Start creating your list for the next trip as soon as you get back from the grocery store. If you forgot something the past time it probably wasn’t something mandatory anyway so add it to the new list. As you go through the week keep adding items to your list. Some people keep it on the fridge so it’s in a convenient location. We actually used to have a chalkboard painted on our wall for a grocery list, a to do list and a calendar.

After you’ve made the effort to create your list you have to remember to take it with you. It may be something that’s hard to get used to but it’s an essential part of the process. There are actually some great free applications for smart phones that can help you track lists and more than likely you will have your cell phone with you.

Now that you’ve created your list and remembered to bring it with you, you have to stick to the list at the store. If it’s not on the list don’t buy it. This will help cut out unnecessary expenses and impulse buying. Even if it saves you $5 per week it adds up over time.

If you are a penny pincher then every cent saved counts. Creating a grocery store list is just another simple way to help tighten your budget.

The largest energy hog in your home is your heating and cooling. If your home uses an electric heat pump it will be the largest percentage of your home electric bill. One way to lower this cost is by installing a programmable thermostat. It will automatically adjust the temperature when you are not home or sleeping and then return to a comfortable level when you are home or awake. energystar.gov suggest the average household can save up to $180 per year by using a programmable thermostat.

Lower the temperature on your hot water. Your hot water is your second biggest energy hog. In order to solve this problem you can actually lower the temperature of your water heater . www.energysavers.gov suggest lowering your temperature 10ºF can save between 3% and 5% on your energy bill, this would be about $100 per year for me.

Turn off the auto dry feature on your dishwasher. I do suggest you use your dishwasher as it can actually save you money on your water bill; however skip the dry feature and hand dry those dishes.

Wash clothes in cold water. Most laundry detergents are now designed to get clothes clean even if the water is hot or cold. Turn the dial to cold and save the energy!

Turn out the lights. When you leave a room turn the light off. There is absolutely no point in having lights on when no one is in the room.

Install energy efficient lighting. Compact fluorescent lighting can typically save you $30 over the course of their lifetime.

There are many other ways to save money on your electric bill, be creative and you will reap the rewards. These suggestions alone will save you over $300 per year.

Cut your shower 2 minutes short. The standard shower head produces 2.5 gallons of water per minute so 2 minutes would save 5 gallons of water per day or 730 gallons per year.

Use the dishwasher instead of hand washing but only when the dishwasher if completely full. I have found research that supports that the average dishwasher uses between 3 to 4.25 gallons of water to do a load of dishes. A typical hand wash can use up to 16 gallons of water! Let’s assume you do dishes 4 nights per week or about 200 days per year. Using 4 gallons in a dishwasher and 16 gallons by hand you will save 2400 gallons of water per year!

Keep drinking water in the fridge or use ice cubes. Running the water long enough to get the water cold in the tap can waste several gallons of water per day.

Turn the water off when brushing your teeth. It’s one of my pet peeves to watch the water flow from the sink the entire time someone brushes their teeth. Even if it’s 1 gallon per day that’s 365 gallons per year!

Skip the rinse. Instead of running water in the sink to get rid of dinner scraps scrape them off then put them in the dishwasher.

Throw food away in the trash instead of the sink. The garbage disposal requires water to work properly so avoid this to save a few more gallons.

With these simple tips you can easily save up to 3500 gallons of water per year!

No, I’m not from Queens, but there are many other websites similar to this one that provides you with cheap or free opportunities for your family to have fun. Family entertainment doesn’t have to be expensive. With the shape our economy is in these days every saved penny counts. As Queens’ Mammas points out there are many great opportunities in your area such as parks, workshops, parades, concerts and fireworks.

Do some searching on the internet for cheap, fun, and free enertainment opportunities for your family. No matter how big or small your town is there are ways to enertain for free or very cheap!

Not only is a Redbox movie great  for a date night, a family fun night, but it’s also great for a road trip. Stop by your local Redbox, pickup a movie for the kids in the car, stop for lunch return the  movie and even pick up another movie for the second half of the trip. It was a life saver for us on the way to the beach a couple of years ago. Our five year old loved getting to stop on the road to pick out a new movie and for only $1.

Now sure, not everyone loves Redbox. Movie rental places such as Blockbuster, Netflix and other online movie rental businesses have taking a major hit from the success of Redbox. However, for us the consumer it’s good news that you can now rent a movie for $1!

Speedway also offers special promotions such as 1000 bonus points for the purchase of a $50 gift card to Speedway. I always take advantage of this offer because I spend the money on gas anyway so why not get the extra 1000 bonus points and pay for my gas with the gift card.

So, where does the difficulty in financial logic come into play with the rewards system? It’s the redemption process. Speedway offers several reward options such as merchandise, food, store gift cards and restaurant gift cards. I can easily avoid the merchandise and food offers. I’m not a big fan of convenient store food or merchandise so it’s easy for me to skip out on these items. However, the problem arises when I’m offered a gift card to a restaurant such as Applebee’s.

Below is a chart showing the reward options and point costs to redeem. I have based my values based on the $200 Speedway cash gift card redemption. This is the logical best value because it can be used for fuel. The food and merchandise are the best in-store value redemptions, but not the best actual redemptions, because these items are way over-priced if purchased somewhere else.

After doing the math 1 point is worth $0.001064, below is my chart.

I did all this work to say that I have redeemed my points 3 times at Speedway since I started the program. Each time I choose the $50 Applebee’s Gift Card. The best deal is the $200 Fuel Card + $0.03 per gallon but for some reason I can’t help but redeem for the Applebee’s Gift Card. It’s something that’s fun and it seems like I am getting a free meal. Why do I have such a hard time redeeming for the fuel card and spending cash at Applebee’s? Anyone else have this problem?

