Frugal Accomplishments - Credit Card Edition

green beans and wax beans from our garden

OK, not everything I'm going to list involves credit cards, but a couple of items do.  If you've been convinced that credit cards are inherently evil, you may want to skip those parts (the first two paragraphs), but if not, you might find a tip or two that will be useful for you.  Here's a summary of our week:

We have a WaterPik that we bought over 20 years ago.  The past month or so, it has started making a noise that sounds like someone put Chewbacca in a garbage disposal.  It doesn't sound good.  I went to Amazon and applied for the card offer they've been offering me for a while.  I was approved, so I got a $50 credit at Amazon.  It was instant, so I used it to purchase a WaterPik, along with a book that I had decided I need to own and some stocking stuffers for Daughter.  I also used the $5 off $25 offer from facebook, so everything was free.  As for the old WaterPik, I will keep it and use it for other things until it dies.  It's a mini pressure washer, after all, so I'm sure I'll find lots of uses for it. 

We're planning a trip to visit my parents.  We will be driving, and it takes more than a day to get there, so we'll be spending the night in a hotel one night in each direction.  We've also decided to stay in a hotel while we are visiting this year.  It's going to make it easier on my parents, breakfast is included, and there's an indoor pool and hot tub.  Since our visit is also our vacation, some little perks are a nice treat.  Before we made our reservations, Husband checked on some things and discovered that by using our UPromise credit card, we get 5-6% of our hotel fees deposited into Daughter's college fund.  In addition, by going through their website to book our hotel stays we are getting an additional 5% cash back.  He also signed up for 5% cash back (I believe that's on the Chase card) on gasoline purchases for the month of the trip.  (We won't be going for a whole month - it's just that they have the offer for the whole month.)

Another way we are saving on one of this hotel stays is by staying in a smaller town.  On the way to Mom and Dad's, the good place to stop is a college town, and the cost for a room was much, much higher than it is in any of the other places we will be staying.  We decided to stop in the college town to eat supper, but then travel another half hour further down the road to the hotel.  We know from past trips that the little town where we'll be staying is a very tiny town, and college towns always have plenty of places to eat, so this should work really well for us.  Traveling a little further after supper puts us a little closer to our destination and saves us about $40. 

I picked flowers from the flower garden to brighten our home.

I picked zucchini, green beans, herbs, lettuces and more green beans.  The peach tree ripened too, so we picked it!  I fed bolted lettuces, spinach and weeds to the chickens to provide variety and save on feed.  I canned 15 pints of green beans...a total of 23 so far.  I made six half-pints of peach-almond jam.  Not bad for a tiny garden.

This year's peach harvest.

I made pancakes, salads, boiled peanuts, Italian beef au jus (which I thickened a bit for gravy), fish tacos, a pork stir fry with rice, sesame bean sprout salad and barbecue chicken/bacon pizzas. We ate leftovers when they were available.


Pork and Vegetable Stir Fry with Ginger-Orange Glaze (and Sriracha!)

Laundry was hung on clotheslines and drying racks.

I trimmed my bangs and deep-conditioned my hair with some stuff I found in the cabinet.

We rode our bikes and went for walks, for exercise and fun.

On town day, Daughter used her free kid meal coupon at Chick Fil A.  She got the coupon from Summer Reading.  We also stopped at Target - spaghetti sauce was .50 a jar after sale and coupon, so we stocked up.  Albertson's is having some great deals too - we went several times and ended up with nearly 40 pounds of beef, lots and lots of canned goods and some produce.  We used stock up funds, which are just grocery money we didn't spend in the past and set back for deals like these.  The roast was 1.60 a pound and canned vegetables and beans were .40 per can - woo hoo!

A friend went home to Iowa for a visit - while she was there she got a few items from the Amish/Mennonite store for me, so now I'm stocked for coconut oil, baking cocoa and buttermilk powder.  I reimbursed her for those things, but she also gave me a #10 can of sweet corn, some dehydrated hash browns, salted caramel hot cocoa mix and a jar of mulberry-rhubarb jam.  Thank you, Dearie!

We are teaching Daughter to play Scrabble.  She really likes it!

Husband cut firewood he salvaged from the pallet factory.  He also stopped and picked up another truckload, which will still need to be cut.  Free heat for the coming winter!  We also cut down some trees in the front yard.  They aren't the best for burning, but they'll get burned because they're wood.  We cut them down because one was dead and the others were...um...'leaking'.  Ew.  We aren't done yet with the trees.  If you're looking for something to do, we'd love some help! (wink!)

There's still plenty of brush to haul and wood to cut and carry.

We sold some things we no longer need, and can use those funds for other things.  I took some books to the used book store for trade and used some of that credit to get a book I was interested in. Now I have credit sitting at two used book stores, which is nice!  Later in the week, we got this with some of the summer sale fund:

We paid $50 for this oak cabinet- score!

We transferred one of Husband's prescriptions to Kmart and got a $25 gift card.  I suspect this will be used to stock up on toilet paper.

In closing, I have a happy to share!  One of the branches in our library district asked me to present a program to teach people how to save on groceries.  I'm calling it Dinner on the Table for Pennies on the Dollar.  Catchy, yeah?  Who knows...it might be the title of an e-book some day......squee!