Welcome to week 56 of Frugal Tuesday Tip! The Frugal Tuesday Tip is a linky blog hop, dedicated to encouraging the frugal lifestyle.  I would love it if you shared your frugal tip with us! It is hosted by:

Sara at Learning The Frugal Life

Julie at JulieCache.com

and me!

Anyone with a frugal tip can share. Just post a frugal tip on your own blog, then come here to add your post (the permalink) with the linky tool. Your post will appear on all of our blogs.

Please use your permalink, which is the URL to your post not your home page.If you don’t know what a permalink is you’ll find instructions here. Posts that link to their home page will be deleted.

**If you are going to link up please add a line somewhere in your blog post stating that this is part of the Frugal Tuesday Tip. We would love to spread the word and get more people involved.

I almost caved last fall and paid money for a gym memberhsip.  I really, really wanted to maintain exercising over the long Ohio winter.  I was having a lot of trouble staying motivated and I thought a gym membership would help me.  Thankfully I came to my senses and realized that not only did I not have the money to spend on this, but I didn’t have the time to drive to and from a gym to work out.  So I opted (once again!) to exercise at home on a budget.  Here are some of the things that are working for me.

If you have stairs you can work out.  A friend of mine (hi Kelly!) sent me some stair workout sheets a few years ago and I still do them in the winter.  They take about 10-15 minutes  each, but I get a great cardio workout as well as getting my legs, buns, and hips in shape.

Body weight exercises are great ways to get into shape.  I am reminded of this all the time with the girls and their gymnastics.  They almost never use any kind of weights, yet gymnasts are some of the fittest athletes around.  Body weight exercises can included push-ups, crunches, pull-ups, lunges, squats and more.  Planks of all kinds are great for your core and I do numerous planks each day.

You can also make your own equipment or use what you have lying around as weights.  In the picture above you can see some paralettes that Kevin made for working out.  Emma is working on her “L” sit which is wonderful for your abs, legs and shoulders.  And she is only using her body weight as resistance.  Kevin also uses bags of salt, a sledge hammer, an old tire and more as part of his workout routine.  You could fill milk jugs with water as weights too.  A gallon of water weighs 8 pounds.

Of course there is always walking or running which I do too, but when I am stuck inside the above helps me stay in shape for free!

*This post is linked to Frugal Tuesday Tip.

Last week we talked about having an emergency fund.  Emergency funds are great!  But how do you decide what is an emergency or not?   Kevin and I have had our share of discussions over whether to use the EF or not and I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules that everyone must follow.

Some of the things we think about when deciding if we should pull from our emergency fund are the following :

• Does the item have to be taken care of now or can it wait for us to save the money separately?
• Is this a need or a want?
• Is there somewhere else we could pull the money from?
• What would happen if we opted not to pay for the item at all?

The better at planning your budget and your expenses the less often you will have to use your emergency fund.  We have used ours 1 time since we moved to Ohio.  ONE time.  Anyone that has been reading here for more than a year will know just how often we have things happen that could easily be deemed an emergency (car repairs, root canals, dog surgery, trees falling down, etc).  But we have always either had a plan in place before a major expense or worked very hard to scrimp and save and make it a part of our regular budget.

Once we started planning for the unexpected expected (we all know life happens!) we started having a lot fewer emergencies.  We will talk about that next week!  In the meantime – when was the last time you had to use your EF?  How did you decide it was time to use it?

We are nearing the end of February and if you aren’t careful those well thought out New Year’s Resolutions could already be forgotten.  February is usually when the dreary winter weather starts to bring people down, they just want to make it through to spring and goals for the new year are long forgotten.  I am trying hard to keep mine going, so here is how we are doing.

Goal #1 – Project Braces – I have added $600 to the braces account this year from my paychecks.  We also received a $139 reimbursement from Michael’s braces that I added to the account.  We now have $1831.51 saved.

