frugal hacks

Today’s frugal win: Deal-stacking.

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DF wanted to see the Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcast of “Lohengrin,” but also second-guessed that wish. The $25 ticket wasn’t so bad when you consider the opera lasted a little over five* hours, but still…And then there was the popcorn and cold drink that he’d surely need to handle five-plus hours of Wagner. He was on the fence until I suggested a few frugal hacks.

Here are the (many) elements of today’s frugal win:

Senior discount. He got $2 off for being old.

Movie Club. This subscription deal at Cinemark gives me one free movie a month plus a concessions discount. I asked the cashier to apply one of my free movie credits to the Met Opera ticket, which lowered the price from $23 to $10.75.

Ibotta gift card. I redeemed a $20 Cinemark card from my Ibotta account. (For more on Ibotta and other frugal hackery, see “Rewards programs FTW!”)  

Cinemark coupon. I got a $1-off concessions coupon by cashing in 25 of my Cinemark rewards points (which you get each time you buy tickets and food).

Movie Club discount. I get 20 percent off concessions purchases with membership.

Once all the discounts and the gift card had been applied, the tab had shrunk to just $1.45.  Now you can see why he decided to go.

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Low- or no-spend February 2023: If you give a mouse some icing…

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During the final week of the low- or no-spend February, I did what I did the first week: spent money. It started out very small and got a lot bigger – but not much more expensive. I coped by:

  • Using a gift card from shopping apps/rewards programs, and
  • Reminding myself, again, that it was low– or no-spend February, not “don’t you dare” February

Here’s how it all began: While doing a little Shopkicking (see shopping apps/rewards programs link above), my eye was drawn to a clearance-colored shelf tag. Turned out the store had cake icing (which some of you know as “frosting,” but I’m from South Jersey) for 25 cents a tub. I double-checked to see if a digit had fallen off the sign but nope, it was 25 cents.

I couldn’t not buy it at that price. And as soon as it was in my hands, I remembered a reader named Wendy, one of the recipients of this blog’s Giving Cards partnership. She used her $20 gift card to buy cake mix and icing, packaged them with disposable cake pans and birthday candles she already had, and dropped them at a food bank.

If you give a mouse some 25-cent icing, she’s going to want cake mix. Then she’ll want candles to make the celebration a little brighter. And what about a birthday card? Every mouse wants one of those.

Referring, of course, to the “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” books. (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items purchased through my links.) 

 

I decided to make a pair of birthday party kits to give away on the Buy Nothing Facebook page. To do that, I’d need to buy the aforementioned cake mixes and candles. The mixes were on sale, two for $3, so not too bad. The candles were zero dollars out of pocket because I cashed in some Shopkick scrip. Finally, I added birthday cards from my card stash and put the two kits up for grabs.

But that wasn’t quite the end of the story.

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Low- or no-spend February 2023, Weeks 2 and 3. (I’m back.)

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Running a little late, obviously. I was already a bit tardy with the low- or no-spend February challenge update when a stomach bug made me almost completely work-avoidant. Many quarts of hydration and loads of hours of sleep later, I am much healthier. But catching up on belated assignments meant missing a week.

While mildly ill, I was reminded yet again that sickness means either spending way too much (medical co-pays, prescriptions, special foods) or feeling too crummy to spend much at all.

This time around it was the latter, fortunately. I was also reminded that I live in a low-maintenance prepper paradise where just about anything I needed was already in hand (and likely bought on sale or at Costco). Powerade? We got it. Canned chicken soup? Ditto. Generic ibuprofen PM, so I could sleep for 12 hours at a stretch? You bet.

That sleep was some of the coziest ever, thanks to the brand-new-to-us down comforter  whose frugal purchase was detailed in the first roundup. Reading some of the comments on that piece, I was impressed by a couple of readers’ stirring tales of thrift.

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Unclaimed funds: Look for them!

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Recently an acquaintance was contacted by a company that specializes in finding unclaimed property. If she would authorize them to act in her name, they’d make sure she got the money – minus their 10 percent finder’s fee. She wondered if this were legit or some kind of scam.

Apparently there’s some kind of software that matches unclaimed funds to last known addresses. If even half the folks contacted respond with, “Sure, go ahead,” that company stands to make a lot of money.

But why give it away without at least trying to get it yourself?

In about 60 seconds I was able to search online and tell her that yes, the state is holding a bunch of money for you. And while I was in there, I learned that both DF and I were also owed some unclaimed funds.

Not a lot of money: just $19.71. But as someone who picks up found coins, the chance to get almost 20 unexpected bucks sounded pretty good. And as you can see from the illustration above, that money is now in my bank account instead of the state of Washington’s.

Not sure how much DF will be getting, because he’s still waiting for the results. However, the acquaintance was owed more than two grand. If that company hadn’t reached out, all three of us would still be owed money. But this way we get to keep it instead of forking over a 10 percent fee.

You, too, might be owed money – so why not look for it? Here’s how.

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Low- or no-spend February 2023: Week 1.

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(Surviving and Thriving has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Surviving and Thriving and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses and recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.) Let me say this upfront: I spent money. Before you … Read more

Pinto bread: A weekly beans story.

