I think handmade household items are going to make a comeback, and that’s good. Making things not only saves money, but in most cases you can make something of higher quality than what you’d find in the store.
Case in point: we have a very sturdy round braided rug made for us in the early 1980s by my grandmother. It’s still in great shape. Gram used to go to thrift stores and buy wool or polyester coats, pants and skirts that she could cut up into strips. Then she’d braid the strips and sew them in a circle. Most of the household items we bought in the 1980s have long since fallen apart, but not Gram’s rug.
Here’s an interesting articlethat explains how to make braided rugs. This would be a great creative project for older kids and teens, or for adults who’d rather not buy a Chinese-made rug that’s going to come apart in a few years.
It’s been probably twenty years since in-store bakeries became the rage in grocery stores. I remember walking into the store and smelling the wonderful aroma of freshly baked bread. I grabbed a bag of warm rolls and brought them home with anticipation.
But as good as they looked, they really didn’t have much taste. I tried that grocery store’s baked goods a few more times and finally decided that there was something they sprayed around the store that smelled like fresh bread, because the bread and rolls weren’t what was giving off such a great aroma.
Since then I’ve preferred my own baked goods. Several years ago, I got a bread machine as a gift. I hadn’t really wanted one, preferring to make my own bread the old-fashioned way, but once I tried the bread machine, I was hooked.
I especially liked the dough cycle: you could have the fun of shaping and baking the bread without the work of kneading the dough. And as far as I’m concerned, nothing smells as good as freshly baked homemade bread that tastes good, too.
At the grocery the other day, I saw a bag of dinner rolls for $2.49 in the bakery section. They didn’t look fresh, and in fact felt a bit hard. I thought $2.49 was a pretty steep price for day-old rolls. Those sad-looking rolls made me so glad to have my bread machine. I throw in a few ingredients in the morning, set the timer, and have lovely dough or even a baked loaf of bread when I want it at dinnertime.
I’ve had good luck with the recipes that came with my machine. But if you buy one secondhand, or are gifted with a used bread machine, you might want to visit this sitefor some good recipes.
BTW, I don’t use bread flour because it’s so expensive. I’ve had good luck with plain old (cheap) flour from Aldi’s. But if you’re picky about your bread, give bread flour a try.
Also, buying yeast in those tiny envelopes gets really expensive. Over at Sam’s Club, they sell two very large packages of yeast for less than $4. I freeze one and put the other in a Mason jar in the fridge, and it takes me quite a while to go through both. Definitely a money saver!
Many homeschooling moms want their children to learn to sew, but they can’t teach them because they themselves don’t know how to sew.
Yes, you can all learn together, but I think the process will go easier if Mom learns first!
There are several steps involved in learning how to sew. First, you need to learn to sew by hand. Stitching on a button by hand is easier for me than setting up the sewing machine, so I’m glad I can sew by hand. I was taught by my mother and grandmother. If you have neither of those, or (more likely) they don’t know how to sew by hand, you might want to inquire at your local fabric store to see if they offer lessons. Another good way is to find an online instructional video, like this one.
Next, you need to know how to use a sewing machine. Once again, you can ask a relative or a friend. My father actually taught me how to use a sewing machine. Being a mechanic, he could figure out any machine pretty quickly. And since he restored cars as a hobby, he had an old industrial sewing machine in his workshop that he used to make new roofs and seats for antique automobiles.
If you buy a sewing machine from a reputable dealer, free sewing machine lessons should be included in the deal. This is the best way to learn, because you’ll learn about your particular machine. This is important. The main reason people give up on sewing is that they get fed up fighting with their machine and trying to figure out why it isn’t working the way it’s supposed to work. It takes time to learn the idiosyncrasies of a given machine, but lessons from the place where you bought it can shorten that learning time.
Finally, you need to learn about using patterns and fabric. I learned from a sewing class I took at my local park district, and followed that up with Home Ec in junior high. (They don’t even offer sewing in most schools these days—what a shame!) Today, there may be classes at your local fabric, craft or quilt shop. You can also ask a friend who sews to teach you. You might even barter one of your skills for sewing lessons from someone you know in your neighborhood, church or social group.
