September 23rd, 2009 by Kristi Stephens

I am a relative newcomer to couponing. Even though I am extremely frugal, I resisted couponing for years – I wondered if it was really worth it. Once I started, though, it became addictive – the combination of frugalness and strategy with bringing home bags of stuff and saying to my husband, “guess how much I paid for this??” was irresistible! Here’s my method of organizing and utilizing all those goodies.

1. I clip every coupon. Even ones I think I’ll never use in a million years. Why? Because occasionally you can get things so cheap (or free!), that even if we don’t need it I buy it anyway and store it or give it away.

2. I usually buy 2-3 Sunday papers per week for the coupon inserts. I go through the inserts in sets so I can stack the identical coupons together – less sorting later, and I can put single pages of the inserts on top of each other and cut out two pages at once.

3. After I pile up all of my treasures, I enter them into my coupon database – an excel sheet with columns for brand, amount, expiration, source, and store (if they are specific to one particular store). Since they are already in stacks, I can copy and paste the rows for identical items. After they are all entered, I sort the whole document by brand, expiration, and amount.

4. I file the coupons alphabetically by brand in an index card file (with letter dividers I found at Dollar Tree.)

Now, this does take some time to clip, sort, enter, file, and use the coupons. I find utilizing this system to be helpful, however. When I first started couponing, I had a small stash of coupons and I pretty much knew what I had on hand. Currently, however, there are 732 coupons stuffed into my coupon file – clearly I don’t remember what I have.

When I sit down to look through the weekly store circulars (I only use coupons when a store has a sale on the same item – I have found that just using a coupon on a non-sale item or purchasing sale items without a coupon rarely brings the price lower than what I would pay at Aldi), I pull up my coupon spreadsheet. It’s quick and easy to scan the circular for good deals and scan my spreadsheet for what coupons I have.

I have also found it helpful to be able to sort my spreadsheet by expiration date, in order to weed out expired coupons or know which high-dollar coupons are expiring soon.

Do you have a coupon organization system that works well for you? I’d love to hear about it!

For more Works for me Wednesday, hop over to WeareTHATfamily.com

September 16th, 2009 by Kristi Stephens

I see the skepticism on your face. Homemade dishwasher detergent… hmmm.

Oh, wait. That’s MY face reflected in the computer monitor!

Seriously. I was very skeptical. We have really, really hard water. I had trouble finding a commercial dishwasher detergent that worked, let alone making some concoction of my own!

Last week, however, the inevitable happened: we ran out of cascade action packs. I love those little things. So easy. And they worked! But buying them at Sams meant dropping almost $20… and buying them somewhere else meant a much smaller pack for more money in the long run. Boo. I have looked at nontoxic/green dishwasher detergent in the past, too, but that’s even more expensive. I try to be a good steward of the earth, but you know how cheap frugal I am.

Image by smysnbrg via Flickr

I started looking around the web a little more seriously for homemade alternatives. This one intrigued me. I decided to try it.

Now, sadly I could not find washing soda at any of the stores I visited. I also had no citric acid, and I haven’t tried the lemon jello he suggested, but it is intriguing.

This is what I mixed together:

2 parts Borax
2 parts baking soda [yet another use for my favorite household workhorse]
1 part coarse salt

Because of our super hard water, I still am using LemiShine, which I love. I’m sure it’s extremely toxic or something because it works so well.

So, here’s the plan:

•Into the main wash cup: about a tablespoon of homemade mix with a couple of teaspoons of lemishine (pretty soon I’m going to take the plunge and just dump the lemishine in with the rest of the mix… one less step)
•Into the prewash cup: a teaspoon(ish) of liquid dish soap (very nervous about this the first time… I’ve had some dishsoap-in-the-dishwasher tragedies in the past!)
•Into the rinse aid cup: vinegar

I watched nervously for copious amounts of bubbles to blanket my kitchen. When the washing cycle was done, I opened the door with hesitation….

Clean dishes!!!

