Frugal Tips!

Sometimes I just do certain things out of years of habit, then I realize they save me more money than I realize. 

During these tough economic times, I noticed that my blog gets a lot of hits on "Homemade Syrup Recipe", and other frugal tip posts.

I thought it might be nice to share a few more of my everyday money saving tips.

We don't hardly ever use paper towels in our house.  I have a large basket full of rags that I store in a closet.  It's just as easy to grab the basket of rags to clean up a mess than it is to tear off a paper towel.  Now, I do have a roll of paper towels on my kitchen counter for those messy, gross, clean ups that I don't want to contaminate my wash when I launder the rags; but we hardly ever use them.  If some messy chemical gets spilled, I use the paper towels, because I can throw it away and rid my household of the chemical.  I'm annul like that about chemicals.  A roll of paper towels usually lasts our household about six months until the boy comes home from college:(  He gets very used to using paper towels in his dorm room (and I can't blame him), so it takes a few weeks for him to get on track by looking for the rag basket.

I also have an old coffee container (it's plastic) that I store homemade liquid soap in.  I don't use this soap for dish washing or cleaning, but I put it into an old dish soap container for the guys to use for hand washing.  There's nothing more annoying for me than the hubby and my son coming in from outdoors, their hands are filthy; and they use half my squirt bottle of dish soap to wash their hands.  How do I make this homemade liquid soap?  I take bars of soap (I have a plethora of hotel soaps someone gave me for free), and I grate a couple of those little bars into the old plastic coffee container.  Then I add water.  I usually add about 10 times the quantity of water that I have in soap grains.  Then I put it in the container under my sink, and let it sit, and sit, and sit.  That's it!  In about 2 - 3 weeks, the soap particles actually dissolve in the water, and it makes a cloudy white liquid soap.  Great for washing up after dirty jobs in the yard or basement.  I also found it to be a fantastic cleaner for my stove top.  I just squirt a portion on the top of the stove (where someone other than me has left boiled over food:), and let it sit.  After 5 minutes, I just use one of those rags from the rag basket to rinse it off.  Bye-bye cooked on stains!

Just thought I'd share a couple of easy frugal tips with you all.  Sometimes we just do things out of habit to pinch a penny or two, but I've recently found myself becoming more mindful of those things.