"Up"Cycling

I like to follow a few frugal blogs and forums, and have been seeing the word "Upcycling" more and more. I am not a hoarder, but I do have problems parting with things and I tend to hold onto things because I know I'll want them later, for something.

For example, I buy baby wipes, quite a few of them in fact. What can I say? I have 2 boys, they make a huge mess of themselves, and I have a tomboy in diapers that gets disgusting from head to toe. In my quest to find the best deal, I know my "buy" point on wipes, which is about $1/per tub or refill. I used to just buy them by the case at Sam's Club, but a quick price comparison shows that they are actually not the best deal out there.

One of the downsides to getting the best deal is that you might end up with a bunch of smaller sized things than you might normally buy. Of course it's easier and more convenient to buy the case of wipes at Sam's, or to buy a big refill bag, but if I can get a plastic tub of wipes for pennies, or FREE, I'm going for the plastic tub.

I had it in my mind that I was going to use all these tubs for something, so I kept piling them up on a shelf in the closet. The other day I had one of those AHHH HAAAA! moments and decided that I was going to condense the random bags and boxes of school supplies into them. I had a few sheets of Avery labels around and just did a quick handwritten label on each one and stacked them in a cupboard. Now when we want to color with the kids, we can find everything easily and pack it up quickly when we are done.

It's not fancy, but check it out

Are You Sick and Tired?

Have you had enough? Are you sick and tired of being sick and tired? Do you pay more than you should in "stupid tax"? If you've followed our journey to becoming debt free, then you know that we have been following the Dave Ramsey principles taught in Financial Peace University. We started out by just reading the Total Money Makeover and then running with it. This past fall we finally got to take the entire Financial Peace University class and it really helped us narrow our focus and keep plowing ahead.

One Free Financial Peace University Lesson

If you are interested in testing the waters of Financial Peace before jumping in, this is a great opportunity for you. If you fill out the form on his website (linked above), you will get matched up to a free FPU lesson near you. Of course I am biased and would HIGHLY recommend that you sign up for one in the 49348 zip code and join the class I am going to be co-leading, but it's ok if you can't make it to my class :)

Hope to see you there!

"Free" Money to be Had!

I know I've mentioned a few different ways that I earn free gift cards and such, but I don't recall if I've ever made a centalized list of all of those. Me? Without a list? Say it ain't so! Having made this realization, I give you:


I started "swagging" about a year ago and just installed the search toolbar on my computer figuring a search here or there might add up to something eventually. Around Christmas last year I decided to see what I had and what I could cash in for. What I ended up with was $50 in Amazon gift cards! Wowza! Anyone who frequents Amazon during December knows that it's the best time of the year since the sales are abundant and I was lucky enough to have a free trial of Amazon Prime, so I stretched that $40 into a LOT of Christmas gifts for people!

My Points
I've been using MyPoints as my starting point for online shopping for years. They also send random emails to your account that have you click through for 5 points each. Sometimes you can earn 10-25 points for filling out a survey, but I rarely do that. If I am looking to buy something online, I ALWAYS start by seeing if it's a merchant that works through MyPoints. I've redeemed over 55,000 points, which works out to a whole lot of gift cards to places like Sam's Club, Chili's, and Starbucks! One thing they did recently was link up to Coupons.com, so if I print out 10 coupons from them (which is incredibly easy for me to do with the amount of coupons I use!), I get 10 points, and you get points for redeeming the coupons as well.

My Coke Rewards
This is a hit or miss one really. I have redeemed my MCR for a few good things like Chili's gift cards and Omaha Steak gift cards, but the pickings on their site are pretty slim. You have to check back often to see if there is anything good there to cash in on. I bank up well over 1000 points before I even think about cashing out. I have a lot of friends who drink Coke products but don't do the rewards program, so they just give the codes to me.

Speedway Rewards
If you drive a car, you pretty much are guaranteed that you have to buy gas. There are less than 5 options on my way to/from work to get gas, and Speedway happens to be one of those. As long as they are the cheapest option, I will choose them to get gas from in order to build up my Speedway Rewards points. At Christmas last year we cashed in our rewards for a $25 gift card to Applebee's and the year before that we cashed in for a $25 card to Lowe's. It's not big money, but we aren't loyal to just Speedway so we don't earn as many points as we could be. If someone offered you $25 wouldn't you take it?

I've gotten random gift cards here and there for filling out surveys, but am always interested in more ways to free up cash in our daily expenses to put towards the snowball.

The Price of Country Livin'

Almost 4 years ago we made the move from urban Metro Detroit to a little township between between Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo. We love living here and have ZERO plans to move back to "the city" at any time, ever. But every once in awhile something comes up where I think, "Wow I really miss that!"

