Saving Money on Fruits and Vegetables

Saving Money on Fruits and Vegetables

Great article on saving money on fruits and vegetables!

Don't Toss Those Seeds!

Want a fiber-ful, cheap, seasonal snack? Save your pumpkin seeds, acorn squash seeds or butternut squash seeds and cook and season them. They can stay up to 3 months in an airtight container at room temperature and even longer in the freezer! Check out some different ways to cook them here!

Sam's Club without a Membership

Did you know that you can frequent the Sam's Club Pharmacy without a Sam's Club membership? Well, you can! I did it the other day with no problems. Way more convenient since Sam's Club is closer to my house than the closest CVS or Walgreen's or Walmart.

Did you also know that you can purchase alcohol at a Sam's Club without holding a membership? It's posted outside the club (those that sell alcohol) that purchasing alcohol does not require a membership or the extra 10% non-member fee.

So get your Rx's and alcohol at Sam's! Just please don't take your meds with your alcohol purchase...

Here is my Soapbox...

I haven't really written about this in depth so I thought I'd take a moment to step up on my soapbox and do so. I don't buy disposable diapers. Both of my boys (2.5 and 5 months) use cloth diapers. I have a stash of about 35 one size pocket diapers that I can button up or down to fit both of my boys. It's great! I never have to worry about running out of diapers and I keep all the money I would have spent on disposables in my pocket.

We use BumGenius 4.0's, Go Green Pocket diapers, and I have a few Kawaii pocket diapers. I can't say enough good things about them. I can count on one hand the number of poop blowouts we've had in them. I can't even begin to count the number of blowouts we've had in disposables with my first child. Another perk, the BumGenius diapers are almost always buy 5, get one free. So I didn't pay full price for any of the ones I purchased. The resale value on diapers is pretty high too so when you are done with them, you can sell them and recoup a large amount of the purchase cost.

I purchased my diapers from Jackbenatural.com (always free shipping and you can pay via Paypal where I have my cash back, survey money, etc. deposited) and diaperjunction.com (you can also pay via Paypal and check out the discount on the left hand side of this blog). Since I use some of my cash back to pay for the diapers, I get even more of a discount since that money had already been taken out of my "pot" anyway. You could always use the Amazon gift cards you get from Swagbucks to pay for diapers too (yes, Amazon carries them as well).

So, save some money, cloth diaper! Washing them is really nothing since you are already doing laundry anyway and you save the environment as well!

Fruit Cheap

Want to get some good, cheap, fresh fruit? Buy fruit that's in season and ready for pickin' at local farms and fields. I got a half bushel of apples for $13.00 and raspberries for $4 a quart. All we had to do was pick them. The outing also served as a great, cheap family outing as well.

P.S. Raspberries freeze and there are a ton of quick recipes that use apples. The fresh stuff tastes so much better than the supermarket stuff anyway...

A Change in the Tide...

As I've been writing this blog, I have been writing from the perspective of a stay-at-home Navy officer's wife where my husband pulls in a paycheck of an O-3 plus bonuses for being in the submarine community. My husband and I decided recently to resign his commission and he's going back to school to get his Ph.D. As a result, we will be taking a pay cut where will be making maybe half of what he makes now in a given month. So, we are having to adjust how we live to minimize our costs when we move to another state and he begins his program.

I've decided that I'm going to chronicle our challenges and money saving ideas and lifestyle changes here on this blog. I will continue to post other money saving ideas I come upon as I have been doing.

I think I should outline our new situation first to give perspective. We are a family of 4 with a golden retriever. Our two boys are 4 months and 2 years old. We will be moving from Virginia to the state of Michigan for my husband to complete his program. We will be living off of a Graduate Research Student stipend and the housing allowance that my husband receives from the GI BIll. This works out to about half of what we make per month currently. I will write about the challenges we encounter and our solutions as we embark on our new journey here. Hopefully, these posts prove to be useful to others who may be in a similar financial situation as ourselves.

What Do You Do With Your Empty Packages?

I save any packing envelopes, boxes, etc. that I can when I get packages and mail. If they are in decent enough shape, I can reuse them to send out packages. I just carefully open the bubble mailer, USPS envelope, or box and then when I'm ready to mail something, I cover the old mailing stickers with the new mailing address and mail the package. I save money on packaging and I'm saving the environment by recycling :)