by Jennifer on January 27, 2012
One of the ways I have been able to stay out of the stores and buy less when I am there is to cook things from scratch. In fact, that might be the only thing that saved me this month. It might take more time, but it is better for you and typically saves you money. This month I made hamburger buns, chicken broth, cheese crackers, muffins, almost all meals, soups, salad dressings, pancakes, and more from scratch. When you have enough basic pantry staples you can make about anything at the drop of a hat. So when I craved hamburgers, but didn’t have buns on hand – that was ok, I just made some myself. I love the I can do that!
I have been thinking about more foods that I would like to make from scratch and have come up with a list of foods to try. A challenge I guess for this year. I figure if I tackle one food a month that is a start anyway. The more I can make food myself the less control the manufacturer and the grocery stores have over me. So this month I really wanted to make hummus, but tahini is expensive and just didn’t fit into the budget this month. I will kick off this challenge by making my own hummus once I can get tahini. Here is a list of things I want to learn to make.
- hummus
- cream of chicken soup
- crackers – I made one kind in January, but would like to experiment with other kinds
- yogurt
- pasta (although Emma wouldn’t be able to eat it, I still want to learn)
- more types of salad dressinig
- pop tarts (the kids would be thrilled!)
- turkey breakfast sausage
- french bread
- frosting (hoping to find a recipe that Emma can eat)
- ice cream
So, does anyone else make these foods and have a great recipe to share? I would love ideas and tips on making these foods successfully!
by Jennifer on January 26, 2012
I started the month going a week without shopping and I plan to end the month doing the same. I have gone to 4 stores in the past few days and I am tired of having to shop around for the best deals to stick within my budget. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that but it is true. One store to get Emma’s yogurt, another store to get produce, another store to get pasta and milk, etc. It just never ends. Here is how the past few days have looked.
I met my sister at Whole Foods so Michael could spend the night with them and got 5 soy yogurts, hummus and tomatoes. I spent just over $10.
Next up – CVS, I had a $5.99 ECB that was expiring. I got the candy for a project for Luke’s class, and the peanuts were to bring my total to $6. Except when I got to the register they were really $2.50, meaning I needed to spend $0.49 more to use my ECB. I grabbed my favorite Easter candy that I get about twice a year. Total was $0.38.
Next stop was my main grocery store. I got some produce to tide us over, I was out of tea (an emergency for me!), milk, and pasta ($0.50/box!). I spent $24.71.
On the way home I decided that I really didn’t want to shop for another week. But I knew I didn’t have enough fruit. So I stopped at the discount grocery on my way home from gymnastics and got the following for $10.37.
And that will be the last time I shop in January. All of this fresh produce will just have to last. I have already started rationing the milk and will use powdered in cooking and baking. If we run out I guess I can have Kevin stop and get a gallon, but I am hoping to make it. I need to figure up my totals but I think I am under $250 for the month still for all food and toiletries. I will post a final summary of how we did this weekend, even though I fully intend to keep not spending until Feb 1st, 2012.
How is everyone else doing if you are participating?
by Jennifer on January 25, 2012
As I mentioned earlier, I am very excited to be hosting Frugal Tuesday Tip this year with Sara from Learning The Frugal Life and Julia from JulieCache.com. Here is a little bit more about each of the 3 hostesses.
Hi, My name is Sara and I blog at
Learning the Frugal Life. I started living more frugally after my family and I did a 30 days of nothing challenge back in January 2009.
That challenge changed the way we lived forever and I started blogging about it. I blog about lots of different topics including frugal and green living, recipes, coupons, gardening, and backyard chicken raising We are still learning everyday how to live a more simple, frugal lifestyle and be content with what we have.
I am one of the original Frugal Tuesday Tip hostesses and I am excited to host another year. I truly look forward to Tuesdays and reading everyone’s tips and ideas. I hope you continue to join us each week and this linky will provide you some ideas on how to live a more frugal life.
My first memories of coupons are of my grandpa redeeming rebates. He always liked to ‘beat the man’ and get his money back. To him, Discover Card’s cash back was the one of best things since sliced bread (and he knew what unsliced bread was!).
I began using coupons when my friend Jean encouraged me to join her yet-to-be-created coupon train circa 2008. We used yahoogroups to stay in touch with everyone on the train. It was pre-Facebook and worked very well to ingrain frugal habits into my life, and with four kids, I needed those habits!
I had the idea to collaborate last year and gathered three other frugal bloggers to join – we used Kimberly’s name Frugal Tuesday Tip, and ever since then, I have been the linky manager. If you link the same post twice, or don’t use a permalink, I am the one who contacts you. I look forward to another year of learning with all our linky friends!
Julia lives online at
juliecache.com, her crafty, personal, beekeeping, bloggy space; Examiner.com as Des Moines (IA)’s Frugal Family Examiner; Three Sisters’ Home Learning Resources, a home school event production company; and at
juliecache.blogspot.com where she tells her geocaching tales.
Hi, I’m Jennifer from Getting Ahead. I have been living the frugal life ever since marrying my school teacher husband 15 years ago. Out of necessity we paid off debt, cooked from scratch, cloth diapered, clipped coupons and did just about everything ourselves so that I could stay home with our 4 children.
We live in Ohio now and all the kids are in school. I still cook from scratch, live frugally, and save money but now I also work from home, chauffeur the kids to gymnastics and soccer, grow some of our own food and try to feed my family from local, organic sources as much as possible – all while sticking to a rather small budget.
