Sorry I didn’t get up the weekly frugal accomplishments last week. I got sick Thursday evening and didn’t recover until Wednesday of last week. The kiddos are still sick, but I think we are on the better end of this, and will soon be back to normal. So for this weeks frugal accomplishments I’m going to cover the last two weeks. Last week I didn’t have the energy to do much of anything, let alone be very frugal, but I got a few things done.

Weekly frugal accomplishments for March 23rd – April 5

Made chicken bone broth.

Earned 50 swagbucks (referral link)

Collected rain water to use on the flower beds.

Purchased some items from an online action for a much reduced price. Some items were needed, and others we intend to clean up and sell for a profit. We are hoping to make this a small side income for our family so we don’t have all our eggs in one basket. Wish us luck.

Our homeschool group was canceled the last two weeks so that saved us the gas to make the trip to town.

I had my husband shop for groceries while he was in town for work saving us gas there as well. We try not to make a trip into town for just one thing.

I have been trying to be diligent to rinse out cans and bottles to recycle. It’s often easier just to through some of them away because I didn’t get things rinsed right away and it can be a pain to soak them and then rinse them, however our town participates in recyclebank.com so we receive a point for every pound of of recycling they pick up. You can then redeem the points for discounts, magazines, and even gift cards. I’ve redeemed several magazines, and when they are available, Amazon gift cards as well! The great thing is, even if your city or recycle company doesn’t participate you can still create an account, and take little questionnaires or read through info and earn points that way. I’ve been earning and redeeming points for years, but have only been participating in their recycling program for about a year and a half when our town switched companies.

I hung out clothes 4 days over the last two weeks.

Our power went out at midnight Friday morning (April 3rd) and didn’t come back on until the evening. It went out again Saturday morning around 10am or so and didn’t come back on for several hours. We had a micro cell that came in for a few minutes and then was gone, but it did a lot of damage through out the entire county. We were fortunate to have no damage, just the inconvenience of having no power while you have sick kids who want to watch a movie, but we managed. We were able to get some ice for free to keep things cool. I put a bowl of ice in our frig and just kept the freezers closed. I threw a heavy blanket over the deep freezer just to be safe though. Our ice cubes in our frig’s freezer didn’t even start to melt. I think it helps that we keep our house cooler in the winter/spring months as well. We didn’t need to get take out. We made scrambled eggs on the grill, and I had Joel cook up some hotdogs for lunch while he was cooking the eggs since he was going into town over lunch and I wanted things to be as easy as possible while he was gone (don’t forget I had three sick, slightly cranky girls to entertain.) I did have him pick up paper plates, disposable diapers and wipes, and a few staples items, but the staple items I was planning on him picking up before we woke up to no power. We did have hot water since our water heater runs on gas, but I was still only functioning at about 75% and, of course, taking care of three sick girls, and I needed a little extra help and the disposables did the trick.

We had a busy Easter Sunday since our church was hosting the community sunrise service and breakfast. Joel was running sound/media, and I was singing on the worship team, so we had to be there extra early, like 6am. So we arranged to have the kids spend the night at Joel’s parents so we only had to be up by 5am instead of 4am if we’d had to get the kids ready as well, plus really, who want to get little kids up at 5am and deal with the consequences of that all day, maybe even week. We got our breakfast to go and headed over to Joel’s parents’ house between services to get the kids ready and then headed back. It was a blessing to not have to worry about breakfast. It was a great Easter service, and thought I was terribly tired by the time it was all done, it was worth it.

So what are your frugal accomplishments from the last week?