CVS Advisor Panel- Earn Extra Care Bucks for Surveys

Did you know that CVS has a survey program called the CVS Advisor Panel?

Basically you get to take surveys related to your shopping habits and then are rewarded with Extra Care Bucks- basically free "money".

I have been a member for a long time and usually get surveys a few times a year though this past month I have taken two surveys and earned $10. That is $10 I now have to use at CVS to great great deals and hopefully lower my spending on household products.

Sign up here to get started on your way to earning some Extra Care Bucks!

Saving Money on Bread

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In an effort to spend less money on the groceries while also eating healthy, I am going to attempt to make homemade sandwich bread.

Lately, I have been buying whatever is the cheapest whole wheat sandwich bread that doesn't contain high fructose corn syrup- typically I spend between $2.50 to $4 a loaf. I used to only buy the  Matthew's brand which was $4 a loaf- it is really one of the only brands that is all natural and does not have weirdo ingredients. Considering the fact that my three kids and I (my husband is not really a fan of whole wheat bread) can polish off sometimes as much as two loaves a week, I will be spending $8 a week just on bread.

$8 a week is a lot. Because I am not willing to buy the cheaper stuff to save money I will either have to cough up the cash or find a way to make my own.

I found this recipe tonight (thanks to Money Saving Mom) and it seem like something that will be easy to pull off with the help of my trusty bread machine. I am a little nervous because I have never made dough in the bread machine and then baked it in a loaf pan in the oven but if I mess it up at least all of the ingredients are cheap!

So, wish me luck! I'll be sure and post my victorious loaf of bread or my complete epic fail of a loaf of bread.

Diaper Stash Contentment!

I have finally found diaper stash contentment!

Don't mind the ugly green plaid chair- it's getting
thrown away when we move

My happy stash consists of:

9 Bum Genius Elementals
8 Flip Diaper Covers
18 Oso Cozy Unbleached Flats
2 Hemp Babies Doublers (may buy one or two more)
36 Cloth Wipes
3 Kanga Pail Liners
2 Superundies Night Time (for my son who is a heavy sleeper and still wets at night)

All of this cost about $300, but I am set until the baby potty trains. If anything is still in good shape I can sell it to make some of my money back. Right now, with all factors taken into account (cost of cloth diapers, cost of laundry, what disposables would have cost, etc.), I will end up saving over $500 by cloth diapering. What is more important is that it's healthier for my kids and a super awesome bonus is that I never have to worry about finding deals on disposables and will never have to run out to buy them again!

Since my stash is mostly natural fibers, I am going to cut up an old micro fleece blanket to use as liners for nighttime diapers instead of buying pre-made liners. I don't mind the baby having wet cotton against her during the day, but her bum gets a little red if I do that at night. Same goes for my three year old daughter's nighttime diaper (she still has accidents sometimes at night so to save my sanity I put a diaper on her).

As for wipe solution, I am using a few drops of Dr. Brommer's Lavender Soap mixed with water (I am going to boil the water first, just to be safe) in a foamy soap bottle. I got the Dr. Brommer's from an awesome deal at American Apparel a couple of weeks ago- I'm talking only .40 a bottle (I bought 2)!

So I have officially moved from the obsessed with buying cute bum fluff mode to zen mode- I am sure my wallet is going to thank me!

See You Later Huggies...

The other day I decided to take a looky-loo into the linen closet (just the fancy name I call the non-fancy closet in my upstairs hallway) and take inventory of my diaper stash. I had tons of overnight diapers for my five year old son who still wets the bed (I splurge on them because pull-ups make him feel like a baby) and not too many baby diapers.

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What a shock it was because I usually have a butt-ton of diapers. I swear when we moved here in the middle of July my husband was chastising me for all of the damn diapers he had to schlep from our old house to our new place. The deals for diapers just have not been plentiful and my motivation for finding deals for things that get pissed in and then thrown away have been non-existent.

While at work on Saturday I went onto Amazon to buy a big box of diapers and was not too happy with the prices- I am a ten cents per diaper kind of girl and the lowest price I could find anywhere was sixteen cents, which was for generic diapers which I have never used before. You know what I said to myself? I said screw this, I am going to go back to cloth diapering.

I cloth diapered my son for a about a year (from when he was a little over one until he was almost two) but ended up quitting- I was pregnant with my daughter and we lived in an apartment that I had to go down to the basement to do laundry so it became too much of a pain. Plus I began to coupon like a mad woman at the time so I was able to get diapers for super cheap and sometimes even free. I sold off my stash that included flats, prefolds, various covers, Happy Heinys and Bum Genius and that was it.

Recently, Amanda at Babies and Bargains decided to cloth diaper the baby she is expecting and that put the whole cloth diapering idea into the back of my mind. Then when I saw how much diapers cost I was sold on trying it all over again.

