Stretching our dollars

With just a little prep work and planning,  our dollars seem to last a longer. 

One thing we do is spend cash for most things bought locally.  

This is the monthly cash I’ll use for groceries, my spending money,  miscellaneous expenses and if we go out to eat.  

The $200 is to buy our monthly card at Walmart.  We use that card for gasoline.  This method works best for us as in our town,  Walmart has the cheapest gas and the stations are very convenient to our home.  Having the card means we can pay quickly at the pump without the hassle of going to the window 2 times as in a cash purchase.  

My husband also has spending money but he doesn’t keep his in a cute envelope with a bird on it.  😂

And no,  I don’t carry all this cash with me everywhere I go.  I take what I think I will need and the rest is at home, usually in a safe.  

I planned to shop for a few groceries, but before I made my shopping list,  I looked in the fridge and made a list of the fresh produce we still had and that I need to plan the next several meals around.  

This list is on the front of our fridge to keep me reminded what to use. 

Then I made a shopping list.  

I divided it out with which products I planned to buy at each store.  I went to Dollar Tree, Aldi and Walmart.  All 3 stores are close together and none are far from our home so this multiple store shopping is not as time consuming as it may sound.  

Below are 3 grocery items I like to buy at Dollar Tree.  

I’ve blogged about this shelf stable milk from Utah before. 

The 4 pack of Dannon yogurts are a favorite of my grands and much cheaper at DT than other grocery stores.  

The coffee is a 6 ounce bag.  My husband really likes it as he like plain, black, basic coffee.  I don’t drink coffee so I can’t  give you my feelings on it.  Our son in law  has drank a lot of fancy coffee from coffee shops and he says this DT coffee is good.  

And in case you don’t know,  everything at Dollar Tree costs $1 or less.  

One big way we don’t spend much is we rarely eat out.  We just aren’t crazy about most restaurant food or the restaurant experience.  

Even on our trip to California,  we only ate at 3 California restaurants during the 5 days we were there.  And we ate a couple of airports meals as we had some layovers.  

I’ve been doing this careful budgeting for a long time and for us,  it has paid off.  

If you have a good method,  I hope you’ll share it.  

The last month or so............

edited - so many typos!

Hello everyone 

I didn’t mean to take a month off from blogging.  We are all fine and I’ll show you some of the things we’ve been up 

Our new puppy Ducky is growing and we enjoy him so much.  He had a few health problems when we got him but those have cleared up.  

We think he is cute as can be ❤️

I have slowed down on couponing, partly because of winter weather and mostly because we are just stocked up from previous couponing deals.  And that is a good situation to have.  

I only went to CVS once, and that was because some of my Extracarebucks were going to expire.  

Below - I got 4 boxes of Lipton black tea- my favorite 

Physicians formula foundation

2 bags of popcorn for grands to snack on

2 bags of cashews 

After coupons and Extracarebucks, I spent $3.84 cash and saved 91% 😍

I left with a $7 extracarebuck for future deals. 

I went to 1 thrift store this month.  

I bought this brand new Brighton bag for $3. It almost matches our breakfast nook curtains.  

The black and white checks are  3 yards of 60 inch wide woven fabric,  I don’t think it’s wool but if feels almost like wool.  $5

The green netting was .25 and I 'll use it to make bathroom scrubbers for cleaning. 

One freebie I did and I’m pretty it is still available is for a free glass spray bottle,  handy if you make any homemade cleaners.  

I’m pretty sure it is USA only.   Just use the link to sign up,  no payment information is asked for 

17NINETY.COM/SPRAY

I never switched our little white tree from winter decorations to Valentines 

But I did just change it to St. Patrick’s Day.  

I had a few decorations and I printed off a few more free printables found on Pinterest.  

It was fun to work with glitter and glue 

Our granddaughter’s school was closed for a couple of days because of a gas leak.  She went to work with her dad one day and one day she stayed with us.  

She helped grandpa start some seeds for his spring garden.

The biggest thing during the past month was my husband and I flew to California.  

We went to see a friend graduate from Marine Corps boot camp.  It was huge ceremony and so special to see all the traditions at MCRD in San Diego.  My husband graduated there in 1975 and went to Recruiters school there in 1986.  

We stayed in a beach cottage aboard Camp Pendleton and we spent much of time seeing places where we lived, worked and shopped way back when we were stationed there.  

This is a base home we lived in for 3 years.  

And another home we were in for 1 year.
  

There are not many Quonset huts left aboard Camp Pendleton 

This was cove, protected by jetties on both sides  just outside our beach cottage 

Inside our cottage......

And our view every evening

It’s been a mostly good month ❤️