Five Frugal Things

  Just five random frugal things I’ve done lately.
(A hat-tip to my friend Katy for the blog post theme.)

1. I got a Big Fat Check.

From Ebates, of course.

The name of their checks is always funny to me, because depending on how much shopping I’ve done or whether I’ve gotten any referrals, sometimes the Big Fat Check is kind of…not so big.

But I’ll take a $15 check anytime someone wants to send me one.   😉

By the way, if you’re an Ebates member, you might want to find two friends to refer, because if you do so before 9/30, you get $50.

Which is equivalent to a whole lot of shopping cashback.

(Incidentally, I do frequently find that TopCashBack has better cashback shopping rates.   But sometimes they don’t have a merchant I’m looking for, so then I revert to Ebates.)

2. I bought more bruised peaches.

There’s this produce stand near my house that almost always has a box of bruised peaches available at a discount.   A totally full box is $20, but when it’s less than full, they just kind of make up a price, and it’s usually ridiculously low.

The peaches are still so, so good, it would be crazy for me to buy the un-bruised ones.

Plus, when I’m done with the peaches, I bring the box back and they reuse it.

There is just nothing to dislike about this arrangement.

3. I returned a skirt.

This is not earth-shaking, but here you go:

My sister has this great skirt from Athleta, and when it went on sale, I ordered one too. Sadly, the leg openings of the shorts were too tight so off it went in exchange for a larger size.

The larger size fit my legs perfectly, but the the skirt was a bit too large in the hips which made it look kind of…not cute.

Apparently my hips and my legs are two different sizes?

The fit was close, and I almost decided to keep the skirt but then I realized it was sort of silly to pay $30+ for a skirt that didn’t fit perfectly.

Fortunately, I’d ordered the skirt when I ordered a swimsuit, which meant I qualified for free shipping, and Athleta offers free return and exchange shipping.   That means the whole skirt thing ended up costing me nothing except some time.

I really try to only add things I seriously love to my wardrobe because that helps me to avoid owning eleventy billion items of clothing.   So if something is a little iffy, I usually decide against it.

(Incidentally, this is even trickier to do at Goodwill because it’s easy to justify purchasing an almost-right piece of clothing because it’s only $3.   But even a $3 ill-fitting piece of clothing is a poor bargain because I won’t wear it that often and it’ll just take up space in my closet.)

4. I saved some sweet potatoes.

This past winter, I bought a bunch of organic sweet potatoes from a local farm, and somehow, the last of them never got used.

By this time they were very, um, not moist, so I peeled, boiled, and mashed them.

(I figured boiling would restore some of the long-gone moisture!)

And then I made a batch of pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, subbing the sweet potato for the pumpkin.

I actually think these muffins are even tastier with sweet potato than pumpkin.

I had enough sweet potato to freeze for a future second batch, which is good news for my children.

5. I organized without buying anything.

Sonia and Zoe’s closet was kinda out of control.   Basically, you couldn’t even see the floor, and the closet shelves were stuffed to the gills.

But they didn’t really need a new organizational system.

They just needed less stuff.

So we got rid of stuff.

Their closet still has the cheap wire shelving that no one lusts after, but by golly, you can see the floor now.

And there is space! For things!

Organization containers do need to be bought sometimes, but 95% of the time, I find that I can organize a space very nicely simply by getting rid of excess stuff and utilizing existing storage.

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Alrighty.   That’s it for me.   How about you?

If you’d like to join me, just comment listing five frugal things you’ve been up to lately.

(If you can’t think of five, 3 is totally ok. Or 4. Or 1.   Or 2.   We’re pretty flexible around here. )

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