My husband made his own pomade! And it went well, so this has also given him the confidence to try and make his own beard balm next. The only extra ingredients we needed to buy were the same price as just buying one container of the pomade, and the supplies we bought should make about 10 containers. ($10s of the ingredients being the ‘limiting reagent’, while the others should last longer). While it’s not an insane budget item- he probably replaced these two every 3 months or so- that’s still the equivalent monthly cost of a streaming service. So not nothing!
I actually did in store returns. This will sound stupid, but for a lot of years I was disorganized enough that if I bought something online and it didn’t fit… well, there weren’t great odds of it getting returned anyway. I rarely online shopped clothes, knowing this about myself. But for maternity clothing, you pretty much HAVE to shop online. (Or go to insanely expensive stores like Motherhood Maternity, and those are all a bit of a drive for me). So I promised myself with these online purchases, after try on I would actually do the returns. And I did! So that was $50 worth of clothing that I’ll be refunded for. (Mat jeans + mat shorts that didn’t fit).
Also, yesterday Husband and I went for some very cheap entertainment. Local grocery store was doing an event with a ton of vendors giving samples. We walked there and then wandered, tried tasty expensive local products, talked to producers, and entered into a raffle for a gift card. Only ended up spending $1.19 to buy a roll to sustain my pregnant starving self for the walk home.
I took the dozen eggs in the fridge that were about to go off and that for some reason we never eat any more, and made an egg casserole with eggs, milk, cheese, and whatever veggies we had (used up some mini bell peppers that were about to go off as well as some chives from the enormous chive plant in the backyard that refuses to die no matter how much I neglect it). We’re going to have breakfast for DAYS.
Also - this wasn’t exactly my doing, but: I went to my neighborhood Fancy Garden Center yesterday to pick up some tomato and pepper plants. They were $3 each, which is actually a really good price for Fancy Garden Center! After you pick out your plants you have to find a worker who writes you up a ticket to take to the cashier. I happened to hand my plants to the manager, who recognized me and asked me how things had overwintered, and we chatted for a bit.
Then he said, “tell you what, I’m going to do 99 cents each for these.” WHAT. Why? Um, OK! It is high season, tomatoes and peppers are just starting here and thus should not be on markdown. If I’d known he was going to do that I would’ve bought more, but I was on foot and had as much as I could carry. And two of the plants were actually 2-flats, so I got 8 plants for 6 bucks! Hooray!
So, yeah, the small thing I did to save money was going to the store that I usually consider to be a splurge. Who knew?
I finangled a lunch out of random fridge odds and ends and resisted when my work buddy invited me out to lunch. Convinced her to bring lunch back and we ate outside because it was 85 degrees and glorious today.
Did NOT eat lunch out even though I got hungry when out with a friend. I was close to home and just came back to eat leftovers.
Did NOT buy the delicious but very expensive pre-made yumm sauce from the store. (ACK it’s so expensive now! This is what happens when you don’t buy something for a decade!) I’ll be making a batch from a dupe recipe I found online, instead.
I waited for a bus instead of taking the train. Free (because I’d already taken a bus within the transfer time window) and saved the rush-hour train prices. Had to walk an extra ~3 blocks to reach my destination.
Took the bus back from the airport rather than a cab!
Took a little longer and (and longer still because a gentleman had to be evicted for drinking vodka and then urinating on the seats) but saved $16.
This is spending money to “save” money, but I bought a refurbished business-grade laptop (from Arrow Direct). $190 including shipping for a solid state drive, webcam, DVR drive, 8G RAM, 220G HD, VGA or HDMI hookup (important to me because I run a two-monitor setup). Only an i5 processor, but I don’t do anything really taxing anyway.
I would have bought a desktop instead and gotten more power for less money, but I can’t rely on my home Internet anymore and may need to run out to a McDonalds or library for wifi at almost any time.
I probably could have nursed my old one/ gotten by with one provided by work for a few more months, but I don’t like doing personal work on the work one, and my old one is Win7 and too puny to upgrade well (plus Win10 would likely cost as much as this new one). Win7 is now too compromised for me to be willing to log into banking. I might have just set it up as a dual boot with Linux instead, but the optical drive is busted (and it’s not just the driver), the Ethernet port is unresponsive, most of the keys don’t work on the built-in keyboard, and the battery won’t hold a charge at all. It’s time.
Made and brought lunch for myself and DH! I made couscous while we ate breakfast, added currants and frozen peas and chucked a tin of tuna in each of our lunchboxes to go with it. It is delicious.
Would you mind my asking what brand/model you got? I no longer have a laptop (work one was returned), my desktop is almost 8 years old now (and occasionally does scary things like completely stops responding whatsoever - I can handle some things, but if the motherboard goes it is done), and I have a tiny netbook from a million years ago which annoys the crap out of me because it is just too slow to handle even fairly basic web pages (like 10-20 seconds to load things like each page refresh of this forum). I’ve been stalling because I don’t want to pay cash money. But $190 (or similar) I would be willing to pay.
Sure, it’s a Dell Latitude E6420. Remember, refurbished, not new. We’ve bought my husband a desktop from that site before and been very pleased with it; IP Daley on the MMM forum first recommended them to me.
