FeedTheFam.com

Tips to Save Money

There are a couple of good tips on how to save money over at BankRate right now. They hold a frugal tips contest every month called Frugal $ense. You can win $100 if you submit a tip and it gets the highest user rating. Last month’s winner was all about saving money by only grocery shopping once a month. She literally plans out all the meals for the month on a calendar, saving the items that take the longest to cook for the weekends. Check out her tip here.

I was sifting through the entries for this month and while I didn’t see much cost savings in the tip to line dry your clothes instead of using the dryer, I did think that the one on growing your own vegetables was great. Basically, this person is talking about taking your background garden to a whole other level by producing a surplus and canning/jarring/freezing it to make it last throughout the year. We’re talking not just veggies but also berries and fruit trees. Although fruit and vegetable prices would probably never go as high here in the continental U.S. as they are, say, in Japan where I hear it might cost about $50 to buy your own fruit and make a fruit salad with, it still would save you a lot of money to do this. It makes me remember a trip to Switzerland where I saw that most of the homes along a train route I was taking had their own little vegetable gardens. Perhaps our residential landscape will start to look like that in the future.