Between my birthday and the remainder of last week’s holiday festivities, this was an especially festive week around here! But we found a great many ways to save in spite of the frivolity.

1. I used my free birthday Starbucks reward to get a latte!
Let the season of free birthday surprises begin! I brought my Starbucks app right on into my local shop this week and redeemed my gift for a free grande iced vanilla soy latte. I can’t remember the last time I had one, which made it all the sweeter! And on a hot day like the Mid-Atlantic has been coping with this week, it was a welcome respite indeed.

2. My New York day trip was canceled. (Boo!)
For a while now I’ve had a fun little adventure planned, just for me: A day trip to New York City, whereupon I’d taken in a Broadway matinee (with a discounted ticket, naturally!), enjoy some 99-cent pizza and head on home. That adventure was supposed to have taken place yesterday, but alas! On Tuesday, while LeeLee and I were enjoying bagel sandwiches for lunch, I got a text from Amtrak informing me that not one but BOTH of my trains had been canceled. The nerve! So that has saved me some money right off the top. But it is a temporary savings: I’m plotting a re-do in the next few weeks. Film at 11! ;)

3. We used a Prime Video coupon for movie night.
When having Amazon orders shipped to the house, I often opt for the slow-boat option, which usually comes with a little thank-you gift in the form of a digital coupon. I redeemed one of these on Saturday night, when LeeLee and I wanted to rent “Tea With the Dames” to watch. Four complimentary dollars later, we were in business! (And the movie is great.)

4. It’s like Grand Central Station at the library these days!
I tell you what, it’s not a normal week if I haven’t visited the library at LEAST once, usually more. This week I brought home four new books (two of which were cookbooks), returned another I’d just finished reading, AND downloaded an audiobook via the Libby app! One of these days I’ll have to tally up the total yearly savings I get from the library – I’m sure it’s substantial.

5. The Leftover Revolution continues.
LeeLee and I have made light work out of meals like Bisquik Chik’n Pot Pie, leftover salad fixings, and, yes, more breakfast tacos! We save so much money (and time) with this – and it’s a thrill, I must say!

:)

Happy Fourth, friends! I apologize for the quiet times around here this week – a holiday week always brings out the summertime frenzy in me! But I did want to pop in and share some of my frugal wins – and tragic fails – that have taken place this week. Ready? Here we go.

1. I completely ruined my home laptop (but blessedly had a spare waiting in the wings).
Let’s cut right to the chase here – this is by far the biggest news of the week, so no sense burying it down at No. 5. Yes, it’s true – I have destroyed my beloved home MacBook, a faithful friend of mine since 2017. In short: Last Friday near the end of the workday, I was working from my living-room sofa in order to enjoy a little sunlight (my office is in the basement and it sometimes gets a bit dreary!), and had both my work and home laptops out because I had some personal work to do right after the workday was over. I decided to treat myself to a fizzy water, poured it in my favorite glass, got up to put the can in the recycling bin outside and somehow managed to completely forget about said water upon my return. I swung my arm around and in slow motion it all happened at once – the glass tumbled to the floor, the water spilled out across the coffee table, and both my laptops were in the way. I snatched both up, but the home one, closest to the spill, was soaked before I could even get to it. I did everything “they say” to do – powered it off, dried it out with a fan, etc. – but it will barely turn on. A (free) visit to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store confirmed its fate.

Blessedly, I DO have a backup laptop, which I am typing to you on right now. My old work computer got decommissioned, so I am using the one our IT folks sent back to me as my home laptop for the moment until I can decide what to do. Do I buy a new-new MacBook Air this summer, while there are some back-to-school sales? Or do I try to hang in there with this new-to-me 2019 machine? We’ll weigh the options and proceed accordingly.

I’m especially angry at myself because I take SUCH good care of my things, but as the techie at the Apple store said, we’re all due one mishap like this in our life. Sigh. The best laid plans.

2. I sold my running shoes on eBay!
Those shoes I listed just last week sold right away, for a good price that’s fair to both parties, and are already winging their way across the country to start a new life! Now I’m waiting on my cycling shoes to sell – all in due time!

3. Our Leftovers game is strong at the moment.
I’m very proud to say that our Leftover Revolution is still in full force! Our fridge has never been so clean and tidy – leftover meals that grace the shelves are gobbled up in days. Just today at lunch, we enjoyed the remainder of last night’s pizza (enhanced with a “pizza bagel” to fill the plate out), and I am confident that tonight’s July Fourth festivities will also bring about some leftovers. I can’t wait!