When I am not hosting Frugal Tuesday Tips you can find me at
Getting Ahead where I talk about frugal living, saving money, getting financial freedom and raising kids.
I hope you will join us next week for the start of our second year of the Frugal Tuesday Tip!
by Jennifer on January 24, 2012
Amidst all the craziness of moving my blog from Blogger to WordPress recently, I have been working on something else behind the scenes. I am very excited to join in hosting Frugal Tuesday Tip with Sara from Learning the Frugal Life and Julie from JulieCache this year.
Starting next week (Jan 31st!) every Tuesday you can come here and link up to your blog with a frugal tip. Your link will automatically be shown not only on my blog but also at Learning the Frugal Life and JulieCache as well. Triple the audience and views! Come back tomorrow to “meet” your hostesses.
by Jennifer on January 23, 2012
We picked up our CSA package this weekend and got the following.
- 2 lbs spelt flour ???
- 1 pint BBQ sauce
- 1 quart yogurt
- 1 lb sausages
- 1 lb ground beef
- huge rack of ribs
- 2 lbs potatoes
- 1 lb salad greens
- 2 lbs corn
I have a confession to make here – I still have a rack of ribs in my freezer from when we ordered a 1/2 pig 2 years ago. Now I have 2 racks of ribs. I can ignore them no longer, they are taking up too much space! My goal is to make ribs for the Super Bowl. Except I just have the 1 pint of BBQ sauce. I will have to figure something out.
Also, how do I use spelt flour? Usually when we get spelt we get it in a puffed form and sprinkle it in yogurt or just much on it plain. It is very good. Do I used the ground flour just like regular flour though? I don’t know.
I love our CSA and it has certainly caused us to be more adventurous with our eating and my cooking. Tonight I made brussels sprouts (I had frozen half the brussels sprouts from the last package) and they were so good. If it weren’t for the CSA I would have never in a million years bought, cooked OR eaten them. Yum!
by Jennifer on January 20, 2012
Well, I made the mistake of going to Wal-Mart when I was hungry this week. After a long morning of working, taking Michael to the doctor and then to school I tried to cram in a quick, small grocery trip to Wal-Mart. Remember I had a couple of gift cards? The gift cards totalled about $20 and I spent $34.17 out of pocket.
Can you tell what we were out of/or needed? Lunch packing stuff, vitamin C and cold supplies. Michael has been sick for a long time with the other kids passing around the same cold/cough thing. Except Michael’s turned into an ear infection and sinus infection. I felt the need to get some good vitamins pumped into everyone. We had strawberry/kiwi/spinach slushies last night and the kids have been getting OJ for breakfast again.
On the lunch making front – cream cheese, salami, ham, raisin packs, and go-gurts should help me get through the month with what I have on hand. Leftovers don’t go far when you are packing 5 lunches each day. I did stay out of the snack aisle.
An Earth Fare grocery store (like Whole Foods) just opened up near me and they sent me a coupon for a free whole organic chicken with a $10 purchase. It expired today. Chicken is the only meat that we don’t eat local/organic very often because it is so darn expensive. I couldn’t pass it up to get a free one – plus we were out of Emma’s butter and I needed to go to a specialty store to get it anyway.
The weather was really bad, so Kevin went with the instructions to get the chicken, Emma’s butter, a pomegranate and some grape tomatoes. Well, at least we got the butter and chicken! He said the pomegranates looked really bad and that he didn’t really think I wanted tomatoes. So he got Emma her beloved Luna bars and the juice instead. Men! Total spent was $10.34 (he did great there!)
Total for the month $182 or so.
*This post is linked to Learning the Frugal Life.
by Jennifer on January 19, 2012
Here in NE Ohio we don’t get very good coupons. When most of the country gets $1/1 we get $0.50/2 for instance. It is frustrating. As we move away from processed foods though, there aren’t that many coupons that I really, really want a lot of. With a Sunday paper costing $2 now, it isn’t very cost effective for me to buy a bunch of papers for a few coupons. This is where ordering coupons works for me.
My favorite place to get extra coupons is EBay. I can get exactly what I want (usually) in a large quantity for a good price. I don’t try to win an auction, as I don’t want to get into a bidding war OR wait for the auction to end before my coupons ship. I always go for the Buy It Now listings that offer free shipping. Last month for instance I was able to get 10 $1/1 All Laundry Detergent coupons for just $0.99. The grocery store later had bottles of detergent on sale for $2.99/ea, so with my coupon I was able to get a year’s supply of laundry detergent for $1.99 per bottle.
I did the same thing earlier this month to get 20 $0.50/1 Starkist Tuna Pouch coupons. I used 12 of them last week to get Tuna pouches for $0.25 each at my local store that doubles coupons. I paid $1.99 to win those coupons – less than the cost of 1 extra paper.
If you won’t want to purchase coupons off of EBay or if you don’t need 10-20 of any given coupon, a better option for you might be a coupon clipping service. I have used The Coupon Clippers several times, but I always spend more money than I want because they have a handling fee + a minimum order amount. If you don’t get a newspaper or want just a few of a lot of different coupons this is the best option though.
Don’t feel stuck with the few coupons you might get in your Sunday paper. There are better coupons out there. Do a quick search on EBay or a coupon clipping service to see if there are better options somewhere else in the country. Chances are good you can get a much better deal by ordering coupons.
This post is linked to Life As Mom.
