Our Frugal Journey

Our pantry and freezer are still well-stocked but I’m beginning to see a few empty spots as we eat our way through our stockpile while staying out of the grocery store during February, our second annual Month of No Spending.

So far, I really haven’t noticed much difference in my cooking or meal planning, other than the panic I felt when my daughter started pouring herself 16-ounce glasses of milk. Needless to say, we had a little lesson in serving size and the difference between 8 ounces and 16 ounces. Ah, the joys of raising children in our ”super-sized” world.

I’ve got just one $20 gift card from Super Target at my disposal to buy milk and produce for the month so stay tuned to see some creative frugality!

This week, I’m planning to get in and out of my Target with a few bananas and some salad fixings.  Thankfully, we still have plenty of apples and oranges left from my last shopping trip in January!

Monday:  Baked ziti, rolls, and salad. Actually, this will be baked spaghetti because that’s the only type of pasta I have in the pantry other than a half box of elbows. While I’m at it, I’ll make a double batch  for a quickie meal later in the month.

Tuesday:  Scrambled eggs and bacon, our breakfast-for-dinner selection for the week. We’ve got plenty of eggs on hand so this will be a good opportunity to use some of these up.

Wednesday:  Southwest roll-ups, applesauce and a veggie side. This has become one of our family favorites since I discovered it on moneysavingmom.com last year. It’s a delicious mixture of chicken, salsa, refried beans and corn wrapped in a tortilla. I’ll make a double batch and freeze the rest for a meal later in the month.

Thursday:  Grilled cheese and tomato soup. Sweet Caroline has a basketball game so we’ll be eating on the run.

Friday:  The DH and I will be headed to Chick-fil-A for our usual dinner out. I’m so thankful for the stash of free coupons I have and the $10 gift card my son gave me for Christmas.

Saturday:  Turkey, mashed potatoes, veggies and applesauce. I’ll be cooking up a big turkey breast I’ve had in the freezer for awhile. We’ll use the leftovers for at least two other meals so it’s perfect timing for the No-Spend Challenge!

Sunday:  Turkey corn soup and home-baked bread. I’ll use half the turkey leftovers to make this soup in the crock pot, tossing the turkey into some canned broth from the pantry, along with a can of corn, a carrot and some minced onion. The kitchen should smell delish by the time we get home from church when all I’ll need to do is add some egg noodles and let it simmer for 10 minutes. We’ll have this for lunch, then celebrate Valentine’s Day at dinnertime. But more on that later.

What’s on your menu this week? If you’re struggling for ideas, head on over to I’m an Organizing Junkie where Laura has written a great post about her struggle with menu planning while having her house on the market! Great inspiration.

You’ve probably noticed the blog is looking a little different this morning. That’s because I have begun to accept advertising.

While the addition of ads is a big change in the look of the blog, I wanted to assure you that nothing else has changed.

My main focus remains the same – to help others while sharing my family’s successes and failures at living the frugal life. The focus is NOT, and never will be, to make gobs of money. (A girl can dream! But in reality, I’m simply hoping to make enough money from ad revenue to pay my annual web hosting fees.)

The opinions I express will continue to be my own — uninfluenced by advertising or marketing dollars. When I do a review or sponsor a giveaway, I will let you know — right up front — if I received the product free.

I prefer the look of a simple, uncluttered blog so I’m hoping the advertisements won’t be too big of a distraction. Rest assured, I will not run ads that float over my posts. And I will not insert ads into posts or in between posts. I dislike CAN’T STAND reading blogs that do this and I suspect you do, too, so I simply won’t do it.

The blog is, and always will be, a labor of love, with my writing time squeezed in between the meal planning, cooking, cleaning, decluttering, carpooling and the dozens of other duties of a stay-at-home mom.

If you have any questions or comments about my decision to accept advertising, please let me know in the comments section. I value your readership and your opinions.

Have you ever wondered why some folks always seem to get better deals at the grocery? Their grocery bills are always lower than yours. And they always seem to be just one step ahead of you when using coupons.

One sure fire way to maximize your coupon savings is to know in advance what coupons will be coming out in the Sunday newspaper.

There are many Internet sites that offer this info early but my favorite is Sunday Coupon Preview. Typically, Sunday Coupon Preview has the Sunday coupons listed by Wednesday.