4. I redeemed some Marriott points to reserve a hotel room for an upcoming trip.
I keep meaning to write a post about how to explore NYC on the cheap – don’t worry, it’s still coming! – but in the meantime, I’ll just say that LeeLee and I have our eye on a trip up to the Big Apple in a few months and I’ve gone ahead and redeemed some of our hotel points to pay for it. Having free lodging is a major money-saver on any trip, but especially to a high-cost area!

5. I’m continuing to scan every single receipt into Fetch.
This is definitely not a high-yield activity, but it only takes seconds, so who cares? I’ll soon have a $25 Safeway gift card, which isn’t chump change in this economy!

Have a great holiday! Hit me up with your frugal wins (or failures – can you top mine?) in the comments.

:)

Free baseball tickets, eBay listings and a victory over United Healthcare – it’s been a busy week on the frugality front! Here’s what’s been happening.

1. Remember that fight I was having with United Healthcare? I won!
It’s true – the nearly yearlong battle I was having with UHC has finally come to a resolution, and two checks for $190.99 apiece have arrived to my home (and were directed immediately to my bank account). This took a considerable amount of legwork from both my company’s benefits team AND a patient advocate, but lo and behold, I came out the victor in the end. So many other patients would have given up and/or forgotten about it, but not me! And I hope not you, either, if you find yourself in a similar situation.

2. I earned two free Washington Nationals baseball tickets!
Our wonderful public library system (which I wrote a love letter about in these pages a full nine years ago!) is a great resource any time of the year, but its summer reading program is the cherry on top. Not only does it offer challenges for kiddos, it also has an adult reading program component for us grown-ups – with prizes! It reminds me so much of when I was an elementary-school student knocking back slices of pizza in the Book It! program. Thanks to a recent trip to the beach, I got ahead on my reading and have already won my first prize – five books read earned me two Nationals tickets for use later in the season! LeeLee and I got our calendars out, selected a date, used our voucher code, and voila – two seats are now ours. Take me out to the ballgame!

3. I returned two Amazon purchases with plenty of time to spare.
I must admit, one of my frugal flaws is a failure to return purchases that don’t work out. I have every intention, but the follow-through isn’t always there. Well, I am proud to report that I have a pretty good little streak going, and it is paying off (so to speak). I recently ordered two pairs of shorts that I was CONFIDENT I’d ordered before in the exact same style and size only to realize after arrival that I was in great error. So off they went to my local UPS Store, and back $50 came to my bank account!

4. I’m turning a Frugal Fail into a Frugal Win!
Remember a few weeks ago when I confessed that I found an extra pair of walking shoes in my closet after I’d gone out and purchased a new pair? Well, I got to thinking over the weekend: My new walking shoes will last me about a year, and while I could save the other pair until I need them, I could make use with that money now! So I’m going to list them on eBay and turn my failure into success.

5. I bought some veggies on BOGO last weekend and am actually using them.
This should be table stakes, I recognize, but it’s not always for me. But this week, I am proud to report that my extra bell pepper and baby bella mushrooms aren’t going to waste! Through salads, fajitas and more, I am using my abundance wisely. And healthily! And most important, tastily.

What frugal wins do you have going this week? Tell us in the comments!

:)

Now, somewhere in one of my more recent Five Frugal Things posts, I made mention of Rotation. I promised to address it in greater depth later, and friends, later is now! (Wow – that’s meta!)

Rotation is a time-honored tradition within my family, stretching back generations. I was first introduced to it with my mother and my Aunt Lynn, my wonderful godmother, back when I was a child. From well before my time stretching on into the present day, Mama and Aunt Lynn were forever putting things into Rotation, shuttling items back and forth from house to house, even including others into the act where appropriate.

The rules to Rotation are simple: If you have something – a home furnishing, clothing, artwork, etc. – that somebody else needs, and you can spare to part with it (on a temporary or permanent basis, though Rotation is usually semi-permanent at best), put it into Rotation! Does one of your lamps actually work better in your friend’s house? Could your friend use it? Put it into Rotation!