The price of clothes has been cheap, relatively speaking, for the past several years. But as the standard of living in countries that manufacture those clothes rises, the prices will go up. Learning how to make and repair clothing is a skill that you’ll be glad to have in the future. Your kids may need that skill, too….learn to sew, then teach your children. Make sewing lessons part of your homeschooling routine, and you won’t be sorry!
Being able to use a sewing machine is such a gift. I learned to sew at the age of 12, and I can’t even imagine how much money it has saved me over my lifetime. I’ve made my own clothes as well as clothes for others. I have no idea how many window treatments I’ve made over the years.
Being a quilter, I’ve made dozens of quilt tops, including many that went to poor families in other countries after the ladies at my church and I added batting and backing to them, so I don’t even know where they are now.
It frustrates me when someone says, “I wish I could sew, but I can’t.” That’s just an excuse. Sewing is as easy as driving, and a lot safer.
Once you know how to use a sewing machine, you can save all sorts of money. We live in a society where most people pitch things and buy new instead of fixing what they have, but I think taking care of what you have is going to come back into style by necessity before much longer.
Think about your bath towels. You know how one side will come loose and get stringy? And then the strings get caught in the washer, which makes the situation worse? If you have a sewing machine, you can hem that side as soon as it starts to come apart so that your towels stay nice and you don’t have to replace them. All that takes is a straight seam…no big deal. But it saves money, because new towels aren’t cheap (at least they aren’t if you like them nice and thick like we do!)
What about hems that come apart on shirts or dresses? It’ll take longer to set up your machine than to sew a hem back up. My son is short, and even the shortest men’s jeans are long on him, so eventually the hems become frayed. My daughter can trim them and sew them pretty quickly on her sewing machine (a job that would take too long by hand and wouldn’t hold up nearly as well either).
Sometimes I use my sewing machine to make one thing into another. A while back I was out shopping and saw a set of three linen dishtowels on clearance for $4. One of the towels was striped, and the other two were in a coordinating print that really caught my eye. I have a pillow at home that had faded quite a bit, and I decided I’d like a new pillow out of those dishtowels, which I bought. I made a nice pillow cover out of the two matching ones, and use the striped one in my kitchen. My newly recovered pillow looks so pretty! Not bad for approximately $2.66 plus tax, and it’s very sturdy because dishtowels are made to get a lot of use.
I’m carrying on the “remaking” tradition from my grandmother, who was a single mom of four small children during the Great Depression. People sometimes gave her hand-me-downs, and she found that when she was given coats, they were women’s coats, not children’s coats, perhaps because the children had worn out their coats while the women took care of theirs.
In any case, she needed coats for her growing children much more than she needed coats for herself, so she accepted every woman’s coat she was offered, cut apart the pieces, and then laid out pattern pieces for kids’ coats on the cut-up coat pieces. She cut them out and sewed them together. In this way, her kids were always kept warm in nice, “new” coats and the only cost to her was her time.
(Once you’ve remade things a few times, it’s funny how you look at everything with an eye to how you could use it to make something. My grandma never did shake the remaking habit. By the time she was a great-grandma, she had begun buying up all the 1970s polyester pants she could find at garage sales and thrift stores. She cut them into strips and wove them into braided rugs. Let me tell you, they are indestructible. We have two that she made for us in the 1980s and they’re still holding up well.)
When I think of the frugal habits I’ve developed over the years, one thing that stands out is being able to re-use things, i.e. to make one thing into something else.
Some of that requires creativity. I’m somewhat creative but not overly so. My dh is much more creative than I am. When we’re trying to figure out how to avoid buying something we need, he’ll say “Why don’t you try using the such-and-such?”
For example, once he built a tall stand out of scrap pine to use as a display table for a garage sale we were having. After the sale was over, the stand sat in the garage for a few years, holding whatever we happened to put on it, until the year we made plans to remodel our kitchen.
