Frugal

Albertson's is going to stop selling Jolly-Time Popcorn. Jolly-Time is a smaller organization and needs your help to stay in the shelves. They will give you 2 coupons for free popcorn just for showing your support. All you have to do is send an email to makeadifference@jollytime.com by August 15th, 2010 with the following information:

• State: “I prefer and am loyal to JOLLY TIME Pop Corn and will shop at another store to purchase JOLLY TIME if necessary.”
• Your name and Mailing Address (so they can mail you 2 coupons for FREE popcorn)
• Street & City of the Albertson’s store you normally shop
• Your favorite JOLLY TIME Pop Corn product.

I try to be both frugal and sustainable and I was asking myself, can I be both? As a frugal person, I do the following:

1. I subscribe to the newspaper, so I can get the coupons. I sometimes glance through it for blog ideas, but not often. I then recycle the paper. This is a bit wasteful.
2. I send away for samples. They come shipped in the mail, using energy to transport them, in huge packaging. The samples then end up being tiny, perhaps even single use. I once got two single serve packets of mayo as a sample.
3. I buy what I get the best deal on. This is not always the most sustainable item. I don't buy anything with phosphates in it, which is easy to do, but I might buy the smallest package or meat that was not humanely treated or chocolate that was grown with slave labor...
4. I mail away for coupons and rebates which get delivered in the mail.

The one thing that I wish I would do better at is buying foods that were produced in humane ways. I don't want chocolate or coffee that was produced with slave labor and I don't want meat where the animals were treated inhumanely. For coffee, we buy Starbucks beans, which are produced without slave labor, but what about chocolate? I've been meaning to research the options out there and create a list of chocolates which are fair trade or better, but I have not yet. We are getting better about the meat and dairy. We now only buy rbst free products (easy to do in Oregon as all Oregon and Washington farms are prohibited from using rbst). But we do not buy free range all the time.

But I think that frugal can be sustainable. To get the most out of couponing, you need the coupons out of the Sunday newspaper, but if you have friends who get the paper, and actually read it, you can get the coupons they don't use. We get the ones my in-laws don't use and I sometimes get them from others. We still get our own so we can have multiples. The samples are not that great, since they are usually so small, so I don't sent away for them often. You can get discounts on sustainable, humanely produced products, just like other products. You don't need to send away for the coupons in the mail. Rebates you should though, as the savings from them allow you to be more sustainable in other areas.

As for buying smaller products, if you buy the giant can of peaches, how likely are you to eat that entire can before they go bad? Buying the smaller cans produces less waste when you don't finish it all. It is more wasteful to buy a big package and only use half of it than it is to buy smaller packages and use it all, recycling the extra packaging when you are able.

Are you familiar with Groupon? Well Groupon is group coupon shoved together. When you get a coupon you get a deal by saving a little money on the item. Well the people putting out the coupon want you business, or they would not bother with the coupon. At Groupon they take people like us and link us up with a deal each day. The deal is usually a really good deal. They also usually have a side deal.

If you are in Portland, the Groupon side deal is $15 for One Children's Cooking Class at The Merry Kitchen ($30 Value). I just signed up and plan on taking Emma to the Disney Princess Dishes, Ages 4-7 class this Friday. They have lots of classes available, but Emma loves Princesses.

Not in Portland? Well, check out these other family deals:

• Seattle: $5 for Two Games of Bowling Plus Shoe Rental at Roxy's Casino or Magic Lanes (Up to a $11.40 Value). Choose from Two Locations.
• Tacoma: $89 for a Seven-Hour Jumparoo Bounce House Rental from Merry Makers ($179 Value)
• Atlanta: Reserved-Seating Concert Tickets for the Frederick Brown Jr. Amphitheater in Peachtree City. Choose from Five Shows.
• Los Angeles San Gabriel Valley: $10 for $20 Worth of Comic Books, T-Shirts, and More at Nostalgic Books and Comics in Alhambra
• Many other cities available!

What's the catch? Well, like other social coupon sites, these deals won't last. They will be gone by midnight! Jump on them now! Or if you don't see anything you like in your town, sign up anyway and wait till you see something you do like. Elizabeth and I have had half price meals from them. I have seen spa trips, all sorts of great deals. Check them out!

One last catch. There is a minimum number of orders needed for each deal. For the cooking class I signed up for there was a 20 order minimum. I was order number 103. I've never seen a deal not go through.

As I have recently mentioned, coupons are a great way to save money. You can easily save 50%+ on your grocery bill with some work. It does take time, but not as much time as it would take to make the money that you save. Rebates are another great way to save some money. With coupons, you save the money at checkout, but with rebates you pay now and get a check later. You can get a rebates on a lot of things. Some companies now offer "instant rebates" which act like coupons, in that you get the rebate instantly, but there are still a lot of rebates that you mail away for.

When you go shopping, be sure to shop the sale items and be sure to use coupons to further improve those savings. Keep your receipts, and look for rebates. When you find a rebate, use you can further increase your savings by sending them in, but there are a few things you need to remember.

Read the instructions! Most rebates will ask for the UPC and the original receipt. Be sure to send what they ask. If you do not follow their instructions completely, you will have wasted both your time and the cost of the stamp. If you have multiple rebates that you want to get on the same receipt, ask the store for multiple copies, when you make the purchase.

You can find rebates in many places. You can find them at manufactures web sites, in newspapers or magazines, or with products you purchase in the store. Even if it is not a rebate you think you will use, you can hold on to it to trade with someone else, or in case you decide you do need it.

