Category Archives: Frugal Fun

Avoiding the pressure to have fun (and spend money)


photo by yoniamir

As much as I love the holidays, I breathe a sigh of relief when Christmas is over. This year I managed to escape the pressure to spend a ton of money on gifts and entertaining. Instead, I found frugal alternatives to extravagant shopping to show the people I love that I care.

Now comes the pressure of New Year’s Eve.

The older I get, the less pressure I feel. But there was a time when all of my friends were heading out to fancy, expensive parties to ring in the new year. All dressed up in new clothes, they’d drop $50 a person on tickets to these parties or head out for expensive nights on the town at fancy restaurants.

One year in college, Tony and I gave in to the pressure. We packed some party clothes and headed to the city with some friends. I have no idea what we spent after travel costs, hotel, food, and a night on the town, but I know it was a lot. The worst part was that we were pretty miserable the whole time. It was freezing, and every place in the city was charging $50-$100 just to walk in the door. We ended up going back to the hotel at 9 p.m. and watching the ball drop in our pajamas … something we easily could have done at home for free.

I know many of my readers will be celebrating the new year with young children this year, so you may not be feeling this pressure. If you are feeling pressure, though, my advice is to resist it!

Instead host a small get together or a movie night. You’ll have plenty of time to go out on the town in the coming year if that’s what you want to do — and you’ll spend a fraction of what you’d spend on New Year’s Eve.

Two years ago, Tony and I stayed home in our pajamas and enjoyed a 24-hour “Seinfeld” marathon. We made a lovely dinner, and toasted to the new year at midnight. It was the most fun I’ve ever had on New Year’s Eve, and it cost practically nothing.

What’s your favorite frugal New Year’s Eve activity?

Guest post: Cook an elegant meal for 6 for $30

This is a guest post from Chris Ambrose. His cooking and entertaining blog, This Guy Cooks, is full of great tips for entertaining and cooking gourmet meals on a budget. If you’re struggling to come up with last minute meal ideas for Christmas or New Year’s, this great menu could be your solution.

First I would like to thank Karen for letting me guest blog on her site over the holidays. I know that this has been a tough Christmas financially for lots of people this year. With all the doom and gloom out there about the economy, just about all of my friends and family are tightening the old belt over the holidays.

As Karen wrote in one of her previous posts, the holidays are supposed to be about being with your friends and loved ones and the wonderful memories that come from those times. In my family, it’s not Christmas without my Mom’s sticky buns. Both my sister and I are in our early 30s, and to be totally honest that’s all we really care about. I have no idea what I got for Christmas when I was 8, but I can tell you that we didn’t have sticky buns that year because Mom burned them.

While things are a bit tight for everyone this holiday season, please don’t pass up on to spending time with your friends and family because you think you can’t afford it. I have come up with a elegant dinner menu for 6 people that you should be able to do for under $30. Hopefully this helps you continue to have those wonderful memories and experiences over a great meal.

Dinner Menu

Roasted Pork Loin with an Apricot Glaze

Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Onions

Spinach Salad with Mandarin Oranges and a Honey Mustard Dressing

Vanilla Ice Cream with Caramel Sauce

Sweet Potatoes

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Peel and cut 2 large sweet potatoes into 1 inch cubes. Slice a half of a onion into roughly quarter inch slices. Toss the onion and sweet potatoes with salt and pepper, cumin, red chili powder, a dried herb of your choice (rosemary goes nicely). Place on a cookie sheet or roasting pan and put in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour until the sweet potatoes have finished cooking and are soft to the touch.

Pork Roast

Mix together a dry rub for your pork loin (about 3 lbs. roast) consisting of salt, pepper, dried oregano, and cumin (remember with cumin a little goes a long way!).

Heat a tablespoon of olive oil over medium high heat in a skillet (love to use my 12″ case iron pan for this). Place the spice rubbed pork loin in the skillet and brown on all sides.

Once it’s browned on all sides, place it in the oven for about an hour or until you have an internal temp of 150 degrees.

For the glaze, take about a half a cup of apricot jam (peach also works well), and heat it in the microwave or on the stovetop. After the pork has been in for 30 minutes, brush the pork with the jam. Repeat this again after you take the pork out of the oven. Once the pork is finished let it rest for 10 minutes before carving it.

Salad

For this salad I normally just get a bag of pre-washed baby spinach and a can of mandarin oranges in light syrup. For the dressing just whisk together Dijon mustard, olive oil, red wine vinegar, and honey.

