I am starting a new series on ShopaholicSavers. It’s called Use This, Not That. It will focus on simple swaps that you can make that will save you money. The first one is using cardboard boxes instead of plastic storage containers. I know that this will not work in all situations but when I am storing things inside my air conditioned house cardboard boxes work just as well as plastic storage containers and they’re free.
Savings- $5 each box 🙂
Before
After
One grocery item that is almost impossible to buy with coupons is a gallon of regular milk. My boyfriend drinks a lot of milk so we always keep it in the house. The cheapest place that I have been able to buy it is at Aldi but it is still over $2.50 and it usually expires quickly. But what could we do except buy it anyway? Or so I thought.
Tonight, I came across an article that shows how to turn one gallon of milk into two by adding equal parts milk and water. A crazy idea right? But maybe not. Skim milk tastes watered down to me anyway. Have we simply stumbled on what milk companies have been doing all along?
I tried this last night and it worked! It tasted exactly like skim milk to me. Actually, it tastes better because I believe skim milk also removes some of the fat content. If you don’t like the 1/2 and 1/2 mix try doing 3/4 milk and 1/4 water.
This is a saving money tip that I have never heard of before. It’s little unusual ideas like this that can really add up. If we pay $3 a gallon for milk (on the cheap side) four times a month (most families buy more) that’s $12. If we can cut that in half that’s $6 savings per month or $72 dollars a year that I can spend on something else. And this takes less than 5 minutes to do. People working for minimum wage will work for half an hour to buy a gallon of milk. Your savings rate per hour here is at least $36 an hour.
EDIT- I would link you to the original article but the site no longer exists.
As I write this I sit in front of my TV watching one of my favorite shows Extreme Couponing. I do not consider myself an extreme couponer even though I am a couponer. My couponing trips are generally under $100 each even though I save hundreds couponing. During the time when I couponed the most I was working part time and using couponing to lower the amount I had to spend on groceries and necessary household items. Now that I work full time it is much harder for me to find the time to do this- especially with groceries. Therefore, I have been trying other strategies to save money. I still try to do short couponing trips for household products thus illustrating that couponing doesn’t have to be all (aka extreme couponing) or nothing. But frankly for the majority of my grocery shopping I’m lucky if I can find the time to make it to a store. With the very little spare time that I carve out I have to be very careful to balance my time with money saving strategies.
I recently discovered a store called ALDI that is saving me a lot of money. Click HERE to read a really great article that I found comparing ALDI to Walmart and apparently ALDI is much cheaper. The above picture is of my shopping trip today and my total was only $63.65!!! (Not pictured are 6 gallons of water and a watermelon). I bought 40 items including a family size frozen lasagna $2.79, MILK $2.69, three romaine hearts of lettuce for $1.99.
Below are some other great deals I have found there.
 
  
The toilet paper for $4.99 for a 12 pack and $2.39 for laundry detergent help me set my price point. A price point is a price that you will not buy an item above because you know you can get it for less. I will not spend more that $5 for a 12 pack of toilet paper or more than $2.50 for laundry detergent. Best of all, these are not crappy cheap products. Quality is valuable too and I won’t buy items that will end up costing me more in the long run.
For those of you who have never heard of it, All You magazine is a magazine that “pays for itself” because it is full of coupons and money saving ideas. I love reading it for frugal advice and information and I have wanted a subscription for a long time. However, my mom and aunt love magazines and give me lots of them so I have refused to buy any magazine subscription, but I had enough free amazon.com egift cards from Swagbucks (a search engine you get rewards for searching on) to get a free subscription.
Now when my copies arrive in the mail I will be even more excited because I know they were free (and I love free stuff) and they will also save me money.
To join Swagbucks click the banner
These are easy and smart ideas everyone should try. Click above for the link.
We love the store Dollar Tree because everything in the entire store is $1 (or sometimes less) and it’s a chain so their stores are all over. Some are better than others. The one in Sanford, FL sells everything from milk to blocks of cheese for only $1, but we have discovered that even the smaller Dollar Trees carry $1 Regularly Priced Laundry Detergent (see the above picture). It’s condensed so it’s not in a huge bottle but it’s for 21 loads. That works out to be about .4 cents for a load of laundry. I often price check the household items I buy against what I find at Dollar Tree. If I can get something there for $1 then I won’t spend more than that on the same product somewhere else. Some of the items are cheap quality but many are actually brand name.
When I was out running errands today, I was hungry and I decided to use the Free Fruit and Maple Oatmeal McDonalds coupon that came on the back of the coupon insert in this Sunday’s paper. It didn’t cost me a cent and although I have a hard time believing that anything that comes from McDonalds is actually healthy, I know it was a lot better than a burger and fries. I was surprised that it actually had a lot of fruit in it.
It often amazes me how much product is left in many manufacturer bottles when they are “empty.” Today I “emptied” this bottle of dish soap into a hand pump dispenser. It looked empty and I bet many people would have tossed it straight into the trash, but I hate to waste and so I turned it upside-down. In a short amount of time, enough soap for more than a week had collected in the bottom.
When I moved into my current apartment, I moved my couponer’s stash of new household products before I was actually living in the apartment. A couple of days before we officially moved, I ran out of conditioner at my old apartment and didn’t think it was worth the drive to go get a new one at my new apartment (and of course it wouldn’t make sense to buy a new one when I had a stash already). So I simply cut open the bottle (that I couldn’t squeeze anything more out of) and *surprise* I had more than enough conditioner until we moved.
Now, I always cut open bottles and tubes before I toss them or add a small amount of water and shake them up. This is beneficial for my wallet and the environment and waste is not. I am shocked that sometimes I get more than a week’s worth of different products this way. Over a year or ten this could really add up. It could also save you from having to make an emergency trip to the store because you are “out” of something.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist but it seems a little too convenient that some companies who want you to buy more of product X are completely unaware that their products seem empty when there are still 4 of the promised 12 ounces left in the container. I made up those numbers but the results are visible. My mother has been doing this for years. I have to ask myself why I wasn’t?
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