I Don't Have a Problem.....

Ok well maybe I have just a itty bitty problem with obsessively stockpiling.... LOL!

Today my post is part of Frugal Friday posts and it is about saving money in the long run. The past month I have been buying boxes of Electrasol with the 2.50$ coupon that came out recently. I went a little overboard and bought 60 coupons off of Ebay along with the 18 I had out of the Sunday paper.

Now this is not being frugal as of this point and time, because I have spent about 80$ this month buying Electrasol. At Walmart, the 2.50$ off coupon makes each box just 1.00$ which is a huge price discount. They are usually over 4$ a box at Walmart and considerably higher everywhere else. I go through about 2 boxes a month (our dishwasher is constantly running).

This is, however, very frugal in the upcoming months and even years. According to my calculations, I will not run out of Electrasol tablets for the next 5 years or maybe even longer. So I spent about 80$ for a 5 year supply of dishwashing tablets, that in my mind is very frugal indeed! It would have cost me over 300$ for the same supply without a coupon. I saved over 60% just buy using the coupon!


I now have 1968 Electrasol tablets!! Yes I admit I probably did go a little nuts with the coupons, but you never know when and if they will put out another one. I am happy that I have such a large supply, that is one less thing I have to worry about buying. If you do this with as many things as you can, you could save a ton of money off your monthly budget just by not having to buy it! I did this with dishwashing soap, dishwasher tablets, trashbags, toilet paper, and paper towels.

That is my Frugal Friday post, what's yours?

Be sure to check out the post below on easy ways to make a little extra cash at home!

Thankful Tuesday

Today my post is about me being thankful for the little things I have going for me. What I mean is, since I am a stay at home mom we basically live on one income, being my husbands. We don't have as much money as we would like to, and I am sure that applies with all mothers that stay at home.

About a year ago I started looking for ways to bring in a little extra income to help our situation. I do not want to work outside the home because I want to raise my baby myself. So I started looking at paid survey companies and I signed up for a TON of them. All I got was thousands of spam emails per day and no surveys! Well I did not let that discourage me. I kept looking until I finally found a couple of programs that I do make a little money on.

These are certainly not get rich quick schemes by any means. I am happy if I make an extra 50$ a month just sitting at home on my computer doing things I would be doing anyways in my spare time. 50$ is a lot of money to me, that's like paying my phone bill or car insurance or just an extra 50$ in savings. If you are like me, you understand how much any extra money helps.

So as time has progressed I finally found a few places that really do pay off.

One of my favorites is Hits4Pay. This isn't a survey company, you get paid for reading the ads on the site. I always thought these places were a waste of time but I have been successful with this one. They give you a 10$ sign up bonus and pay you .02$ per each ad you read. Right now I have 18.41$ in my account for just for clicking on the ads I get everyday. That's not bad for a couple of minutes a day!

One of my top favorite survey companies is American Consumer Opinion Program. This is a very good company to do survey's from. The thing you need to know about this place is you do not get surveys inside your account. They send you surveys and the sender's name is Anne Parks. Whenever you see these surveys you should definitely do them, they pay great! I just finished a survey about Rimmel Lipstick and earned 5$ in about 10 minutes, which will be credited to my account in less than 2 weeks. I LOVE this company!!

I also do surveys for SurveySavvy. They send surveys to your email too, and some of them are really good! Once you sign up for an account, go fill out the short profile surveys so you will receive more surveys! It takes a little while for them to start coming in but they generally pay very well for short surveys.

I really love Mindfield Online! I love all of the survey companies that send surveys straight to my email because I have a a habit of forgetting to log in and check for them. They have short surveys about your demographics that you should fill out to be included in a broader range of surveys, but even if you don't you will still get them! I just checked my account and I haven't fill out any of the profile surveys except for the general one and I receive quite a few surveys to my email, and most of them are 5$ surveys! I think the lowest one I ever saw was 3$ and I have seen them go up to 10$. Sometimes you won't qualify for certain surveys but that usually doesn't happen to me.

InboxDollars and SendEarnings are basically the same company. When you log in to you account everything lookls exactly the same, but they are different companies! You can make money from both of them seperatly. They send you paid emails which you earn a couple of cents clicking on them, and they also have paid surveys! You get .50$ per survey and they are usually pretty short. You also get a 5$ sign up bonus. You can usually take a few surveys a day so if you did 2 a day for 1.00$ per day, on each site, that would be 60$ a month! I like this place too, and clicking the emails do add up!

