We did a few things last week to save some money. Instead of putting our deposit bottles in our recyclable can like most of my friends and neighbors do, I returned them to Fast Cash to get my $.05 per bottle or can back. Hubby had not taken them back since early autumn. I needed them out of the garage, so I took them. This trip I redeemed them for $ 7.70. I have been saving up this money in a separate envelope for a purpose. It got used today to pay for our tire change over from our snows to our regular tires. The cost was $ 80.00. Needless to say I had over 4 years worth of return money. I could have used any of our money to pay for this but it just felt good to reach the goal that I had for the bottle return money I kept in a labeled jar.
On Friday morning we had our scheduled appointment with the town assessor. Hubby, I think did a great job of stating our case for a lower assessment. The assessor now gets to decide. She said that we will get notification the beginning of May. If we are not happy with her decision, then we can go to grievance day. Our fingers are crossed.
Breakfast, on Friday morning, was a grilled ham and cheese sandwich which I made when we got home from our appointment. The ham was from my leftover Christmas ham. It had been thin sliced with my meat slicer and frozen.
Dinner was a sheet pan meal of chicken legs( sale price $ .89 lb.) and vegetables from produce that I got on sale that needed to be used up: Onions, multi colored peppers, and one Yukon gold potato. Everything was roasted in the toaster oven.
Every morning, the minute it turns light out the one light that I was using in my kitchen is turned off. I do my best to not waste electricity or natural gas.
On Saturday, I spent some time making a plan to reorganize my freezers. Then I did a load of wash. When that had been folded, we took the rest of the day off.
Sunday, we watched the golf tournament on TV. I puttered around here and made taco salads for dinner. The rest of the day I spent reading The Complete Tightwad Gazette. I do this every year to refresh my memory.
This morning I made my grocery lists for the week. There again is nothing that I need at Aldi. I will got to Niagara Produce and possibly Top’s.
Then I rearranged my chest freezer and I now have only meat and fish in it. Each kind of meat and fish are in their own separate reusable grocery bag. The oldest meats and fish are on the top of each bag with the newest on the bottom. The bags easily pull out to get to the ones on the bottom of the freezer. All of my frozen vegetables and fruits are in an upstairs freezer drawer. I have a small amount of breakfast sausage and bacon in there too so that it is easy to pull out to defrost for all of our breakfasts, especially the Sunday ones with family. The rest of the freezer space holds shredded cheeses. While I was doing this, I pulled out that turkey casserole that I made and froze after Easter. We will bake that in the toaster oven for tomorrow night’s dinner.
Tonight’s dinner will be hotdogs with our choice of toppings. I want homemade chili and cheese melted on top of mine. Hubby has his choice of many things. We have not had hot dogs in a long time. I will slice up some tomatoes on a plate. They need to be used up.
We got our electric and gas natural bill this past Friday. We were pleasantly surprised. Our bill was $ 50.86 less than last year’s. This year’s was $181.55. Last year’s was $232.41. It has been a little warmer during this period. The average temp this year was 46 degrees vs. 43 last year. We only used 454 KWH and 84 ccf’s. Last Year’s usage was 513 KWH and 113 ccf’s. The current bill was for 30 days and last year’s was for 34 days. We are hoping to be able to turn the heat off soon. It has been really cold the past week or so.
What have you been doing to save a little money?
10 replies on “Saving Money Recently”
We have a large window that faces West, while wonderful in the winter not so much in the summer. So, currently the blinds are up as soon as the sun peeks it way in and I turn down the heat.
We have switched the pups and kitty food back to what they ate when we were “poor”, We tried food with limited ingredients for allergies but it made no difference in how itchy they were.
I have started making Keto brownies and cookies from scratch instead of buying the boxed mixes
City Market had eggs for 1.99/dz so I bought the limit of 5 and continue making breakfast bowls for breakfast at work
Working my way through the cow I bought 2 years ago, its a bit too lean for us but I am not going to waste it…always good with gravy 🙂
Hi Patti,
It’s nice to hear from you. I hope that you and Hubby are well. I sure wish it would get warmer soon. We had large size hail on Saturday. So sorry that your kitties and pups are itchy. I have heard so much about companies changing the animal feed. Yikes.
