Are you looking for unique ways to save money? So am I. It’s been a long time since I’ve done a choosing to see you post, but I thought it was time that I gave an update on some of the little things that I’ve been doing to save.
- Ebates. I’m still using Ebates for online purchases when I can. For each thing that I buy online that I buy through Ebates, I get a small commission. Not a lot of money, but it helps.
- Shopping with coupons at Rite Aid. I have continued to go to Rite Aid at least once a week and play the drugstore game. I use coupons and the Up Reward coupons to buy basic supplies that we use in our house. I’ve been getting toothpaste, tampons, toilet paper, cleaning supplies, paper plates, hairspray, and shampoo. I’m making a conscious effort not to spend more than five dollars each week at Rite Aid. I’m trying to build a small stockpile of bath also supplies, but I don’t want to end up with too much stuff it just becomes clutter. Ya know?
- Preparing for our neighborhood garage sale. I’ve been doing a lot of decluttering in the house and setting aside items for our neighborhood garage sale. The last two times I participated in the sale, we made almost $200. Again this is not a ton of money, and it is a little bit of effort to put the garage sale together, but since we participate in the neighborhood sale we get a lot more traffic, and we don’t have to do a lot of work to advertise the sale. People are just in our neighborhood anyway checking out all of the sales.
- I’m continuing to use that cashback apps like Ibotta, Snap, and Checkout 51. I need to be better about remembering to use these apps, because often they have cashback for staples that we buy all the time like bananas and bread.
- Signing up for organic food delivery. This seems like it would be a huge expense, and it could be for some, but for us it’s actually been saving us money. We signed up for a service called Full Circle that’s located in the Pacific Northwest. I’m not sure if it’s everywhere, but it something that works well for us. We do have to pay $39.95 per month, but we get tons of organic fruits and vegetables delivered to our house. That produce that we’ve been receiving is so much more high-quality than what I can buy at our local grocery store, that the food lasts longer and were wasting less food. Before we were spending a little bit less each month for the vegetables, but we weren’t buying as many, and a lot of the vegetables were going bad so we weren’t even getting to eat them. This spending on fruits and vegetables it allowed me to cut back on our spending on processed food, which has been really nice. I’ve also been to cut back on my trips to the grocery store.
- I’m trying to do weekly trips to Costco to stock up on staples we need that aren’t fruits and vegetables, and I’m loving that I am not spending so much time shopping.
- Swagbucks. I’m still using Swagbucks as my search engine, but I haven’t been searching online quite as much this week so I haven’t been earning quite as many points. But hey, it’s free money, and I don’t mind using this search engine. People say that it’s not quite as good as the Google search engine, and that’s probably true, but for what I search for its great.
- Checking the credit card statements. This week I sat inside charge on my credit card for a membership that I had signed up for a year ago that I didn’t realize it’s going to automatically renew each year. I called the company that was charging us for this membership and cancel it, and got our $24.95 back. Score!
- Trying to make things from scratch. I used to make a lot of your bread from scratch and with our bread machine, but since we moved to Washington state, I don’t get the results that I used to. I don’t know if the water or the yeast that I buy, I’ve tried a lot different things and it’s just not working. So I started trying to find other things that we could do the foods we can make from scratch. This week we tried making rice milk from scratch. I used this tutorial from Don’t Waste the Crumbs. We do not have a super strong blender, so our results in making rice milk were not completely spectacular. But, I am using the rice milk to make smoothies, so by the time the rice makes it to the smoothies is just fine. It’s something I would like to continue doing, we can save a little bit on our milk costs, and it’s kind of cool to be able to make our own rice milk. Maybe I’ll get better at it?
- Automatic payments on the student loan. I’m still chugging along with this. Thankfully it’s automatic!
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