Goal #2 – Improved my posture and strengthen my core.  This is a daily project and I do my exercises each day.

Goal #3 – Shop second hand more.  I have yet to shop at all this year, so haven’t done anything towards this goal.

Goal #4 – Use more coupons.  Well, I haven’t been able to print coupons from the internet in a long time, so I can’t say I have used more, but I think I am using about the same amount.

Goal #5 – Think before I speak.  I think I am doing better, but could still improve a ton.  This is certainly be an ongoing struggle for me.

Goal #6 – Grow the blog.  I am working on this.  I am trying to be better about commenting on other blogs and developing relationships with other bloggers as well as posting more frequently.  Switching the blog to WordPress was difficult and and I still need to work on the background stuff some, but I am glad I switched.

How are your resolutions coming?  Are you still working on them, or are they long forgotten?

One of the things I wanted to do this year was learn to cook more from scratch.  On my list was homemade salad dressing.  Emma loves raspberry vinaigrette dressing.  Of course the stuff from the store is loaded with yucky stuff and hardly any real raspberries.  I decided to try to make my own.  It turned out wonderful!

Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing

Ingredients

1/2 cup raspberries (I used frozen from the summer, but thawed them)

1/4 cup rice vinegar

dash of salt

dash of pepper

1/4 teaspoon oregano

1 tablespoon maple syrup

1.5 cups olive oil

Directions

Add all ingredients to the blender and blend until well mixed.  Pour into a serving container and serve.  I keep mine in the fridge since it has real raspberries in it.  The only problem is remembering to set it out before dinner so the oil “thaws” as it conceals in the fridge.  We all love this dressing!

Welcome to week 55 of Frugal Tuesday Tip!  The Frugal Tuesday Tip is a linky blog hop, dedicated to encouraging the frugal lifestyle. I would love it if you shared your frugal tip with us! It is hosted by:

Sara at Learning The Frugal Life

Julie at JulieCache.com

and me!

Anyone with a frugal tip can share. Just post a frugal tip on your own blog, then come here to add your post (the permalink) with the linky tool. Your post will appear on all of our blogs.

Please use your permalink, which is the URL to your post not your home page.If you don’t know what a permalink is you’ll find instructions here. Posts that link to their home page will be deleted.

**If you are going to link up please add a line somewhere in your blog post stating that this is part of the Frugal Tuesday Tip. We would love to spread the word and get more people involved.

Playing the drug store game has helped me save thousands of dollars over the past few years.  I buy almost all of our toiletry and household needs for next to nothing by matching sales with coupons and rolling Extra Care Bucks.  I don’t have a Rite Aid near me, and Walgreens never works out very well, so I stick with my favorite – CVS.

A great way to save even more money is to make sure you scan your Extra Care Card when you enter the store.  Almost all stores have a kiosk now where you can scan your card and get coupons or check the price of something.  Sometimes I end up at CVS needing something last minute and having to pay full price.

Except by scanning my card I can sometimes turn a bad deal into a great deal.  Tonight we needed a good night time cough medicine for Luke.  The natural stuff I have been using isn’t working and he coughed all night last night.  So off to CVS I went after dinner.  When I scanned my card I received a $3 off $10 health care purchase AND a 30% off coupon.  I was able to use both of them and paid just $5 for something that was regularly priced $11.29 and not on sale.  That was an exciting deal for 1 swipe of my CVS card.

*This post is linked to Frugal Tuesday Tip.

One of the first things financial experts say to do to get a better handle on your finances is to build an emergency fund.  Having some money in the bank is key to stopping the debt cycle and getting on solid financial ground.  Dave Ramsey calls the first emergency fund the “Baby Emergency Fund”.  You want just enough to cover the little things that might come up to knock you off course.  He recommends $1000.  To some people this might seem like a huge amount of money.  To others it might not seem like enough.