Not wanting to work constantly to keep paying for the things we need or want, I'm constantly on the lookout for ways to save money. Do we really need cable TV? No, the digital converter box works just fine. Do I need internet on my phone? No, I have it on my computer. Do we need to go out to dinner once a week? No, but it would be really nice if we could.

Date night is important. We need the time together, to spend those couple hours with just Elizabeth make me feel nice. It is important to her too. But it gets expensive. Spending $35 on a meal really hits the pocket book. How many hours does it take to make that $35 and we blow it in an hour of leisure? Ouch. But we need that personal time... How can we cut the costs?

I've found a couple of options for saving. You can get one of the coupon books that has coupons for eateries or entertainment in your area. Some have 50% savings at restaurants, discounts at movies, plays, museums and more. They offer some great discounts. You should look through them though. Most of the coupons will never get used and you want to save more than you spend on the book. A lot more. Why spend $25 for the book if you are not going to be saving at least $100 off of the coupons?

Another option is to have deals delivered to you. Check out the web sites of your favorite places. They will sometimes have deals listed. You can also use services such as groupon or woot. These guys have a deal a day which is a great deal. With groupon, it only happens if enough people buy it, but you can often find meals at 50% off, and the like. Woot keeps the same deal going until they have sold every item, then they have another deal.

If you don't mind writing a report about you eat, go shopping, whatever, you can also be a secret shopper. There are a lot of places that offer secret shopping jobs to people like you. The DMOZ has a great list of mystery shoppers, but beware of scams. A legit service will never ask you to pay them for a job, nor will they ever send you a check to deposit and then ask you to send them money back.

If you save money on grocery shopping then you can spend that savings on fun things, but saving money using one or more of the above methods is better. Save money good.

While I'm still working hard at my paid jobs, I love writing here, so I thought I'd try to post once in a while. Just don't expect it often. Today I'm going to talk about frugal life, using coupons to keep enjoying life, as if you were not living frugally.

Coupons are a great thing. I'm sure you have all read about, or seen news clips about the coupon mavens that can buy $100+ worth of groceries for less than $5. It sounds amazing and a little far out there, but it is possible. I've started to buy groceries using some of their methods. Keep in mind, I've just started and have not harvested the supply of coupons that some of the experts have collected. I spent a couple hours collecting coupons from the internet, newspapers and magazines. I then went to the grocery store during a sale. Using the coupons I had, we purchased mostly things that were on sale, and we had a coupon for. We had over $110 worth of groceries and spend $60. On top of that we got $13 off of our next trip. Not bad, but I hope to do better next time.

A couple things I learned. If you don't have to bring a child with you, don't. One of the coupons I had was for some fish, which we wanted. It was also on sale for buy one get one. We got four, thinking that we could buy one, get one, twice. Well, Emma was distracting me, and I did not notice that we only got one free, total. I would have asked about this, had I noticed and if it was limited to the first two, I would have put the other two back. We would have saved more that way. Two bags of frozen fish was plenty, I just wanted to stock up.

Find an coupon organization technique that works for you. I kept sorting through the coupons to find the right one, read it and make sure that we were getting the best deal, sometimes the generic is still cheaper. It took a lot longer this way. I had them sorted by section, but it still took more time than we had expected. It was worth it though, for the savings. It was only an extra 30 minutes, for almost $60 in savings...

Sign up on mailing lists. I've signed up for all the mailing lists I could. Many manufacturers, as well as the food councils, have mailing lists. Sign up for them, and they will mail or email you coupons. File them away and use them to get even more savings.

Get rain checks. If the store is out of a sale item, even if you did not plan on getting it, or they are only out of one flavor, get a rain check. Later on when this item is full price, you might want it. You might also have a coupon for it later that you do not now. Then you get it at the sale price, that is no longer valid, and you have a coupon.

Just some ideas for saving with coupons. How do you save with coupons?

In this economy it is very important for everyone to be a little frugal. In any economy it is important to save, cut waste, etc. Today's frugal tip is on how to save money and reduce waste on food preparation by buying whole chickens instead of chicken parts. I hypothesized that if you buy a whole chicken you will get enough breast meat that with the price of boneless, skinless chicken breast, the remainder will be free. Let's look at my results and see if my hypothesis is correct.

I bought three whole birds. I then cut off the legs and wings and set them aside to make BBQ. I sliced off the breasts and set them aside for chicken parm and I pulled out the giblets for fried giblets. Everything else, the neck, ribs and back were tossed into a pan to make stock. I also gave a few scraps to the dog. I could use all the scraps as raw dog food, but have not spend enough time studying raw diet to know what I can and cannot give him.

Below is a chart of the birds. It shows the price of the bird, the weight of the bird, and the weight of the breast meat I got off. The first bird I did not get all the breast meat off, because I was still learning, so I might have gotten more breast meat had I been a little better bird hacker.

Now, what does this little table tell us. I had hypothesized that the breast weight would be enough that the cost of the bird would be covered by the value of the breasts. Boneless skinless chicken breasts from the same brand were $4.99. We ended up with 3.25 lbs of breasts, so that is worth $16.22. That did not quite make the $16.95 I spent on the three birds, but close. I also might have ended up with the extra 73 cents worth of meat had I been a better cutter in the first bird. Despite that, look in the picture to see how much more bird I got for that 73 cents!