I was thinking I wanted an island, but we were worried that we would just end up tripping on it. I was trying to find an inexpensive island in the sale ads for temporary use (the cheap ones on wheels that you can get on sale for $70) when Tim suggested using that pine stand in the garage. We cleaned it up, covered it with an old flannel-backed table cloth, and began using it as an island. It didn’t take long for us to discover that we loved having an island. When we remodeled the kitchen, he built me a beautiful island that I’ve loved ever since. But we wouldn’t have known that we wanted one for certain until he made a temporary island out of that pine stand (which also saved us the $70 research fee).
While I didn’t come up with that idea, I do know a good idea when I see one. I once had a neighbor, a lady probably 15 years older than me, who taught me a lot about frugality. For example, the first time I saw her home, I complimented her on the lovely sheers she had throughout the first floor. I was expecting her to answer as the rest of the women in the neighborhood would have: “Oh, I picked these up at Macy’s.”
But she surprised me. It turned out her sheers were custom made….by her. She’d gone to the thrift store and bought up all the white sheers she could find, which cost her just a few dollars. Then she remade them to fit her windows. How cool is that? She and I have both moved away from that neighborhood, but I still remember how clever she was to do that, and when I’m in thrift (i.e. resale) stores, I look at the linens and window treatments with the thought of “What can I make out of these?”
Of course, in the case of remaking window treatments, you need more than just a nearby thrift store. You need one of the frugal person’s most valuable abilities: knowing how to sew. More on that in upcoming posts!
Go to your wallet, take out two or three dollars and throw them out in the street.
Sounds silly, but that’s what you’re doing when you pitch leftovers.
Leftovers get a bad rap, but when you throw out leftovers, while they’re fresh or once they’ve gone bad, you’re throwing away your food dollars.
I think leftovers are wonderful. I often double a recipe I’m making for dinner and we eat it two nights in a row. My husband doesn’t mind (he loves home cooking), and it means I only have to reheat dinner the next night instead of making something from scratch. Since I work at home, I’m always looking for easy, economical ways to make dinner, and leftovers fill the bill.
Yesterday we had a wonderful rump roast with mashed potatoes and peas for dinner. Afterwards, there were no veggies left over but quite a bit of roast. So I cubed the leftover roast, added the drippings, and put the cubes in the fridge.
Tonight I nuked some potatoes, then sliced them and fried them in a little oil with some leftover onion slices. I added half of the beef cubes and stir-fried them until they were hot. Topped with Trader Joe’s organic ketchup, it was a delicious dinner.
I put the rest of the beef cubes into the freezer. The next time I make noodle soup, I’ll toss them in, along with any leftover celery, carrots or onion I may have sitting in the fridge at that time.
I do that a lot with meat. If I’m oven-frying chicken pieces, I like to cook extra (the family packs are always a better price anyways) and freeze the uneaten chicken after stripping it off the bones. Then it just waits in the freezer to be added to soup or chicken tortellini salad.
Sometimes I forget what I have left over in the fridge. I used to be afraid to use old leftovers because I wasn’t sure just how old they were. But I got in the habit of writing down menus ahead of time, and now I just look at the calendar to see which day we had the pork chops, or whatever. I’m pretty strict about leftovers; once they’re four days old, I’m afraid of them. So I make a real effort to use them up before the fourth day.
Often, I find weird odds and ends in the fridge and wonder how to combine them. An omelette serves this purpose pretty well. All sorts of veggies or meat taste good in a cheese omelette. A little leftover cheese is good in muffins or bread. A couple of lonely hot dogs can be sliced and stirred into a pan of homemade cornbread. Mmmm….there’s never any leftovers of that stuff!
On the rare occasions when we go out to eat, we always bring the leftover part of our dinner home with us. Restaurant portions are so huge these days that you can’t finish dinner anyway, but they taste even better as the next day’s lunch. I’m not embarrassed to ask for a take-home box. If anyone who sees me with it thinks I must be cheap or tacky, that’s only fair, because I think people like that are stuck-up and very likely not debt-free like we are. ;)
Whether your leftovers come from the fridge, the freezer or the restaurant, the most important thing to remember about leftovers is that they’re like money…if you lose track of them, it costs you. Leftovers can really stretch your food dollar by making sure you don’t waste anything.
