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 ❤️

Bargains and sewing

Hello everyone, 

The only bargain shopping I’ve done this week was a trip to CVS.  

Before I went,  I knew I would get deals but my low totals surprised me a lot.  

Some of my coupons were not attaching so the manager, who was training a new worker, checked me out in 3 transactions.  

I only paid $3 total for everything! I started with $28 in CVS Extracarebucks and coupons.  

I left with $13 in Extracarebucks for next time and all this merchandise.  

Around the first of November, our big freezer was just so full.  We decided to use it up before we did much meat rebuying and restocking.  

We’ve done a good job of eating at home and using what we had. 

Coupons.com recently had a Wild Mikes pizza Coupon for buy 2 get 1 free.  We had never even heard of them.  I found them at Walmart for $5.74 each and bought 3.  

Well, they are really good frozen pizzas! They are bigger than most frozen pizzas too.  

We liked them so much, I asked my daughter to print some coupons too.  

And now our freezer still has a good amount of meat, vegetables and 14 pizzas 😍 

No, we don’t eat pizza everyday.  But we do eat almost all our meals at home so I expect we will eat a pizza every week or so.    If we have grandchildren over,  they all like pizza just fine.  

I don’t know if this Coupon is still available to print on coupons.com though.  

But if you like other frozen pizzas or salsa,  both those foods Always are on good sales the week before the Super Bowl in the USA.  

My latest sewing was a new bedspread.  

Our bed is extra big and tall and I haven’t been able to find a bedspread even close to the size it need 130x108 inches.  

Aldi has these plush blankets for $16.99 this week.  I bought 2 king size ones and it took almost all of the blanket fabric.  It was a fairly easy sewing job and I’m so happy with it.  The bedspread is soft as velvet and it will launder easily in our washing machine.  

Ours is the sage green color.  They also come in a pretty white and denim blue navy. I had a hard time deciding which blankets to buy as I liked them all.  

Monday list and our family Christmas party

Good morning everyone,  

I’m feeling the need to get back to my organized habits so I made a pretty to do list for this week.  

As always,  it’s just notebook paper on a clipboard, decorated with rubber stamps.  It hangs in my kitchen where it’s easy to keep track of and check off tasks as they get done.  

For several reasons,  we were finally able to celebrate Christmas with our family party.  It was in our home Friday night, 15 adults and 8 children. 

To make it easier,  we tried having the meal catered.  I ordered it from Chipotle and it turned out to be a great decision.  I selected a meal for 20, which is the smallest size meal they cater, and I upgraded it to 3 meats instead of the standard 2.  

It included everything we needed- rice, beans, meats, chips, tortillas and shells, so many toppings along with the warming stands, utensils, bowls,  instructions.....they even included matches for the Sterno heaters.  

The food was all delicious.  

Clean up was easy and there were a few leftovers that we enjoyed for the next few days.  

Yes it was more expensive to have takeout than scratch cooking but for the price, it was worth it to us to be able to enjoy our family party instead of being busy and tired with cooking.  We won’t do it every family meal but for big events like this,  we will have catering again.  

It was busy, fun party and I took only a very few photos.  

Here are our 3youngest grands enjoying the fresh fruit tray that my brother and his girlfriend brought.   

RJ is 1,  Charlie and Jackson are 2.  

Eating fruit is fun, especially when you have a fork in each hand like Charlie or get to use the tongs like Jackson.  

Lots of sewing -gift bags and curtains

Hello everyone, 

I had a good size stack of Christmas themed fabric, so for the last few weeks,  I’ve been sewing up reusable, fabric gift sacks, to wrap future Christmas gifts in.  

I used only fabric and trim I already had.  

They are assorted sizes, since some of my fabric was scraps, I let the fabric decide what size each bag should big,  

I think there are 27 finished bags, from small to extra large.  

When I put gifts in them,  I will tie them shut with ribbon or twine.  

Tuesday morning,  this is what our breakfast nook and..........

Living room looked like.    

I started with these older Waverly Vintage rose tablecloths.  

And by Wednesday evening, the rooms like this..........

I used the Vintage Rose to make curtains, a short table runner and 2 bench covers.  

The new prints on the wall were free printables found via Pinterest.  

The dining room got a new curtain, sewn with a huge length of sheer fabric.  (Most of my fabric stash was gifted to me, either from my mom, from some friends and some from my Dad’s yardsale purchases.  I’m guessing this sheer fabric was in a fabric lot my Dad bought) 

It was kind of pain to sew with but it made such a full curtain that it is fairly private even though the fabric is sheer.  

In the living Room,  the big white tree was packed away.  The heavy curtains were swapped out for the muslin ones that were hanging in the dining room.   

I added a table top white tree with winter themed ornaments

We still have wrapped presents, because for several reasons, our big family Christmas will be here this weekend.  

While I was swapping things around,  I put these 2 pictures that my mother embroidered about 60 years ago in the Living room.   The deer and horses are all satin stitch with embroidery floss and just beautiful. 

Little Ducky is just fine.  He’s grown a little but not much so I’m guessing he may be a small dog even when full grown.  

He is very fond of his toys and amazes us that he already plays fetch with that big taggie ball.  

My father in law thinks we should of named him “two socks”