Dessert

This is just a simple dessert. Pour a caramel sauce over a good quality vanilla ice cream. Feel free buy the sauce at the store or go ahead and make your own. It’s pretty easy.

Wine

I think that a Syrah would stand up nicely to the pork and fruit flavors of this dish. One of my favorite value Syrah blends is the 2006 Penfolds Kanooga Hill Shiraz/Cab blend. You can normally pick it up for about $7.99.

Check out Chris’s blog for more recipes & entertaining tips!

Focus on the memories — not the money


photo by kspeterson

Last year at this time, our financial situation was pretty bleak. I was working two jobs — a part time retail job and a temporary office job that paid well but only lasted until the end of February. Though we had some extra money coming in, we were saving aggressively because we didn’t know how long our savings would have to last.

We were also away from family. I couldn’t take time off work and we couldn’t afford to travel, so we stayed here, 800-miles from our families.

At the beginning of the season, I was dreading Christmas. I imagined us alone in our apartment with no family, no gifts, no decorations and only sadness.

We looked at our budget and decided we could afford to spend $100 on Christmas. In the past, we had gone overboard on gift shopping for each other. I had come to associate Christmas with fancy gifts and extravagant meals. I couldn’t imagine recreating Christmas with so little money to spend.

We were surprised, though. Finding practical frugal gifts was a fun challenge. I aggressively shopped sales to find little things to put under the tree. I used creativity to come up with ideas. I reassessed our priorities and shopped only for things that I knew Tony wanted and would use.

We had fun putting up our old decorations and fashioning new homemade ones.

Christmas Day we dined on cheap Chinese food and caught a half-priced matinee at the movies.

Instead of focusing on how little we had, we made the most of every dollar and every moment.

Remember: Gifts don’t last, but memories do.

The most important lesson we learned last year was that gifts really don’t make or break Christmas. Shopping is fun if you can afford it, but the best part of last Christmas is the memory.

Twenty years from now we won’t have any of the gifts that we gave to each other. No matter how much you spend on it, stuff doesn’t last forever. After 24 Christmases I can only remember a handful of gifts. Many of them didn’t even last a year. What I remember is the time spent with family and the traditions that cost very little or nothing at all.

Keep that in mind if you’re struggling this year. Even if there’s no room in your budget for gifts, focus on the memories.

Make this Christmas a happy memory. Cherish the good moments and remember that the bad won’t last forever. Remind yourself that “stuff” is fleeting.

If you focus on the negative, then all you’ll remember is the sadness. Instead, focus on the memories you want to keep forever.

If you told me last October that our $100 Christmas would be the best we ever had, I wouldn’t have believed you. A year later, I know that I’ll always cherish the memory of last Christmas not in spite of our struggles but because of them.

Favorite frugal holiday traditions from childhood

Photo by yogi

Tony and I have only been married six months, so we’re still working on building our own family traditions. While some of our own traditions are completely new (like our private gift exchange and candle lit dinner at home a few days before celebrating the actual holiday with family), many of them are borrowed and adapted from our families.

We’ve been thinking a lot about which traditions we’ve to carried over from our own childhoods. Here are some of our favorites, and the ways we’ve adapted them.

Then: Every year, I watched old Christmas movies with my mom (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas,” and “The Bishop’s Wife” were our favorites).

Now: Tony and I still watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” every year. We’ve also added “Love Actually” to our list of holiday favorites. This year, we’re attending a free screening of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in an old theater downtown, so we’ll get to see it on the big screen.

Then: Tony listened to a local radio station’s frequent on Santa’s whereabouts Christmas Eve.

Now: Well, not right now, but someday when we have kids we’ll track Santa with them online at a site like Norad’s Santa Tracker.

Then: Both of our mothers baked huge trays of Christmas cookies for us to eat every year.

Now: I don’t trust myself with large amounts of cookies around the house, so if I bake I’ll give away most of the cookies to co-workers or family.

Photo by ggladman

Then: We both grew up in the Midwest where there was plenty of snow for snowmen, sledding, and snowball fights.

Now: No snow in North Carolina. :( We’re heading north for Christmas, though, and we’re hoping to see snow then. Cross your fingers for us!

Then: When I was a kid, we opened one gift on Christmas Eve and the rest in the morning. Once we were all too old to wait up for Santa, we began exchanging gifts at midnight on Christmas Eve. We celebrated all evening by eating good food, listening to Christmas music, and playing board games. Tony’s family has always exchanged gifts on Christmas morning.

