walmart account to make them even cheaper.

We ran the sprinkler system this week so that the lawn won’t burn out. It is the first time we have used it this year. We only use it when we don’t have rain. Most of the spring, it rained all of the time so we did not have to run it. Our summertime water bills should be way down.

I needed to buy some catnip toys and some treats for Eloise. I bought them from Amazon and just spent the minimum to get free shipping. Then I used up all of my Amazon reward points to keep the cost down.

I switched our Mint cellphone accounts to their senior plans and we now get unlimited everything for the same price we were paying.

We are eating our third night of pasta, meat, and sauce. I made Hubby spaghetti sauce on penne with meatballs the first night. I made me alfredo sauce with penne and chicken which I ate for 2 nights. Hubby had a hot meatball sandwich last night. Tonight, he again will have a sandwich and I will eat the little bit of alfredo that is left with a salad. We still have alot of penne left so I will make a cold pasta salad for dinner tomorrow to use it up. Waste not, want not!

I hung the laundry to dry again this week.

I have switched to drinking a lot of water with a bit of lemon juice when I am thirsty.

That is it for now. What have you been doing to cut your costs?

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Every Day

A Small Grocery Haul and Some Cost Cutting

I missed a great deal when I went to Top’s this week. I don’t know how I did that. Since I had to take a bag of bottles back and drop off a prescription drug at the drop box at the pharmacy to safely dispose of it, I went up early this morning. No one is ever at the bottle return room when I go at 7am.

They had a pork shoulder on sale for $ 1.49 a lb. However, if you used the Super Coupon, it was reduced to $ .99 a lb. At the sale price, it was reduced to $ 15.57 for a 10.445 lb. roast. Using the Super Coupon, I paid $10.34.

They also had corn today so I purchased 4 ears at $ .39 each. I am saving my raincheck to use when our local corn is ready. I surprised Hubby with his favorite ice cream which he eats sparingly because he is a diabetic. Perry’s had his MintTingALing on sale for $4.00. So my total for all 3 items was $ 15.90. I had saved up the receipts for our last 3 trips to the bottle return. They totaled $ 14.75 and I had them taken off my bill, so I paid $ 1.15 OOP.

I am planning on cooking the pork shoulder in the crockpot outdoors tomorrow. I will shred up the meat and add BBQ sauce. We will have BBQ sandwiches for a couple of days and the rest I will freeze in portions for future sandwiches.

Tonight, we are grilling hot dogs and we will each eat one corn on the cob for dinner. The other ears of corn will be eaten tomorrow night.

I transferred some money from our checking account to our high yield savings account. The next time I go to the bank I will open another share certificate to get much higher interest.

We always use our credit cards to get the best rewards back on different items that they give cash back for. I spent some time yesterday refreshing my memory on those.

I have been researching the best price on tissues because we are down to our last few boxes. It looks like $ Tree has the best price( $.007) per tissue when you buy the 175 count box for $ 1.25. I have not yet researched Sams Club and B. J’s.

Hubby and I have been discussing dropping collision on our car. We just renewed so we have plenty of time to think about it before it renews again next March. Right now, the SUV is only worth $7,000.

I am back to using cloth napkins as I run out of paper ones.

We are trying to only make 3-4 meals a week with enough leftovers to easily make 7 or to just make a meatless pasta salad for a couple of meals.

Every time I go into Top’s, I see a line of people getting coffee. It always amazes me that people will spend a fortune for a cup of coffee there. I just make mine at home and take it with me. All the money that is saved by doing that goes straight into investments and savings that give me passive income.

I will be cancelling my Peacock subscription next week. I got it for about $19. a year ago on a deal and did not plan on paying a fortune for it to renew. However, now my cable company has added Peacock, Disney, Max, Paramount which I already have via my Walmart + membership, VIX premium and AMC +, all for free to our plan.

We always try to repair items instead of replacing them. I have a Shark handheld vacuum that I love. It would not turn on for more than 3 minutes after charging it so we thought the battery was dead. We were about to throw it out. But I decided to take it apart to see if I could fix it. The reusable filter was really dirty. .I didn’t even know that it had a filter. Hubby used to always take care of these kinds of things but he didn’t seem to know why it wouldn’t work. I cleaned the filter and took the whole thing apart and cleaned everything really well. I left it apart to dry overnight and now it is working just like it is new. That saved me spending $ 89.99 for a new one.

I got $ 2.25 cash back on a small delivery order from Walmart. I will use it the same as cash on my next order. I like to do the cash back on items that we use because it helps pay the tip.

My dentist appointment a couple of weeks ago reminded me that we never pay for toothpaste or floss. Our hygienist gives us samples of Crest Gum toothpaste and many different kinds of floss at our appointments. Hubby has an appointment coming up so there will be more. If we run out before we go again, I look for a $1.00 off coupon for an on sale $.99 tube.

I changed the filter in our A/C today to get ready for when we need the A/C.

That’s it for today. I hope you are having a frugal money saving day.