I remember the feeling I had when we finally had $1000 in the bank that wasn’t earmarked toward anything.  It was just there as a cushion to cover life’s emergencies.  Just having $1000 in the bank eased my stress level tremendously.  With 4 small kids though, emergencies tended to be high dollar and come more frequently than most people.  It wasn’t long before I decided we needed $2000 in the bank as our baby EF.  That is the beauty of it – you can decide!  But just make sure to start somewhere.

We are currently trying to increase our emergency fund.  Our goal for the year was to increase it by $1200.  We have only touched our EF once in the past 5 years, but I still think we should have more in there.  As the kids get older it seems that when things pop up they are a lot more expensive than they used to be.  We have opted to increase this by depositing $100 a month into the EF.

If you are just starting out on building your savings then you should probably work quickly to build your baby EF.  You can do this by slashing spending, using your tax refund to boost it up, or selling things.  However you do it, having money in the bank that isn’t designated for anything but an emergency will certainly help you sleep better at night.

There are so many great blogs and articles out there! Here are a few great ones I found this week:

• Retirement savings has been on my mind a lot lately – probably because we do not have near enough saved.  I have been trying to figure out how much we might need and more importantly how to get there before we retire.  Kacie at Sense to Save is running a great series on retirement right now and her article How Much Money Will You Need To Retire is packed with good information.
• Mary at Owlhaven.net is teaching her teenages to stick to a budget when grocery shopping and feeding themselves.  Each teen will get $20 for a week’s worth of food to feed themselves.  They have to cook all their meals themselves as well.  I have some work to do before I can try this with my oldest, but what a great teaching and learning opportunity for her kids!  I can’t wait to try it myself.
• Look at this amazing blanket made out of old sweaters!  I can’t wait to try it and need to hit a second hand store to scout out some nice old sweaters I can use to make one too.

This is what happens when you go 6 weeks only purchasing the bare minimum of groceries.  With 4 growing kids we were eating food at a rate much faster than I was purchasing it.  $200 at Costco today has made me feel a lot better about the state of my fridge and pantry.  And I am sure will make the kids happy now that they have choices again.

I passed up several items that we semi-needed in an effort to keep my final total down but I guess you wouldn’t know that by looking.  I can’t believe the price of chicken!  I was out of several staples like oil, flour, cheese, etc. that really adds to the total.  I think I spent $30 on cheese alone.  I am just glad that we were able to afford a huge grocery shop like this that will restock us for a bit.

While this is only the second week that I have hosted Frugal Tuesday Tip, it has actually been going on over a year and this is week 54.  The Frugal Tuesday Tip is a linky blog hop, dedicated to encouraging the frugal lifestyle. I would love it if you shared your frugal tip with us! It is hosted by:

Sara at Learning The Frugal Life

Julie at JulieCache.com

and me!

Anyone with a frugal tip can share. Just post a frugal tip on your own blog, then come here to add your post (the permalink) with the linky tool. Your post will appear on all of our blogs.

Please use your permalink, which is the URL to your post not your home page.If you don’t know what a permalink is you’ll find instructions here. Posts that link to their home page will be deleted.

**If you are going to link up please add a line somewhere in your blog post stating that this is part of the Frugal Tuesday Tip. We would love to spread the word and get more people involved.

I do a lot of printing.  The schools rarely send anything home anymore, I have to print whatever I need.  Schedules, forms, etc.  I print coupons and recipes all the time as well.  Unfortunately you don’t always know exactly what you are printing – many times coupons come with a full page ad. I always cringe when those ads print out.

One of the ways I save money on printing costs is to print in gray scale and black and white as much as possible.  Color ink is more expensive than black.  Most printers are automatically set to print in full ink.  You don’t need that much ink.  You can adjust the settings to conserve ink when you print.

If you print papers for school you can adjust the font and pick one that doesn’t use as much ink.  Adding bold print or using a bolder font will use more ink.  Printing minimally will help you conserve on ink.  Try to proof read before you print if at all possible.  I just wish my kids would listen to that last one!

