money saving tips

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

Save Money On Your Water Bill Doing Dishes

March 15, 2013 by 19 Comments

Don’t Rinse Money Down the Drain

At an average of 120.00/month, our water bill is our most expensive utility (due to private ownership of the local water company, no regulatory oversight, etc.). One way I save money is to use all of the frugal settings on my dishwasher. I use the water miser, the light wash, and of course, the air dry settings (to save on electricity). All of my savings were going “down the drain”, however, when my 15 year old daughter loaded the dishwasher. She was running the water the entire time she rinsed the dishes, even though I told her how to do it a different, more frugal way. So, I assigned other chores to her and now do the dishes myself. I am happier that it gets done my way and it also saves on our water bill.

-Sharon Y.

Preventing Bills From Getting Lost

February 18, 2013 by 17 Comments

I thought I’d share a short post about preventing your bills from getting lost. If you keep things organized you can save money on fees and reduce the stress of worrying about bills being late.

Margaret Writes:

Our bills are sorted by date–the due date is written on the envelope. Then the pile is organized by due date, with the ones due soonest on top. These are paper clipped in the checkbook. Top bill gets paid first.

-Margaret

My system is similar. I line my bills in order in a napkin holder (one that just has 2 bars to hold the napkins because I can see the bills easier), with my checkbook behind them.

Apple Barn Soup Menu – Easy Vegetable Soup Recipe

February 14, 2013 by 30 Comments

Apple Barn Soup - Easy Vegetable Soup Recipe

Easy Vegetable Soup Recipe and Menu

Tips:

If you don’t have time to make cornbread or are out of crackers when serving soup, serve it with some of your favorite seasoned croutons.

It is so easy to make your own croutons. You can use any old, dried bread you want but tougher breads like French bread work best. This is a good way to use things like leftover hamburger buns, bagels or dinner rolls.

All croutons store well an airtight containers for a couple of weeks.

Homemade Gift Baskets

November 7, 2012 by 25 Comments

From: Donna

I have a great and cheap idea to share for Christmas savings. I love giving gift baskets. They’re versatile, personal, and best of all… cheap.

This year I am making a candle and potpourri basket for my sister in law. I bought a bunch of the $1 tiny jar candles from Wal Mart and Dollar General so she can test out new scents, and a big bag of potpourri on clearance for $2. ($10.00)

My best friend’s husband loves to grill, so I bought a basting brush, paper plate holders, grilling spices, and marinades. ($6.00)

And for my best friend (an Air Force wife and employee and mother of a one and a half year old), a spa basket. She always seems to be stressed out and never gets downtime. I bought a 4 piece green tea bath mix ($3) from Wal Mart, added two small candles, potpourri, a bath pouf, and a sleeping mask. ($18.00)

Needless to say, most of my ideas came from Dining on a Dime. I just switched them around a little to compliment my friends and family. I have a few more people to shop for, but so far I have not spent over $20 on any gift, and everyone is getting about 6 different items.

Dining on a Dime contains a very large section on gift baskets and jar mixes. At different times in her life, Tawra worked in floral shops and part of her job was making gift baskets, so we added that as part of the cookbook.

In addition to the large lists of ideas to use for gift baskets, Dining on a Dime includes many recipes for gifts in a jar that you can make yourself and add to the gift baskets. For example you could make an Italian basket with bread, noodles, sauce and some homemade Italian Seasoning from Dining on a Dime or make a basket with soup fixings with our Bouquet Garni Bags. If they like spicy we have a Cajun Seasoning, BBQ sauces or special mustards.

You could make up a basket with the ingredients for pumpkin pie, adding our homemade pumpkin pie spice and our recipe for pumpkin pie. And of course, there are lots of cookie mixes, muffin mixes, etc.

Besides the holidays you could give a laundry basket of cleaning supplies for newlyweds or for a housewarming gift. Make up some of our homemade cleaning supples (and of course a copy of Dining on a Dime 🙂 or use a cute container to help stock the couple with spices and seasonings, filling it with cinnamon, nutmeg, chili powder etc. and adding homemade seasoned salt or taco seasoning from the book.

Dining On A Dime also includes recipes for hot chocolate, flavored coffee and spiced tea mixes, kids things like Easy Bake Oven mixes, play dough and slime. There are potpourri and sachets recipes. Homemade ornaments.

These and many more ideas are included in Dining on a Dime. Hopefully these get you started!

photo by: merelymel

Organizing Kids’ Schoolwork

August 17, 2012 by 9 Comments

How To Organize Your Children’s Schoolwork

School has started in many places, which means more mounds of paper clutter to keep under control. Here are some tips to help keep all of that school paperwork from multiplying, reproducing and generally taking over your home and your life.

