How I Saved Money This Week

The very best thing I can do to lift my frugal spirits is to visit our church's clothes closet. Every clothing item here is 25 cents. It is an endless supply of affordable fabric, buttons, and even clothes to wear as, well, clothes.

I got my younger son two shirts for school, my older son a long underwear shirt that he has already worn to an outdoor Halloween event, a tee shirt for my fiancee, and
drum roll, please...

a manual typewriter I've been promising my younger son since I couldn't find one for his birthday!
It was $3.

Don't tell him. He thinks it's wonderful and that it must have cost a lot of money.

On Friday, I was cleaning up a little and found three hot dog buns that were dried out and two bread ends. I almost threw them out, but changed my mind.

(Ok, I did throw them out and then dug them out of the trash when I got an idea.)

I cut all this into cubes, rolled them around in melted butter, added some parsley flakes and salt and garlic, and put them in a slow oven until they were crunchy.

Now I have homemade croutons. I put them in a cleaned pickle jar. I can't tell you how happy this made me!

I used to think that watching grocery ads was a waste of time. I thought it would save money over the long run to go to one store, get what I need, and come home and cook. This week I watched the store ads. I used a store coupon to get 9 pounds of frozen chicken breasts for $1.58 per pound, and bought 6 pounds of grated cheddar for $2.50 per pound. I like this method and will try it again next week. I hope to build up a nice supply of cheap groceries this way.

Our Walmart had small bags of sweetened cereal for $1.00 each. This comes to 10-11 cents per ounce, which is good. But I went home and found a Malt O Meal coupon online for $1.50 off three bags of cereal. So the final price was about 5 cents per ounce, which is fantastic! We have cereal to last a while now, because I let my kids eat sweetened cereal only on weekends.

What I want to stress here is that I found the product, then found the coupon. I didn't buy something just because I had a coupon. Find a good deal on something you buy anyway, then look for a coupon to further increase your savings.