Every day this week has felt like Friday to me. I’m glad Friday is finally here so I can finally know what day it is!
I’m really enjoying thinking back on the week to discover some frugal gems that would otherwise be lost in the busy-ness of everyday life. I would love to hear about your experience with the frugal life this week. Please share the good, the bad, and the funny!
Changing tires, making grape juice, eating cold cereal, and celebrating a birthday and an anniversary are all part of my frugal feats, flops, and funnies this week.
Here goes!
Frugal Feats of the Week
We had a few note-worthy frugal feats this week. Here are the highlights:
Tire Trouble
I went out to take my kids to school the other day and found the front passenger tire completely flat. Thankfully I was able to quickly arrange a way to get my kids from school, then I dealt with the tire. My friend who helped me get my kids came over to help with changing the tire too.
When I texted my husband to tell him about our exciting afternoon, he said to go ahead and let our six-year-old change the tire, but just make sure he got the jack in the right place.
With my friend supervising, he started on the tire. He did a fabulous job and only needed a little help from a grown-up.
My son got his mad tire skills when we bought our current van. The van we were retiring (because its transmission problems wouldn’t let it pass California’s smog test) had tires that were just months old. The used van we bought to replace it was the same make, model, and year (and coincidentally needed new tires), so my husband and son took all the tires off and swapped them— that’s eight tires to take off and put back on, so he got quite a bit of experience!
Birthday Time
The day after changing our tire like a champ, my son turned seven. Gifts were easy because I had some that I had been saving for him in my gift stash. I found a magic kit at the thrift store for $3.50 on half price day, so I paid $1.75 for it (the original price on the box was $22). I’ve been hanging on to it for over a year, waiting until he could read the magic tricks to humself. He LOVES it and has been practicing all sorts of fun tricks.
He also got some clothes, a craft project kit, and a new notebook and pen. He is my project man– always creating his own projects, so he was thrilled. And there’s just something about new blank notebooks that thrills my kids. He has been writing and drawing in it daily.
We had a simple family birthday party at home. One my frugal birthday hacks (a fancy way of saying “lazy shortcut”) is how I wrap the gifts. When it’s just us at home, I use pillowcases instead of wrapping paper! It’s waaay faster than traditional wrapping, requires no scissors or tape, is completely reusable and and it’s totally free!
Frugal Flop of the Week
This week’s flop wasn’t a total failure, more like a disappointment.
Making Grape Juice
Remember the free grapes we gathered a couple of weeks ago? They’ve been sitting in our fridge for a while. Because my husband saw that I wasn’t getting to them any time soon, he took it upon himself to do something with them.
He decided to just wash them, crush them in our Blendtec blender and then strain off the seeds. If you know anything about the Blendtec, you know that it’s powerful. The thing doubles as a wheat grinder (though I grind my wheat with this grinder). I was afraid it was going to just grind up the grapeseeds and make gritty grape juice.
He didn’t blend it very long, so the seeds weren’t obliterated. All in all, it was a good experiment. The only problem (and the reason why I’m classifying it as a flop) is just that it made so little grape juice that it was kind of a joke. We had less than a quart of juice, which means everyone only got a wee bit. The grapes were pretty tiny and the seeds were pretty big, so that made for a pretty inefficient grape juice process. It was fun, but we’ll probably just stick to eating grapes in the future.
Frugal Funny of the Week
Cereal and Our Anniversary
My husband and I celebrated 11 wonderful years of marriage (and zero bad years, in case you were wondering exactly what anniversary it was). I happened to be in town that day and also happened to have no children with me (a rare occasion indeed).
After an appointment and some errands (including the grocery store), I grabbed a carton of ice cream that was on sale and made a surprise visit to my husband’s office. I brought up not only the ice cream, but some cold cereal and milk. We had a fancy anniversary brunch of Life cereal followed by ice cream.
I was going to leave it at that, but as I’m typing this up, I’m realizing that this was actually quite fitting for our anniversary. Let me tell you why. After we were married, we spent our first night in a fancy hotel (because his aunt told him that it couldn’t be just any hotel).
Being two frugal college students, we were astounded at the price of breakfast at the hotel. Honestly I don’t even remember how much it was, but neither one of us would consider spending that much.
So what did we do? We ventured out for our first shopping trip as a married couple. We bought cereal, milk, two bowls and some plastic spoons. Cold cereal was our newlywed breakfast!
And we’re still living happily (and frugally) ever after.
That sums up the memorable parts of our frugal life this week. I can’t wait to hear about your frugal adventures!
It’s your turn!
- What were your frugal successes and failures?
- Any funny frugal moments?