I was visiting my family this weekend, which was a very frugal trip since we haven't sold our house there and can sleep there for free, and this morning I drove by Randazzo's Fruit Ranch. When I lived there I would typically go there at least once a week to buy fresh produce and I absolutely loved it. We would make fresh salads with our meals, lots of stir fry's, and plenty of variety in buying fruit. Driving by I remembered just how much I miss having that kind of convenience.

So I stopped in and walked around. I could have bought a couple of just about everything, but ended up leaving with: 3 heads of garlic, 2 lbs of gnocchi, 2lbs of popcorn, 10lbs of apples, 2.5lbs of grapes, and celery....all for $11.10. Last time I bought celery, about a week or so ago I paid $2.50!

I guess there really are trade-offs to everything, I just wish I didn't have to give up reasonably priced produce to live here!

Savings Angel

So it's been a little over a year since I started using Savings Angel and I wanted to get some thoughts down on the program.

Pros:
-Amazing deals!
-Centalized list making
-Easy access to printable coupons
-Supportive community for swapping coupons and non sale deals

Cons:
-It does cost $20/month

It took me a long time to wrap my mind around the whole concept of paying $20/month to be a part of the service, but the money is VERY well spent! I easily save that in just a week of shopping using them.

I was not a Meijer shopper at all before Savings Angel, and now that is pretty much my store of choice. With their MealBox coupons stacked with a manufacturer coupon, I can get groceries for just pennies on the dollar, or just plain free. Plus, I am in Meijer more often, so I can take advantage of their produce and meat markdowns that I come across as I am in the store. My kids have enjoyed more fruit this way than I was able to budget and buy in the past. Fruit in our house doesn't last much longer than a day or two, so the ripe fruit markdowns are just fine for us.

As we've paid off our debts and we've had some wiggle room in our budget, I've actually increased our grocery budget over time. We were budgeting right around $200/month at one point, and I've increased that to $250/month. We were almost living exclusively on chicken since it was the most inexpensive meat to buy, but now I splurge and we're eating more beef and pork than we used to. I personally could eat chicken every single day because I love the taste of it, but the variety is nice too. In theory, Dave would have us stick to the barebones until we were debt free, but I think that he would be amazed that a family of 5 could even make it on $250/month, forget the $200 we were skating by with!

Gone Baby Gone

Hard to believe, but today I scheduled the FINAL payment on our credit card. I honestly can't remember a time in our relationship where we haven't had some sort of credit card payment to contend with. It was a long road that we started down, and while the numbers were somewhat fuzzy, I look back and see that of the nearly $40,000 in debt we started with, approximately $12,000 of that was credit card debt.

When we got our tax return back, we were thankfully able to be able to cover quite a few things that needed to be taken care of:

1. Tires on our van
2. Paid off the credit card
3. Paid our property taxes

I'll admit and throw out there that once those 3 things were taken care of, we did purchase a new desktop computer for our house. Matt is actually building it because he was able to get a pretty good deal on the parts vs a ready made system. Our desktop died quite a few months ago and we've been trying to run things off of a second hand laptop that I bought from work, and every once in awhile it takes an absolute dump and we get the blue screen of death. We aren't very "hard" on our computers, so I anticipate we'll be holding onto this one for quite a few years, much like we did with our dearly departed desktop.

Starting debt: $39216.30
Amount paid: $25,153.71

$14062.49 until we are DEBT FREE

We Have a Winner!

I've been experimenting with different bread recipes trying to find one that works for our family. The main criteria being:

1. Simple ingredients that I have on hand (yeast, flour, salt, etc)
2. Not overly elaborate steps
3. Low maintenance

Let's face it, I have 3 kids and I work full time, I don't have time to knead, proof, rinse, repeat, babysit and all that comes with the more common bread recipes. I have a KitchenAid mixer with hook, so that cuts down on the amount of hands on I am willing to put into this. I don't want a bunch of extra stuff in the bread either, so I avoided recipes that have shortening (gross!), butter, whole milk, buttermilk and a host of other oddball ingredients that I either don't want in my bread or I don't have in my house often enough.

Tonight I think I found my winner. From start to finish it was a little over an hour and that was 40 minutes of cooking. In between steps I found time to hand wash the mixer parts and empty my dishwasher, so it's a multi-tasking friendly recipe!

http://www.theheartofnewengland.com/food-Simple-Bread.html

The bread does have brown sugar in it, but it's not super sweet at all, in fact, I forgot the sugar was in there until I just looked at the recipe again. I have some honey that a friend from church gave me from her hive, so I am thinking I might try to use that next batch to see how it tastes. If anything, I would rather have my kids eating bread with local, fresh honey in it than GFS brown sugar :)

Tomorrow I am testing driving a recipe from the Hillbilly Housewife, Italian Beans and Rice:

http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/italianbeansandrice.htm

Last month Spartan had coupons on their website, http://www.turntospartan.com, for $1 off of a 2lb bag of dried beans, so I picked up some dried northern beans and we've been trying to use them in different ways. We made a very tasty bean and ham soup, and now it's time to put them to the beans and rice test.