Wednesday also happens to be the day that most stores in most areas of the country release their new sales circulars. So, while you’re planning your meals and making your grocery list, you can match up the sales to the coupons you have on hand, as well as to those scheduled to be released on Sunday.

For example:

Your grocery store has your favorite brand of cereal, normally $4 a box, on sale BOGO this week but you have no coupons for it. At $2 a box, it’s a tempting deal.

However, when you check the Sunday Coupon Preview, you notice that this Sunday’s coupon inserts will have a coupon for $1 off a single box. By simply delaying your purchase until Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, you will be able to purchase that $4 box of cereal for $1.

Knowing what coupons are about to be released has an additional benefit if you are interested in building a stockpile of your favorite pantry staples. Using the cereal example again, since you know there will be a $1 coupon, it may be worth your while to purchase extra newspapers to get additional boxes of cereal at the super low price.

This Sunday, Feb. 7, newspapers across the country will contain two FOUR coupon inserts, one Red Plum, one P&G, one Smartsource and one Smartsource General Mills.

Click here  to see the complete list of coupons and their values. (Regional differences are possible.)

There are a few great coupons I have my eye on. I am particularly excited about the $1/1 Quaker Old-Fashioned Oats, the .50/1 Quaker Instant Oatmeal and the .55/1 Earthgrains bread. I just might have to part with a few CVS ExtraCare Bucks to “buy” a couple of extra newspapers during our Month of No Spending!

If you are an admitted coupon geek, like me, feel free to leave me a note in the Comments section telling me which coupons you’re especially eager to clip this Sunday.

I love my public library.

Where else can you choose as many books as you want and walk out the door without paying a penny?

When you think about it that way, you have to wonder why anyone goes in a real bookstore and pays real money for a book.

Now my local library system has given me another reason to gush about it.

Starting this week, anyone and everyone with a Wake County, N.C.,  library card can download audio recordings of their favorite books onto their home computers. From there, it’s just a matter of a few clicks until you have your next book ready for listening on your Ipod. For FREE.

(On amazon.com, by the way, most audio books sell for $18 to $21!)

For starters, the library is offering 600 titles, including some of the most popular titles now in circulation: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, The Help, That Old Cape Magic and Off Season are among the titles available. Books for children and teens can also be downloaded. More titles will be added as the year progresses.

Having books available for download from the comfort of your own home is a frugal book lover’s dream come true.

With no actual book to pick up or return, think of the gasoline saved.

The rather minor inconvenience of being on a waiting list for a book should all but be eliminated by downloadable books.

And those pesky fines will also be a thing of the past with downloadable books. They are automatically “returned” after your seven- or 14-day loan.

Which brings me back to my original premise. Why would anyone lay out real money for a book when libraries are offering them free for the taking?

LOCAL READERS OF THIS BLOG: Click here to get all the information you need to download audio books to your Ipod.

It’s Feb. 1, the start of our 2nd annual No-Spend Challenge.

In case you missed it, click here to read all the details of this year’s money moratorium. Click here for a look at what happened during last year’s Month of No Spending.

But in a nutshell, we won’t be spending any cash this month on food, cleaning supplies, personal items, gifts, entertainment. Basically, if we don’t NEED it, we won’t be buying it.

We’ll be eating from the pantry and freezer, staying out of the stores and learning to use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without, as the saying goes.

Since I won’t be out and about chasing bargains, I’m hoping to spend more time at home, getting things organized, clearing more clutter and tackling a few projects. But more on that later.

If you’d like to join us in the No-Spend Challenge — even for a week or a day — I’d love to hear from you in the Comments section.

And if you’d just like to watch from the sidelines, I understand. Weigh in with a comment anyway.

This being our Month of No Spending, we’ll be eating exclusively from the pantry and freezer this month. Based on a quick survey of the freezer and pantry, that shouldn’t be too difficult — at least not the first two weeks anyway. We’ve got plenty of frozen chicken on hand, along with a frozen turkey breast and a full-size bird. In addition, we have more than enough beans, rice, pasta, spaghetti sauce, flour, sugar and powdered milk. Ditto on the frozen veggies, cheese, cereals, pudding, Jello, coffee and diet soda. (Gotta have my two-can jolt in the morning.)

We’re a little short on bread and ground beef so I may have to get a little creative in the waning days of February, but for this week, at least, our meals are fairly typical.

