Dreadful Penny

Last Christmas, we gave gifts that included both store-bought and homemade items — crabapple candy (including fruit from our own tree), spiced apple syrup, cinnamon apple wedges, and dolls that I designed and sewed.  This year I intend to do the same and it’s not too early to get started.
I don’t have many ideas yet, […]

“Suddenly, saving is sexy and budgeting is back in vogue.”  So says this article on Kiplinger.com (via Get Rich Slowly).  Rrrright.  While frugality is more widely accepted than it was a few years back, I’m going to need a lot more convincing to call it sexy.
I’ve seen a load of articles about how people are […]

For some reason, a wave of financial anxiety hit me on Saturday.  The sort that makes your throat constrict and your stomach begin to flop like a grounded fish.  It passed quickly enough.
We’re doing ok.  We’re not-by-choice landlords (we couldn’t sell my husband’s former house at a reasonable price, so we have it rented and […]

I’m posting this on the slim, skinny, extremely slender chance that someone found my envelope and will search the web to find the owner. Doubtful, eh? I have to try.
What: unmarked white #10 envelope filled with coupons (over $20 in CVS ExtraCare bucks, a $5 Walgreens register rebate, free coupons for Yoplait Kids […]

Is it worth the time to shop sales and use coupons? Trent over at The Simple Dollar mentions that he’s often met with scorn when he posts specific frugality tips — “I’m not wasting my time to save $2!” — and when Cathy of Chief Family Officer wrote a guest post about the Drugstore Game […]

I don’t have a green thumb. I hate yard work. It’s inescapable, however, so I figured that I might as well try to make our yard as productive as possible this year, especially when I’m trying to eat better and feed the family more cheaply. I’m not Farmer Penny and while we […]

There are a lot of places online to find legitimate manufacturer’s coupons, from aggregations like Coupons.com, SmartSource.com, and CouponBug.com to the websites companies set up themselves to promote their brands. Many require you to download a plug-in that controls the quantity you can print. The coupons are often passed from the website to […]

There’s some back and forth on Instapundit over rising food costs and AP’s editorial laziness, and I had to kick in a few words. Food prices are absolutely higher and sometimes the change is made in a subtle and insidious way — as Consumerist often points out, the price and package size remain the […]

I don’t plan to write about pinching pennies often, but it’s on my mind today, so here goes. It’s the end of a three-day weekend and Kid Dreadful has been visiting relatives, so my husband and I have had the house to ourselves. Mindful of our current budget, we tried to have a […]

We’ve reached the most obvious indicator that we’re done with home improvement projects for a while. Yep, we’re out of cash. We finished all but one item on our ambitious 2008 outdoor project list before the well ran dry, which I attribute to good planning, lots of research, and no shortage of hard […]