Savings
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How to Save Money When Eating Out
We love food of all kinds. While we enjoy eating at home and making our favorite meals, we love eating out just as much. We have a busy life during the school year with all the kids activities, practices and games. It makes it difficult to eat at home all the time, so we eat out quite a bit. Since eating out is expensive, we try to limit it when we can. When we do choose to eat out, we use various ways to save money. Here are 8 ways we save money when eating out, I hope they help you save money when you eat out. Coupons – a lot…
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15 Things to Buy at Dollar Tree
I have always loved going to Dollar Tree. How can you beat knowing that everything in the store is only $1. Some things they sell are not any cheaper than at other stores and sometimes the quality is not as good. But you can save money if you know what to buy. You need to know your prices at other stores to know if it is a good deal. There are a few items that we just like better than the ones at other stores. This post contains affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy for more details. Orchard Park Hazelnut Coffee Creamer – I started buying it because it was cheap,…
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Meal Planning for Vacation
I have several packing lists including meal planning for different types of traveling. We like staying in resorts when we travel because they give more room for our family. When we stay in a hotel room we feel like we are all on top of each other. The other advantage to resorts is that they have a full kitchen. This saves a lot of money when we travel. We still eat out sometimes but we don’t have to eat out every meal. When you are feeding 5 at adult prices, it adds up very quickly. I have a food travel list that makes purchasing and packing the items we need…
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Buying a House CAN be a Money Mistake
We have made a lot of money mistakes over the last 30 years of marriage. I hope by writing this that I can keep somebody from making the same mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, but the most important thing is to learn from them. My husband and I have very different family experiences growing up, but neither of us were taught how to handle money. I was in college when we got married so I only worked part-time and my husband worked in a warehouse so he didn’t make a lot of money. We lived in a small 1 bedroom apartment when we first got married, but moved to a 2…
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Hot Ham and Cheese Sandwiches Done Cheaper
My husband fell in love with these hot ham and cheese sandwiches at a friends party several years ago. I looked the recipe up on line and we tried a few different versions until we found the one he liked best. To view the recipe I use, click here. I have made them several times since then but don’t make them often because they are so expensive. They decided to have sandwiches and desserts at church after the singing on Sunday night. I decided I wanted to do something besides buy bread and lunch meat. I thought of these but really didn’t need to spend that much money this week. …
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Prom Time – Why is it so Crazy These Days?
Why is Prom so crazy these days? It just gets worse every year. I remember when I went to Prom. We had our prom in our cafeteria at school. We decorated it, ate supper there and then danced and had fun until it was over. There was a photographer at the prom, we all lined up and took our pictures in front of the themed background. Everyone’s pictures were basically the same. The main cost for prom was either your dress or tuxedo. There were no limos, no fancy dinners, no professional photographers, we even painted our own nails, applied our own makeup and fixed our own hair. Now it…
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Meal Planning – My Way
I have said it before. I am not good about meal planning. Our life is crazy most of the time. I rarely know if we are going to be home for supper or at least how many are going to be home. I have tried to plan out meals, but it usually doesn’t work out. I like to have easy meals that I can throw together quickly, that is just what works for our family, but I still like to cook fairly wholesome meals out of real food when possible. I have a few tricks that help me with this. I buy ground meat in the larger amounts and prepare…
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How I Save Money at Kroger
Kroger is one of my go to places to save money on groceries right now. I love that there are so many ways to save money there. There are free items, digital coupons, paper coupons, weekly sales, and fuel points. There may be more, but right now these are the main ways I save money at Kroger. We have one of the largest Kroger Marketplaces, when it was built, they said it was the largest Kroger in the world. There have been larger ones built since then. A Kroger Marketplace is unlike any other store we had around here. Not only is it a grocery store, but it has a…
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What’s the Deal at Aldi?
We didn’t have an Aldi locally until a couple of years ago. There was one an hour away and I had heard that people made special trips up there to buy groceries. I even went and looked around once when I was in that town for work. I wasn’t impressed because I didn’t recognize anything, I remember thinking it is just a lot of ‘off-brand’ stuff and I didn’t get a basket because I didn’t know they were outside. So I wasn’t excited when I heard we were getting one. I didn’t go to the grand opening or even visit there the first month or so. I am really not…
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Not Cheap, Just Frugal
I do not consider myself cheap, but I am frugal. I combine store sales, paper or online coupons and money back apps to save as much money as I can on items we use regularly. I stock up on items that we use a lot when there good sales, but things go on sale somewhat regularly so you really don’t have to buy too much at one time. I have limited storage space so I try to only buy enough to last us until the next sale comes along. It takes good organization to not only store these extra items, but to be able to find them when we need…