Monday:  Salsa chicken in the crock pot. I’ll be making a double batch of this fantastic dish and freezing one for later in the month. This has become a frequent meal in our house after I discovered it last fall over on the Frugal Upstate blog. We generally eat this on tortillas but also love it served over pasta or just solo.

Tuesday:  Four-cheese macaroni casserole, salad.

Wednesday:  Cincinnati-style chili with crackers. This is in my freezer, just waiting for me to defrost and heat through for any easy meal.

Thursday:  BBQ chicken sandwiches, baked french fries, applesauce. 

Friday:  This is sweet Caroline’s regular night to sleep over at Grandma’s so we’ll treat ourselves to a fast-food dinner out — sans cash. I’ve got coupons for free chicken sandwiches at Chick-fil-A and we’ll either drink water or bring our own soda. Talk about a cheap date! I think this takes the prize. But, hey, it will still be nice to spend a little time together.

Saturday:  Tilapia on the grill, if weather permits. If not, I’ll make it in the crock pot using a recipe from Stephanie O’Dea’s Make It Fast, Cook It Slow cookbook. I’ll serve it with veggies and homemade baked french fries.

Sunday:  Blueberry pancakes, our breakfast-for-dinner selection for the week.

Check out more menu plans over at I’m an Organizing Junkie.

Want to get a head start on planning next week’s shopping trips?

No need to wait until Sunday morning when the paper hits your driveway.

Click here to head on over to Sunday Coupon Preview to get a complete listing of the Sunday insert coupons.

This week, we can expect one Smart Source and one Red Plum insert.

I like to check the coupons early to decide whether I want to head out to the drug store to buy extra copies of the paper just for the coupons. Then I stack the insert pages, staple and cut them assembly-line style.

 And remember, at least in my neck of the woods in central North Carolina, Walgreens is the cheapest place to buy an extra newspaper at $1.50.

Let me know in the Comments section if you’d like me to link to this “sneak peek” of the coupons every week.

Happy clipping!

Starting Monday, Feb. 1, we won’t be spending any money. The entire month.

No groceries, no movies, no large diet sodas through the drive-thru, no clothes, no gifts. No discretionary spending, period.

No kidding.

Unless, of course, we can devise some other way to pay for the item in question that doesn’t involve money. Bartering? Yes. Credit? NO. Borrowing? Yes. Debit? NO.

If this all sounds familiar, that’s because we survived a month without spending last February. In truth, we more than survived. In a lot of ways, our family thrived.

We spent more time together playing games, building puzzles, baking, watching TV shows together and, wonder of wonders, talking to each other.

Whenever possible, we left the car in the garage and walked.

And most days, I simply stayed at home, leaving me to muse it was the first time in my 21 years as a stay-at-home mom that I actually STAYED HOME.

All that time at home left me with lots more time to get things accomplished such as organizing the house, selling our clutter for cash, planning our meals and working on other projects I had been meaning to get to but just never had.

We ate meals using the food we had stocked in the pantry, freezer and fridge. If I didn’t have an ingredient, I borrowed or improvised.

As much as I like shopping with coupons and chasing the deals, it was nice to take a 28-day break from trolling the aisles of my grocery and drug stores.

Most important, it gave us all a new appreciation for all that we have and all that we take for granted. What if this wasn’t a self-imposed exercise in extreme frugality, my husband and I asked ourselves more than once.  

All in all, we decided it was a challenge worth repeating.

Here are this year’s ground rules for our Month of  No Spending.

1. We won’t spend any money on groceries. Like last year, we’ll be creating our meals from food we have stocked in the pantry, fridge and freezer.

2. Similarly, we won’t spend any cash on cleaning supplies, personal items, clothes, entertainment, gifts, etc. Basically, if it’s discretionary, it’s not permitted.

3. We will, of course, pay all our normal monthly bills.

4. We will also pay for the Girl Scout cookies we have on order, the tickets to a family event scheduled at sweet Caroline’s school and the deposit on her Girl Scout summer camp fees. These were all expenses that came up last February and I know they will recur this year. 

5. Unlike last year, I won’t be able to attempt going the entire month without having to refill my gas tank. Now that sweet Caroline is in middle school, I’m responsible for carpooling five kids to Raleigh once a week, which is a 35-mile round trip. BUT, I will attempt to keep my gasoline usage to a minimum. I’ll keep you posted on how I do. The DH, of course, will fill his tank as needed to get to work and back.

