Coupons galore

I love coupons. My family knows this about me, I’m always cutting them out. A nice way to spend a few minutes on a Saturday is to look through flyers for deals and coupons with I.N.. The only thing about coupons is that you can get sucked into buying stuff you didn’t really need just because of the coupons. The trick is to use them only for things you really would have bought anyway. This website has a very nice selection of online coupons for stuff I might actually use. Their BestBuy coupons has a 20% off memory cards and tripods coupon, nice since our videocamera needs some. And since Valentine’s Day is coming up, the FTD coupons are handy. The site’s design is sort of crappy, but there are some real deals on there, for bigger, more well-known online retailers as well as smaller ones I’ve never heard of. Check it out.

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Budgeting software.

So, when you have practically no money, it’s a good idea to know exactly what’s happening to it… And if you have lots of money you want to keep it that way, I’m sure. Mvelopes sounds like a good idea to me. Just like those old-fashioned envelope budgeting systems, but updated and online. It can automatically pull your bank transactions into its software, as long as your financial institution is one of the listed ones. You can then assign the transactions to your own budget categories. There’s a 2 month free trail and I am tempted to give it a try. The only question is whether this type of budgeting would save enough to justify keeping it going once it switches to a paid system… Hmmm…

Makin’ it from scratch

So, see, here’s the situation. We are broke and poor and this isn’t likely to change soon: We’re both students and we have a toddler. Good planning, eh? We exist on a combination of student grants, student loans, and several different part-time job sort of things. It works, but just barely. So I cut corners wherever I can. This means making things from scratch, a lot. It takes extra time but I count it as leisure time since I can listen to music, watch TV, or interact with D. while I do it. I don’t mean just making dishes from scratch that you can buy frozen… I bake a lot of our bread myself. It only saves about 80 cents a loaf, but it adds up since we eat so much bread. Plus, I can make it wholewheat and preservative free. Other baking-type things we regularly make ourselves are tortillas and rolls. Lots of my starting recipes come from here. The Beginner’s Bread is what I started on before branching out. I’m still looking for a good, easy, plain bread recipe that I can make completely wholewheat without it getting sort of brick-like…

Dollar stores

I love bargain-hunting. Not because I love shopping, but because a) I’m cheap, and b) I’m broke, and c) I have a combination of Scottish and Dutch blood that predetermined this for me. Dollar stores are their own special sort of fun. Some are better than others: The ones that call themselves “dollar stores” but sell cups for $4 each are useless. My favourite dollar store is the one near Sassymonkey’s house, because it really does sell everything for a dollar, and because it is two huge floors of awesomeness. Now, of course, part of the fun of the dollar store is the amazing amounts of crap that can be found. Things that make you wonder whether anybody would actually spend a whole dollar on it. But for things like kitchen and cleaning supplies, they can be really hard to beat.

The only thing that worries me sometimes is whether all the things that show up in dollar stores are actually safety tested the way they should be. Consumer Reports says that “defective goods often find their way to dollar stores and other deep discounters.” So things likely to be ingested or with the potential to give off fumes in the microwave, etc., I tend to stay away from.