1,000 ways to Save Money - Part 3

*If you missed part 2, you can go here http://tinyurl.com/mwzdtr


#21 Drink water for your meals, instead of milk, juice, or soft drinks.
The prices of these items can add up quick, especially for our family of six. If you have children that are accustomed to drinking other things, besides water with their meals, then start out slowly and don't take all the 'fun' drinks away at once. Maybe water throughout the day and then bring out the fun stuff for dinner.


#22 Cook from scratch
Do the math, but usually cooking from scratch is a lot cheaper than buying the item. For example - Chocolate chip cookies were $3.39 for the Keebler brand, off brand was $2.68 (better deal) made them from scratch - less than $1.00 for six dozen cookies (I had all ingredients on hand except for the flour, went to Aldis and paid $1.47 for a 5# bag of flour), plenty left over for several more batches of cookies.

#23 Buy ingredients out of season
Now is the perfect time to buy flour, cinnamon, and other baking ingredients BEFORE the holidays get here. Sure there are sales on these ingredients during the holiday season, but keep your eyes peeled for sales on these items now, plus if you go ahead and buy them (on sale)now you will have them and not be looking all over the place for them during the holidays which in a lot of cases will result in higher prices on these items. I am all stocked up on flour, cinnamon, and extracts (rum, vanilla and almond)

#24 Make your on greeting and thank you cards
If you have children they will especially enjoy making birthday cards for their friends.

#25 Make your on gifts
Birthday, baby, and Christmas gift can be expensive, so make your on. At Christmas I always bake goodies for our children to give to their Sunday School teachers and for our neighbors. When someone has a baby maybe take a meal to them or even to clean their home before they come home from the hospital. Babysit for free once the new mommy feels like going out on a date with her husband.
If you can cross stitch, crochet, or knit things...those would be awesome, but yet inexpensive gifts as well!

#26 Turn your lights and electric 'toys off
If it is a bright sunny day out side open your curtains and let the sunlight in. Turn your computer off, when not in use (I used to have a bad habit of leaving my computer on all night, I would wake up, check on my children and then check FaceBook, email or blog; so as I began to look for ways to save money I decided to just to start turning it off at night time and our electric bill has been about $35 cheaper each month, now grant it our electric bill is not that much cheaper because of me turning the computer off at night time but it has helped. Here are some other things that we are doing to reduce our electric bill:
-not using any lights unless necessary
-replacing our light bulbs with energy saving light bulb, yes these are expensive unless you can find them on sale, so we only replace two a month.
-open the windows on cooler days-
-use the ceiling fans instead of the air conditioner
-make sure that the 'fan' on the thermostat is on auto and not ON...learned this the hard way!
-only use the oven when needed - I try to do all my baking in one day, I bake a lot on one day and we eat on it for several days and besides, if I need to I can freeze it.
-keeping the fridge closed or should I say keeping the kids from standing in front of it with it opened trying to figure what they want. We have told them decide what you want before you open it,get the item, and then shut it quickly. So far they are listening and it is working great!
These are just small things that we are doing to cut back on our utility bill and so far we have seen about a $35 in savings each month. That is a savings of $420 a year.

I would love to know how you save money, so please leave a comment below.