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Save Money At After Halloween Sales

November 1, 2023 by 8 Comments

After Halloween sales can be a great time to pick up a few things at a discount that can help you save for other occasions. Here are a few tips to help you!

After Halloween sales can be a great time to pick up a few things at a discount that can help you save for other occasions. Here are a few tips to help you!

Save Money At After Halloween Sales

Don’t forget to go to the after Halloween sales to get some great bargains on candy and other items. You can get many other things at after Halloween sales besides candy:

  • Packages of little toys for party favors.
  • Cupcake wrappers. Cupcake cups with pumpkins can be used all the way through Thanksgiving and if it is just for your family, most kids don’t mind if their cupcakes have a pumpkin wrapper on it, even in January.
  • Candles and candle holders
  • Napkins and disposable tablecloths

 

hallween decorations - creative pumpkins

Do you have a graduation coming at the end of the school year and the school colors include black? Buy your plates, napkins, streamers and party favors now. Look for bargains on these types of products after every holiday. If the school colors are red, you can find great stuff after Christmas or Valentine’s Day, silver after New Year’s Eve, green after St. Patrick’s day and so on.

Get costumes for next year or pick up odds and ends if your kids like play acting or drama. We always kept a costume box. It had a lot of basics, including a black cape, sword, cowboy hat, cowboy vest, clown wig and nose, black gloves, etc.

You might be surprised about what you find. One year the store had 24 bag packages of lunch chips for a dollar. This was cheaper than it would cost for me to package them up myself. Happy Hunting!

-Jill

 

Filed Under: Halloween, Saving Money Tagged With: Budgeting, budgets Homemaking simple living, cheap living, debt free living, frugal cooking, Frugal Living, Frugal Living simple living, frugal recipes, homemaking, homemaking blogs, homemaking ideas, homemaking tips, money saving tips, saving money, saving money on groceries, tightwad, tightwad gazette, ways to save money

Quick and Easy Homemade Breakfast in 15 Minutes Or Less!

October 1, 2021 by 44 Comments

Do you feel too overwhelmed to make breakfast? By planning ahead and getting organized, you can have an easy homemade breakfast in 15 minutes or less!

Here are some great tips for how to make a quick and easy homemade breakfast in 15 minutes or less! A better breakfast that's just as fast or faster than the drive-thru and a lot cheaper!

Quick and Easy Homemade Breakfast in 15 Minutes Or Less!

I just finished writing a future newsletter about breakfast and I realized one of the reasons we don’t often eat breakfast is because we have difficulty managing time. Not only is it important to time things to get them done quickly but, when it comes to breakfast preparation, it is important to get everything done at the same time, too. This can sometimes be a big challenge to a beginning cook, but practice makes perfect.

Here are some helpful tips along with a simple menu I will use for my example:

Sausage
Eggs, scrambled
Toast
Coffee

If time is truly tight, then get as much done ahead of time as possible.

Things to do the night before:

(All of this should take not more than 5-10 minutes.)

  1. Put the coffee and water in the pot.
  2. If it comes in a roll, slice the sausage into patties.
  3. Put the eggs in a bowl, mixed and ready to go.
  4. Set the bread and butter by the toaster.
  5. Place the pan or griddle on the stove ready for sausage and eggs and stage the oil for cooking by the pans.
  6. Set the table.

Things to do in the morning:

  1. Start the coffee.
  2. Put the sausage patties in the pans and start cooking them.
  3. Pop the toast in the toaster.
  4. Flip sausages and start cooking the eggs.
  5. Butter toast, stir eggs, dish up sausages and dish up eggs.

Voila! You’re done!

Of course, this process can vary from person to person. I’m sure some of us do it differently and I do it differently on some days, too. The point is to think through the order in which you will do things.

  • Start your longest cooking items or things that can be just popped into a pan and need no attention first.
  • Look for areas where you can save time. For example, don’t make trips back and forth to the refrigerator. Get everything you need out at one time and put it all back at one time.
  • Mix and stir items as closely to the things you are cooking on the stove so you don’t have to run back and forth. For example, if you are cutting up a bowl of fruit, cut it near the stove area so you can easily stop and flip the bacon.
  • Write down a list of quick and easy breakfasts to make. For example, place oatmeal in the crock pot overnight, have Egg McMuffins ready to warm and have homemade waffles made and ready to pop in the toaster.
  • Again, do as much as you can ahead of time, like having the table set the night before.

