Money Saving Tips & Tricks for Savvy Moms

Shannon - A friend of mine, and Mother of two sent out an email to a large group of women inquiring about the specific ways that they go about saving money. It spawned a GREAT discussion, several useful money saving tips & tricks, and some GREAT recipes to boot. I thought I might highlight some of those here in my blog in case anyone might like some ideas to save a few pennies here and there in this unstable economy....

So be on the lookout as I get them in - I will post some of my favorites.....

Here are some great tips from Liz

-If you have good cell phone coverage & signal, dump the landline. How often do we actually use our home phones anyway these days? And if you do need a landline in an emergency, in most cases you can still plug a phone in and be able to dial 911 regardless of whether you have an active line. If you must have a landline, call your carrier and get the least expensive plan they have...usually $10/month or so and use it for strictly local calls. Don't pick a long-distance plan. Use your cell phones for long distance & toll calls.

-Cable. Cut premium channels. We don't have this anyway, but if you have any sort of premium channels or 'tiers', that can save about $10/mo or more.

-If you or your spouse do see a substantial decrease in income, you can see about qualifying for a level-pay plan with your gas/electric/water utility companies. I don't know much about this, but I always see something about this in the flyers that come with your bill

-I'm sure we all do online bill pay exclusively, but if you don't, this saves so much money in stamps and also assures that your bills are paid on time, thus avoiding any late fees, finance charges, and the like.

-If you must go and grab fast food, skip the combo meals and just buy the main sandwich. Bring it home and have drinks out of the fridge. This saves a ton of $. Also by avoiding the combo meal, you are avoiding the fatty fries full of empty calories.

-Take the time to clip and organize your coupons prior to going to the store. Companies are losing $$$ big time, so the coupons to lure consumers to buy their products are big. I rarely see any coupons under 50 cents anymore and most of them are over $1.00. Ralphs grocery doubles any coupon under $1.00. So pay attention to those coupons.

-Get a free CVS club card. CVS is a great store to shop at for lots of your staple items simply because of the coupons. For instance, just last night I was able to use 3 CVS coupons all at once. Save $3.00 off any purchase of $15.00 or more. Save $2.00 off your next purchase and Save $1.00 off your next purchase...Plus I had a manufacturer's coupon for $1.00 my body wash. Before the coupons, the total was $33.22. I walked out of there paying $26.22, a savings of $7.00. And to top it all off, I had another $8.00 in coupons attached to my receipt for my next shopping trip over $15.00. SCORE!