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Every Day

Savings Goal & How We Cost Cut

Remember a while ago, I told you we wanted to save a large amount of money to get to our net worth goal of well over $100,000. The goal is in a prior post. We have been working really hard on that this month of June and will be cutting every cost we can possibly cut for the rest of the year. After the month of May’s savings, we are getting very close to our goal. We are hoping to reach it by the end of the year or before.

We needed gasoline so I filled up using points and saved $.30 per gallon. Hubby has had to go to PT for weeks and most of those weeks he has gone twice a week. The therapy center is in the next town so it is a hike. Needless to say between those appts. and other appts., our gasoline bills have skyrocketed. We used to be able to only fill up once in about 6-7 weeks. Now it is every two weeks. However, the last scheduled PT appointment is the end of this week and then he goes back to the doctor to be reassessed. It would be nice also if he could just do the therapy at home and we wouldn’t have to pay $ 40.00 in co-pays a week.

Yesterday I had to go to the dermatologist to get a precancer on my ear taken care of. The doctor froze it and said it should be gone and give me no more trouble in about 6 weeks. If I hadn’t noticed it and had it taken care of it eventually would have turned into cancer. While I was there she asked if I wanted anything else taken care of so I mentioned that I only had 3 warts that I would need to have removed. She said they take those off by freezing them also. I told her that I would think about it knowing full well that I would find a way to take care of them myself. When I got home and told Hubby about the warts, he said he sees the cans of the stuff to freeze them advertised on TV. Since I don’t watch TV, I never knew that. I did my research online and ordered a can. It will be here tomorrow. The cost was $ 16.49, no tax, and free shipping. That is a whole lot cheaper than it would have been to have her remove them.

We got notice yesterday from our health plan that effective January 1, 2025, there will no longer be co-pays for insulins or for telehealth visits. This is June and they are just getting around to telling us? Weird! But we knew about the insulins because the drug stores have not been charging us. However, we did not know about the telehealth visits. We will take full advantage of that for anything minor.

I have been very picky about what I buy at the grocery store. This week strawberries and corn on the cob have been on sale. The strawberries were already going bad so I skipped those. Our local strawberries will be ready soon. They ran out of the corn the first day of the sale ($.39 an ear) so I got a raincheck for a dozen ears. We eat some but most of it we cut off the cob and freeze it. You can’t even buy a can of corn for that price and this tastes so much better. The only thing I did buy was 2 packages of fresh Italian sausages for $2.99 a lb. which was cheaper than I have been able to pay for them in about 2 years. Each package had 4 large ones. So that will give us 8 meals. I mostly use it in spaghetti sauce. They also had BS chicken breast on sale for $ 2.49 a lb. But I got some at $1.99 a lb. over Memorial Day. I am hoping they will repeat that sale for the 4th of July. Then I will stock up again. Extra large eggs at my store are $ 2.99 a dozen. When I get close to running out of eggs, I will be stocking on those.

Hubby and I treated ourselves to appetizers from Applebee’s. We had enough for two meals. We used our discounted gift cards that we purchased the end of last year via a Top’s deal to pay. I am afraid that Applebee’s is not going to be in business much longer so we will be using these cards up sooner rather than later. We did the drive thru to pick them up and ate them at home.

I am very mindful of scanning my receipts into Ibotta and Fetch. I want to keep those free gift cards coming.

I used to do mystery shopping in Arizona and loved it. I am looking into doing it here.

I received $4.00 in rebates last week. They were online ones so I didn’t have to use a stamp. BTW, remember, that they are going up on July 13th so get your Forever stamps if you need them before the increase of $.05 each. I will be getting a 100 count roll.

I have been watching the price of silver for a very long time. I have never seen a price this high ever. I believe it will go up a bit more. We have a lot of sterling silver pieces that we no longer use. I will sell it soon and make some money off of it instead of letting it sit in a cupboard.

We continue to leave the lights off in the daytime hours. If I can cook something on the outside grill, I do. If I cook in the crockpot, I do it outside to keep the heat out of the house. Heat has been off since my last post. We have had 3 days that it was near 90 and humid here but we did not turn on the A/C. We kept the shades and blinds drawn on the sunny windows. If it cooled off at night, we opened a couple of windows. We would like to keep the A/C off as long as we can. If it gets stuffy and hot in here, we use the ceiling fans.

I have been watching our daily energy usage online. The data is always 2 days old. I am seeing that we have a spike at brunch time and from 4pm until we go to bed. We are trying to be mindful during those periods. They are mealtimes, downtime so TV’s are on and darkness.

I did the $30. gift card deal at Chewy’s when I purchased Eloise’s food. I am saving it for the next time I need food or litter.

Our driveway is being sealed today. The company is only charging us $140. which is cheaper than we can buy the product to do it ourselves.

Top’s again has sent me 4 weeks of $5. off a $50. order coupons and 4 Free coupons for fresh bananas, pasta, shredded cheese, and ice cream. They start next week.

I got my Amazon CC bill and earned points worth $ 12.36 from buying a few Amazon purchases and charging over $700. in dental bills to that card. That money will be used when we actually NEED something.

This is it for today. I will be back soon. How are you saving as much money as possible?