One of my favorite Rotation stories is the tale of the bookcases. My father built several sturdy, solid wood bookcases eons ago, in probably the late 1970s, and they lived at our house, in his office, for years. In the mid-1980s, Aunt Lynn and Uncle Jim needed some bookcases, my dad was redoing his home office space anyway, and voila! Into Rotation they went, down the street to Lynn and Jim’s house. And there they lived happily for about 15 years, residing in various spaces throughout the home, until I needed some bookcases for my first apartment, and – voila! – into Rotation they went again, over to me. Those bookcases now live upstairs in LeeLee’s office, but I’m certain their Rotation travels haven’t ended just yet!

And Rotation has certainly carried on into this generation as well. My friend Denise and I are constantly placing items into Rotation – in fact, I’ve got a bag for her now, filled with a 1,000-piece puzzle, a book, and a brand-new bottle of dish soap with a fragrance that was too strong for me. We’re constantly shuttling items back and forth, for a moment or for keeps, and I wouldn’t have it any other way!

Do you have a version of Rotation? Sound off in the comments!

:)

I took a week off of ol’ FFT last week due to a confluence of work and life craziness, but I couldn’t stay away for long! Here’s a rundown of how I’ve been trying to maintain some semblance of frugality … and one way I totally failed, because honesty is the best policy.

1. We’ve been enjoying leftovers every which way.
Since the start of my Leftover Revolution earlier this year, we’ve been pretty dang good about using our dinner leftovers for a second dinner each week. And when the leftovers aren’t quite enough to yield a whole dinner, we’ve been incorporating the ingredients into salads, rice bowls, or lunches (which aren’t quite as hearty as dinner around here). In fact, the main photo for this post is one of our leftover-yielding dinners: Crock-Pot Hoppin’ John, which has the dual benefit of being a make-ahead slow cooker meal AND a leftover producer that gave us two meals apiece!

2. I continue to fight my medical insurance company to ensure they reimburse me for a vaccine.
I don’t think I’ve written about this here yet so here goes. Last September, LeeLee and I went on a trip to Europe (on points, I might add!), and before we went our doctor encouraged us to get the new covid vaccine, which was just being released. So we went to our local CVS and asked for the vaccine, and our pharmacist told us that because it had just come out, many insurance companies weren’t coding it properly yet so we’d need to pay out of pocket. Normally we’d just wait a few weeks, but since we were traveling internationally we knew we needed it and fast. So, safe in the knowledge we would be reimbursed, we went ahead and got one vaccine apiece, for the ripe old price of $400 all in. (Four hundred dollars. For a vaccine that was supposed to be free.) I immediately filed my claim with United Healthcare and naively waited for it to go through. Nearly a year later, I am still waiting, only now I’ve pulled in a patient advocate and the entire benefits team of the company I work for. I WILL get this reimbursed! Four hundred dollars may not be a lot to some people, but it’s a great deal of wealth to me. And even if it were four dollars – it’s the principle of the thing! I want what I’m owed and I will see that I get it.

3. I’m still doggedly scanning every grocery receipt into Fetch.
I know I’ve talked about Fetch before, and while it’s certainly not going to get me rich any time soon, it IS a good way to get a little kickback for shopping I’m doing anyway. A few seconds to scan yields anywhere from 25 to 1500 points, which I can turn into gift cards along the way. Not a bad payoff for very little work!

4. I fixed the rogue thumping noise coming from my microwave.
When the microwave started making a thumping, grinding sort of noise coming from the turntable area, I feared the worst, but Google came to the rescue again! After a search, I quickly realized that the culprit was in fact gunk (that’s the scientific word) on the little carousel wheels that help the turntable rotate. A few minutes of elbow grease and order is restored. And the microwave purrs like a kitten again!

5. And – last but not least – my Frugal Fail.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I boasted about my walking-shoe return? After I returned the ill-fitting Hokas, I purchased another style, which was much needed (as I’d literally worn the soles off my existing walking shoes). I got a reduced price and felt fine about it. ALL THE WAY UNTIL I was putting some cooler-weather clothes away in my closet and found a brand-new pair of walking shoes tucked away, still in the shoebox, just waiting to be worn. I PROMISE you I’d looked in my “shoe stash” and came up empty! But there they were, smirking at me from their snug little box. So much for that. On the plus side, now I won’t have to buy new walking shoes for a long, long time. Silver linings!

What have been your frugal wins (or failures – be brave and tell us!) this week? Let us know in the comments!

:)