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Earlier this month I mentioned a frugal challenge called “weekly beans.” DF and I have vowed to make beans the focus of at least one meal a week. In part that’s because of inflation, which is scaring our frugal pants off right now. Mostly, though, it’s because we have so many beans in storage.

Sure, they’ll keep indefinitely (or what passes for indefinitely at our ages). But why have them, so why not eat them? Especially since they were bought at a lower price than they go for now, and since they’re good for us, and since they’re so darned tasty?

The week after that post we used the seasoned black beans from the freezer for rice bowls and burritos. The last few spoons of beans went into a soup made from boiling bag broth, to add some additional heft (and nutrition) to the carrots, potatoes, onions and homegrown celery.

Last week I announced that I would cook a few cups of pinto beans. Most would go into the freezer for future chili. But some would go into a recipe that I couldn’t get out of my brain: pinto bean bread.

Once I saw that, I couldn’t un-see it. The same is true of things like ketchup cookies and Kool-Aid pickles. It isn’t just a good idea to try these things. It’s the law.

Pinto bean bread isn’t a new thing, but it was certainly new to me. This particular recipe came from a blog called A Farm Girl in the Making. The blogger, Ann Accetta-Scott, called it a “stick-to-your-bones and fill you up kinda recipe.”

She’s not wrong.

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The birthday pear fiasco. (Free recipe inside!)

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Every year my daughter sends me a box of Harry & David pears for my birthday. The sweetness and juiciness of this fruit defies description. I look forward to them every year because you just can’t get pears like this in Anchorage. This year’s delivery was a little different, because the pears were delivered…frozen.

Not because they sat all day on the temps-in-the-teens porch, either. The delivery guy put the box directly into my hands. But when I opened up the gift, I found a batch of pearsicles.

Somewhere along the way, the fruit had encountered too-low temperatures – and there’s plenty of those on the Last Frontier. That’s never happened before with a Harry & David’s delivery.

As any savvy consumer would do, I phoned the company. Listened to the apologies, accepted a new delivery date for a new box of fruit.

And as any good frugalist would do, I wondered if I could salvage the old box. So I sliced one open and took a tentative nibble: hard and not sweet at all. Not surprising, since pears are picked under-ripe and allowed to develop to their full potential when customers want them.

While putting the pear’s core into the boiling bag, I decided that the rest of the fruit would not follow. I invented a new dessert* instead.

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Soup of the evening.

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DF was an alchemist this morning. Pulling containers and bags of stuff from the fridge and freezer, he filled the crockpot with:

Two kinds of broth (chicken-vegetable and seasoned pinto bean)

The drippings from a chicken he’d cooked on the Weber

Leftover pork loin (bought deeply discounted, of course)

Chopped-up garlic scapes (from the 2022 garden)

Diced onions

A handful of red and yellow pepper chunks (from the produce section’s “ugly but still good” shelf and cut up to freeze)

Homegrown celery (frozen), carrots and potatoes

The slow cooker began to emit a marvelously savory aroma as the day wore on. A little after 5 p.m., DF sliced up some of his easy rustic bread and announced that dinner was served. Outside it was 13 degrees and snowy, but indoors it was all warmth, comfort, and food that was prepared and shared with love.

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Extreme frugality: Deal eyes.

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The first Tuesday of every month is a standing date for DF and me: “Senior Day,” when folks over the age of 55 get 10 percent off all Kroger brands. In keeping with our extreme frugality ethos, we cruised the entire store to look for special deals.

And boy, did we find one. The price was so startling that we did double and then triple takes: 1½-pound boxes of Kroger breakfast sausage links for 49 cents.

What made the deal extra-surprising is that the 1½-pound boxes of Kroger breakfast sausages right next to them cost $4.99 each. Examining the extreme-frugality version, we saw the reason for the startling differences in price: The cheaper sausage needed to be used or frozen that very day.

Fortunately, we now have two freezers: My niece replaced her 5-cubic-foot model with a much bigger deep-freeze, and gave us the old one. DF and one of his sons had picked it up just two days before.

So we bought a lot of sausage, including five boxes for my niece and her kids. This being Senior Day and the sausage being a Kroger product, we even got an additional discount. (Sort of. More on this below.)

The moral of the story: If you want to practice extreme frugality, you need to develop what I call “deal eyes.”

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Life hack: Baking soda as oven cleaner.

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While baking pie* recently I smelled something burning. My initial thought was that bits of crust had fallen onto the cookie sheet under the pie tins. Nope. The smell was from the floor of the oven, where a now-carbonized remnant of a previous meal** continued to smolder. Time for some oven cleaner.

DF offered to take care of it. I agreed, and suggested a very simple way to do this. No need for a commercial cleanser or the oven-cleaning cycle as long as we had baking soda on hand.

He was unfamiliar with this particular life hack, so I explained it to him:

  • Cover the burned-on stuff completely with baking soda.
  • Sprinkle water atop the soda until it’s fairly damp (but not soupy).
  • Let it sit for a bunch of hours (for me, that’s usually overnight).
  • Wipe it up.
  • Rinse thoroughly.

Easy on, easy off*** – could it really be that simple? 

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