I am strictly doing it to save money so I am avoiding at all costs being sucked into buying tons of cute diapers- it is hard because I have zero willpower but I keep telling myself that I want to spend as little as possible. I decided to go with prefolds with diaper covers because it is the cheapest option; I bought four Econobum Trial Packs from Amazon for $11.95 each and bought three Alva Baby pocket diapers for $4.59 each. I also bought six doublers to add extra absorbency at night. I figure this should be good for now to diaper my ten month old daughter and also diaper my three year old daughter at night (she doesn't usually need one but I'd rather be safe than sorry). If I need more maybe I'll buy a couple more of the pocket diapers.

All in all I've spent about $50 on my diapering needs (I had $25 in rewards points from our Amex card that I used at Amazon) and after doing the math I will have saved us $650 if the baby wears diapers until she is two and a half, but most likely she'll wear them until three because that is about when my other two kids were potty trained (I based this on each diaper costing sixteen cents and using seven diapers a day).

As far as laundering goes I am going to use Charlie's Soap. I used it on my son's cloth diapers back in the day and I now use it for all of our clothing. Using it for everything means that I won't have to worry about residue from non cloth diaper friendly detergent building up on my diapers. Washing the diapers will be so much easier this time because we have our own washer and dryer, plus I do laundry 24/7 anyways so another load every couple of days is no dig deal.

I should be receiving my prefolds today so after prepping them I'll be good to go on my path to saving a  bit of money. Now if only I could not spend a bazillion dollars at the grocery store I'd be all set...

No More Money Down the Drain... No More Cable Bundling

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When we moved we signed up for a bundle package from the local cable company. We got phone, Internet and cable for a mere $120 a month after taxes and other silly fees that get added on.

Over the past month I barely watched regular tv- I mostly used On Demand and have recently been watching Mad Men on DVD (I got seasons one and two for $5 each at Target awhile ago). Today while sitting at my desk at work I started to wonder why are we paying tons of money for things that I am not even utilizing? $120 a month is a lot of money, especially when we are doing some major belt tightening around here.

I did some research and found that we could cut the $120 a month almost in half with little pain involved. Here is what we did...

-We canceled our bundle and just signed up for Internet service. We got the mid level service (which is good for streaming movies) for $48.59 a month for 12 months which includes taxes, etc. and the router.
- We bought an  HDTV antenna for $38 from Amazon so that we can get the local channels on our television
- We bought the magicJack Plus for $67 from Amazon which includes one year of phone service and after that I believe it is $20 or $30 a year. With the plus version you do not need to hook it up to a computer (we are only using my laptop- the desktop is packed up because we have nowhere to put it). We actually are better off with the Magic Jack as the phone in the bundle we had did not include long distance calls.
- We signed up for Netflix for $7.99 a month (the first month is free) so that we can stream movies and tv shows; there is more than enough content to keep my husband, the kids and I entertained. If you sign up for a one month free trial through Swagbucks you get 675 Swagbucks which you can buy a $5 Amazon gift card with (450 Swagbucks) and have some leftover. Just go to the Earn tab and then Special Offers.

After crunching the numbers:

$48.59 per month Internet
    7.99 per month Netflix
  67.00 Magic Jack with one year of service
  38.00 HDTV antenna

The total is $64.66 a month for the next year (I spread out the costs of Magic Jack and the HD antenna over 12 months). Not too bad, and we still get everything we need/want.

Now I can breath a little sigh of relief because we have $55 more dollars to put towards paying down our debt and getting a little closer to buying a home. Every little bit helps and now I don't have to pee myself anymore when I open up the bill from the cable company!

Disclaimer: This post contains my affiliate links

I'm Lazy and I Made Baby Food!

I recently bought a five pound bag of pears at BJ's for about $6 and true to form I left them out on the counter for too long and let them over ripen. I put a few in the fridge for the older kids to eat over the next couple of days and decided to turn the rest into homemade baby food- how marvelously frugal of me!

I was never one to make baby food, mostly because I told myself that I didn't have time to. Well I guess I was wrong because it really takes no time at all to do! I used a baby food blender thing that I got on clearance for about $7 at Target when I was pregnant with Jilly Billy and within ten minutes I was able to peel/cut the pears, puree the pears and pour the puree into an ice cube tray.

I'm not sure how much cheaper it is to make your own baby food but in this instance I was saving money because I would have most likely thrown out the pears for spoiling before the older kids were able to eat all of them. Plus, there is something nice about knowing exactly how your baby's food is made.

No More Money Down the Drain- Frugal Cologne/Perfume

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My husband ran out of cologne recently so I did what I do best- bought him some online.