Set a certain time and place to go through your kids’ backpacks and paperwork each day. Use this time to sign all those papers you need to sign, mark upcoming meetings or events on the calendar and sort through everything.

The best time and place to organize schoolwork will vary for each family. For us, it was best to do it the moment the kids walked through the door while it was fresh on their minds. I would have a snack ready for them, they would explain the papers to me and while I was dealing with them (signing, writing on the calendar or admiring their handiwork), they would tell me about their day.

Then I would return everything that needed to go back into their backpacks, trash the rest or put it in a special place or folder. This helps prevent things from getting tossed on the counter or table where they are eventually lost or forgotten.

Of course you will need a calendar and/or small bulletin board or dry erase board.

My calendar has very large squares where I simply mark what needs to be done. If there is something very important that I must not forget no matter what, I mark it in red, but I write everything else in pencil in case I need to change it. Then I can just erase it and make the necessary changes.

There have been times when I used a purple pen if I wanted the kids to remember something. I read about a study which found that people will remember things better when marked in purple.

Use different colored markers or pens for different things. For example, one child’s events will all be in green, all dentist appointments are in blue or whatever works best for you.
If there are special papers that go with an event, I either paper clip them to the calendar page, pin them to a small bulletin board or place them in a folder, making a star on the calendar so I know to look on the bulletin board or in the folder for the paper that goes with the event.

All my events seem to fit fine on one large square of a calendar. If your events don’t fit, you might need to look at changing a few things in your life and cutting back on some things. This could be a sign you are too busy.
There are many many fancy and expensive calendar systems out there. I personally find them to be more confusing and more work than they are worth but if they work for you, use one.

I know that some of you who work away from home need day planners and other organization systems but that is another whole subject that I deal with in my e book Plan It, Then Do It.

Another system some people like is to have a folder for each child with special papers in it. For example, if one child is having a class party, I will mark the class party on the calendar but then place the paper with all the info about it in the folder. Once again, I would place a star by the event to remind me more info is in the folder. Once a week these folders should be sorted through so they don’t get cluttered.
Always keep folders of any kind in an upright position in a holder. Most folders or papers that are laid in a horizontal position get forgotten, lost, piled on or not used.
KEEP IT SIMPLE. This could be the most important point of all. If it is complicated and too involved neither you or your family won’t bother to use it. Sometimes it isn’t our families which are the problem but the system we choice to use. Just because it comes highly endorsed by a famous organizer or some such does not mean it will work for you so don’t fight it and try something different.

Well I will sign off for now. I am looking at the piles of paper on my own desk and think I might need to take a break, practice what I preach and clear my desk. : )

-Jill

Photo By: magma666

Water Savings

August 3, 2012 by 16 Comments

I am a big fan of saving money in any way possible! We conserve water at our house. If we are just rinsing something out we save the water to put on our garden. If we do not finish a glass of water we put it into a special pitcher and it is given to our cats and dogs. If we find a bottle of water we pour it on an outdoor plant. Sheri D.

Some families couldn’t handle this next tip but we always drank after each other so I kept a small lightweight jug of water in the fridge. The kids would take a drink out of it and pop it back in to stay cold. I never had a pile of dirty glasses and at an earlier age the kids were able to open the fridge and get a drink so I didn’t have to get water out of the sink for them to drink each time.

I guess most people now have refrigerators with the water on the door but I sure did love my jug because it saved not only water but prevented me from having to wash so many glasses and finding glasses sitting all over the house.

-Jill

Fancy Inexpensive Dinner Breads

February 18, 2012 by 12 Comments

canned regrigerator biscuits in bundt pan

FANCY SCHMANCY dinner breads cheap…

Use a decoratively shaped Bundt pan,

a stick of butter or margarine,

3 cans of biscuits (jumbo or regular) (you could use frozen dinner roll too)

seasonings to suit the meal…for instance, serving Italian? Use basil and Parmesan cheese

Melt butter or margarine in bottom of Bundt pan evenly. Sprinkle seasonings. Then put biscuits in on end, like stacking dimes, one at a time, to allow seasonings and butter to ooze between each one. Bake as directed on the can. Then simply turn out onto a serving plate, and VOILA! –a beautiful bread ring. You can use cheddar cheese and jalapeno for Mexican…brown sugar and cinnamon for pull apart cinnabuns…rosemary and olive oil and olives for Italian or Greek… ANY assortment you can think of… dried tomatoes and olive oil… try it!

-Vicky B.

All I can say is yum! I am going to have to try this one!

Tawra

Photo By: C Jill Reed

Saving Cooking Disasters

November 18, 2011 by 18 Comments

Saving Cooking Disasters

I happened to think of a couple of things today that might help you for Thanksgiving and for any of the other holidays, too.

