I admire the devout frugalists who can darn socks, feed people for $1 a week, and otherwise cause physical pain to the consumer system by not buying more than necessities. I am not that strong. I admit it! I am a person of creature comforts. But I do love nifty websites and pre-cooked soup.
I have had a subscription to bigdates.com for about a year or so and I think it's pretty useful. (No referral links here. I just think it's cool.)
I love sending birthday cards and emails and such, but my previous method of keeping track of things was a 2002 Star Trek calendar. I know that the calendar (bought for $1 in February 2002 and used for 3 years) is the frugal answer. But I kept forgetting to pull it out, and I felt like an awful mean person for forgetting. I will just face up to it: I am not that organized. So now with bigdates emailing me, I magically appear organized! Hooray!
You can check out BigDates if you are so inclined.. It's about $6 a year and I think it's worth it. My dad suggested for my new business venture that I send out birthday postcards and I'll probably be using this to track it too.
Another thing that I probably should make myself but don't is soup. Yes, I love soup. I know that cream of potato soup is probably the cheapest thing in the world to make a gallon of, but for my part I would rather just pull out one of the umpteen cans of Chunky soup or Campbell's Select that live in my desk drawer and eat something exotic and bad for me that I would totally mess up if I tried to cook it. I tried to make hot and sour soup (my favorite) a couple of times in high school and it came out as vinegar and raggedy mushrooms soup. Ech. Also in the food category is chicken salad - it just takes SO LONG to cook the chicken and THEN make the chicken salad from the ripped up chicken. At least with tuna salad you just take it out of the can and mix it up.
I used to try and make my own clothes - basically the farthest I got was skirts. As in, drawstring-waist, floor length, non fitted skirts. This is a really great invention for wearing over pajama pants to keep yourself warm in the winter. I got the idea from the Malaysian girls at college who wore a full length dress over their clothes (because it is much warmer in Malaysia than Cleveland and they were always cold.) But you do stay pretty toasty with your own personal air bubble of warm air around your legs. I haven't really tried to make anything in a few years although I have a bunch of fabric for a few projects in the closet.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
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2 comments:
I've realized that although it is cheaper to eat made-from-scratch foods than pre-fab foods, it is an even bigger savings to eat pre-fab foods as an alternative to eating out. There are times in a working person's life when you are either going to pick up take-out or open a can. The can is almost always cheaper.
The other pre-fab thing we keep on hand in the winter is frozen pizza. We can feed all 3 of us for about $4, and we usually add a cut up vegetable to the top so it's healthier. That is way cheaper than ordering take-out pizza.
Yeah, the one benefit of the canned or frozen foods is that if you start paying attention every week, you can spot a coupon and a sale to combine and get the stuff REALLY cheap! Nothing better than fast, easy AND cheap food that's bad for you. MM-mm!
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