CreationRewards is a really neat place. You earn points and the points can be cashed in to buy all kinds of stuff including gift certificates to places like Amazon, Target, Starbucks, Walmart, or you can even receive a paper check from them! It is very easy to accumulate earnings here because there are 2 surveys you can do every single day and if you do both of them you earn 220 points. You can earn a 5$ Amazon giftcard with 1000 points so if you did both surveys everyday, you could have enough points for a 5$ giftcard in 5 days! You can see that it is easy to accumulate points here. You can also earn points by visiting certain websites and paid emails, but the surveys are the fastest way to get your points.

The is a cool new concept a few places are coming out with now, search the internet on their site and earn points! Redeem your points for all kinds of cool stuff! The one I like the best is SwagBucks. You do your regular internet surfing and if you are anything like me, you do about 20 google searches a day, LOL. Anyways, do your searches and you get rewarded SwagBucks! You can also get randomly rewarded too. Earn enough SwagBucks and redeem them for just about anything! 115 SwagBucks gets you a 10$ Barnes and Noble giftcard. I am sure going to love this place, I have only been using it for like half a day and already have 10 SwagBucks, woohoo!






Lastly, there is this cool new place called Scour which is like a type of search engine. This is almost just like the one above. You can search by going to the site and doing any kind of search that you would do on Google or Yahoo or any of those places or you can download their toolbar. You get points each time you search and you will randomly get bonus points! I just started trying this and it seems really cool. I will post an update once I use it more and see what all it has to offer.

Those are all the places I have had success with thus far. I have a few more I am trying out to see if they amount to anything before I let my readers know about them. The best thing about these places is they are tried and true and you don't have to go through all the trouble like I did trying to find the ones that actually do pay off! Check them out =)

This post doubles as my Works for Me Wednesday post. If you would like to see more WFMW posts go here.

My Menu This Week

Ok so now since you have seen what I bought for groceries this week, I will give you the recipes I am using to cook all week! I didn't have to buy a whole lot because I have almost everything I needed in my stockpile. I am getting very good at cooking and I only make a meal once per 30 days, so I am always trying new stuff. Being that these recipes are new to me and I haven't tried them before, I cannot vouch for how tasty they are =) I always check the reviews though and they seem really good so I am sure it will all be yummy!

Menu:

Monday

Brown Sugar Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and mac&cheese
Find the Brown Sugar Meatloaf here.


Tuesday

Garlic Chicken with Pasta and Breadsticks
Find the Garlic Chicken recipe here.

I am cooking the garlic chicken per the recipe, and serving spaghetti on the side with Pillsbury breadsticks.


Wednesday

Ham Steaks with mashed potatoes and broccoli/cheese.
(No recipe for these, just cooking the ham steaks I found in the freezer)


Thursday

Homemade pizza & cheesy breadsticks


Friday

Salisbury Steak with mashed potatoes and a veggie
Find the Salisbury Steak recipe here.


Saturday

Leftovers or something the hubby cooks


Sunday

Homemade enchiladas
(recipe on the back of the Hatch enchilada sauce)

Good Deal Alert

If you have an HEB grocery store near you, they have Boston Pork Butt Roasts on sale for 1$ per pound. The limit is 2. I have never used this kind of meat before but for 1$ per pound I was willing to try it. I am hoping to make atleast 3 meals out of it!

If you have an Albertsons grocery store near you, they have Wholly Salsa on sale this week for .99$ and there are 1.00$ coupons that came out a few week's ago which mean free salsa!! I picked up 8 boxes this week and am thinking about going back and getting another 8 or so, it looks very yummy!

