Wednesday, June 22, 2011

On A Brighter Note

Okay, that last post today was kind of a bummer. Not very helpful, either. Here are things I've recently discovered that could be helpful.

Sam's takes food stamps now. I don't know how long they have been doing it, but I just learned this in the last month or so. Also, if you have one person in your family that does most of the grocery shopping, you can split the cost of membership with a friend. Each of you get a Sam's card for around $20/year. Next time my husband is feeling perky enough to make a Sam's trip with me, I'm taking him off our membership and putting a friend of mine on. She has a large family and takes a lot of her older relatives grocery shopping and they use food stamps, so it might work out well for them. With stores like that, it really depends what you buy whether or not it's a good deal. For some families it is, for other families it might not be.

Second thing is frozen chopped green bell peppers. Fresh green bell peppers are on sale at my local Kroger for 89¢ a piece right now and that's a really good deal. They normally run well over a dollar each. In the freezer section, store brand frozen veggies go on sale for a dollar a bag pretty regularly. This is when I buy my chopped frozen green bell peppers. I do not know exactly how many peppers are chopped up in the bag, but I'm pretty sure it is more than one. They are already chopped, they aren't going to go bad if you forget to use them. It's hard to beat that.

Another thing I've done off and on when I've halfway got my act together is to take snacks and a drink when I have to run errands. Even if I go through the drive through and order off the dollar menu and only buy a sandwich and a drink, I'm going to be spending a couple of bucks. With just a little planning ahead, I can take a bottle of water or tea or whatever and a ziploc bag of pretzels along. It's not a meal. It's not delicious. It's not healthy. It is, however, cheaper and probably healthier than a double cheeseburger and a coke. It takes the edge off and helps me to wait until I get home to eat. When my kids were smaller and I took them nearly everywhere with me, it was more of a challenge, but still well worth the trouble when I was able to manage it. Drink bottles can be a pain to clean, but I found wide mouth, durable, plastic drink bottles in the camping department at Walmart. They can be cleaned pretty easily with a bottle brush.

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