Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

Thirsty kids can really rack up a small bill.  I’ve learned to avoid those purchases by always having water on-hand in the car.  There are a few ways to go about this, choose what best suits you!

I used to pack a drink cup for each child when we went in the car, then as they got older I would have my kids fill their own water bottles.  This seemed to work for a while, and they started intentionally “forgetting” the water and begging for drinks from the drive thru or drink machine.

To avoid that, I’ve lately been picking up a 12 pack of mini water bottles from Walmart to keep in the trunk.  I’m spending $1.88 on 12, but it’s sure a money saver over a stop at the drink machine or drive thru, which can easily cost me nearly $6 for three kids.

Now they’ve got two options….pack a bottle of ice water or get a warmish thrist quencher from the trunk.  It works for me!

One way to extend the harvest is to can or freeze fruits and vegetables when they’re at the peak of the season.  Normally this is the cheapest you’ll find them, so you’ll save money in the long run.

You can check out THIS ARTICLE for tips for freezing produce.  Some produce does not freeze well, while others do great.  I’ve frozen berries, apples, peaches, corn, green beans from the garden, grapes (because my kids like them frozen), bananas for bread, and a few other items. Blanching is recommended for most vegetables. 

If you are a canner, you can probably keep a few more items like tomatoes, pickles, beets, etc.  My mom has been canning for years and normally tries to can enough of their favorite vegetables for the entire winter, all harvested from their garden.

Both my mom and grandma have/had root cellars, which are great for extending the harvest and storing fresh produce.  I would venture to say many people don’t even know what those are these days!  I vividly recall the cool air and distinct smell of my grandma’s root cellar and the shelves lined with canned vegetables!

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

“Going without” seems like a common sense tip to me, however I have come across many people in my adult life that don’t know how to do just that.  Maybe you know that person.  She’s the one who seems to “have it all”, including a pile of debt!

Even if you’ve got excess money in the bank it is good to learn to do without.  I find it to be healthy!  We can all do without some things, which helps us to be better stewards of our money.

I’d like to have a new car this year and some new porch furniture, but at this point I’ve been doing without for a while and can stand to go without for a while longer.  I’d also like laser eye surgery, but instead my daughter got braces, so I’m going to do without.  I don’t mind, I’m an expert!

I encourage you to take inventory of the things you can use up, wear out, make do…..or DO WITHOUT!

What are you doing without?

Cars 2 will be released on November 1st, 2011.  There is a new rebate available for $10 back when you buy Cars 2 on Blu-ray Combo Pack or DVD and $20 worth of select Kimberly Clark products. Your Kimberly Clark purchases must be made between October 30th, 2011 and January 31st, 2012. They do allow receipts from different retailers and you can send in photocopies of your receipts.

You must purchase $20 worth of the following items (and the $20 is BEFORE coupons):

• PULL-UPS® Branded Training Pants
• HUGGIES® Snug & Dry Diapers
• HUGGIES® Little Snugglers Diapers
• HUGGIES® Little Movers Diapers
• HUGGIES® Overnight Diapers
• HUGGIES® Pure & Natural Diapers
• HUGGIES® LITTLE SWIMMERS® Disposable Swimpants
• HUGGIES NATURAL CARE® Baby Wipes
• HUGGIES® Soft Skin Baby Wipes
• HUGGIES® Refreshing Baby Wipes
• HUGGIES SUPREME® Baby Wipes
• COTTONELLE® Toilet Paper
• COTTONELLE® Ultra Toilet Paper
• COTTONELLE® Aloe & E Toilet Paper
• COTTONELLE® Flushable Moist Wipes
• COTTONELLE® Soothing Clean* Flushable Moist Wipes
• KLEENEX® Facial Tissue
• KLEENEX® Hand Towels
• KLEENEX® SPLASH ’N GO!® Hand and Face Wipes
• KLEENEX® Dinner Napkins
• SCOTT® Towels
• SCOTT NATURALS™ Paper Towels
• SCOTT NATURALS™ Napkins
• SCOTT® Extra Soft Tissue
• SCOTT® 1000 Tissue
• SCOTT NATURALS™ Bath Tissue
• SCOTT® Rapid-Dissolving Tissue
• SCOTT NATURALS™ Flushable Moist Wipes
• VIVA® Paper

Go here to print the rebate form and keep your eye out for the $5 coupon Disney usually puts out with their new releases. 

Thanks, Couponing To Disney!

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

If you have been couponing for a while you probably notice the sale and coupon cycle.  Certain sales and coupons happen and come out once or twice a year.   Keep the sale/coupon cycle in mind when you shop and stockpile the items you can get at low prices.