I want to start with an everyday example. There is a convenient store / gas station chain located in the Midwest and Southern parts of the United States called Speedway. Many of the Speedways that I know today were once Super America stores but this is just side information. The point is they have a rewards program. For all your in store and fuel purchases you are awarded points. These points can be redeemed for merchandise, gift cards to Speedway or gift cards to other partner stores. Sounds like a great deal, right? Wrong!

First, the term convenient store means you are going to pay a lot more for any item you buy there because it’s convenient. You won’t have to wait in a long grocery store line to checkout and you can get your can of soda already chilled and ready to drink, but it will cost you, sometimes as much as 500%! For example, just the past week soda was on sale for $2.50 for a 12 pack. I admit this isn’t typical, but you can sometimes find these deals. A convenient store may charge as much as $1.00 for a can of pre-chilled soda. $0.21 for a grocery store soda versus $1.00 for a convenient store soda is about a 500% markup.

How can you solve this problem of convenient store robbery? The answer is pretty simple and you have a couple obvious options. First, don’t drink soda; it’s not good for you anyway. Second, pack a small cooler to take in the car when you leave the house. Fill it with cold soda and even snacks. If you plan to be on the road for a while it’s a great break from driving to stop and grab a snack.

Remember I said this was a two part post, stay tuned for part two very soon.

For the most part America is a “living in the present” society. The majority of us do not plan ahead, and financial statistics will prove that a small percentage of us even have a savings account with a balance of $1,000. That’s why my first technique may be obvious however; difficult to implement. Clothing stores often mark down their clothing as much as 85% toward the end of a season. Most of us will wear the same size clothing one year later so why not take advantage of the sales? Store the clothes away in a storage tote and break out your new, extremely discounted clothing the following year. Sure, it may be a season old, but I would be willing to bet that the majority of us wear clothes for longer than one year anyway. My wife often buys new, brand name clothing for our children for $2 and $3 per piece using this technique.

 Second, use those coupons! Almost every clothing store will issue some type of coupon in the local paper or on the internet. These coupons may only be for 10% – 15% discount but if you were going to buy the item anyway, why not save a few dollars. When using coupons always read the fine print, often coupons exclude certain items including items that are on sale or on clearance. If you get to the checkout counter and they won’t accept your coupon don’t be afraid to walk away. In order to avoid a voided transaction the cashier may honor the coupon anyway.

 Take advantage of discounted gift cards. Gift card resale is becoming a very popular trend and many websites and businesses are completely designed around the resale of gift cards. They offer to purchase gift cards that you won’t use for less than face value and in turn resale these gift cards to someone who will use them for a small profit. For example, you may receive a $50 gift card for Dicks Sporting Goods as a Christmas gift. You know you will never use it so you decide to sale the gift card for $40 to a gift card resale business. The resale businesses will in turn sales your card to someone else for $45. You get $40 for your gift card that you would never use and someone else saves 10% from purchasing your gift card, everyone wins!

 Now that you have read the saving techniques you may already know where I’m going with this, but if not let me explain. Simply combine two or three of the techniques for extreme savings. Let me give you an example to further explain. I start my search on a gift card resale website. I purchase a $50 Kohls gift card for $45. My wife loves to shop at Kohls because their off season clothing prices are great and usually you can use a coupon even on clearance items. Let’s assume it’s the end of summer and their discount is 85%. I buy $350 worth of clothes and after the 85% discount my total is $52.50. I use a coupon that is 15% off your total purchase that brings my total to $44.63. Sales tax adds another $2.68 for a grand total of $47.31. I use my $50 gift card to pay the balance and get back $2.69. My total percentage saved after all discounts is is almost 88% and that’s not including the discount on the gift card, not bad. I just bought $350 worth of clothes for $47.31.

A few weeks ago a lady at work overheard me talking about needing a babysitter. She jokingly told me she would babysit for me anytime I wanted to come over to her house and cut her grass. I never really thought any more about it until a couple of days ago. Why wouldn’t I take her up on this barter for services?

We usually pay our babysitters $25 or so for a couple of hours of service. That’s a pretty big amount per hour for a babysitter, but we feel it’s not worth the hassle of someone coming to our house for less money than that. This can make a date cost upwards of $80 for dinner and a movie. Why wouldn’t I barter for free babysitting?

The lady from my work hates yardwork and tending to her lawn. She would much rather watch our kids for a couple of hours than cut the grass. I actually don’t mind yard work and I could always find an extra hour or so to tend her yard if it meant free babysitting.

Think of some ways you can use your skills to save some money. With the recent recession I think it’s possible you will start seeing more of the barter system being used. An ancient system may be making a comeback!

The consignment store was offering a deal where you could stuff a bag full of clothes and only pay $15. I thought it would be a pretty good deal if the bag was a decent size. I’m all about saving money so I gladly watched the children while she went to scope things out.

About an hour and 20 minutes later she returned with her bag full of clothes. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the bag was a decent sized bag. She actually crammed exactly 40 articles of clothing into the bag. All of the clothing was name brand clothing and looked new. So she bought the clothes for about $0.38 each. The best part is that everything she bought was something she would have probably purchased anyway. Sure it’s mostly for next summer but you just can’t beat a sale like this!

If you really want to save some money in the clothing budget check out consignment stores. Most of them only buy back clothing that looks new so there is still plenty of wear left in the clothes. Most of the clothes are also top name brand clothes, so you can be stylish and still save a lot of cash!