I spent money on my absolute necessities....milk, cheese, and tea. I spent under $10.

I did not leave the house yesterday so I did not spend one penny! I'm trying to recover from being on vacation last week which always seems to cost more than one thinks.

Debbie and Vintage, you are doing a wonderful frugal job!

Vintage, not going out is a GREAT way to not spend money. Unless you end up on Amazon.com...hehehe

This has been a good week. My month's food stamps came through and i used the various store sales to buy the food and earn money back coupons from Frys, Alco, CVS and Walgreens. I managed to get a free ten dollar gas card from CVS plus some extra bucks from my quarterly purchases and green bag tag uses. I got $28 in register rewards from Wags, two coupon bucks from Fry's for picking up gatoraid, and a ten dollar Alco card from spending $50 on food.

One of the cereal boxes I got from CVS also has a mail in rebate in the back to cover the total cost of the item! More money back!

I figure that if i am going to buy food with the stamps anyway, it's better to buy food that gives me a reward. Then i use the rewards to buy non-food.

And I can plan my meals around the foods i end up with or at least put in the pantry for later use.

Today I used a free gas voucher for $25, got some more walgreens register rewards from buying food, and filled up about 25 gallons of water in my water jugs at the Catholic Charities, for free.

I needed the water, as I have my city water turned off. So i plan to do some washing in the Wonder Wash this weekend - yay! Clean clothes!

I wanted to do some of my barters, but i got out too late and everything was closing up. So i had to prioritize. I will try to do my bartering next week.

Anyway, it was a free day for me bc of the food stamps.

Vintage, did you say Sonic has a happy hour? What is that about?

today I spent just over $20. I topped off my gas tank at the local neighborhood store, they have good gas prices and 10 cents off on fridays. I spent $1 on a soda, which I admit I didn't need.
A friend gave me two large skeins of high quality German sock yarn, so I should get a few projects and patterns for my site out of that.
Money has gotten a little tight for us, and I am going to get serious about living well and frugally. It amazes me how fast I get spoiled. I want to come up with a long term plan so my family can reach some long term goals.

Lisa, that's pretty good on gas. What place has ten cent friday discounts? The best gas I find around here is usually at Frys, where you buy food and then good gas discounts at their pumps. Frys is also known as Krogers.

I want to hear more about your long term plan? How do you want to get serious about frugal living? I can totally help if you want to bounce your ideas off me. I like to help.:)
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Me: I spent around 50 cents today for a few gallons of nice drinking water from the 15 cent kiosk in front of my local grocery store. There are kiosks all over town, but most cost 25 cents or 20 cents a gallon. i like the 15 cent ones.

Reverse Osmosis drinking water is really yummy. I find i drink more water when i love the taste of it. It becomes my favorite treat.

No expenses today! But then, I didn't leave the house.

I have errand running tomorrow; we will see how I do.

Last thursday I spent eleven dollars at the tavern, but that was all I have spent so far this month except for bills. This week i did pay my mortgage and sewer bill, and I will be paying ten dollars towards a traffic ticket this week too.

I managed to get some donated bags of cat food yesterday, which is nice and will help a lot.

And tonite I have to spend $15 in Extra Bucks and Register Rewards at CVS and Walgreen (they expire tonite, so i have to go down and pick out some things to buy for free, YAY. Free is fun).

Okee dokee. I used my free extra bucks and register rewards and got some freebies. I did miscalculate a little and had to shell out two dollars and seven cents at walgreens, though.

The trick with walgreens register rewards is that you have to have an item for every coupon/register reward. So with five RRs you have to have five items. So i was forced to run around and find three filler items to use all the RRs.

If this sounds complicated, that's because it is.

CVS Extra Bucks are MUCH easier to redeem. You can stack them all together for just one item if you wanted. But then, it's easier to earn Register Rewards than Extra Bucks. So there is sort of a trade off.

Next time I will take more time (they were about to close tonite) and figure out how to walk out of there without opening the wallet at all.

I have another handful of RRs ($12) to use up by thursday, so I will come back and report on that.