I’ve been keeping a running list of frugal and coupon bumper stickers and slogans that I thought were funny. Thought I’d share those with you here. If you have others to share–please post them–I’ll be sure to give a shout-out for the best ones. If you’re on Twitter, be sure to leave your Twitter ID there too.

Image credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

Here it goes…

• Frugal is the new black
• Couponers do it for less
• Frugalistas do it for less
• Tighter than two coats of paint
• Less is the new more
• It’s chic to be cheap
• New brakes were too expensive, so I had them make the horn louder
• Friends don’t let friends pay full price
• Ask me how much I saved, and prepare to be amazed
• Follow me to a garage sale
• I see debt people
• I speak “coupon” fluently
• I stop for garage sales
• Living like no one else (A Dave Ramsey sticker)

In the past I haven’t home-made kids costumes, but I haven’t really had time either. This year, I decided to be thrifty. (Surprised?)

I traded the kids’ too-small costumes from last year for a pair of winter shoes for our little one from a local consignment store. Today I busted into the “Halloween bin” from the garage to take inventory. I found a big black feather boa leftover from a prior year’s decorations or costumes and combined it with a black T-shirt, some elastic (salvaged from a torn fitted bed sheet), and a manila envelope, as well as a mardi gras mask from a costumed charity auction from a few years back.

It took about 20 minutes to make this cute crow-costume for our four-year old.

Halloween 2008--A Crow!

Here’s how I did it:
1. Find a T-shirt (fitted women’s worked four our daughter–the length was perfect for a dress–but a hooded sweatshirt would also be great). Tack a length of the feather boa at the top of the shoulders and make an elastic loop to fasten at the wrist (this creates “wings”). Repeat on the opposite side.

2. Sew all but four inches of the remaining boa around the bottom hem of the T-shirt.

3. Sew the remaining boa around a piece of elastic to make a headband.

4. (Optional) Run a length of elastic through the bottom hem of the T-shirt, and pull it tight and tie it together to create a gathered look at the bottom.

5. (Optional) Tack loose feathers (there will be bunches) to the front of the T-shirt to make “belly feathers” for the little bird.

Mask instructions

For the mask, use a mardi gras mask with a triangle beak, or a headband with a beak. Alternately, you could add a beak to a hooded sweatshirt from felt. A mask could also be made from a painted paper plate.

If you have frugal costume ideas and would like to showcase them here, please email them to me at jessc098@gmail.com, and I will post them as well as a link back to your blog with instructions.

Most grocery stores are laid out in a “box” pattern with vegetables on one side, dairy and meats along another (usually the back due to theft concerns) and breads on the other side. Anything in the middle falls into one category or another:

1. Make it instead
2. Don’t buy it at all
3. Buy it elsewhere.

The one area that I stray is with pasta. One store we go to keeps it with bulks in the back—another with ethnic foods in the middle. I’ll run around and get some pasta—even though it’s easy to make at home.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

http://www.govlink.org/hazwaste/business/imex/

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

The litter is flushable, but we toss it in the garbage as we have a juvenile litter-changer here who gets a little overzealous with the flushing.

Because this litter is so absorbent, it clumps super-fast and stays odor free. We empty the clumps out of our cat’s box every day, and only change the crumbs in the pan every other month (with no odor!). When you see the litter, it’ll give you sticker shock. We buy a big bag for about $25, but it’s six months or more of litter. Since it’s not clay, tracked bits don’t scratch floors or furniture. It’s low on dust, there’s no odor at all and it’s environmentally friendly.

I realize it’s very strange to blog cat litter as a “frugal family find” but crunching the numbers on consumables is a great way to save money around your house. (Not having pets is also a great way to save money, but personally, I think our cat is worth it.

Note: this is not a sponsored post and I have received no compensation for endorsing this product—it’s the real deal).

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

Every day our daughter brings in the paper, salvages the bag it’s delivered in and uses that to clean out the cat litter. We hang on to the rubber band from the newspaper for craft projects. It seems that practically everything we throw out could have been used for another purpose.

I always thought it was a tacky cheapskate thing to do, to keep yogurt cups and cottage cheese containers and re-use them for leftovers, but now that I have kids loosing expensive store-bought containers at school or under the seat of the car, etc., I’m just as happy to loose a yogurt cup. Call me tacky, at least I’m not angry about the missing plastic-ware.

I compost almost everything I can. Junk mail, bank statements (yeah, steal that ID thieves!) coffee grounds, vacuum dust and lint from the dryer. There’s something satisfying about watching the MasterCard statement being eaten by worms and then growing mint for my mojitos.

We throw out one kitchen-sized bag of garbage per week, and mostly that’s cat litter and leftovers past their prime. A substantial decrease from where we were about three years ago.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

Eliminating the expectation of rooms filled up with “stuff” can be percieved as weird, but it’s sure a lot easier to dust. 

One area you may notice this especially is in the area of gift giving. Scaling back your gift-giving can be especially challenging.  My best advice is to go in little increments rather than all in one.

