Garage Sales and Thrift Stores

Our family doesn't buy clothes new from the store very often. We go to a lot of Garage Sales and Thrift Stores. You can get great clothes almost brand new sometimes! Here are a couple of things we got recently...


I got this green skirt at a Garage Sale for $0.25!

Here is a fun shirt I got for $0.75!

OK, this is the best bargain I have gotten lately. I found these two prom/formal dressed for $10 and $15! They still have the tags on them. They were never warn!

My mom and dad just went to the Thrift Store today and found some great little kid clothes.

This was $1.49.

This was $2.99.

This was $1.99.

This was $4.99.

And this was $1.99.

You can't always find exactly what you are looking for, but you just might get lucky.

Free Audiobooks online

My mom found this great site online. It's called LibriVox. It's a site that has free audiobooks to listen to. It's all volunteers that make them and they only have book that were published before 1923, because those books are no longer under copyright. It's a great place to listen to older book like ones by William Shakespeare. It's all free! Check it out.

~Cynthia

Gardening

Our family has had a garden for the past two years and this year isn't any different. We just planted our garden this past week. We all got out there and worked hard. All except mom, but she is pregnant so she has an excuse. Gardening is a lot of work, but well worth it in the end. What we plant...

Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Peppers (jalapenos, sweet red and sweet yellow)
Green Beans
Zucchini
Lettuce
Radishes
Carrots
Basel
Chives
Mint

These are the main things we plant. Gardening is a lot cheaper then buying all that food at the store and it's something that the whole family can take care of and help with. We really enjoy our garden.

I love to make salsa with the tomatoes we get. I make really, really, really good salsa! We eat a lot of salsa in the summer. :-)

~Cynthia

Recycling and saving money at the same time!

What do you do with all those Walmart, Target, etc, white plastic sacks? Well we just use them for bathroom trash can liners. This is my kind of recycling.

I don't have to remember to take any bags to the store to put my groceries in to help the environment, and I didn't have to buy any at a dollar a piece. And I don't have to buy bathroom sacks. Free bathroom trash can liners... Savings, savings. Love it!!

Renting Movies

Movies are always fun. Sometimes our family goes to the Dollar theatre, but we hardly ever buy brand new movies. We rent them. We rent them at the RedBox's or at 7-eleven. RedBox is $1 rental and so is 7-eleven. It's a great way to save money and still watch new movies. RedBox is a great way to see if they have the movie available. You can look online and reserve them at the location you chose. They have more and more RedBox locations all the time. One other thing we do is rent movies from the library. It doesn't cost anything, unless you don't get it back to the library in time (one week).

~Cynthia

This way we can make our own popcorn, have Lemonade or Soda and it's WAY cheaper!

Free Haircuts

This is one of the big money savers in our home. I just give my husband and boys their haircuts. This saves us 50 dollars or more each time, and it's at least every 3-4 weeks. I just buy a set of clippers at Wal*mart for 10-20 dollars and they last about a year or more before they start to get dull, and give them all haircuts on the back porch. Even during the winter, we just try and catch a warmer day to do them. They even have little instructional videos with some of the clipper sets, and I have seen instructional videos at the library if you are looking to start.

We girls go to supercuts training studio and get free haircuts. (They are on the north side of the city but easy to find.) Here's their phone number to call and get information on free cutting times and how to get to their location 840-1086 . I always go really early in the morning, at least 20 minutes before they start their haircuts, that way I don't have to wait in line.

A Grissom Trip to McDonalds

Well thought we would share what we do even when we eat out. A trip to Mcdonalds could easily be a bigger expense than we should spend on it, so here's what we do. The kids all pick one thing off the dollar menu, ( a double cheeseburger or chicken sandwich usually). I split one for my two littlest ones, because they can't eat a whole burger.

We all drink waters, which are free and healthier for us. And we split a fry, (and if you had ever watched the movie "Super size me" you would only eat a few fries too).

So a whole trip to Mcdonalds to feed our family of 8 people (not counting daddy) would only cost 10 to 11$. Verses if we were to eat happy meals and the whole shebang, it would surely be close to 25$.

Cloth wipes

We have just recently started to cloth diaper the little kids. And I was given some cloth wipes along with a bunch of free diapers. We wanted to make some more cloth wipes, so here is what we did.

We used two soft receiving blankets and ironed them and put them right sides together. Then we took our example wipe (measuring about 6 inches by 8 inches) and used that as our guide. Then we cut wipes out just slightly bigger than that size. Cynthia sewed them right sides together, leaving a little place to turn it inside out. Then we turned them inside out and flat ironed them. Last step she went around and sewed a zig zag seam around the outside of the top, closing up the whole as she went along.

Cloth diapering has saved me a bunch of money so far. But so has the wipes. I was going through one huge box of wipes every month. Now we just use these soft cloth wipes. We were able to make 12 cloth wipes out of the two receiving blankets. I would definitely say that cloth diapering and cloth wipes saves money. Especially if you are going to use them over and over again for multiple kids. We recommend fuzzi bunz for diapers.

Bar soap vs. Liquid soap

Well we have tried both, and of course I have to say liquid stuff is fun. But if we are talking saving money... and I am with this one...bar soap is way cheaper. I just bought some bar soaps and they cost only 3 for $1. ( I noticed that dollar tree always has 3 for a buck). One bar of soap will last probably about a month in one of the bathrooms. So 33 cents is cheap for the month. Compared to the liquid stuff that costs around $1 for the pump and then refilling it several times a month with a bottle of liquid refill. Last I remember the bottle I bought was around $4 dollars. Amazingly somehow we would go through a refill bottle every month. That's saving money in my book and it adds up. For a whole year that is over $40 dollars. I just bought 3 soap dishes at the dollar store and we haven't looked back. Remember a dollar saved is "truly" a dollar earned. A 40-50$ savings for us could buy us a pass to the zoo or someplace. And all we had to do was use bar soap.