The Non-Consumer Advocate

As a frugality writer and longtime cheap-o lady frugalista, you’d think I would eventually reach a saturation point where there’d be nothing new to learn. Luckily, such is not the case. Yes, it comes in fits and spurts, but there are always new frugal hacks to incorporate into my daily life.

Just recently I figured these these new tricks:

• I mostly wear my hair down, but occasionally do put it up. I was doing fine with two elastic ponytail holders until I suddenly had none. Inspired by Bea from Zero Waste Home, I decided to move past the eww factor and shop from the turf at my son’s soccer field. (A rich supply of ponytail holders, if ever there was one.)  I am now the proud owner of a single functional ponytail holder. And nothing had to be bought, manufactured, packaged or thrown away.
• I recently washed our bed pillows using a Pinterest tutorial, (I wasn’t pleased with the results, so I’m not sharing the link) which included putting sock covered tennis balls in the dryer. I liked how the tennis balls give the laundry an extra bounce of movement in the dryer, so I’m now using them for each and every load. The clothes seem to be drying faster, and I finally found a use for my father’s spent tennis balls plus those sad single socks. (New idea . . . a match.com site for socks that are missing their mates!)
• I am a prolific tea drinker, and am very fussy about the strength. (Too strong and it might as well be coffee, too weak and what’s the point?) However, I recently picked up an adorable small $2 vintage teapot (looks a bit like a small Brown Betty) which is the perfect size for two cups of tea. Actually, it’s the perfect size for 2-1/2 cups of tea, yet is still the perfect strength! People, that is a free half cup of tea! Multiply that by 365 and that’s 182 free cups of tea per year! (Math, yo!) And since my kids also drink tea, the savings are actually worth writing home about.

Have you recently incorporated any new frugal hacks into your life? Please share in the comments section below.

Katy Wolk-Stanley

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1. I took my older son and one of our former Japanese exchange students to go hear my sister’s band The Moonshine last night. It was a special free gig that fit perfectly into our schedule, and the owner told us that our non-alcoholic drinks “Were on the house!” Sweet!
2. I read on Pinterest that you can put your vacuum cleaner filter through the dishwasher. I was a bit skeptical, but since I’ve simply been cleaning ours with a rubba-scrubba since 2001, I thought I’d give it a try. And it worked great, and looks as good as new! And since a new filter costs $15, this was a great discovery! (Note, I did not wash any dishes with the same load.)
3. Sunday was a very busy day with soccer and errands. Not to mention that I was still ridiculously exhausted from having driven nine hours the previous day. It would have been sooo easy to order takeout for dinner, but instead I pulled a pan of restuffed potatoes from the freezer and all was well. I gave last week’s Katy a little thank you, perhaps even out loud.
4. I took a pot of red pepper hummus back to New Season’s for a refund. The texture had been weirdly pasty and everyone (including me) refused to eat it. Yes, it had been bought for Super Bowl Sunday, but that made no difference. I left with $3.50 in hand, which I promptly popped into the boys’ college fund.
5. I did not buy a Lear Jet.

Now your turn. What frugal things have you been up to?

Katy Wolk-Stanley

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1) I have to drive a mini-van full of boys down to Grants Pass and back for a soccer game this weekend. Because it’s 4-1/2 hours each way, I loaded up on DVD’s of movies and TV shows from the library. (My mini-van has a built-in DVD player that we use so rarely that I thought it didn’t work anymore.)

2) I spent all day Tuesday in the kitchen prepping meals and filling the fridge and freezer with frugal and easily accessible food. Because I cook almost completely from scratch it can take awhile to get dinner on the table, which is a problem for busy evenings or when inspiration fails me. The sad thing is that I accomplished all this when I normally would have been watching evening TV.

Here’s what I cooked and prepped:

• One batch of kale pesto.
• Chopped a huge amount of garlic in the Cuisinart.
• Three casserole dishes of restuffed potatoes.
• Sautéed a pan of diced potatoes for breakfast burritos.
• A batch of oatmeal cookie dough. (I bake cookies a dozen at a time so they can be added to school lunches or for treats. This way they don’t get snarfed down immediately.)
• Roasted a chicken which had been defrosting in the fridge for a few days.
• Cooked up a batch of chicken soup using the leftover clingy bits from a rotisserie chicken.
• Washed and chopped a couple heads of broccoli.

3) I didn’t have anything good to bring for my work lunch, so I just threw some bulk quick cooking oatmeal and brown sugar in a bag. (I also threw in an apple and a yogurt I got for free.) The meal was filling and healthy enough to keep me from having to buy food in the hospital cafeteria.

4) I took my kids to see The Lego Movie on Monday with some free passes that I’d been holding onto for a looong time. I made sure to feed them a nice filling meal before we left the house so they wouldn’t beg for snacks.

5)  My 15-year-old younger son just got his driving learner’s permit yesterday. My plan is to have to drive on this permit a good long time before becoming a licensed driver. No reason to hike up our insurance premiums prematurely. (In case you were wondering, my 18-year-old son has zero interest in learning to drive so far.)

Now your turn. What frugal activities have you been up to?

Katy Wolk-Stanley

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