How Far Can Your Dollar Stretch?

Although I am not crazy about the reasons that I am currently a Stay at Home Full Time Mom-out of work due to an injury, preparing for surgery, I do love the fact that I get to spend time in my kitchen.  I love to cook. I love to teach others how to cook.

If I could do that for a full time job I would be the happiest girl on the face of this planet.  But since that isn’t a reasonable job for me right at this moment…perhaps in the future. I am enjoying spending time in the kitchen and teaching my daughter how to cook.

In hard economic times like we have been facing for the last couple of years families are struggling to pay the bills and put food on the table.  Frugal living has gone and taken a brand new meaning in this day in and age. People are needing to stretch every dollar farther than ever before. 

I have decided to help people with this new series: How Far Can Your Dollar Stretch?

In this series there will be a variety of different topics from Meals to Saving money in little ways that can really add up all over your home. Being frugal means different things to different people, it doesn’t mean that you have to give things up necessarily, it means by making good choices on a variety of different things you can have the money to spend on the things you want.  By making things at home for your family it could save you extra money that could either be put to use paying a bill or allowing you to buy some special ingredients to help spice a meal up for a special occasion.

I have to admit that I hate to spend any more money than absolutely necessary on anything.  So I do try to shop around and find the best deal but I also don’t want to spend all my time doing it. I do use the knowledge of other bloggers, especially that ones that specialize in coupon matchups and sales.   I honestly don’t have time to do a lot of the matchups as there is always some work of some kind to be done here either with kid or animals, gardens etc..

Extreme couponing isn’t for me. I don’t know of any local stores that would allow me to make those kinds of purchases with that amount of coupons.  But the idea behind it or getting items for little or no money does appeal to me. So I have decided to try and  only do 1 or 2 items that I can really add to my stockpile. Like a week or 2 ago our local store had Ragu Spaghetti  Sauce on sale for 3 for $5 which equals out to $1.66 each, I had obtained approximately 30 coupons for 50 cents off 1, which our store doubled so it was $1 off each jar, making them 66 cents each. Ragu is the one spaghetti sauce brand that we are loyal to so when a sale like that comes up I work really hard to get as many as I could.  So I spent $19.80 for 30 jars of sauce which will last us most of the winter, normally that would have cost me about $60. So I saved $40 dollars that was able to go towards something else.

There are lots of ways to obtain coupons but please take a moment and think about if you are paying for coupons, that the amount you spend doesn’t cost more than the amount those coupons are going to save you.