A few years ago I hosted a bridal shower for a dear friend, and when I sent the invitations I sent an index card with instructions for guests to bring it back with a favorite heirloom family recipe.   I compiled all of the index cards in a discounted wedding photo-album from a craft store as a “brides first cookbook.”  Now when she goes to make her husband some cookies, she can use his mom’s favorite recipe and when she craves comfort food she can make her dad’s mac and cheese.   We filled in the album later with snapshots taken at her bridal shower and additional recipes from loved ones that she requested for her collection.  Sometimes buying more/bigger stuff doesn’t make for “better” stuff.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

Image Credit: Freedigitalphotos.net

Having just a laundry basket and a bicycle to my name, this appeared to be my only realistic option to for grocery shopping. There was a positively crushing membership fee of $35 annually, which I didn’t pay because I didn’t have that much cash. Instead I opted to accept the prices a few cents higher on each purchase.

Generally, my purchases there were limited to a tiny amount of chicken every other week, corn tortillas, cheddar cheese, jalapenos, potatoes and onions.

The house I was caring for had a good tomato garden and some herbs. From this I could make tasty quesadillas and salsa for next-to-nothing and rice for breakfast and lunch. (My food budget was $50 a month in the summer of 2000).

Co-ops pool resources and buy in bulk sharing the savings with the membership. There are some famous co-ops that you might not even realize exist (REI is a co-op).

Now I rely on more informal co-ops. A friend organizes a co-op with the mail order food company Azure. I haven’t participated yet but I’m working on my list and price comparison sheets to determine my order for winter. I could buy 10 pounds of oats and use them, but I think the bag size is 25. I could use ¼ pound of cinnamon, but not 1 pound, so it’s a little hard to develop a list.

This friend has several people that put in the orders together and then the food is all delivered by tractor-trailer to a central location—where everyone comes to pick up their orders. Some things will definitely be going on this list—like peanut butter, flour, some spices, but other things are going to need more careful consideration (how much butter do I want to freeze in the name of a good deal?). A co-op can be formed in an organized way via a membership club, but even splitting a jumbo box of diapers from Costco with a pal can save you some serious dollars down the road.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

Sometimes you can help a food bank by picking up donations and delivering them to their distrubition  site—they may send home surplus items with you (yes, food banks do get TOO MUCH of some items). Of course I don’t recommend that you divert any resources from the needy, but its frequently true that they are overwhelmed with cerian items at some times and are forced to throw them out.

You can offer to glean a neighbor’s neglected pear tree in exchange for a few jars of pears, or employ Web sites like Freecycle or Craigs’ List to look for fruit tree/garden owners with too much produce to manage. (If you live in the town I grew up in, it’s likely that this time of year, mysterious baskets of zuchinni have already appeared on your doorstep this summer).

I wrote a piece for Seattle’s Child Magazine while back about berry picking with kids. I was surprised to learn that most berry-picking isn’t more cost-effective than buying supermarket berries (color me disappointed!) but I did learn a valuable gleaning tip:

In my county, wild blackberries are prolific and not sprayed! (Call your city or county’s department of natural resources for details on if harvesting these is permitted and if they are sprayed or not).

Here blackberries are considered a weed and are managed by pulling or burning, but not during the summer. They’re not sprayed and grow heavily at the edges and borders of many county parks. I verified with my county that it is permissible to pick the berries provided that I am on public lands or picking the berries with permission on private lands.

Every summer we take our beach buckets out several times a week and bring berries back. We wash them and lay them on baking sheets to freeze then scoop the frozen berries into zipper bags. They freeze well and make pies, smoothies, cobblers and ice-cream-toppings galore.  We’ve picked more than five pounds of blackberries already this summer to freeze for winter.  (Some have found their way into pies and blintzes already though).

Ambitious canners can also make jelly out of this yummy gleaned fruit.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.

I was looking for some old empty spools and found a costume designer who was tossing a drawer full.

With three brown-baggers in the family, we’re always short on reusable plastic containers—but found a family in the midst of a move giving away an entire box of them.

Likewise, sometimes someone has fallen on hard times and the food bank doesn’t provide washing detergent—I’ll fill up someone’s detergent container with my home-made brew.

I’ll pass on formula and diaper coupons I don’t need, and when a piece of furniture or tricycle is outgrown, it gets “freecycled” on to another family who could use it.

This is a great way to find (or be rid of) children’s clothing, movies and books.

Etiquette says that you don’t ask for something unless it’s really needed (i.e “wanted: new laptop with DVD player” won’t fly) and that if you’ve received something, pay it forward by sending something back.

You can find a freecycle group local to your area using YahooGroups. I suggest “lurking” for a little while to get the idea of how the system works. This is also a great way to find appliances—as when someone upgrades they often post an ad something to the effect of “come get it if you want it.” Similarly, it can be a good way for canners to glean from otherwise untended fruit trees or gardens. Just today I saw a post for crab apples. “You pick.”

Better a crab apple than a road apple anytime.

This post is part of a series I’ve entitled “Frugal August” and is inspired by (though not copied from) the book The Complete Tightwad Gazetteby Amy Dacyczyn. My tips are meant to build on hers, but generally are not duplications.