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Frugal Simplicity – It’s Not Just About Saving Money, It’s a Way of Life! Let’s Be Frugal!
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Paperless eCoupons – Free Coupons that You Don’t Have to Print
Have you heard about, or used, the new paperless coupon company called SavingStar? They recently launched. SavingStar makes it really super to save money on groceries.
This is another way to be frugal and practice frugal living!
SavingStar’s e-coupons aren’t printable coupons. In fact, they’re totally paperless. There’s nothing to clip or print because the coupons are 100% digital. Plus they will work at over 100 grocery store chains in 24,000 stores across the nation.
Here’s how it works:
First, just select all of the e-coupons you want from the website, or from the mobile app, and they will then automatically be linked to your store card, right then.
Next, when checking out at the grocery store, simply use your card at the checkout and the money is added into your SavingStar account. Unlike tradittional printable coupons, when you use the SavingStar card, the savings won’t change your grocery bill amount at the register and the amount you save isn’t printed on the receipt. Instead, the amount you save each time you use your card at the checkout gets deposited into your SavingStar account within 2-30 days, depending upon where you shop.
Last, once your SavingStar account reaches at least $5 in savings, you can pick your payout from a bank account deposit, a PayPal account deposit, an Amazon gift card, or a use it to make a donation to charity.
Live Frugal and Make Payments Regularly for Successful Consolidation
By Rick Murphy
Managing your finances in a better way is the key to secure a wealthy future for you and your family members. If you are indisciplined in your financial behavior and can’t live within your means, chances are there that you may face serious financial crisis. Moreover, you may be an impulsive shopper or you may be a reckless user of multiple credit cards. All these do not do any good to your financial prospects.
So, it makes good financial sense to live frugally. It is to be noted that in majority of the cases, you fall into a grave financial situation because of your years of financial indiscretion. Instead, if you were a little bit frugal in your spending habits, you could have avoided your current financial mess.
The majority of the present day personal financial crisis has originated from mounting credit card debts. Just for the sake of expanding their businesses, credit card issuers have issued cards to the people even without judging their repayment capacity. Again, many of you have engaged in rampant usage of this plastic money without bothering much about its implications. So, quite naturally, many of you have fallen into serious credit card debt crisis. However, if you have already fallen into debt, it would be wise if you resort to appropriate debt elimination strategy as soon as possible.
One popular debt elimination strategy available before you is to opt for credit card bill consolidation program. This excellent debt deduction program combines all multiple debts into a single big debt and you are then required to make single monthly payment so as to get rid of your all unsecured debts.
While you are undergoing this debt elimination exercise, it is recommended that you follow certain financial restrictions. For, instance, during this exercise, you must avoid using credit cards. You must try to become as frugal as possible in your spending behavior. In other words, you must always make the provision for arranging the single monthly payment amount which you are required to pay in order to get out of debt. Make sure that you make the monthly payment amount on a regular basis. If possible try to pay more than the monthly payment amount so as to become debt free early. However, for that you need to go one step ahead by lowering your expenses through frugal living.
In the first step of the credit card bill consolidation program, you are required to find a genuine debt consolidation program. In order to find a truly genuine debt consolidation company, you need to check its status with Better Business Bureau (BBB). If the company has a good record with the BBB website, you can be rest assured about its genuineness. The debt consolidation company, after discussion with your lenders, decides upon your single monthly payment amount. This amount is less than the total monthly payments that you were making before opting for credit card bill consolidation program.
By making the single monthly payment amount to the consolidation company for a certain period of time, you finally become free of debts and achieve financial independence.
About the author:
Rick Murphy is a contributory writer associated with the Debt Consolidation Care Community and has written several articles for various financial websites. He holds his expertise in the Debt industry and has made significant contribution through his various articles. To get credit card bill consolidation related help visit:http://www.debtconsolidationcare.com/credit-card.html
Most of us have pets, so we know how expensive it can become to have fur children. But just as with our human children, it doesn’t have to be expensive to have pets and take care of them. Frugal living with pets works, if we know what to do and what not to do.
Here are some frugal living tips for parents of fur children, to help save money and still provide great pet care.
1. Pet food - Dog food and cat food doesn’t have to cost a lot. If you have coupons for the name brand pet foods, then by all means use them (more so if the item is on sale – extreme couponing!). Some (not all) store brands of pet food are the same as the name brand, meaning the name brands package the exact same thing under a store brand. Trial and error on this will help you know which is which and what your pet likes and will eat.
The higher priced dog food and cat food might have more vitamins, but this doesn’t mean you have to buy it, just for the vitamins. Buy tablets or a paste and add it to your pet’s food. This is healthy but much less expensive.
2. Pet vaccinations - Pets need their vaccinations just as your human children do, although obviously different ones. Taking your pet to see the vet, if only for shots, can run into some money. A much more frugal approach to this is to visit your local feed type store. You can get the vaccination shot along with the needed syringe and give the vaccination to your pet yourself at home. Buying the vaccination and doing it yourself costs about $10, as opposed to a much higher fee if you go to the vet just for the pet shots.
