Gather Little by Little

Photo by: shaymus022

We’ve been buying bottled water now for more than 10 years. Call me spoiled if you will, but I just can’t stand the taste of tap water. We’ve tried the Brita pitcher, the Pur 3 faucet mount filters, and many others. None of them tasted as clean as bottled water.

We generally try to purchase our bottled water when it’s on sale, but it’s not nearly on sale as much as we would like it to be. We drink roughly 120 bottles of water a month. A 24-pack of Dannon water runs $3.99 – $4.99 depending on where we buy it. That’s 5 packs per month at the cost of $19.95 – 24.95 per month, or $239.40 – $299.40 per year.

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SmartyPig is a recently launched website that lets individuals or families set specific savings goals and make specific contributions to those goals on an automated and recurring basis. With SmartyPig, savings accounts are goal oriented and not just a place where money is stashed. SmartyPig partnered with Westbank to set-up high interest (4.30% at the time of this review) savings accounts to save for these goals.

SmartyPig is all about saving for goals such as vacations, books, a new lawn mower, etc. SmartyPig allows and encourages family and friends to chip in and help you out by contributing to your goals through the the site. Savings goals can be made private or public when the y are initially created.

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Photo by: Aislinn Ritchie

This article is part of an ongoing series called Money Saving Monday. Each Monday, I share tips and techniques you can use to start saving money.

Inspired by Lynnae’s Homemade Laundry Detergent article, I decided to do some research and see if there were any homemade recipes available for car cleaning products. I found a number of recipes, some a bit crazy and some not so home made at all (i.e. mixing two commercial products together). Fortunately though I did find a few that I would actually consider using on my cars. Once our water restrictions are lifted, I plan to give them a try.

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Photo by: Andy Welsh

This article is part of an ongoing series called Money Saving Monday. Each Monday, I share tips and techniques you can use to start saving money.

Instead of sharing one focused tip with you as I normally do, I’m going to share 6 completely random things that I do (and you can too) to save money and reduce overall expenses.

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Photo by: chefranden

This article is part of my ongoing Money Saving Monday series. You can read the rest of the series here. Have a tip you would like to share? Then contact me!

I’ve written about kids eat free deals before and how given we have 6 children we are the constant prowl for restaurants offering kids eat free deals. One of the restaurants we found recently is Dickeys BBQ. They offer a free kids meal with the purchase of each adult meal on Sunday afternoons. Unlike a few other kids eat free restaurants we’ve ran across, the food is awesome!

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Photo by: meandmybadself

If you aren’t using MyPoints, you’re missing out on a really easy way to get what boils down to free money. MyPoints is a service that pays you for reading emails and taking short surveys. I generally receive 3-5 emails per day and they take all of 3-5 minutes to read and receive points. My wife and I both participate.

Last week, my wife cashed in her points for an Olive Garden gift card. We started doing a weekly date night a few months back, and used the gift card to pay for most of a night out at the local Olive Garden. She used 3,450 points for a $25 Red Lobster/Olive Garden gift card.

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As many of you that have read this blog for a while know, November of 2006 was a devastating month for my family and I. For the first time in our lives, we visited a pawn shop and sold many of the items we valued, including my most of my wife’s jewelry, my banjo that she had purchased me for our anniversary a few years earlier, our video camera, and my wife’s first digital SLR camera I purchased for her as a gift to get her started in photography. Selling these items taught us a valuable lesson that some things are far more valuable than the stuff we have, but it was hard to do, and a very low point in our life. It’s amazing how when faced with not being able to pay your mortgage or put food on the table how quickly your priorities can change.

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Photo by: Paul Mannix

One of the key things you can do to save money is create and follow a budget. I’ve heard Dave Ramsey say many times that when you start following a budget, it’s like getting a raise. I’ve found that to be very true. When you start tracking and pruning your expenses, you find money that you were previously just blowing.

One of the many reasons people don’t budget is because they think budgeting is too complicated. It really isn’t, but I can fully understand why people think this. I struggled with maintaining a monthly budget for most of my life.

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Wachovia bank recently announced a new program called Way2Save. If you watched the super bowl last night, you were bound to see a few ads for the program. The Wachovia Way2Save program works by automatically transferring $1 from your Wachovia checking account into a high interest (5.00% APY) Way2Save savings account for each dollar you spend when you:

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• Use your Wachovia bank check card to make purchases
• Pay a bill online, including through Wachovia Online Banking and BillPay
• Set up automatic debits

Photo by: bjearwicke

One of the things my wife and I have been trying to do a little more lately is taking advantage of points programs. Points programs provide you with points for doing various things. These points can then be used like cash to purchase items, receive gift cards, and give to charity. We’ve been primarily using two programs, but are on the prowl for others:

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1. MyPoints
2. Debit Card Rewards Points