Frugally Speaking

For those of you to follow me you know that I like to get the most for my money. In fact, I made it part of my stay at home mom career to work to get the most out of my husbands hard earned money. Now we are retired and I am so grateful that we learned to live well within our means throughout our young married years, the years of raising our family, becoming grandparents ten times over, and through to our retirement.

My husband no longer leaves for work each morning, we have no weekly pay check, weekdays has turned into movie matinees, lunch specials out, bike rides, and leisure projects around the house. With all of these big changes there is one thing that has not changed. We still live well within our means to protect our savings for our future needs.

I have always shopped the ads and used coupons. Now my husband does it with me. In fact, most Sunday mornings he has the coupons clipped out of the paper before I get out of bed. He has learned prices and how to best match coupons, store specials, and the doubling, tripling, and quadrupling of our cents off coupons.

In fact so far in May all of our groceries have been free! We had over $200 on one of our shopper cards from funds earned for transferring our prescriptions!  You better believe we still got the best deals and used our coupons to stretch those free dollars! Shopping wisely for the needs of our household has become a hobby that we now do together.

Each week we glean the ads for the best prices, we clip and file our coupons, we take advantage of the gas points, gift card points, prescription dollars (which were recently $50 per prescription transferred!), and steer clear of impulse items. Our goal is to never pay full price for anything. We stock up on things when they are on sale and store them away in our pantry to plan our meals around. We love receiving the weekly grocery ads so that we can work our magic. Kmart offers weekly specials. The drug stores very often have great promotional deals too.

By the way we shop our two walk in pantries and our two freezers are like a grocery store with a large variety of items on hand. The best of all everything in the pantry and freezer was purchased at the best price possible.

For us, we would much rather save our money where we can on the cost of running our household for cushioning our savings, vacations, early retirement, special holiday traditions, and of course on spoiling the grandkids!