Of course, if your pet is sick or hurt, by all means go to the vet. This frugal tip is only concerning the vaccinations, not medical care if it’s needed.
3. Pet grooming - If you have a pet (usually a dog) that requires a lot of grooming (such as a poodle), then you know that taking your pets to a groomer can run into some money – especially if you have more than one pet to be groomed. There are frugal ways to save money on dog grooming.
One way to save money on pet grooming and be frugal about it is to do your own dog grooming. This DOES take practice, and time, but you can do it. The first couple of times might mean your dog comes out looking a little funny, but remember that it does grow back. Plus after a little practice, you will become good at grooming. You can get a dog grooming kit at places such as Amazon.com, Walmart, etc. A good dog grooming kit will cost you from about $50 or so, maybe up to $100 – basically the cost of one or two grooming trips.
Another frugal way to save money on dog grooming is to barter, or trade, for the services of a dog groomer. If there’s something you do or can do, that a dog groomer would be willing to trade to groom your dog, then you’ve both saved money and gotten a good deal. For example, you might craft something the groomer wants, update a web page, create a WordPress blog, babysit for a few hours, etc.
Conclusion: Having pets can run into some money, but if you practice frugal living with your pets, then you will be happy and your pets will be happy, but you won’t be broke or in to poor house just because you have pets.
Yesterday I started making some changes to my Frugal Simplicity blog site. This frugal blog has been around, as a blog, since about 2007. Before that, it was a regular website, since about 2000. Over the years, a lot of posts became filled with dead links, dead ads, and old posts that are no longer relevant to us today. So, it was time for me to do a major cleaning up of the site.
And clean I did. And cleaning I am still doing. With so many frugal living posts over the years, it will take a while to go through all of them and see what’s relevant and what’s got to go.
During the cleaning, the first thing I changed was the way the URLs to the site were presented. Instead of having a URL with the date in it, along with the relevant keywords for each post, I changed it so the the URL would only show the relevant keywords and took the date part off. In doing that, it also changed the links to every single post on the blog.
So, if you got to the site from a search engine and it took you to the 404 Not Found Page, the way to most likely find the post you were looking for is to just removed the date part of the URL. For example, if you were looking for frugal living tips in the search engine, and saw this link, http://www.frugalsimplicity.com/2010/11/19/frugal-living-tips-2, and clicked on it, it would take you to the 404 Not Found Page. To get to the page with the updated link system, simply remove the dates and the last slash mark … in this case that would be 2010/11/19/ … making the updated URL http://www.frugalsimplicity.com//frugal-living-tips-2 … But even this updated URL still goes to the 404 Not Found Page, so the next obvious thing to do would be to remove the number 2 and the dash before it from the end of the URL, making it http://www.frugalsimplicity.com//frugal-living-tips … and here we have a live link and a live frugal post. Most URLS would only require removing the numbers and the slash as I mentioned first. Once the search engines catch up to the updated URLs, this won’t be an issue.
Also, you can just go over to the top right column in the search box and type in what you’re looking.
I’ve made it easier for readers to subscribe to the blog feed. At the top, in the Nav Menu, there is a SUBSCRIBE link that opens to a page for you to put your email address into. This gives you a morning email (when there are updates) with the title and link to what’s new on the site. If there’s not an update the day before, there will be no email.
Readers can also now get their frugal living tips on Kindle. This post, http://www.frugalsimplicity.com/frugal-simplicity-on-kindle/, gives the information so you can sign up. It’s easy and simple! When there are updates to the frugal blog, you’ll get them on your Kindle. It’s so cool! I totally love this feature!
I’ve updated the Frugal Specials page, located at http://www.frugalsimplicity.com/specials/ …. this page automatically updates itself as new frugal deals, freebies, and coupons become available. Lots of ways to save money!
The printable coupon page at http://www.frugalsimplicity.com/coupons/ is a printable coupon database that also automatically updates itself as new printable coupons become available. You’ll want to bookmark it and check it often. Who doesn’t love coupons?
The Free Samples tab in the Nav Menu now goes to FreebiesRock.com, another of my blogs. Rather than add the same freebies on various blogs, I’m streamlining things to post them only on the freebies blog.
A couple of new features I am adding will be coming over the next few days. One is to start posting more coupon codes. These will be simple to use: just find the coupon code you want and click on the red button to copy the code to your clipboard and automatically be taken to the linked page to shop and use the coupon code. I totally love this new coupon code tool! The second new feature allows me to create coupons – this one I am still testing, but it’s such a cool coupon tool that I am sure you will love it!
The last change, and this is big one, is that I am going to start posting more in the first person… as in more personal type frugal living posts. In the past, the majority of my posts have been straight frugal living articles or posts for coupons, freebies, bargains, etc… but very little personal type posts. I’ll still be posting all of these, but also the personal type posts pertaining to frugal living, along with adding more personal type notes to the other type posts.
That’s it! Lots of changes, but hopefully all for the good. Let’s go out there and be frugal!
