Ok, so I saw a post on a net-friend Angela (Moonfever0) about 25 things her family does to save money. It was a follow-up to a BLOG called Frugal for Life that asked for this sort of input.

I decided to post a short reply comment with a few ideas of my own...and it ended up going on and on and on! (no surprise when you get to know me)

So I decided to post my list of 25 saving suggestions here and post a link back here at the Frugal for Life BLOG that asked the question to begin with! :-)

To me there are two aspects to being Frugal, or at least two ways to think of it. The first is one where you think about the value of any and every particular purchase. This is I think what people do most of the time. The other thing we can do is to worry about cash flow....and sometimes that means we can "invest" or spend money on things that will pay off in the long run.

People do that when they insulate a house, or buy a more efficient furnace. So the list below contains a combination of both of those concepts.

Tell me what you think!

• Insulation in the Roof: Cheap investment....easy to install, and saves you year over year in summer and winter (and you probably could use an upgrade if your house isn't only a few years old)

• Use the Clothes line over the dryer: This is obvious and EASY! Besides, the clothes end up smelling so nice too!
  

• Train everyone to be a lightswitch "flipper": We try to stress having only lights on in the rooms we are in....and even only when we NEED them. Yea, compact fourecents are an improvement, but you can't beat the savings of just NOT turning that light on in the first place!
  

• Don't water the lawn: Some people could never get away with this, but it is fine with my lawn. I just cut the grass a little taller starting in early July, and it keeps it strong enough to survice the summer heat without watering. (water costs are high in southern NH)

• SpeedPASS: The days of tokens in NH are over. They used to give you a 50% savings, but the toll back-up was still not that great. Speedpass only offers something like a 33% discount, but you save gas since you generally get to keep mocing through the tolls....and it can be used in a number of other states!

• Tankless water heater: I'm actually waiting for my original heater to die, and it's going in. No heat loss for idle hot water. (if your stuck with a tank, at least go back to item #1 above and wrap it! :-)

• Save Food Store Plastic Bags: Ok, so this isn't a huge saver,  except if I ever had to replace them with something else. These plastic bags come in so handy, I don't know how I would replace them!

• Utilize FREE Farm Horse Fertilizer for the Garden: We didn;t have a garden this year, but when we do we go down to the Horse Farm in Londonderry and they let anyone come and help them get rid of all their nice fresh horse poop. Yea, there is often hay seed that shoots up weeds in the garden, but there are going to be weeds anyways, and I'm going to have to be out there weeding either way!

• Use Horse Poop "soup" on the Lawn: That horse fertalizer can be put into a 55 gallon drum and have water added to it. Mix it into a "soup" and let it sit there. Then drain the nutrient saturated wated into spray buckets and use it on the lawn. (oh your grass will thank you!)
  

• No more photos: In the old days yuo would share photos with people by making them prints. (ditto for your own album) Now I just take digital pictures, upload them to FLICKR and shoot off emails to my friends and families telling them they can take and print what they want!
  

• Repair rather than replace: Try to keep things when possible. My lawn tractor is about 19 years old....ditto for the snow blower. Rebuilt parts of both. (of course they are made for repair too) My cars all last over 10 years, and most have at least made it to 190,000 miles. I'm going to perhaps do this with my last pairs of US made shoes....but you really have to go to the cobbler before I would normally consider them unwearable! (but I know I could probably double their life...BTW: This is my last stand with respect to buy American....I'll go for hand made shoes if I have to :-) All of this boils down to "Buy things that last, and take care of them!"

• Fans and Keep house closed: Ok, that's a summer thing...use the houses natural insulation to keep heat out, and use fans to circulate air for cooling. We only have room AC in the bedrooms and generally only use it in the evening. I also want to get a whole house fan some day.....drawing through the cool basement. (but being the granite state, I would also have to increase my radon test regiment)

• Weather Stripping: Update it in any doors and windows. Drafts cause tremendous heat loss in the winter.

• Plastic "shrink wrap" window coverings: Yes, I have double pane glass windows, but they are still cold to the touch. Airflow up against this cold transfers away heat, and these are fairly cheap when you buy them in the spring for the next year.

• High Efficiency Furnace: OK, I'd much rather have a Geothermal well based heat transfer system. Pumping the earths heat into the house is a lot cheaper than propane or oil....but the system and well were going to set me back about $10K (probably $15K now) But the result is much lower operating costs....and given the increase in fuel prices, I bet the payback is much lower than the 12 years it was when I first looked at it.

• Self-Service: Perform as many home and car tasks as I can on my own. Oil changes, tire rotations, belts, fertilizing, simple construction, lawn/yard service, pool service, etc.... Yea, my father was the part-time mechanic/mechinist/builder....but he taught me a few things too.

• Simple Dress: I'm not a fashion plate....err, I have one order of dress....almost giranimal in complexity. Only variation is for a couple of pieces of work clothing which come from old worn daily cloths (generally) and two old suits. (and I mean old :-) I have no idea where I got so many ties....but I didn't buy them!

• Luck out: Work at Sun Microsystems and I take advantage of all the T-Shirts we give out. Use them for everything, from wearing on hot days to buffing the paint on my car! (when they get old...OK, that's a bit silly)

• Care less about what others think: (regarding what I have and how I spend my money) Of course....do NOT even worry about keeping up with the Jones'...or even my brother in-law. :-)

• Buy in Bulk At Local Farm Stands: First of all, you get to support your local farm...but also, at the end of the season, the farms generally have lots of left-over squash and other hardy vegetables. I buy squash and potatos by the bushel and store them away in the cool basement. I have squash for family and friends right up until picking season the next year!

• Canning: We have not done this for a few years since we had our garden, but my mom did a lot of canning of fruits and vegetables. She would go to farm stands as I did above, except pick up bushels of fruits as well. They don't keep as well, so she would prepare them (hopped, diced, blended, etc) and can them in Mason Jars. (as well as make treats like pickles, chilli and other things she would also can and store for later)

• Buy Meats in Bulk: I guess this would hold true for just about any food product...so perhaps this should be titled "Have a food freezer". But meat is a common item to buy in bulk, and you might go so far as to grind burger yourself too...but that is more of a quality issue....you can have the best hamburger on the face of the earth!

• Cost per work hour?: When I ask myself "How much do I really need this item", I have always equated all purchases to how many hours I have to work to get it...and then how many hours of work worth of items I have bought recently. (in my recent memory) I'm not all that lazy, but I hate to think of working for something that I will just sit idle. I have thought about this over the years, and when I was younger, it made me really consider things that cost $1....not I think about things over say $10...so it has naturally grown as my income has grown. (I know...that's silly...but it is the way my mind works)

• Upgrade my PC rather than buy new: New PCs are getting cheaper all the time, but I find upgrading better and cheaper because of several reasons. First, I can pick up pieces when they are on sale...and I can enhance ONLY the area of the PC I need to. (Disk maybe....memory, etc...)

• Get printers and maybe other PC stuff at the dump: People tend to upgrade at a breakneck pace these days. They often throw out perfectly good computer parts....like printers and scanners. I  have not bought a printer in about 5 years, having picked up an HP Personal Laser printer, an HP All in one scanner/fax/printer, and an Epson color inkjet. The Laser printer looked like it was brand new! The PC in my basement that I use to fool around with Redhat Linux was a 1.2GHz AMD Athlon FREEBEE from the dump. It had an 80 GB drive and about 512MB of memory!
  

Current Mood: Thrifty!