On the Cheap

Ok, so in my last post I talked about some of the ways I save money. A lot of people do really well with coupons, but that hasn't worked for me. If you buy name brands or buy premade foods, that can work out really well for you, though, and I highly encourage it. If companies are going to give you free money, you go for it. Even Costco has coupon books now, and I have used those here and there.

Now that so many people are unemployed, we have time to learn to do some of the things our mothers or grandmothers knew, like making our own pectin using green apples, rather than paying $3 or more on a package. Here's a great website teaching just that. You would be absolutely amazed what you can do and make with a little ingenuity and an inquiring mind that asks how things work. We are so conditioned here in the US to buy everything premade and packaged, when there are so many things that we could just make out of nothing. For instance, I was checking into starting my own seeds, and found all these ads for seed starter kits and mini indoor greenhouse systems with special waterflow watsymajigs... and then I found a site from the UK advocating using newsprint to make little pots you could put directly in the garden, and layers of damp newspaper underneath the starting tray. Tada! FREE. Not 'New Low Special Offer' but free!

For a short time (very short) there was a UK interior design show on HGTV that I don't even remember the name of. One of the things they showed was how to make textured paint by using dirt from the garden (yard, here in the US). That's right. Not sanitized bags of sand at Home Depot, but good old clean dirt that you've sieved to take out the big chunks. (Unless you want big chunks.) It was like a little light bulb went off in my head! I started looking at everything I had taken for granted buying, and started asking how it was made and if I could do that. When you think that way, it's really surprising how consumer-oriented we are as a people. Look how many people pay twenty bucks for a bag of rice or seed corn to heat in the microwave for a heating pad when they could easily make it for themselves. It's just a matter of learning how to make do. Like our grandmothers did. We need to stop feeling sorry for ourselves for what we can't have, and start empowering ourselves to save our money for the things that are really important to us.