I think it’s sad that today has become a retail event. It’s just one more reminder of the commercialization of Christmas.
While flipping through the sale flyers stuffed in this week’s newspapers, I was struck by how many furniture stores are having sales. I guess the idea is to impress your holiday guests when they come over by having new, up-to-date furniture.
I’m not one to update furniture much. I’m emotionally attached to most of our furniture (ok, not the sofa or loveseat, but pretty much everything else). Also, I just can’t see paying good money to buy furniture made in China when I already have good furniture made in America.
But I understand that change is good. Even I, sentimental and cheap, like a change of decorating sometimes. But my husband freaks out at the idea of change, especially if it costs a lot of money.
Some years back I discovered a book that satisfied the urge for change without replacing the furniture. It’s called Use What You Have Decorating by Lauri Ward.
I found the book long before real estate staging came into vogue, but both use the same room design principles. I was not familiar with those principles until I found this book. It taught me that the “push all the furniture up against the walls” decorating method I was raised with is definitely not the way to do things. Instead, Ward suggests better ways to rearrange your furniture and accent pieces.
This book taught me basic room design principles, and gave me the courage to use them. Of course, my husband doesn’t like it, because it advocates change. But I think it’s a great book!
I avidly collect recipes, far more than I’ll ever use. But it’s an addiction, and every time I make something new that my family loves, my addiction is reinforced.
Some of my very best recipes have come from the Internet, specifically from Lucianne.com. Lucianne doesn’t allow recipe sharing very often, because her site is intended for the discussion of politics and culture. But every rare once in a while, she permits a weekend recipe thread, and people share some fantastic recipes.
The thread runs only for today and tomorrow, and I imagine it will probably stay up for just a few days afterward. So don’t wait….pop in there soon and check back, as people will probably add to it all through the weekend
The bad news about the economic instability of our economy as well as those of other countries continues. Scary stuff, and it can make you feel pretty helpless. But there are things you can do.
First off, stop spending money on things you don’t absolutely need and try to save money wherever you can. I know many people believe that in times like these, you should spend today’s dollars because they’ll be worth less tomorrow. Beans! There’s nothing like the feeling of having money set aside for a rainy day.
Here are a few ways to save right now:
Pay for necessities with cash and put the change in a jar.
Take the amount you save by using coupons and put that in a jar.
Brown-bag it and put the money you would have spent for drive-up fast food in a jar.
Skip the Starbucks and put that money in a jar.
Pretty soon you should have a nice, full jar. Now, start with a new jar. In the past, I would have suggested you take that full jar to the bank and deposit it. But I’m thinking it’s a good idea to have some cash on hand at home. There are some shaky banks out there (check yours here), and it sure wouldn’t hurt to keep some of your money nearby….like in your house.
Today at the grocery I made a major killing. I spent $25 and my receipt showed I saved $28. Of course, that’s money saved off of full price, which I almost never pay. But it’s still savings. Shopping the sales combined with using coupons is always wise.
Buying in quantity when on sale is another no-brainer. I now have three 32-oz. jars of Miracle Whip Light in the house. At 99 cents each, they were a great deal. They’ll keep for a while, so I don’t mind having a few extra. I use them for homemade potato, tuna or egg salads, which are far cheaper homemade than what they cost at the grocery store deli counter.
Homemade….that’s another thing you can do in these unstable times. Make your own meals! You pay so much more for take-out, and plenty just for prepared foods and mixes. Case in point: the guy ahead of me in line at the grocery was buying a dinky container of seafood salad (surimi and pasta with dressing). The little one-pound container had a deli label on it that said $5.94. Good grief! You can easily make a huge batch of that stuff for less than $5, especially when you’ve got the items waiting for you in your pantry and fridge since you bought them on sale. A box of pasta for 69 cents, some ranch dressing mixed with mayo (maybe $1 worth) and a package of Crab Delights on sale for $1.50 (and even cheaper if you buy the store brand), plus a little diced celery….what does that total, maybe $3.50? And you’ll have enough to feed eight people.