Now: We’ll celebrate on Christmas Eve until we have young children who are expecting Santa. But as they get older, we’ll probably abandon the Christmas morning gift exchange for a Christmas Eve celebration. As a teenager, I loved celebrating with my family on Christmas Eve then sleeping in on Christmas morning and relaxing all day.

Then: My mom always put an orange in the bottom of our stockings. It was a nice healthy snack that didn’t at all make up for the pounds of junk food we ate at Christmas. But it was a nice touch.

Now: I will always put oranges in stockings, no matter how weird Tony thinks it is. :)

What about you? How have you adapted your family’s traditions?

TGIF Round Up: Holiday Countdown Edition

I can’t believe we’re down to 3 weeks until Christmas! Time has been flying by.

The decorations are up, most of my shopping is done, and our plans are all set for our trip to see family. I just can’t believe how soon it’s coming. Despite the fact that everything’s pretty much done, I’m still feeling pretty unprepared for the holidays this year. Like they snuck up on me. Anyone else feel that way?

Tonight we’re going to a holiday party. I’m looking forward to getting all dressed up and enjoying some holiday cheer. :)

And onto my favorites from my reader this week:

  • Emily at Remodeling this Life is slowing down this holiday season. I absolutely agree with her. We’re all so stressed during the holidays, but it should really be the time to slow down and enjoy ourselves.
  • Christina at Northern Cheapskate shares how you can be generous even if you’re broke. It’s really important this time of year to remember that even when you’re struggling, it’s still important to help others.
  • Get Rich Slowly shows how to afford anything (but not everything). It’s so easy to get blinded by all the things we want, that sometimes we forget how easy it could be to get one thing with a little focus and effort.
  • On Simplicity offers alternatives to traditional gift giving. In the economy, we should all be thinking outside the box for ways to make the people we love feel special without spending a lot of money.

Hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season so far. Happy Friday!

Thanksgiving is the most frugal day of the year

According to the American Farm Bureau, the average American family will spend $44.61 on a traditional Thanksgiving meal for 10 people this year. That’s a $2.35 increase from last year’s price, which is more than double the typical yearly increase of $1 and some change.

There’s been a lot of buzz about this increase in the news. You know what, though? That’s not too bad if you ask me. Try finding a restaurant meal of Thanksgiving proportions for under $4.50 a person. Not happening.

Thanksgiving really is the most frugal day of the year. What other day do the majority of American families stay home instead of going out to eat? Most stores are closed, so nobody is out shopping. Instead of spending money, we stay home eating a good home cooked meal and spending time with family.

I was curious about our Thanksgiving costs, so I took the time to add up the numbers for our meal. Here’s an estimate of what we spent this year:

12-pound turkey: $6
Potatoes: $2
Cubed stuffing: $2.50
Celery: $1
Fresh cranberries:$2
Canned pumpkin: $1.25
Miscellaneous cooking items (flour, sugar, eggs,milk): $3 (a very rough estimate)

Total: $16.75

It may look like we’re spending more than $8 per person, but don’t forget about the leftovers! We’ll be eating them all weekend long. :)

What about you? How much are you spending on Thanksgiving this year?

New traditions for my favorite frugal holiday

Photo by rick

pumpkin pieBeing newly wed is so much fun at the holidays. It’s so fun combining traditions from each of our families, adapting them to suit us, and creating our own. We’re building our own family history starting now.

Last year we ate a traditional meal on Thanksgiving Day, but the holiday really ended there. Because I worked in retail, I had to head back to work early the next morning and throughout the weekend. No fun. :(

This year is our first opportunity to enjoy the entire holiday weekend. So we’re thinking about the kinds of traditions we’d like to begin.

For starters, there’s turkey and pumpkin pie and a whole day devoted to cooking and eating. Of course.

But then what?

We won’t be home for Thanksgiving, but that’s fine. If we lived closer to home, we’d be spending the day with family anyway.

On Friday, we’ll cook our own Thanksgiving meal this year. I like the idea of staying home all day and watching movies. Normal weekends are so jam packed with errands and cleaning and everything I have no time to do during the week. Since Friday is a freebie day off, the idea of lying around all day in comfy clothes appeals to me.

When I was a kid, we usually ate another Thanksgiving meal on Friday every year. We went to my grandma’s for Thanksgiving Day, but my mom loved cooking for Thanksgiving so much that she liked to make her own meal on Friday. I can see us doing the same thing in the future.