First, if you haven’t already done it, clean out your refrigerator today. You really should clean your refrigerator before you go buy everything for your dinner but if you haven’t done it yet, do it now. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to stuff leftovers into an already full fridge when you have a house full of company over, so clean it now. If you can, leave a certain shelf for the things you are going to store before and after Thanksgiving dinner.

Fixing Cooking Boo Boos:

If you didn’t cook your turkey with our recipe, it may come out too dry. Don’t panic. Just slice it, lay it on a platter and pour gravy over it. Then serve.
If your stuffing is too dry, once again, add some turkey brot or gravy to it.
If a side dish burns and sticks to the bottom of the pot, carefully pour it out of the pot, being sure not to scrape the bottom of the pan or any of the food stuck to it. You can save quite a bit this way.
If your dinner rolls burn, carefully slice off the bottoms. If all of the bottoms are gone, people will think that is just the way they are supposed to be.
If the crust on your pumpkin pie doesn’t turn out, scrape out the filling and place it in a nice serving dish. Cover it with lots of whipped topping sprinkled with a little cinnamon and call it Pumpkin custard.

Let’s Talk Turkey

I don’t think there is anything more dismal looking then a picked over turkey carcass. Usually, I am so tired from making the meal, being hostess and cleaning up that having to face the turkey carcass can almost put me over the edge. What I finally learned is not to do anything with it on Thanksgiving day. Then, the day after Thanksgiving, we pick at it all day long, making sandwiches and other things. Later I pick off the last of the big chunks.

I usually cook my turkey wrapped in foil or in a disposable pan so, when I’m done, I just wrap the foil around the turkey or gently shape the disposable pan around it. Then I stick it all in a couple of plastic bags, pop it in the freezer and forget it for a couple of weeks. Often I wait until January when I bring out the turkey remains and toss the carcass into a large pot for soup. That’s when it gets it’s final picking over.

If any of you have tips about how to fix Thanksgiving cooking boo boos for our beginning cooks and even some of us old timers, feel free to post. You may be the one to save someone’s Thanksgiving. : )

-Jill

We just received this today from a reader and thought it was perfect to add here.

From Cindy:

I had just made your pecan pie muffin recipe and popped it into the oven. I checked another recipe site (not as good as yours!) and many commenters said their muffins stuck to the pans and that they had to make it over again with flour, oil, Baker’s Joy or whatever.

I thought “Great! I need these for a bake sale tomorrow. Just my luck– They’ll be stuck in the pan and unusable.” So when I took the pan out of the oven I immediately ran a sharp knife around the sides and popped the muffins out. It worked just fine. I can see, though, that if you left them in the pan to cool they probably would stick. They’re very good. Thanks for the recipe and Happy Thanksgiving!

This is a good place to give everyone a heads up that if you bake anything sticky, sugary or syrupy, you’ll want to get it out of the pan immediately before it cools. I put a sticky topping on my cinnamon rolls so I have another pan ready to “dump” them on to the minute they come out of the oven.

Be careful with things like pecan pies and don’t fill them so full that they spill over the top and onto the edge because you will spend most of the day chiseling and trying to get a piece of pie out of the pan.

Of course, when it comes to pecan pie, I would find a way to get it out of the pan and into my mouth, even going as far as sucking on the pan if I have to. Yum! : ) : )

No matter what you make, a good rule of thumb is that if it is sticky and touches the pan it is like brushing on glue so either grease it very well or get it out of the pan quickly.

-Jill

photos by: toomanythoughts and technodad

How Do I Winterize An Outside Faucet?

November 5, 2011 by 9 Comments

How Do I Winterize An Outside Faucet

From: Janice J.

How do you use styrofoam to protect an outside faucet? It is getting colder and I am worried. Thanks!

I would duct tape a big chunk around the faucet. Maybe break it apart so it fits snugly around the faucet and then just duct tape away until it’s on there tightly.

-Tawra

Depending on your faucet, I have taken 2 large styrofoam cups and put one inside of the other then taped. Be sure to get it as close to the house as you can.

This really works. I had my outside faucet freeze one year and what a mess so I don’t chance it any more especially since it is so easy to do.

-Jill

Mike: It might also be good to stuff some rags into any places where air might get in, wrap the outside with a plastic trash bag and tape it with heavy duct tape to prevent moisture from getting in. (If it’s in a sunny area, a black plastic bag will keep it warmer in the daytime, too be cause the black absorbs sunlight.) If you manage to keep cold air and moisture out and provide some insulation with the foam, rags and/or some other insulating material, it should not freeze.

Of course, if it’s possible to turn off the water to that faucet from inside the house and then open the faucet to let any water drain out before you wrap it, that would be even better.

Photo By: rwkvisual