Yet another thing you can do to save money: Don’t put anything on your credit card unless you can absolutely, definitely pay it off at the end of the month (credit card interest is a tax on spendthrifts!) Why even bother buying things on sale if you’re going to put that 14-25% tax on it? Ditto for buying furniture on time….no payments until 2010! Big deal…that’s how they rope you in, and later on you learn the interest has been piling up all that time, waiting for that first payment two years down the road. Don’t do it! If you must have furniture, if it’s a real need (not a want!), buy it used. Better yet, put out the word among family and friends that you need a new table or sofa, and maybe you’ll get a freebie. This is no time to be dropping hundreds or thousands of dollars on new stuff.
If you’re like me and you live a no debt/cash only lifestyle, be patient. Before long, overextended people will put their plasma tv’s and leather sofas on Craig’s List for next to nothing, because it’s going to be the only way they can raise cash. Their credit is tapped out and they need some money. The signs are already there. I’ve been looking at fifth wheel RV’s and there are some great deals out there!
Those are just a few areas where you can save money. There are many more. Go to the library and find yourself some books on saving money. If nothing else, use interlibrary loan to snag some of the classics written during the recession of the early 1980s, or one of Amy Dacyczyn’s books of the 90s (they all have “Tightwad Gazette” in their titles.)*
The more techniques you learn for saving money, the more empowered you’ll be, and the bad financial news we’re hearing on a daily basis these days won’t be quite so scary. This is not the time to sit in the corner and whimper. It’s time to take action!
* In case your library can’t get them for you, here’s Amy’s wonderful book plus some more that will help you:
Our public library has a table where people can share magazines. I love this! It’s like a treasure hunt. You never know what you’ll find. I also like leaving my own magazines there instead of throwing them in the recycling bin for the garbage man.
This week I found the September issue of Good Housekeeping. Years ago, I subscribed to GH, but over the years its editorial mix changed to more of a celebrity/decorating/beauty type of magazine, and I stopped getting it.
But this issue had a few useful things in it, including a time vs. money list of grocery store purchases. Some examples weren’t that impressive. For instance, if you make your own ground beef patties instead of buying them preshaped, you’ll save 13 cents per patty (92 cents vs. $1.05 each). Using dried beans instead of canned beans will save you just 15 cents per serving (10 cents vs. 25 cents). Shredding your own mozzarella only saves 8 cents per serving.
But most of the examples made it clear that you can save a decent amount of money by shunning convenience (all price examples are per serving):
Romaine (head) vs. precut Romaine: 25 cents vs. 97 cents
Whole carrots vs. preshredded carrots: 25 cents vs. 48 cents
Baking potatoes vs. frozen steak fries: 20 cents vs. 43 cents
Jello cooked pudding mix vs. Jello refrigerated pudding: 20 cents vs. 62 cents
Celery (in a bunch) vs. precut celery sticks: 29 cents vs. 62 cents
Fresh green beans vs. fresh green beans in a microwave/steam-in bag: 37 cents vs. $1.33
My personal favorite is the brown rice example:
Raw brown rice (cooks in 30-40 minutes) vs. precooked brown rice in microwaveable pouch: 19 cents vs. $1.10.
And that’s per serving, so for a family of four that’s a savings of $3.64, just on rice!
(Here’s another article from Good Housekeeping about saving money when grocery shopping.)
Sometimes I hear from people who would homeschool if they didn’t have to work full-time. This post is written especially for them.
We bought our first house when we weren’t much more than newlyweds. We were the only people in the real estate office when we made our offer. The reason nobody but Tim and I were buying houses is that the prime rate was in the double digits. But we didn’t know any better, which is how we ended up with a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at 13½%.