I am not an extreme stockpiler, but I do stock up on items that are an excellent deal, so that I don’t ever pay full price.  Toilet paper, Kleenex, paper towels, pasta, rice, cereal, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, razors, cleaning products and detergent are a few of the items I try to keep on hand in larger quantities. 

Having the items in my stockpile eliminates the need to make weekly or monthly purchases, which lowers my grocery bill.  Plus, we don’t run out of things that require emergency trips to the store.

What are your favorite stockpile items?

If you can’t go to the mall without making an impulsive purchase, I’d offer you three pieces of advice. Stop shopping at the mall, stick to a list, and make yourself return to make the purchase after a set amount of time when you’ve given it some thought.

I usually spend some time thinking about the purchases I think I need.  Once days and weeks go by and I haven’t actually needed the item, I realize I don’t really need it.  If I am still thinking about the item and feel it is a worthwhile purchase, I buy it.  This process eliminates 75% or more of my purchases.  The other 24% are eliminated by staying out of stores. 

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

This tip goes against most advice, but I’ve found it to be a great way to save on routine car maintenance!  Check your local car dealership for routine car maintenance prices like oil changes.  It may be surprisingly less than you think!

I could probably change my own oil if I had the right tools for about $12-15.  My dad made sure I could complete an oil change myself before he let me get my license.  I changed my own oil until I was 21. 

DIY oil changes are not the most practical option unless you have the right tools and can jack up your vehicle safely.  I now get my oil changes at my local new car dealership.  They pick up my car, change the oil and wash the vehicle for $19.99, then return it to my door.  The last time I checked, a 10 minute oil change cost around $38.

I’ve also found inspections to be cheaper at the dealership, however the cost of repairs may not be cheaper.  It may be worth looking into.

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

The amount you spend on groceries each month, the amount of money you have in your savings and the amount you spend on bills are all very personal choices that will be vastly different for everyone.  There is really no way you can compare your own finances to someone else’s because your situation, your upbringing and your life are different (even if they look similar)!

I stopped trying to ”live-up to” and compare myself to others a very long time ago.  My husband and I do what works best for us based on our beliefs and our past experiences.

Unfortunatly (or fortunately?) we are wiser individuals when it comes to our personal finances because of earth shattering experiences with cancer and job loss early our marriage.   We no longer take life for granted, however we don’t live like there is no tomorrow.

Personal finances are truly your own thing that you cannot compare with anyone else.  So, I encourage you to live by the standards YOU set for yourself, YOUR goals, and find the balance that makes you happy!

You may hear some money savers say that they play games in their mind in order put and keep money in their savings account.  “Playing mind games” is something I have done for years.

What are “money saving mind games?”  Mind games are deals you make in your mind that help you save money.  These may be different for everyone, and come in all forms, but they really work for me.

An example of a money saving mind game (for me) is this rule:

• Money in the savings account is not allowed to be spent.  If it is borrowed, it has to be returned x2.

I have about a dozen money saving games floating around in my head at all times.  Here are a few more:

• If we are going to spend money on something “extra” we first have to put the same amount in the savings, prior to making that purchase.  (The money in the savings is not for that item, it is just savings!)
• If we are going to take on a new monthly expense, we need to remove one in an equal amount.

Also, I often play a little game (which my husband detests) that works wonders on our frugality and savings account.  I take an entire month’s pay and deposit it into the savings and MAKE us live off of what is left from the prior month.  Let me tell you, this is hard work, but we always make it through and thank ourselves for doing it!

Do you bargain with yourself when it comes to money?  What kinds of rules do you have for saving?

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for Saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

I don’t know about you, but our bills seem to creep up over time.  Every so often we have to ask ourselves if we really need all these channels on our cable bill and if these cell services are really necessary.  It seems like every so often we need to check on whether or not the bills we are paying are an acceptable use of our money. 

You can scale back in other ways too.  This year I decided to scale back on outdoor plantings and saved $150.  We’ve scaled back on parties as well, inviting only our closest relatives and friends.  The school has been soaking us twice a year with school pictures and we don’t need them, so we’ve scaled back to buying one small package per child, per year.

What ways have you found to scale back on bills, services and household goods?

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

Once you have spent some time couponing and have a small stockpile, you can probably cut out shopping every aisle at the supermarket.  As a general rule, I only shop the perimeter to save myself the temptation of purchasing processed foods and unnecessary items which end up costing me extra money.

Perimeter items at almost every supermarket include dairy, meats, produce and bread.

Consider only shopping the perimeter only on your weekly trips.  Most of the items found in the center of the store are unnecessary or are items you could be stockpiling at a very low cost.  Only take a trip down those “other” aisles to pick up very specific items you have on your list, or for which you can stock up on very inexpensively.