Most breakfasts for a family of 4 can be made in 15 minutes or less if you are organized. You might find everyone more excited about getting up in the morning and getting dressed if they wake up to the smell of something yummy cooking in the kitchen.

 

Try these breakfast ideas for your family:

  • Breakfast bowls
  • Breakfast burritos
  • Fresh fruit
  • Oatmeal with fruit
  • Toast with jelly or bacon
  • Breakfast sandwiches
  • Eggs, scrambled, poached or to your taste
  • Hard-boiled eggs
  • Apples, cut into quarters, with core removed
  • Bagels
  • Muffins
  • Dried apples or bananas
  • Oranges, peeled and quartered
  • Pumpkin bread
  • Banana bread
  • Zucchini bread
  • Bananas
  • Crackers and cheese
  • Celery sticks, spread with peanut butter
  • Cheese
  • Homemade granola bars
  • Beef jerky
  • Tortillas with cream cheese
  • Peanut butter snacks
  • Yogurt with fruit or wheat germ added
  • Milk
  • Chocolate milk
  • Homemade hot chocolate
  • Creamy Orange Shake
  • Smoothies 
  • Apples, quartered and cored with 1 tsp. peanut butter on each quarter
  • Bananas sliced in half and spread with peanut butter
  • Bread or toast cut into quarters and spread with jelly, jam, peanut butter, spiced honey or honey butter
  • Crackers spread with peanut butter and jelly or jam
  • Place some peanut butter and honey on a pancake and roll up for a snack. This is great for leftover pancakes.

 

Many of these easy breakfast ideas and more are from our cookbooks!

[dining]

 

Filed Under: Cooking Ideas And Tips Tagged With: Budgeting, budgets Homemaking simple living, cheap living, debt free living, frugal cooking, Frugal Living, Frugal Living simple living, frugal recipes, homemaking blogs, homemaking ideas, homemaking tips, money saving tips, saving money, saving money on groceries, tightwad, tightwad gazette, time management, ways to save money

Time and Money Saving Tips and Ideas

July 26, 2013 by 22 Comments

Time and Money Saving Tips and Ideas

Here is an odd collection of tips that you might find useful:

This morning I went to buy eggs. I usually try to get them on sale but couldn’t find any. Since I needed the eggs right then, I had no choice but to pay full price, so I bought a carton of medium eggs.

Sometimes we automatically buy the large eggs (we do that with so many things) thinking that they are the best but for my purpose (baking), the medium eggs worked just fine and they were cheaper.

If you are having trouble with a recipe being extra sticky or not quite right in some other way, you might change your egg size and see if that helps.

Another thing I did this morning was hang my clothes out. After writing an e-book about laundry and how to hang clothes on the line I didn’t think I had missed anything. As I was hanging some T-shirts on the clothesline, I noticed that one of them was sagging in the middle, so I pinned it on the line and I re did it. You need to hang the items taut on the line, not stretched too tight but not sagging. This helps get rid of much of the wrinkling that some of us experience. Sometimes we tend to let our clothes sag in the middle to give us more clothesline space but don’t do this. It’ll only make more work for you.

Here are some more useful miscellaneous ideas:

  • If you lose the plug for your bathtub, use a golf ball. If it happens to get dislodged, it just rolls right back into place.
  • Rub hair conditioner on your shower curtain rod to make your shower curtain slide more smoothly.
  • Wipe up those spills. I know I sound like a parrot but if you spill something on your stove top, clean it right away. If you turn on a burner or  your oven, the mess bakes and hardens on the stove. I recently heard about a new way of doing finger nail polish and guess what they use to make it harden and stick more firmly? -Heat. The same principle works with your stove, so don’t wait to wipe up the mess.

I hope some of these ideas help make your day go more “smoothly”. : ) Have a super day everyone!

      -Jill

Photo By: Brenda Gottsabend

Filed Under: Cooking Ideas And Tips, Laundry, Save Money On Groceries, Saving Money Tagged With: Budgeting, budgets Homemaking simple living, cheap living, debt free living, frugal cooking, Frugal Living, Frugal Living simple living, frugal recipes, homemaking, homemaking blogs, homemaking ideas, homemaking tips, money saving tips, saving money, saving money on groceries, tightwad, tightwad gazette, ways to save money

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