These are three money saving ideas that I use all the time for spending less on groceries and household goods. 1. Unless you are using a coupon, don't shop for big brand names. I always buy value ranges and there usually no difference in quality. 2. Buying loose fruit and vegetables costs less than buying them in packs. There is less wastage because you only buy as much as you need and they can last longer. 3. Don't go out for coffee or snack lunches if you can make your own. Home cooked or home prepared food is cheaper and much better than ready meals and packaged snacks.
Ruth, thank you for these great ideas! I am so with you on the 3rd listing above. I have saved so much by altering my habits of not going out to eat.
Cooking is my number one place to save money... I'm amazed at how much money people spend at restaurants. I have friends that go out several times a week and spend easily $30 or $40 each time (for two people)... That's about $500 a month!
I repurpose as money items in my house as I can. I use the bags from the grocery store as trash bags, I do try to take my own bag to the grocery store when I go but I do not do the major shopping for the house. Also when cooking I have started to use smaller pieces of meat when cooking. We use to have a chicken breast a piece now I take one or two breast cube them for 4 people everyone gets more than enough to eat and the meat goes a lot farther.
My husband and I went through a rough patch a few years ago when he was laid off and we had to dramatically reduce our spending. We came up with the easy answers, like getting rid of our landline phone, we cut back to the cheapest satellite TV programming, we turned the thermostat back, we stopped eating out. But what I found to be the most useful was to make a spreadsheet of record every penny we spent! Even something as little as buying a candy bar at the gas station went on the list. I would put the name of the item or the store, how much I spent and a category, like "Groceries", "Eating Out", "Utilities", or whatever. At the end of the month, I would sort the spreadsheet on category and add up how much we had spent. It was quite illuminating - to see exactly where our money was going. For example, I was convinced that we had stopped eating out, but the first month, we still had $100 in restaurant expenses. By looking at how much we spent and where our money was going, we were able to come up with a plan to cut our expenses.
I reduce my tax liability by donating to Goodwill, Salvation Army all year round. My deductions enable me to get more of the money that I paid back on my refund. I just gather clothes that my grandchildren have outgrown, check them over, wash and dry them and pack them up. Also items around the house that I no longer want, lamps, end tables, pots and pans, silverware that may be lacking a spoon, fork or knife. The list goes on and on....
I am so surprised that no one has mentioned senior discounts here ! I always ask if they have a senior discount, any time I am at a new store. Some places advertise a special "seniors day", especially at grocery stores and thrift stores. I have also found that many of the fast food places have a senior discount, or sometimes a whole menu for seniors, like a regular restaurant has. Mostly, they don't advertise this; but if you ask for the discount, they will give it to you. If you are traveling, Greyhound has a senior discount, plus a big savings for buying your ticket ahead of time. I think that Amtrak does this as well. Beyond that; I make sure I turn off any lights that we are not using, turn the heat down low and then dress warmer and cover up with a blanket to keep warm. In the summer when it is hot; I put a little fan right beside me, and that helps me to keep cool and not the to use the AC as much. Both of these help save on the electricity bill. I shop at Kroger for my groceries, and they have what they call manager's specials, where they close out any items that are about to go out of date, and you can buy them for less than half price. Also, kroger has a "scan-rite guarantee" which says that if they mis-charge you, then you get the item free. I always go through my grocery receipt, and when I find a mistake, I get in the customer service line, and get the item for free. Often, when an item is on sale, they don't get the priced changed, and you still pay the regular price, so it is always a good idea to check the receipt on your groceries, regardless of where you shop.
We bought a three-unit apartment building in 2000, and converted it into a single-family home. Built in 1910, it was one of the first houses in the town, so there is nothing on file in the town office on it, so its history is hard to determine, but it was clear that it had gone through a few renovations before we bought it. It shows up on an old postcard as being the one of only two houses on our street, which was the second street built in Millinocket, so the best we can determine, it was built as a boarding house for workers in the paper mill that was constructed here before the town. At some point, someone told us the 1940s, it was converted into a single-family home, and then converted into three apartments in the 1960s. I can see that what had been a back porch had been sectioned off and enclosed, to make two bedrooms. We removed two of the kitchens, leaving just a cleaning sink downstairs, and leaving the upstairs kitchen because it was the largest and prettiest of the three. We removed the wall diving the two back bedrooms and made a large library out of it. We removed one of the three bathrooms, since it was weird, being place beneath the stairs. We removed portions of a couple of walls, converted an upstairs bedroom into a walk-in closet, and later built a stairway to the attic leading from that room, after I put a floor in the attic. Still, being built in 1910, once the price of oil began climbing, it was costing a whole lot of money to heat the place. We replaced all 38 of our windows with new, double-paned vinyl windows, which mean that I didn't have to cover them with plastic in the winter any longer. Our front door had a porch with open walls, being basically just a roof over an area of the front door, so I put walls on it, and put in ceramic tile that I had left over from doing the floor on our camp. Soon, I'll add insulation to the walls and add an interior wall to it. Although unheated, that should reduce the amount of cold air that our front door has to contend with. After a heating system freeze, we decided to cut the baseboard heating to the library, and to use space heaters in there only when we planned to use the library. I am thinking of a small wood stove in there soon, however. Since we own an hundred acres of woodland and a couple of chainsaws, the wood would be free. That cut back on our oil usage, since that part of the house, having previously been an porch, was not well insulated. Putting in the floor to the attic, I added insulation to the roof portion, and beneath the floor of the attic, which keeps more of our heat indoors. Then we took the water heater off of our oil heating system, and replaced it with a propane system on a demand system, so our heater would quit firing up just to keep the hot water tank hot, even when we weren't using it. Last summer, we found that there was a program in Maine that supplied heat pumps to people, based on age, since it was intended largely for seniors, income, and need, which had to do with whether they determined that it would appreciably cut down on fuel usage. That was installed upstairs, and at no cost to us, and that's a huge savings, I think. Plus, it acts as an air conditioner in the summer. In the winter, we keep our thermostats down to sixty, and use Slankets and space heaters.
We put in a tankless water heater which only heats the water as you use it, instead of how a regular water heater goes on and off constantly to keep the water hot. It made a huge difference in our gas bill... it cut it about 30%... (But we don't use heat much in LA, so it started out sort of low to begin with...)
I had rented a house in Long Beach for three years before I even tried to turn the heater on. It was an old gas heater that was kind of scary. There was a grating in the floor in one corner of the living room. A valve extended from the heater, which was in a basement room, to the grating, where I could reach it, but then I had to let the gas run for a while and drop matches down through the grating until it lit, and since this was a distance of about six feet, the gas had to build up enough to ignite when a match was dropped anywhere near it. Shining flashlight down through the grating, I could see a door in one wall of the basement, which was apparently accessed through an outside door, but the entrance to the basement had been filled in and planted with grass. That was an odd place. With a Cherry Street address, it was a single-family house that had been divided into a duplex. It was surrounded on three sides by highrises, with an alley entrance in the back. So it was what looked like a single family home, with a lawn, surrounded by highrises. It worked out well though, because I was a single parent raising a boy, while the renter in the other half of the duplex was a single mother with a boy a couple of years younger, and we worked different shifts, so we could watch out for one another.