Keto desserts are easy to make. I may make some brownies for Hubby this weekend. The mixes are so expensive so I have quit buying them.
I am loving those egg prices right now. It sure beats paying $7-8 a dozen.
Enjoy that beef. Wold slow cooking it make it more tender?
Thank you, Precious! We are well and just waiting for spring. I keep pondering growing something, anything but I know nothing will grow up here…too desert like, still doesn’t hurt to hope. Maybe 1 tomato plant like last year that a got 9 cherry sized tomatoes from even though they were supposed to be full sized.
I used up the last 2 boxes of dessert mix last weekend. The Duncan Hines Keto Cookies were not even close to looking like a chocolate chip cookie, I wrote to them and they are sending a coupon. The brownies were fine though, but I am glad to get them out of my pantry.
Hi Patti,
Have you tried to grow regular tomatoes in a pot. That is the easiest way I find to grow anything. But you would probably have to water them a little more often than I do. I remember what it was like in the desert when we lived in AZ. Not easy to grow there. Yeah on using up the boxed mixes.
Hi Precious, love the paragraph about your savings of the bottle returns. It is a good reminder that little things add up. I will have to think about what kind of little goal like that would work for us. And fingers crossed for your property assessment. We are going to have them later this year also, and not looking forward to it. I will report when we get our gas and electric bills.
Hubby and I are all done with our antibiotics and I don’t need to do laundry every day anymore. Yay! This past weekend was the birthday celebration for our older granddaughter, who turned 7. I made a fruit salad for the family dinner part and hubby and I went to get the pizza daughter ordered. We used a BOGO card that was a fundraiser for a local school to pay. So 4 pizzas for $32.xx. The card is good until the end of 2023. We usually give cash for a birthday gift, and a small gift for the girls. I had gotten a coin counting bank for 75% off at the after Christmas sales, so that was her gift, along with some coins in a little baggie to get her started. 😉
We finally got all of our tax refunds and deciding what to do with them. We are leaning towards buying another CD since the rates are favorable and we don’t really need the $$ at this time for our daily living expenses.
Last week I didn’t need all of my grocery money, so will roll over to this week. We found more tissues at Kroger on Sat morning when we were there to pick up a prescription. These ones were the bigger boxes in a package and so each box was .80. You can believe I snapped up both packages and wished there were more. LOL!
Hi Chris,
The little things always add up! You can only save on so many big things but there are so many ways to save on the little things. Without being conscious of all of those, I don’t think we would be comfortably retired all of these years. I will be very interested to se how much your utility bill went down.
I am glad that you guys are feeling better. Her party looked like it was so much fun. Wow! That was a great deal for 4 pizzas. I love that you got her a bank. It’s never too soon to teach a little one how to save money.
Yeah on the tax return. CD’s seem to be the only way to make money right now.
I need some more tissues. The cheapest here would be at $ Tree right now. I may stop there today while I am out running errands. $ .80 a box is such a good price.
Hi Chris! So glad you are feeling better!
Here you go Chris.
It was most certainly not a frugal time for us (international trip to see family, that we’d been saving up for years to go on). A few very small wins:
-Packed snacks for the flight
-Chopped up tomatoes that were going to go bad while we were gone, & froze them
-Took advantage of our priority pass lounge access (came with our credit card) to get a few free meals
-Used a credit card that was offering 10% off rides with Lyft, so we could get to the airport. We priced this out via parking, and it was still cheaper.
-Used a meal service for this week/next week, through a promotional offer my work was offering. While these are normally extremely pricey, with the work offer, it netted out to about $19/week for 3 dinners (for 3 people). Not the most frugal, but the other option was likely going to be some takeout at least one meal, with the jet lag & our schedules. This was healthier & cheaper.
Hi HP,
I am so glad you got to go see your family! It was worth all of your saving. 🙂
I love all the savings you did. Every little bit helps. Food is so expensive in the airports. Great savings on that food. When we were flying cross country so may times when we lived in AZ, the parking was so very expensive. Wish we had had Uber and Lyft back then. That meal service is well worth it.