saving money

Frugal hack, frugal snack.

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Sometimes you just want a crunchy treat. Chips or pretzels come to mind, but have you noticed the prices lately?

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, a 16-ounce bag of potato chips now costs 47% more than it did five years ago. Here at Casa Frugal we have a frugal workaround: homemade croutons.

I started making them for salads, but often they would be gone before supper because DF favors them as a snack. And why not? They’re salty and crunchy and incredibly cheap. Croutons can be made while you’re roasting meat or baking a cake; if you’re not cooking, you can bake them in an air fryer or toaster oven.

I can get a loaf of day-old Italian bread for as little as 58 cents. That means almost a pound of snacking joy – and as the years have gone by, I’ve refined the technique. Here’s how we do it.

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Harvest home.

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For the past few weeks DF has been practicing the music for an ecumenical service that will take place near Thanksgiving. The song that sticks in my head most is “Harvest Home,” an 1844 hymn*. This quatrain in particular applies:

Come, ye thankful people, come

Raise the song of harvest home;

All is safely gathered in,

Ere the winter storms begin.

No storms yet, but it was 29 degrees when I got up the other day. We are thankful that all is safely gathered in.

It was a somewhat dismal summer for the second year in a row, and gardens were more than a month late in ripening. Some things didn’t produce well, or at all; for example, a local tree expert posted on Facebook that he didn’t get a single cherry from his five trees.

We didn’t get that many cherries ourselves: 28, to be exact. Then again, this is only the second year the tree’s been in the ground. Popular fruit-tree wisdom holds that “the first year it sleeps, the second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.” However, I can’t hope for too much in 2025 because a moose got into the yard last week. It harried all three of our fruit trees before DF could scare it off the property by banging a hammer on a shovel.

This isn’t the moose that got into the yard, but I bet he knows the one who did.

Fortunately, we’d already harvested the apples the previous week. Moose can be real jerks.

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Senior Tuesday takedown.

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The boneless/skinless chicken breasts featured at the supermarket entrance made me feel a little queasy today. Not because they looked bad; on the contrary, they looked fresh and appetizing. It was the $8.49-per-pound price tag that made me want to lie down with a cold cloth on my eyes. After all, it was Senior Tuesday and I’d hoped for some low prices to go with the extra 10% off store brands.

Good deals – really good deals – were about to be discovered, in two batches. That led DF and me to a new rule for bargain hunting, which I’ll explain below.

The total bill was $77.83 for a shopping trip that included 51 pounds of fresh meat, 23 cans of corned beef hash (more on that in a minute), salsa, sour cream, three pounds of bacon and a big bottle of creamer.

It was the meat that made us happiest, however. DF was so tickled by the markdowns that he added up the weights and noted the original prices vs. what we paid. Here’s how it all shook down:

  • Five pork roasts, ranging from 3¾ to 4½ pounds, for $1.06 each (96 cents after the senior discount)
  • Five whole chickens, two of them organic, averaging five pounds each, for 96 to 98 cents apiece (86 to 88 cents with discount)
  • Two packages of organic boneless/skinless chicken breasts, totaling 5.65 pounds, for $1.95 each ($1.69 with discount)
  • Five one-pound packages of Angus beef burgers with barbecue seasoning for 98 cents each (88 cents with discount)
  • Three pounds of bacon, which would normally total $18.87, for $12.02 thanks to store coupons

The 51 pounds of meat (excluding the bacon) would have originally cost $233.72. After the senior discount, we paid $17.97 for 51 pounds of animal protein.

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How frugalists rock Earth Day.

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(Happy Throwback Monday! It would have been Throwback Thursday per usual had Earth Day been responsible enough to occur on a Thursday. This post originally ran on Earth Day 2023, which was April 19.)

Everywhere I looked online this morning were reminders of Earth Day 2023. My initial reaction was to remember my high-school Ecology Club. That’s when I believed, truly believed, that we’d have this all figured out pretty soon.

Boy, was I young.

That thought was followed by this one: Frugalists are eco-warriors.

Because we are. We really are! Although our goal is to be good stewards of our finances, we wind up being good stewards of the Earth. The steps we take to save money help us ameliorate our impact on the environment.

