Reader hacks
The Frugal Blogroll is exploding with new members! Be sure to have a look all the frugal blogs and share your favorite links and tips in the comments here.
A few submissions from readers over the past week:
- Perla offers tips on choosing meat: These days, it’s not a good idea to use the color of meet as a guide to determine it’s freshness. Many supermarkets now use carbon monoxide to “treat meat”. The carbon monoxide reacts with the meat resulting in a bright red color. This reaction can actually make the meat look red and fresh for WEEKS after it’s sell-by date. To ensure meat is fresh (as best you can) always check the package and buy meat that has a sell-by stamp date that is weeks away.
- Kim Chen pointed me toward Tjoos.com (sounds like choose), a clean and powerful site that searches every imaginable online store for coupons and does price comparisons on the products you are looking for. It looks very comprehenseive, yet easy to navigate. Not an easy balance to strike, and I'm eager to give it a try!
- Nick sent me this interesting tidbit:
I’m Nick, and I work for a company called Truphone. We’re a mobile operator that uses the internet to give people free and low-cost calls (and SMS) on their mobile.
We’ve just built a new application for Facebook which lets you make free phone calls from Facebook. I've been checking out your blog and I think this application could be of real use to you and your site visitors.
The Truphone ‘Call Me’ Button lets you call real phones from within Facebook for free. This means your Facebook friends can make free calls to your landline (or US/Canadian cellphone). You simply add the application to your profile in the normal way.
It is available to all Facebook users and is particularly useful if you’re travelling or away from home.
I recently set up a Facebook account but haven't really used it much yet. Has anyone else tried making phone calls through Facebook yet? Who wants to try it out and report back to us?
- Ed offers extensive advice on repairing your credit: ...truth be told, if the blemishes on your credit report are factual (meaning you actually did blow off paying American Express for 8 months), there's no way to remove them. Sure, there are a number of shady corporations out there who claim to make your credit report squeaky clean. But they're not even going to want to talk to you before they have a hefty consultation fee in their pocket. And guess what? That's all that's going to happen, you giving them your money. They'll say they'll make everything better, but they won't. If you have bad credit for whatever reason, no one can eliminate your history. You earned that metaphorical scarlet letter, and you're going to have to wear it until it either disappears after 7+ years or you're going to have to take matters into your own hands. Right now... (read the rest of the article)
- Vanessa says:
Save Your Grocery Money with a Menu!
How much did you spend on your groceries last week?About six months ago, I was spending approximately $200-$250 a week on groceries for my family of 4. Ridiculous, huh?
I've searched and searched for years to learn ways to save money on groceries and I think I've finally found the way...for me at least.
A Menu Plan!
Every week, I sit down and plan a menu for 8 days. I chose to do 8 days because that gives me an extra meal in the freezer just in case I don't get to shop on my regular day and the added bonus of extra in the freezer each week if I do get to go shopping as usual.
I start with a blank piece of paper and draw 4 boxes for each day:
Breakfast -
Lunch -
Dinner -
Snacks -After my boxes are drawn, I scour the Internet and my cookbooks for different recipes I want to try, and of course the die hard favorites, then I figure out what ingredients I need for each one and write those down on a separate piece of paper. Once I've finished the menu, I write down all the snacks we will need for the week, including lunch snacks (for those that eat out of the house), fruit and the snacks we'll eat at home. Then I finally add the extras we need like, toilet paper, paper towels, sandwich baggies, etc.
Since I've started doing this, I'm only spending around $150 a week AND my sister has since moved in, so now we are feeding 5 people on that!
My next goal for my groceries is to get the bill down to $100 a week, which I hope to do in the next six months...I'll keep you posted
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2 Responses to “Reader hacks”
January 15th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Thanks for posting my rather wordy hack! I especially like Perla’s little interesting tidbit. The same is often quite true for shrimp, salmon and tuna.
Often if you’re careful you can see untreated spots on steaks and roasts, even if they’re still fresh. They look like gray little flecks, you can typically see them no the bottom of the meat.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:46 am
My biggest problem with being frugal has always been how much I love to spend money. I solved that problem (and save even more money) by shopping on eBay for discounted gift cards to places I regularly shop and then “stacking” that discount on top of store specials, coupons, etc. I wrote about it recently in Maximizing Savings By Playing The Gift Card Market
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