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

This tip is not an original idea, but one that has helped us save lots of money over the years.  “Pay Yourself First” is a little trick I started doing shortly after I married my husband.  The idea is to make an automatic payment to yourself each month just as you would pay any other bill.  The money can go into your savings or into a retirement account or BOTH!  You decide the amount.

To be honest, I started doing this a long time ago to twart my husbands spending.  It seemed no matter how much he had extra in his account, he found multiple opportunities to spend all of it.  So I scheduled a routine transfer from our checking to our savings on payday.  This was in addition to our retirement savings.

I eventually got my husband on board with this idea by having him read The Automatic Millionaire: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich by David Bach. To me many of these ideas were common sense, but for my husband they were new ideas.  I would highly recommend this book if you can’t seem to find ways to save your money!

Paying ourselves first has been THE biggest way we have saved money over the years.  It has been easy and has taken no effort!  It is automatic and we don’t even think about it or miss the money from our checking account.

Lowering our thermostat in the winter has saved us a great deal of money over the years.  We have become so accustomed to the lower temperatures, we simply can’t go back!

Just how low can you go?  It really depends on the people who live in your home and what you can get used to.  1 degree lower is barely noticeable but does have benefits in saving you money.

We dress warm and like a cooler home.  One thing that makes our lower temperatures more manageable is the humidity in our home.  Increase the humidity and lower your thermostat and you will not feel the difference.

Since installing programmable thermostats 5 years ago, we rarely think about the heat, but we realize the savings each month when the bill comes.  It has been debated whether or not lowering temperatures at night really does save you money, but our family sleeps better when the temperature is 3-5 degrees cooler at night.  Our thermostat does this for us automatically.

Of course, the opposite thinking goes for those living in warmer climates and air conditioning.

Have you saved money by lowering your themostats?  How low do you keep your home in the winter?

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

This tip is sure to be my husband’s least favorite of them all, but I like it:  Go Meatless!  No, I am not suggesting you do anything drastic, but the suggestion is to take one of your meals per week and make it meatless.

Since meat is usually the most expensive part of the meal, consider taking out the meat once a week and save yourself approximately $250 per year -or more!

How do you go meatless? 

• Replace the meat with beans or eggs
• Consider a breakfast for dinner meal
• Pick one day out of the week and call it meatless; make it fun!

There is actually an entire website called Meatless Monday that helps you come up with healthy and nutritious meatless meals.  There are not only money saving benefits to Meatless Monday.  There are health and environmental benefits as well.

Who’s up for some Meatless Monday creativity?  If just 10 of you pledge (here in this post) to go meatless on Mondays and post your meals in my “What’s for Dinner” post, I’ll go meatless on Mondays for a year!!

Welcome to Money Saving Tip of the Day, where you can get an idea for saving money in your daily life. Check in daily for this feature, share your great tips, and go away with new ideas for saving.

I’m no appliance expert, but a few years ago I researched high efficiency washers and it made perfect sense to me to switch out our funtional top loader to save cash and get laundry done more efficiently. 

If you are hanging onto your top loader to save yourself some money, think again.  Your top loader is costing you money!  After switching, I realized there are more arguements for an HE washer than against, and if the cost is a concern, it will be made back within a year or two with the savings you’ll acheive!

HE Washers…

• Allow for bigger loads of laundry (mine holds 16 pair of jeans)
• Use less detergent (new Whirlpools have a precise dispense feature)
• Use far less water
• Get clothes cleaner

Considering the fact that you can wash more, use less detergent, less water and keep your clothes looking nicer longer, this washer pays for itself in a year. 

If you are still using a top loader, keep your eye out for a big sale and take advantage of the Energy Star Rebates and possible tax credits for your purchase.

It might be tempting (and fun) to go shopping for seasonal goodies and decorations.  It is probably not necessary!  Look around at what you may have at home and repurpose those items! 

Instead of throwing out an old wreath, take it apart and use what you can to put together something new.  The candy corn wreath above is simple and sophisticated and you can probably make it for around $2.  You’ll be glad you didn’t pay $60 for a seasonal wreath you’ll take down at the end of the month

GO HERE for decorating ideas and instructions or search the internet for even more frugal decorating tips.

Making homemade foaming hand soap is something I’ve been doing for many years.  This simple tip has saved me hundreds of dollars in soap purchases.  I absolutely never buy hand soap thanks to this recipe!

To make this soap you will need three things:  regular strength soap or shampoo, an empty foaming soap container and water.  Simply pour 1-2 tablespoons of soap into your foaming container, fill with water and shake!  Voila!  *This does not work in regular soap bottles.  It must be “foaming” soap container.*

This is a great way to use other soaps you may get very cheap and stretch them for just pennies per bottle.  And this money saver is great for kids bathrooms.  There should be no worries if they use too much!