We have been following (loosely) the Dave Ramsey plan for the past 7 or 8 years.  For those that don’t know, the Dave Ramsey plan involves 7 baby steps to financial success.  While I think it is a great plan, I do not think it is a “one size fits all” plan.  There are too many variables. Here are the baby steps that Dave Ramsey advocates:

1. Baby Emergency Fund of $1000
2. Pay off all debt except the mortgage
3. Increase your Emergency Fund to 3-6 months of expenses.
4. Save 15% of your income for retirement
5. Fund college for your kids
6. Pay off your mortgage
7. Build wealth and give.

We seem to be perpetually stuck on baby step #3 unfortunately, while we cash flow life expenses.  The experts always talk about how expensive it is to have a baby.  Having a baby is NOT the expensive part.  I think ages 10-18 must be the most expensive.  It seems that around age 10 the expenses really start to increase.  As in braces, activities,  school expenses, clothing tastes, ect. I wouldn’t trade the kids for anything though.

Join me each Monday as I explore the baby steps, money issues and the finances involved in raising a family.

We got our CSA pickup this weekend.It was a great package!  Here is what we got:

• 1 spent hen – an old laying hen for chicken noodle soup
• dried egg noodles
• homemade linguine
• 1 lb bacon
• cheddar cheese
• 2 lbs sweet potatoes
• 8 apples
• dozen eggs
• cherry preserves
• large bag of spinach
• 2 lbs corn meal
• 2 lbs butter (we paid extra)
• quart of plain yogurt (we paid extra)

I am so glad we have to opportunity to get this CSA, it makes eating local, real food so much easier!

Luke made a pirate ship cake for the Father/Son cake walk for Cub Scouts.  We started by making a cake in 2 round pans.  We cut each circle in half placing them on top of each other with frosting in between.  We cut off the bottom a bit to make it sit flat.  We inserted long wooden skewers to hold the “ship” together.

We followed that up with frosting all over.  We used licorice stips to make the railing of the ship.  We stacked Whoppers to look like cannon balls. We used long wooden skewers for the masts, with fruit roll-ups cut into triangles for the sails.  On the skewers holding the cakes together we then put Rolos to look like cannons on the side of the ship.  Then you can put candles in the Rolos and light those for a birthday.

We decorated the top with some pirates and a treasure chest filled with yellow skittles to look like gold.  The Pirate Ship cake was the 2nd cake chosen!

For more cake inspiration, head over to Life as Mom for plenty of great ideas.

Tuesday was going to be the last day of our No Spend Month.  I figured up my total for all groceries and household supplies and came in at $238.46 for the month.  This is less than half what I normally spend.  We ate a lot of food that I had been avoiding cooking and it was too bad.  I dug some interesting things out of the freezer.  This challenge was not just about food and toiletries though.  I was challenging myself to not eat out at all and spend no money on clothing, gifts, and more.  While I think we did great on the food part of the budget, the rest of it didn’t quite go as I had hoped.

Three of the kids needed shoes this month.  We hit a sale at Famous Footwear and got 3 pairs for $30, which is great!  That was the only money spent on clothing all month and it came from our cash envelopes that had excess in them from previous months.  I guess technically I didn’t spend any of January’s money on clothing.  No money was spent on gifts.  I pretty much stayed out of the stores completely except for groceries.

Eating out was our downfall!  I did good by not stopping for lunch out at all in January, but as a family we didn’t do so well.  We went to 3 gymnastics meets and while I packed food for 2 of them it wasn’t enough.  We spent about $20 at the concession stand for those 2 meets supplementing what I had brought.  The 3rd meet, we just went to watch.  At the last minute I took Emma and some of her friends straight from gymnastics practice to the meet.  I left home at 11:45 and didn’t return until after 9.  I had packed a lunch but that was it.  We hit Chick-Fil-A on the way to the meet for a total of $20.  Then I ended up with an evening with just Michael and he had brought home an awesome report card.  I said we should celebrate and he wanted to go out for ice cream.  Another $6 there.  So during the No Spend Month challenge of not eating out – we ate out more than ever!  I can’t remember the last time we have spent that month on eating out.  Ugh!

