Tuesday, March 4, 2008

How Do You Save Money?

Ok, Shelley and I have been talking a lot lately about different ways to save money. What do you do? Do you buy food or clothes from the "store brand" instead of name brand? Do you cook the majority of meals at home to keep from spending money on fast food? Do you buy food and other things (toilet tissue, paper towels, etc.) in bulk to save? Tell me what you do...give me your ideas. I am ready to REALLY start saving some money and welcome any suggestions...

5 comments:

Shelley said...

I am going to live off ramen noodles so I can join curves....

Michael said...

Ain't nothin' wrong with sum ramen noodles....

dean said...

when i was in seminary and we had no money, we actually existed (subsisted was more like it) on ramen noodles... and i mean for 2 meals a day for a year. but it was purely economics, 'cause there ain't nothin healthy about them. you're actually creating the need to go to curves if you start on a regular diet of these things...
ONE package is actually TWO servings, therefore, ONE PACKAGE contains:
-380 calories
-14 grams of fat (7 of those saturated fat)
1,460 grams of sodium

granted, the vast majority of the sodium is found in the flavoring packet, as the very first ingredient listed is... salt.
salt is listed as the last ingredient in the noodles themselves, and in fact the noodles contain less than 2% salt. but unless you crunch on the dry noodles for a snack (as i also did back in the impoverished days of seminary), who eats them without the flavoring?

dean said...

oh shoot... you were asking for money-saving suggestions...
well, since 22 days out of the month we're on duty at the children's home, we eat mostly children's home food. on our 8 days off per month (which consists of two 4 day weekends), we buy lots of fresh fruit, and usually only eat 2 meals per day... but we eat out more often than we should.

however... when we're on duty, i do all the grocery shopping for the cottage, and i've made a game out of stretching our food dollar (we're on a monthly budget), and last year i had enough grocery money left over at the end of the year to splurge on things like roasts and steaks, and even a few household and kitchen items i've been coveting (like a new crockpot, shelley :-).

but it's really not a fair comparison to make to the average normal household, because we get some USDA commodities (we're a part of the school lunch program) and a lot of donated items. we also have chickens, so free eggs most of the time!

i do buy all canned goods at save-a-lot (10-15 cents cheaper than wal mart on most canned items), as well as breakfast sausage and occasionally bacon (sometimes wal mart's bacon is cheaper though). for a while, walgreens milk was cheaper than anybody else in town, but wal mart wins that battle again lately. save-a-lot meat is better than anyone else's, so even if it isn't always cheapest, i still buy it there (they did just run their hamburger meat on sale for 98 cents per pound though, and i stocked up)

to me it isnt a whole lot of trouble to shop at multiple stores, as i always find myself in different parts of town throughout the week, and i pretty much know who has what cheaper on a regular basis. i did get messed up on milk when i was buying it at walgreen for $3.49 and wal mart had dropped theirs from like $3.90 to $3.30 and i didnt realize it for a few weeks. but i just make a big circle from wal mart, to walgreen to save-a-lot and back to the cottage. i only go to piggity wiggity if i see something in their sale paper that's an exceptional deal (last week they had milk on sale for $2.98!!)

i am extremely jealous of you and shelly for being able to go to sam's, although with gas like it is, i'd have to already be going to little rock for some other reason to make it worth my while to make a sam's run...

K.T. is Mommatude said...

Well lets see,I do buy all canned goods at Sav-a-lot,actually I do most of my shopping at Sav-a-lot unless another store has a sale on commonly used items,or I need a specialty item.Shredded cheese and cereal I buy at the Pig,because most of the time you can find sales on those items there-like here recently they had 6 boxes for $10 of a specific brand.We grow a few vegetables even,like tomatoes.I buy most clothes on sale for the kids,I love TJ Maxx,Ebay,used to be Old Navy too,and so on and so forth.WE dont buy alot of junk food,so most of our meals have to be prepared,but I also try to stick to recipes with less than 5 ingredients,if you are making a recipe that calls for 20 ingredients and you only have 1 or 2 on hand-it can get into big $$$.Books I buy at rummage sales,on Amazon or swap.Hope that helps!:D