Here are seven ways we do that. Note: These aren’t universal. Few people likely do all these things or even most of them, but I know that my regular readers do at least some of them.

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KeyHero is your friend.

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Greetings from Phoenix, where I have keys to my daughter’s new locks. In fact, I had those keys when I arrived, thanks to KeyHero.

She recently replaced those locks due to how “old and beat-up” they were after who-knows-how-many years of service. (Hint: Abby didn’t change them when she and her now-ex husband moved in 12½ years ago.)

The locks still worked, but looked pretty terrible – and like me, she saves where she can so she can spend where she wants. In this case, what she wanted was new locks.

This meant my old keys were kaput, and since I was arriving at almost 11 p.m., she would likely be asleep. I make it a point never to wake up a hostess with chronic fatigue.

Hence: KeyHero.

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Meet a reader: Ann from South Carolina.

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First, let me be clear: Ann is not a turtle. She’s a  camera-avoidant reader who requested that I use a photo she snapped of a turtle sunning itself.

There’s another reason for the turtle, though: Its slow-and-steady approach to life is analogous to Ann’s brand of frugality.

She’s in no rush to get the latest anything, has lived in the same house for more than three decades, and knows all the best thrift stores. Recently, Ann met a friend for lunch at a hospital snack bar, which she says has a “spa-like” vibe: “It’s got a skylight, it’s very sunny, they’ve got healthy food, it’s inexpensive, it’s fast.”

She drives a car “that no one will steal,” and specifically chose a job with a pension. Ann is lucky to live in a city where supermarkets “compete,” and she can turn those deals into comfort foods that cost way less than takeout.  “I feel rich if I’ve got cooked ground beef in the freezer…a perfect start for tacos, spaghetti, chili or nachos.”

Ann has been a reader since the MSN Money days, so it was great fun to attach a voice to the history. Please join me in congratulating her on her end-of-December retirement, at age 57. And enjoy the following conversation, which has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

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Always check the register receipt.

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Recently I wrote a piece about why you should always check the clearance section. The other day, DF and I were reminded why you should always check your register receipt, too.

While shopping on Senior Tuesday (10 percent off all Kroger brands), we noticed that boneless, skinless chicken breasts were on sale at an almost agreeable price. Since I wanted to try a new recipe (butter chicken in the slow cooker), we decided to spring for a package rather than buy a whole chicken and cut it up.

(Maybe not the most frugal move, but he recently had a major health issue and since then we have sweated far less small stuff. Besides, it would be loads cheaper than going to an Indian restaurant.)

Generally I do check the register receipt; in fact, I tend to watch items as they get rung up, to make sure that sale prices show up correctly. On that day, however, we were both a bit distracted. At one point he did glance at the electronic readout and said, “Wait – did that say 99 cents a pound? … No, I guess that was the discount per pound.”

When we got home I checked the receipt to see how much we’d saved overall – and noticed that the boneless, skinless chicken had indeed rung up at 99 cents a pound. D’oh!

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Always check clearance. Always!

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When visiting my daughter in Phoenix, I walk as often as possible. In part, that’s because I’m nowhere near a gym* but it’s also because (a) it gets me out of my daughter’s hair for a while** and (b) in the winter it’s such a delight to see sidewalks without ice.

By foot, it’s about one mile to a Walgreens. I always go in, even if I don’t need anything (or need to use the bathroom). That’s because my rule is always to check clearance. Most of the time I don’t find anything, but sometimes I score.

Last month, I scored big-time: three two-packs of replacement brush heads for our Sonicare toothbrush. They were Walgreens brand, but they fit. (I called DF to make sure before I bought them.) Each two-brush pack cost me 70 cents, or 35 cents apiece.

Typically, these brush heads cost anywhere from $1.99 to $13.74 (!) apiece. In other words, 468% to 3,825% more. Wow.

My dentist is happy. My budget is happier.

Clearance is (sometimes) your friend

It sounds like such a no-brainer. Such a simple thing to do. But it’s not true for everyone.

If you didn’t grow up watching someone sort patiently through piles of dross in hopes of finding a diamond, then “clearance” might be foreign territory to you.

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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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