Cologne can be very expensive which is why I spend time comparing prices between perfume sites while also checking to see what coupons each site may have available as well as if there is any cash back to be had from Ebates. It seems like a lot of trouble but it's really not, especially considering how much money can be saved by just taking fifteen minutes or less for research.

The biggest way I save money is by buying him a tester version of his cologne. A tester is the same as the cologne you would buy at the store but it just doesn't include the cap. We don't mind this because we have a cap from a bottle I bought before I realized I was throwing money away by buying non-tester bottles. We keep the cap, put it on the new bottle and toss the old bottle. See, I can be pretty practical sometimes (not all of the time though because that would be boring).

Tonight I saved about $15 by buying the tester version and combining that with a coupon and free shipping. I paid about $35 for a 3.3 ounce bottle whereas the best price I could find for the same bottle (non-tester version) was about $50 with a coupon and free shipping.

$15 is definitely worth 15 minutes of research in my book, and I am one lazy lady most of the time. So save your perfume/cologne cap, buy a tester bottle and save some money.

Look, I Can Be Frugal!

My daughter loves macaroni and cheese more than life its self. I only let her have it once in a great while, and when I do make it she could easily plow down a whole box by herself. Since I am a somewhat responsible parent I don't let her but then I always have at least half of the prepared macaroni and cheese leftover which ends up getting thrown away (my son doesn't like macaroni and cheese and I cannot have dairy plus I think saving the leftovers is just plain nasty).

Then I had an idea- why not split the box in half so I'm not wasting my money on half eaten food?

Basically, I just measure out half the ingredients to cook and put the other half of the pasta back into the box and the other half of the cheese mix into it's pouch. For anyone wondering- there are 5 ounces of pasta and 1 ounce of cheese mix in Annie's mac and cheese so I save 2.5 ounces of pasta and .5 ounces of mix for later. Then I tape up the cheese mix pouch, throw it into the box with the pasta and tape up the box where it waits patiently for my daughter's next mac and cheese bender.

See, I haven't totally fallen off of the frugal wagon!

Monkey Joes and a Lesson in Being Cheap

For Christmas my husband's cousin got my two older kids gift cards to Monkey Joes. I had never been there before so I looked online at their website- it's basically a big building with bouncy houses and other fun kid stuff in it.

It looks like a fun thing to do with the kids and I don't have to worry about almost killing them at the park. Plus the baby is so little and it's been cold out so I don't like to drag her outside so the kids can play. The Monkey Joes in my town charges about $9 per child and $5 for two year olds which seems to be a fair price, especially since the kids get to run around like maniacs somewhere other than my house. Even though I have gift cards my frugal self decided to sign up for their emails to see if maybe I would be blessed with a coupon of some sort.

Guess what? Minutes later I had a coupon for buy one get one free admission. I saved myself $5 (what my daughter's admission price would have been) and will therefore have stretched our gift cards out a bit further.

Yes, I could have been content with just going and spending our gift cards with abandon as they were free to us but why not make that "free" money last longer?

The lesson in this is always sign up for newsletters and emails from companies because you never know when that 30 seconds of typing will snag you some awesome savings (if you don't like getting tons of promotional email, sign up for a free email account where you can have this sort of stuff sent).

How I Saved Us 75% On Some Family Fun

My husband took some vacation time this week so we could spend some time together before summer was over. On Wednesday we went to the beach at Watch Hill, RI and had as much fun as we could with a 14 month old who hates sand (within the first five minutes she did a face plant into the sand and from there it was all down hill) and a three year old who hates sand stuck to his feet (ummm, what part of going to the beach did he not understand?). We parked on the street (free parking equals very long walk to the beach equals complaining three year old) and beach admission was free so the day cost us nothing except a bit (a lot) of sanity.

(random picture of one of the rooms at the Boston Children's Museum)

Today we went to the Boston Children's Museum. It was so much fun for my three year old son- there was so much for him to do and he was smiling the whole time. My 14 month old daughter had fun but she ended up getting a little overwhelmed and cranky after awhile.

Today's outing to the museum could have cost us $48 which is $12 per person (kids under one are free but I refuse to lie about my child's age to get a discounted price- what kind of lesson does that teach?). That is a lot of money. Our trip would have not been worth $48.

Our trip was worth $12 though!

Our local library offers free passes to various educational places throughout the state to library card holders. We got a free pass that admitted four for only $3 per person- we paid $12 for our admission! If planning this trip were up to my husband we would have paid full price (yikes!). I love my husband, and though he is learning more everyday about being cheap he is still not up to my level of cheapness. I just wonder how many others don't take advantage of this great service that their local library offers?

So why don't you take a look at your local library's website and see what kind of passes they offer? Educational fun for kids is great- getting it cheap is awesome!