Saturday night we have tickets to a holiday show. I thought that would be a fun way to kick off the season, and they only cost $10 each. We decided to skip our monthly restaurant meal this month and use that money for the tickets.

We’ll spend Saturday afternoon decorating our apartment for the holidays, putting up the tree and the lights and eating Friday’s leftovers. Then we’ll head out for the show.

I’ve always felt like the Christmas season really only begins after Thanksgiving is over. That’s why the holiday is so much fun. We get to celebrate Thanksgiving and the beginning of the Christmas season all in one weekend. :)

How about you? What are you favorite Thanksgiving traditions?

TGIF Link Round Up: Film Festival Edition

This weekend, Tony and I are getting out of the house. I was able to get free tickets to an independent film festival through my work, so we’re spending the weekend watching movies. Usually this type of thing isn’t my cup of tea, but I knew my movie buff husband would love it, so we picked out some movies that look good to both of us. I’m just excited to get out of the house without spending any money.

At some point between film screenings we’ll have to fit in our regular weekend errands, including groceries, the last of our Christmas shopping, and cleaning. Hopefully we’ll have time to get it all done!

It’s been a great week in my reader. Here are some of my favorite posts to kick off the weekend:

  • J.D. at Get Rich Slowly has 34 do-it-yourself Christmas gifts. There are lots of great ideas here, and the best part is they seem easy enough that anyone could do them.
  • Trent at the Simple Dollar has a compilation of the 25 best money-saving tactics. This is a great place to start if you’re just getting started with the frugal lifestyle.
  • Lynnae at Being Frugal shared an interesting guest post from Amy at My Daily Dollars about how blogging helped her save $13,000 without bringing in any direct income. It’s hard to quantify, but I know blogging has helped me save thousands and given me the tools to save thousands more in the future.
  • Simple Mom cools off house fever with a long term plan. We’re already looking ahead to a house purchase even though it’ll be years before we can do it, and having a solid plan in place makes it easier to wait.
  • When Emily at Remodeling this Life wants to get away, she looks to her own town for fun tourist activities. Sometimes there’s a lot of frugal fun right under your nose.
  • Kelly at Almost Frugal shares a guest post from Nicole at Breaking Even about how losing weight can save you money. It’s amazing how much getting healthy can save, not just in food and bad habits but also in health care costs down the road.
  • Penelope Pince at Pecuniarities writes life is too short to sleep on low thread count sheets. I’m constantly asking myself where I should cut corners and what’s worth a little extra money. I think bedding is one of those things that’s worth a little extra money. Of course, if you shop around and look for a deal, you’ll be surprised at how little you pay for high-quality sheets.

Whew! Lots of great posts to read. I’m off to the movies (after work of course). Happy Friday!

Planning a frugal Thanksgiving for two

Photo by dennissylvesterhurd

Thanksgiving turkeyWith the election over (thank goodness!), we’re all turning our attention to Thanksgiving, which is now exactly three weeks away. (Where did the time go?)

I’m no exception. Tony and I won’t be traveling for Thanksgiving. We’re making a big trip to see family for Christmas, so we’ll be home in North Carolina enjoying a quiet holiday. We may invite a culinary-challenged friend or two if any of Tony’s classmates stay behind and want to join us. If not, it’ll be just the two of us.

That doesn’t mean we’re not cooking a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings, though. My amateur chef husband wouldn’t miss roasting a turkey for the world. We had the most wonderful holiday last year. We invited a friend over for dinner and enjoyed a Thanksgiving feast. The leftovers lasted days. I’m looking forward to continuing our tradition of a low-key, no-stress Thanksgiving holiday cooking and eating good food, watching movies, and relaxing.

Last night we began preparing by putting together our Thanksgiving menu. We’ll be making all the traditional dishes, including turkey, mashed potatoes, cranberry dressing, stuffing, greenbean casserole, fresh bread, and pumpkin pie. It’s a lot of food for two people, but we plan to eat nothing but leftovers all weekend. :)

Last year we didn’t roast a whole turkey. Instead, we bought a small bone-in turkey breast. I highly recommend that you do the same if your dinner party will be small.

To reduce the impact on our budget, we’ll be spreading out purchases for the menu over the next few weeks. At some point in the next week or two, I’m expecting a big sale on turkey at the grocery store. We’ll pick up our turkey then, and pick up an item or two for the meal on every shopping trip in the coming weeks.

Here’s how some of the bloggers from my reader are preparing for the holiday:

How are you preparing?