Welcome to Friday!
My Frugal Kitchen
We had a grocery store pick up delivered this week, so we are stocked back up on food for the next month or so.
We bought twenty pounds of ground beef and divided it up into twenty different bags and stored it in the freezer.
This week I made two dishes that we ate on all week and then today I will be making a Broccoli and Carrot soup for dinner.
Frugal Entertainment
This week we decided to watch Hocus Pocus for movie night.
Other Frugal Activities
This was the week for making phone calls. I ended up calling on my auto, homeowners, and life insurance polices to adjust those and was able to get lower rates on all three. The savings on all three policies will amount to $1,077.12 over the course of the next year. I decided this was better for me as I'm not subbing right now and can revisit the issue when I do go back to subbing.
This week I decided to trim my hair, which looks and feels so much better.
On Sunday we will have Echo and Rambo here to pet sit for ten days, which will give us some extra income.
This week I had a Roamans reward certificate for $10 that was about to expire, so I used it to purchase new undergarments, which saved me about half the price on those.
This week I sold one item on eBay and listed another item for sale, which already has bids on it, so it will sell this weekend.
Stolen Mail
Since we live in a rural area, our mailbox sits on a country road about 1/4 of a mile from the house. We can't see it from the house and last Saturday, our mail was stolen out of the mailbox along with three packages. Our Saturday mailman has a bad habit of leaving packages hanging out of the mailbox, which is why I think they were stolen.
One of the packages stolen was for Bailey's allergy prescription medications. We had to make multiple phone calls this week to get those replaced. Since she needed those meds now, we ended up going to town to pick up her new RX.
Another package that was stolen was from Wazoodle where I had ordered Zorb and PUL to make Bailey some new cloth pads. That was $35 worth of material, so I put in a claim to the post office for that. The other package was a book for Mom from Amazon, which cost $1.29 plus shipping, so Mom went ahead and replaced that herself.
Planned Obsolescence/New Washer & Dryer
Planned obsolescence is an industry policy of designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so that it becomes obsolete after a certain period of time. The rationale behind this strategy is to generate long term sales volume by reducing the time between repeat purchases. It is the deliberate shortening of a lifespan of a product to force consumers to purchase replacements.
We bought our Roper dryer in 2014, so six years of service. And our Roper washer we bought in August 2017, so three years of service. We had the dryer worked on this summer when it stopped working, but then three months later, it stopped working again. Rather than spend the money on another dryer repair, we decided to buy a new mid-priced dryer.
The new dryer came with it's own set of problems. We ordered the wrong plug and they refused to install it with our existing dryer vent since it was not metal. So we have a repairman (the same on who installed our a/c this summer) coming on Monday to install it for us.
Our Roper washer has had its own set of problems. The transmission went out on it before it was a year old, so the repair on that was covered by the warranty. This past summer it has gotten to where it will not finish a load of laundry without stopping before it's finished.
We tried to restart loads where they stopped, which didn't work, so we tried starting them over and sometimes it would work, but not always. And the machine was not getting clothes clean like it should.
So, we decided to buy both appliances new and in the mid-price range, hoping they would last longer than the Roper models.
We originally order a new LG set, but Lowe's cancelled that set on us as they're having a hard time keeping washers and dryers in stock, which is true across the board for all stores. So, we ended up buying this GE washer and dryer. Let's hope this pair works for a long time.
Since the washer still works, we've been washing things and hanging them to dry in the house. This will definitely save on the electric bill. Both appliances were bought with cash that was saved up for things like this.
Whew! That is our week in a nutshell. How was your week?
Belinda
~ Living within our Means ~
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