But it all worked out, because we only paid $65,000 for the house. A few years later, rates dropped and we refinanced for 10½%. Our house payment dropped $250 per month, and we used the difference to buy a new car. (Nowadays, rates are only around 6%, but houses cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you can’t change that amount by refinancing.) So despite our ignorance, things worked out very well for us. We sold that house seven years later for almost twice what we paid for it, and came out with a chunk of change that we put on the next house. We prepaid on the mortgages of both houses, which is how we ended up completely debt-free before we were 45.
But I digress. Back when we applied for that 13½% mortgage, I was appalled to learn that my income could not be counted on our mortgage application. At that time, loan companies only counted the husband’s income, figuring the wife would eventually quit work to have children, because that’s how most families did it back then. Nevertheless, I was insulted. Why, I had a degree. I had a good job. How old-fashioned to leave out my income!
I’m a little smarter now. Looking back, I can see that once mortgage companies started looking at both husbands’ and wives’ incomes when determining whether to approve a mortgage loan, home prices began to skyrocket. Eventually, prices got so high that most couples, and particularly first-time homebuyers, could not afford to buy a house with only one income. This contributed to the deterioration of family life, for sure, but it also made life more financially difficult for those who didn’t make above average incomes.
That second income, while increasingly necessary, has a very high opportunity cost, because it means there’s no one home to run the household. Now, I’m not saying all women should go back home. But having one person home, male or female, to run the household makes for a much more livable home while easing financial pressures.
How can this be if the family has lost one of its incomes? Well, home-cooking means better nutrition for less money. Cleaning the house means saves the cost of paying someone else to do it. Doing the laundry at home saves on dry-cleaning costs. The stay-at-home person can shop for the best deals on food and supplies, saving money on a regular basis. That person can also do yardwork, thus saving on lawn crew costs. The person staying home does all these things, thus saving money, plus that person saves even more money by not having the expense of a work wardrobe, lunches out, or paying taxes on their income. (The second income often increases the family’s taxes substantially).
These advantages become even more obvious once children come along. The stay-at-home parent saves the family the hefty cost of daycare. Kids raised at home instead of the daycare center pick up fewer bugs, keeping medical bills at a minimum. Since there’s a parent at home during the day doing household chores, the working parent has time in the evenings to enjoy the children instead of trying to do all the chores the couple who both work find when they come home in the evenings.
The girl who “taught the class” was young and had a good sense of humor. She worked quickly and prepared nine or ten recipes in about two hours, with several breaks in between. We were given copies of the recipes, which was helpful. She also demonstrated some different techniques that I was aware of but my daughter was not, so I’m glad she had the chance to be there. (Last night she successfully made the chocolate lava cake recipe we saw demonstrated that night…were they good!)
The best thing about the evening was the chance to spend some time alone with my daughter. But the program itself was a bit disappointing. The highly promoted free samples turned out to be a packet of seasoned bread crumbs, another seasoning packet and some plastic bags for steaming veggies in the microwave. There were a few coupons and a lot of ads. There were no samples of the recipes demonstrated. All of the food made that night was given away on serving dishes as door prizes.
Oh, yes, the door prizes. There were many of them, and they were handed out throughout the evening. But it seemed as though quite of few of them went to people sitting together. In fact, my daughter counted five prizes going to people sitting together in one short row, which seemed pretty coincidental in a packed auditorium of about 700 people. Most of the door prize entries were not drawn out of the bin right before being awarded (we couldn’t see most being taken out at all), so we suspected a bit of collusion.
The worst part of the evening was not the fault of the program’s producers. I got there thirty minutes before showtime but the only available seats were way in back. Soon after I sat down, four young adults sat down two rows behind me. They spent the entire first half of the program talking, and were they ever awful. The things they said about our country, certain presidential and vice-presidential candidates and even some of the people in the audience were sickening. I kept giving them the evil eye, but they kept talking. I had to pray for self-control. God answered my prayer in another way: they never came back after intermission. But I’ll tell you, it was depressing to hear how crass and depraved some young people are today. More than ever, we need to pray for our country.
by Linda Kelley. Another interesting book on this topic is 
by Andy Dappen.