My Shopping This Week

There has not been very many great coupon deals lately, but I have managed to snag a couple! Recently the 2.50$ off of Electrasol coupon came out and I use this stuff A LOT so I got about 15 copies of the newspaper and I bought another 40 coupons off of Ebay. I am planning on getting a 2-3 year stockpile this time around. So here is how I did this week:

Walmart:

(17) boxes of Electrasol - 59.50$
(3) cans of Campbell's cheddar cheese soup - 3.72$
(2) bags of Texas Toast croutons - 2.12$
(1) package of ready made pizza crusts - 3.64$
(1) can of GV crescent rolls - 1.46$
(2) packages of Pioneer brown gravy mix - 1.00$
(1) bottle of Adam's almond extract - 2.13$
(1) box of GV cream cheese - 1.07$
(2) boxes of Pillsbury bread sticks - 3.88$
(1) 10lb. bag of potatoes - 3.50$

Total Before Coupons - 83.42$

Coupons Used:

(17) 2.50$ off Electrasol
(1) .40$ off 2 Pillsbury bread sticks
(1) .30$ off 3 Campbell's soups
(2) .55$ off Texas Toast

Total After Coupons - 39.12$




HEB:


(1) 9.41 lb. Boston Pork Butt Roast - 9.41$
(10) French's Worcestershire sauce - 8.30$

Total Before Coupons - 17.71$

Coupons Used:

(10) Free French's Worcestershire sauce

Total After Coupons - 9.41$



CVS:


(7) 12 packs of Pepsi
(1) 20 oz. Pepsi

Total Before Coupons - 24.45$

Coupons Used:

19.96$ ECB
2.59$ ECB

Total After Coupons - .04$
Got back 10$ in ECB's for buying Pepsi



So those are the deals I have gotten this week. I have already went over my monthly budget for January because of buying sooooo many Electrasols. They equal out to 1.00$ per box after coupon and I have bought 54 boxes already and still have another 24 coupons to use!

I'm Back! Yipee!

Well I finally feel like I *kinda* have everything under enough control so I can start putting time into my blog again! I really missed being away and I can't wait to get back into it. Just to let you know, I have not stopped couponing.... NEVER! Coupons are a way of life for me. I have gotten a ton of great deals but I quit taking pictures of them some while ago, I guess I will be starting that up again soon!

I am going to keep a spread sheet of exactly how much I spend every time I go shopping, I haven't started yet but I think I know where all of my receipts are. Even if I can't find them, I can always start a little late and it would still be pretty accurate for 2009 =)

Yes I admit it, I have gotten a bit lazy since the baby come.

Anyways, you will never believe the most coolest thing ever I got in 2008 (well besides my baby ofcourse)!!!!! I am not sure if you knew about this, but back in December, Amazon had a customer vote thing where you could vote on what you wanted to be able to buy for a certain price. The thing with the most votes kept it's price, which was a hugely discounted price on Amazon. Anyways, I never thought too much about this but I was just messing around one day and I voted on Round 6, the KitchenAid Pro 600 Series. The price was 79.00$!!! By luck I was checking emails one day and I clicked on the one that said Amazon Vote or something like that. They said I was invited to a "race" to try and buy the mixer for the special 79.00$ price. The catch was, there was only 500 mixers available and far far more people than that racing for it.


Well I have always wanted one of these mixers ever since I learned how to cook, or should I say, I taught myself how to enjoy cooking. I got up that morning and waited by my computer for an hour until 7:00AM when the race would start. I didn't think I had any chance at all because the Amazon forums were going crazy with people saying they were racing for it. I gave it a shot and I so could not believe it when I saw it in my shopping cart! I raced through the checkout, and I got it 2 days later! It was so HUGE! OMG I did not know these things were gigantic. Thank god I have high cabinets or I would have been sorely disappointed not being able to leave it on the counter (it wouldn't fit under the cabinets either).

So here's the kicker.... I discovered KitchenAid had a rebate going for the purchase of select mixers. a 50$$$$ REBATE!! Mine happened to be one of the models so I sent in everything required and I didn't think I would be getting the rebate because of how low the price was that I paid. I was started to get bummed out here the past few days because it still hadn't came yet... And imagine my surprise when I checked my mail box and saw something from KitchenAid, opened it up, and saw this!


This was too good to be true but it was! I got a KitchenAid Pro 600 Series (brand new) for 19$!!!! Is this like the deal of the century or what?

So to wrap it up =) I am going to revamp my blog a bit and figure out where I am going to take off, and I am so glad to be back around! I also got a new email address that is much easier to check so please email me if you would like to, I promise I will get back the same day =) My last email was so hard to get in to and it had so much spam going I just quit logging in, it drove me crazy! texascoupondiva @ stx.rr.com