Frugal Friday!

Thursday, July 16th: I haven't partaken in one of my guilty pleasures in a while, shopping at The Limited. I decided to go during my lunch break today to look for some work pants. Well, I didn't find any pants that I liked, but I did find some shorts. Pants, shorts, kind of the same thing, right? Oh well.

Regular Price: $44.50. My price: $11.89. Total Savings: $32.61 or 73%.

Frugal Tip:

I love my Real Simple magazines. Plain and simple, I just love them. They always have really fun organizing tips and recipes. The thing I like most about the recipes is that they all have pictures to go along with them. This is really beneficial to the visual readers. I don't know about you, but compared to recipes with no pictures, recipes with pictures make me way more excited to cook. I'll compare it to a picture book for a kid. What kid wants to look at a book with no pictures? Not me. I'd be running around the room in no time. Because I cannot bare to part with the articles that I might need to reference one day, and I definitely cannot get rid of the fun picture recipes, I have been hoarding neatly storing my magazines until I figure out what to do with them.

On another note, we were doing some Spring cleaning at work the other day and I found a binder in the trash pile. We've all heard the saying, "one man's trash is another man's treasure," and I hit the jackpot. Did I mention that I also love sheet protectors, aka slick sheets? Is that weird? When I saw that the binder had slick sheets AND dividers numbered 1-10, a light bulb went off in my head. Oh man, this is going to be good. I brought the binder home and started tearing out all of the juicy recipes that were making my stomach growl and all of the organizing tips and articles that put a skip in my step. After I had compiled all of my pages, I trimmed the torn edges and put the recipes in one binder and the articles in another. I sorted the recipes into 9 different categories: 1. Breakfast 2. Lunch 3. Bread, Soups and Salads 4. Sides 5. Veggie and Red Meat (ironic, I know.) 6. Chicken 7. Seafood 8. Pasta 9. Dessert. I'm still working on my "fun tips" binder, but I finished the recipe binder today. It looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. I don't normally toot my own horn, but toot toot!

Moral of the story: Save money by making your own recipe book - a recipe book that contains only the recipes you like. The slick sheets are great because they guard the recipe from any flying food. Not only did I save money by not buying a recipe book that doesn't have pictures for all of the recipes, not to mention a recipe book that includes recipes with ingredients that I don't care for, I also reduced my carbon footprint by reusing trash and making it my treasure.