- What are your favorite frugal birthday hacks?
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Congratulations to your son and you for changing tire skills and the 11 year anniversary. That’s a great story and it must be a fantastic marriage!
I changed the tire once in my life but if I had to do it again, I don’t think I would ever figure it out because the first time I did it, I had 2 others with me who helped. Hoping that it doesn’t ever happen to me!
Congratulations on your 11 year anniversary! We just celebrated our 7 year wedding anniversary! Cheers, and may we both celebrate many more!
I loved your newly wed story, what a wonderful presidence to set for your marriage. Marriage is so much more than love, it is a lifetime partnership to obtain your mutual goals. From all of your stories it sounds like you are an excellent match, and I’m impressed with your wheel-changing children!
Happy Birthday to your son and Happy 11th Anniversary to you both! What a delightfully sweet anniversary breakfast at your husband’s office! 😊🎉
I appreciate receiving e-mail from you. Your positive attitude comes through each and every time. Thanks for sharing!
I love that you use pillowcases to wrap gifts. Growing up, we also used pillowcases, or blankets, or newspapers. Sometimes mom had bulk butcher paper on hand and we would wrap the gifts, then color pictures (and funny messages) on it to make custom wrapping paper.
Also, it is reassuring that you were frugal on your honeymoon. My husband and I went a little too far–a total frugal flop that felt like near-starvation! We had planned the week in a favorite national park. I had made a complete meal plan involving the dutch oven we were gifted, and we loaded up the cooler with fresh foods from Winco before we left. Then we were entirely unsuccessful in cooking anything in the dutch oven, due to heavy, cold wind and useless self-lighting charcoals. We could have just gone out to eat, but we (okay, read–me) were too worried about spending money. Instead we survived (while hiking several miles a day) on frosted animal crackers, beef jerky, fresh fruit–and young love 🙂 And as a side note, hotel coffee creamer is not a good substitute for butter when cooking microwave boxed pasta. Errggh…
Yeah, I was in my 30s before I ever changed a tire. Sad, huh? And I’m really surprised your fancy wedding hotel didn’t include a complimentary breakfast. Hotel breakfasts are one of my favourite things in the world. Not the continental breakfast of toast with a glass of o.j., but a proper breakfast buffet – yum!
Frugal feat: We live about half an hour from town, so I try to go only go in once a week. Last week was a dismal failure (3 trips to town) but this week, only the one. Yay, me! Also, the kids had Book Week this week, and I pulled together their costumes without having to spend a cent. Frugal flop: I forgot to drop off the receipt for my daughter’s dentist visit at Medicare for reimbursement. Once I get the receipt in the full amount will be reimbursed; but I guess that’s going to have to wait for another week or so now. Frugal funny: My husband and I have been working on putting together two coin collections, one for each kid, of all the decimal Australian coins. There’s a very pretty Flander’s Field $2 coin with an orange circle on the back. We’d never actually seen it in circulation so my husband bid for it on-line and won it for $5. The very next day, he bought a roll of $2 coins from the bank and found one; and the day after that, he bought a roll of $2 coins from the bank and found another one. D’oh! But at least it was only $5 – some of the special $2 coins with colour on the back sell for $100 or so on eBay.
We were kind of shocked that breakfast was that way too. We had no experience with fancy hotels (not that we do now, either)!
That’s funny that you had never seen that coin and now you have three of them!!
I loved your wedding breakfast story. 🙂
This time last week, we were in Vegas. I had never been before so needless to say planning was somewhat of a challenge because I had no idea what to plan for let alone expect! However, we came out of sin city under budget (by $11) and enjoyed so many of the free activities there! Plus it was a good workout.
We got our hotel room for free, a HUGE discount on our flight for booking ahead, and we had a sinking fund started in January so that way we could slowly save up for our trip!
Way to come out under budget! That’s awesome Lindsey!
Congrats on 11 years! I love your wedding breakfast story!
I always bring my breakfast whenever I stay at hotels. The motels that provide contential breakfast usually don’t have food that fit my nutritional needs and toting a bag of granola with me is much cheaper and quicker than going out.
Happy Birthday to your little man! I love the pillowcase idea! May have to do that for more than birthdays at our house! When my husband and I got married, we had our reception at a local hotel that has an amazing variety for a free continental breakfast. Needless to say, most other hotels haven’t really compared since then.
That’s great for your wedding, but too bad it set the bar too high! 🙂
Love the pillow case idea! I am considering using some Christmas fabric I have into pillow cases just for this!
We are pretty self-sufficient when we travel too. I’ve found it’s better to be prepared with food on hand than end up with a hungry (aka grumpy) family or break our budget. 🙂