Here’s my fine print: We will use coupons and the gift cards I have on hand (earned from using coupons and sending in rebates) to buy milk, produce and an occasional treat. And I do mean occasional. Since I earned these gift cards through thrifty means (or received them as gifts), I won’t feel guilty using them, but I also don’t want to use them all up in one month. Remember, we live thrifty 365 days a year.

Anybody out there willing to take the No-Spend Challenge with us? If you don’t want to commit to an entire month, how about trying it for a week. Or even one day.

Leave me your thoughts in the Comments section.

I haven’t bought a paper napkin in more than two years.

Ditto for disposable plates, cups and cutlery.

But up until very recently, I’ve had enough stashed away that we were still routinely using them.

That’s all about to stop. I assessed my supplies and have tucked away an “emergency” stash — just in case.

Within the next few days, we’ll be wiping our mouths 100 percent of the time with cloth.

One less thing to buy, one less category of coupons to clip, one less item to thoughtlessly toss in the trash. I just love it when frugality intersects neatly with the pursuit of living green.

I first started using cloth napkins a few months back but only sporadically. I wanted to get my family used to the idea. They are mostly accustomed to mom’s “crazy ideas” by now so the cloth didn’t elicit too many comments beyond “What’s the occasion?” and “Are we having company?”

********

Just to clarify, I did not run out and buy a set of cloth napkins. That wouldn’t be very frugal! I purchased a huge pile of napkins at a yard sale several years ago for $2. They were neatly tucked into my dining room buffet just waiting to be put to use.

I only wish I would have thought of it sooner.

If you’d like to go green and stop leaving a paper trail of napkins but don’t have any cloth napkins on hand, consider making your own. Any leftover cotton fabric will work. Simply cut into squares and run a hem stitch on your sewing machine. Don’t have any fabric? How about using an unwanted item of clothing headed to the rag bag or donation pile?

I don’t know if you noticed, but I failed to post a menu plan last week. We managed to stay out of our favorite fast-food establishments. Barely. Truth be told, I felt the lure of Chick-fil-A more than once.

Without a plan, I had that wave of 5 p.m. panic. Day after day. It was not fun. We ate a lot of soup and sandwiches.

Needless to say, by the end of the week, I had a new appreciation for the few minutes it takes me each week to check the pantry, peek into the freezer and jot down my list of meals for the week. It’s just not that difficult and the pay off is huge: $$$$ saved, sanity preserved.

No 5 p.m. panic this week:

Monday: Baked chicken and baked french fries.

Tuesday: Grilled cheese and tomato soup. Sweet Caroline has her piano lesson and basketball practice (both at the dinner hour) so simplicity is the main ingredient in this meal. If there’s time, I’ll bake some whole wheat bread and use a variety of cheeses to dress this up. If not, well, at least I can say I got supper on the table.

Wednesday: We’ll have chicken corn soup made with the leftovers of Monday’s chicken. It’s Girl Scout night so this will be another easy meal eaten before or after the meeting, whichever works.

Thursday: Scrambled eggs, bacon and salsa burritos, our first of two breakfast-for-dinner selections this week. We haven’t had these in awhile so I’m eager to make them.

Friday: Our regular dinner out while sweet Caroline spends the night with Grandma. We’ll combine coupons and a gift card to make this a cheap date.

Saturday: We’ll be celebrating Andrew’s 22nd birthday with homemade macaroni and cheese made in the crock pot. This has become an instant favorite in the family since I discovered it in Stephanie O’Dea’s great crock pot cookbook, Make It Fast, Cook It Slow. Andrew typically requests something more meaty, but he’ll be on the mend from oral surgery so this delicious dish will be perfect when paired with one of my homemade ice cream cakes for dessert. Just what the doctor ordered.

Sunday: Pumpkin pancakes. I don’t typically make two breakfast-for-dinner meals in a single week. It is a great way to save money and I do have LOTS of pumpkin puree to use up, but my real motivation is to make another soft meal for the patient before he heads back to school for the week.

What’s on your weekly menu? Leave me your ideas in the Comments section.

(Do you like my handy dandy Menu Planning title at the top of this post? It comes courtesy of  Laura over at I’m an Organizing Junkie. Every Monday, she and literally hundreds of other folks across the Internet post their menus for the week. It’s a great resource for inspiration and recipes.)