Now, I have been pre-rinsing them a tad bit more, but really, they are coming out clean. Hooray for clean! Hooray for cheap! Hooray for nontoxic (well, except for the LemiShine… makes me want to try the jello. I am skeptical, but that’s nothing new.)

For more Works for Me Wednesday, jump on over to We Are THAT Family.

September 9th, 2009 by Kristi Stephens

…it’s always better to not have to use it.

AG was always a fairly neat eater. Of course we have the standard spaghetti on the face pictures, but never the spaghetti bowl over the head/ noodles on the wall type ordeals.

LB makes up for it.

He watches his dad put gel in his hair in the mornings, and as soon as he gets milk, peanut butter, cheese sauce… anything… on his hands, he smiles gleefully and styles his hair with it. Or fingerpaints with it all over the table.

Oh, and if you don’t grab that plate away with lightning speed when he announces that he’s done, he will fling the leftovers on the floor with equal glee.

He’s adorable and hilarious, but he is NOT neat!

Every night as I crawl around on my hands and knees wiping up the carnage, I am thankful for my husband’s brilliant idea when AG was a baby.

We took the plastic chair mat from under our rolling desk chair and used it under the high chair. So simple, yet so brilliant! I can vacuum over it, it never gets rolled up, it’s very easily cleanable, and it’s big! I rarely have to pull out the carpet cleaner (although, at times his pitching arm is extra exuberant.)

It’s a beautiful thing.

For more Works for me Wednesday tips, hop over to We Are THAT Family.

August 19th, 2009 by Kristi Stephens

As of this morning, our homeschool “room” (actually a corner of the dining room) is finished! I’m always amazed by how much an educational poster or something like that can cost, but have been thankful to find or make everything super cheaply!

Here’s the rundown:

Top left: Super cute “yesterday was _”, “today is _”, “tomorrow will be _” signs and the days of the week came in a set at Dollar Tree (for $1.00, obviously!) I laminated them for a buck or two at the educational resource center, and used the art waxer to make it stick on the wall. [Those art waxers are great! It puts a thin layer of wax on the back, and it sticks to the wall without damaging and can be moved around endlessly! Love it!]

Left middle: A poster we picked up in Williamsburg when we were first married. :)

Lower left: See our felt board sticking out there??

Top right: Calendar set, also from Dollar Tree! The calendar itself, day numbers, and month headers were separate, so it came to a budget busting $3.00. Not too bad, considering I saw an ad last night for a teacher calendar set for $23.00! I art waxed the back of the numbers and month headers, and used some Command poster hangers to hang the calendar up. This is double coupon week at KMart, so with the $1.00 command coupon from last Sunday’s paper, those poster hangers were less than $.50!

Middle right: Nice, glossy, heavyweight US map also from… Dollar Tree!

Lower right: Remember the learning clock? Cheap to make and it has been marvelous for teaching AG to tell time!

That bin and cups on the table were my solution a while back to where to keep all of our crayons and markers and coloring books –

Nate cut a heavyweight box on an angle for me and I covered it with contact paper. The cups are just tin cans that Nate spray painted white! (we covered the rough top edges with duct tape first.)

Our dining room has a swinging door into the kitchen which we don’t use [we keep it open with these stellar door stops we found at Ikea! The only way we can keep LB from trying to break his hand in the door!] With it open it provides a bit of a divider between the “school corner” and the rest of the dining room, and it also gives me more space to hang stuff! :)

I found the pocket chart in the dollar bins at Target last year, and a few weeks ago I found another one there! I keep our daily schedule in the pocket chart on word strips, along with little clock cut-outs with the time. This is an outdated schedule… another item on the “to do before we start ‘school’ list.” ;)

The handwriting poster is also from Dollar Tree, laminated at the educational resource center, hung up with command poster hangers. It’s nice that it’s at eye-level for AG when she’s sitting at the table.

I am so thankful for the many ways God provides for us – coupons, dollar stores, dollar bins, free services… He is good!

For more “works for me” tips, head over to We are THAT Family!