Money Saving Tips

In my quest to deprive myself, I am always on the lookout for money saving tips. So I have decided to post them here for your benefit. Some I have figured out on my own, others I have picked up from other sources, such as www.stretcher.com.

 Enjoy, and come back often, as I will add more as time goes by. E-mail me with your own suggestions or comment below to add them.

February 20, 2007

Save money with other people’s mistakes. Home Depot and Lowe’s offer “oops” paint, where they mixed the color wrong for someone. You can usually get a gallon of paint for something like $5 as opposed to $20. This is best for areas where one gallon will be all you need, as the color may be hard to match if you need more.

Shop at TJ Maxx and Marshalls. If you just feel like splurging on things like bath products, hand soaps, etc, want inexpensive but good quality clothing, need kitchen items at a discount, nice bed sheets cheap, or any number of things, these stores usually have good deals on a lot of things you would ordinarily buy anyway, or some things you wouldn’t splurge on if they weren’t so cheap here.

Join Freecycle. Freecycle is a place to get rid of that stuff cluttering your garage or attic by giving it to others instead of throwing it out. Conversely, it’s also a place to get things you may need or want. They have groups in a lot of various places. Visit http://www.freecycle.org to find one near you.

February 16, 2007

Use shaving soap. For Father’s Day last year, I got a very nice and expensive shaving set, consisting of a bowl for shaving soap, a shaving brush, a razor handle designed to hold Mach III blades, and a stand to hold it all. I bought a bar of shaving soap from Crabtree & Evelyn for roughly $5. That was June 2006, and I am still using that one bar today. It stretches very very far. (Visit http://www.ebarbershop.com for some shaving sets. You can get them other places as well, some very inexpensively.)

Eat lunch. If you have money budgeted each week for dining out, go out to lunch, not dinner. Many places have lunch menus/specials and you can spend much less at lunch than at dinner. We go every Sunday after church for our weekly dining out experience.

Take your lunch to work. Whether you buy a few frozen meals at the grocery store for a couple dollars a meal to take to work, or you eat the previous night’s leftovers, you can eat lunch pretty cheap but still have a good meal.

Stop and think before buying. When you decide to go buy something, whether it be a cleaning product, a CD, book, something else fun, food, or whatever, think about why you are buying it. What purpose is this product fulfilling, and can the purpose be fulfilled more cheaply? For example, say you are buying cleaning supplies and you are going to pick up those Lysol cleaning wipes. Can’t you just as easily use an old holey towel, torn into rags, with some bottled cleaner or just ammonia and water? Do you really have to buy that book you want to read when you can pick it up at the library for free?