Overall it was a great month and we saved a lot of money.  We were able to pay cash for Michael’s soccer season ($305) and the second half of our Winter CSA package ($357) out of our regular paychecks.  Unfortunately as sometimes happens when you get paid every 2 weeks – all of our utility bills have hit this pay period.  It happens about once a year and usually I see it coming and plan ahead.  I didn’t this time and so the No Spend Month continues another pay period.  As of this post I have 8 more days.  I gave myself $150 to replenish groceries and household items and added no money to any of our other envelopes in order to pay the bills.   I can’t wait for February 10th!

Check out how other people’s No Spend Months went here.

This is the first week that I am co-hosting Frugal Tuesday Tip and I am very excited.   The Frugal Tuesday Tip is a linky blog hop, dedicated to encouraging the frugal lifestyle.  I would love it if you shared your frugal tip with us!  It is hosted by:

Sara at Learning The Frugal Life

Julie at JulieCache.com

and me!

Anyone with a frugal tip can share. Just post a frugal tip on your own blog, then come here to add your post (the permalink) with the linky tool. Your post will appear on all of our blogs.

Please use your permalink, which is the URL to your post not your home page.If you don’t know what a permalink is you’ll find instructions here. Posts that link to their home page will be deleted.

**If you are going to link up please add a line somewhere in your blog post stating that this is part of the Frugal Tuesday Tip. We would love to spread the word and get more people involved.

I asked my family for a frugal tip to post for today’s Frugal Tuesday Tip.  Michael immediately said the following:

“You should only buy what you need, not just spend all of your money.”

Isn’t that great?  How many times do we go into a store with the mindest of spending a set amount of money on something and come out spending that and more?  When you take $80 cash with you to the grocery store, do you shop until you have $80 worth of items or do you get only what you need and spend a good bit less than $80?

When you have the mindset of only buying exactly what you need you typically spend less money.  Changing your way of thinking can save you a lot of money!

This weekend as the fridge started looking barer and barer I came very close to giving up on this challenge.  I was nervous that we didn’t have enough food, I thought I couldn’t do it.  Then I took a deep breath and came to my senses.  I still have plenty of food (I wasn’t trying to eat it all!), we still have options, no one is hungry, etc.  I just figured I needed a plan.  Coming up with a plan for what we would eat through dinner tomorrow (really breakfast on Wed) would either 1) tell me we had plenty and we could make it or 2) tell me that I needed to forget the challenge and head to the store.  Guess which one happened?

We still have plenty of food in the house, although I did have to go get milk today.  I was not in this challenge to deprive my family though and going 2 more days with no milk was just not an option for me.  I had to get creative on the lunches some today, but the kids are probably happy with something different, right?  Kevin stopped at a local farm and bought 2 dozen eggs late last week so with the milk I need to add $11 to my total for the month.  I will tally it all up tomorrow and let you know how I did overall, not just the food budget.  We had some good things happen and we didn’t do so well in other areas.  But no one is perfect right?

If you are interested in learning more about eating fresh, local foods I have a deal for you.  Through February 1, 2012 you can watch Fresh The Movie online here for free.

Kevin and I watched it last night and it was really good.  It goes along with Food, Inc if you have seen or heard of that one.  Fresh The Movie interviews not only organic, sustainable farmers, but also extensive interviews with a couple that runs a chicken lot for Tyson (I think that was the company).

The movie is only 1 hour and 10 minutes so a quick one, but packed full of information.  Watching this just confirms many of our feelings about the importance of eating local, knowing your farmer, growing food yourself and cooking from scratch.