It’s the second day of my staycation and I had three money-saving lessons reinforced in a big way today.
Have a plan B. Lunch. Five of us intended to eat lunch at Quiznos using two buy one sandwich, get one free with a soft drink purchase. Come to find out, the Quiznos near my house closed. Now what? Plan B? Ummm…didn’t have one. Lesson learned.
In what had to have been divine intervention here’s the end of the story. I had one other restaurant coupon on me and it was for an unknown pizza place that I was not going to hunt down. I drove to our next destination while thinking about what we’d eat. Someone suggested pizza and I pulled into the next pizza place I saw. Guess what? It happened to be the very pizza place for which I had a coupon. Having a plan B would have been easier.
Follow the coupons. Wait a second, what do I mean “follow the coupons” when I am the one that first looks at sale items, then checks for coupons not vice versus. Yes, but that is the grocery store not mini golf. All summer I have been setting aside coupons for recreational activities, knowing my family would be here and we’d want to be out and about. I scour the Val Pack coupons and coupon magazines I am mailed, plus I keep my eye out for deals in the paper. Today I just checked the fill box where I’ve stashed coupons for all sorts of recreational activities and we went to that mini golf course. In other words, we followed the coupon and saved $15.
Think ahead. I have known about this staycation for a few months. I have known I’d have to feed four additional adults and that we would want to do touristy things around town. Every week for the last 2 months I have put together a grocery list for my family, but also added in items that I knew I’d like to have on hand this week. Doing that has saved us a ton of minute on last minute purchases (see airbed story in point 1 for example of last minute purchase I wish we’d avoided). We’ve enjoyed ice cream, bottled water, pop, Sobe flavored water, cookies, and crackers that were all free or next to nothing in past weeks.
I use this “think ahead” principle all the time. At the beginning of garage sale season I think ahead about all the things I’d like to pick up at garage sales that summer. At the start of the year I think ahead to all the gifts I will need to buy throughout the year – baby shower, wedding, birthday, Christmas, anniversary, etc. – and keep those in mind when I see products on clearance throughout the year. I aim to get all my gifts at 75% off retail price by thinking ahead throughout the year.
Your turn: What money-saving lesson have you learned the hard way?
About Carrie Rocha
Assuming someone in your vehicle has a cell phone, there are two great free services you can use when looking for a restaurant or (other business) as in your experience above — 1-800-GOOG-411 and 1-800-CALL-411 (the first is sponsored by Google, the latter by Microsoft) are free directory assistance/411 services with some neat bells and whistles.
When you call you will be prompted for the city/state you want to search in, then you can give either a business category or a specific business name. The computer-voice when then usually read you a list of options that match what you are looking for — either options that fit the category you listed or multiple locations in the nearby area for a specific type of business. (For example if you had called and said “Quiznos”, it might have given you the five nearest Quiznos locations either in the city you specified or nearby cities).
Next you can select the option for which you want to hear more details. Then you can get connected directly to the phone number for that business, get the address/phone number of the business texted to your phone, or one of the services (I think it’s CALL-411, but I am not 100% sure) will read you driving directions if you can give the address or intersection you are starting from.
The services aren’t perfect of course: you have to talk to a computer which may or may not be able to understand what you are saying, sometimes the wrong city is given for a particular address (for example, it might think an address that’s really in Richfield is still in Minneapolis…which could be confusing if you aren’t familiar with the area), and of course it is only as good as the information in their databases, so if a business just closed down last week that data has probably not been updated yet. But even given these drawbacks we have used these services many times with success!
Each season, I research all of the festivals, concerts and free activities throughout the upcoming season and put them all on a calendar. When a weekend creeps up on us and we want to do something, I check the calendar first. This helps us avoid impulse spending on expensive activites and we get to learn/enjoy with our local community.
We realized this past weekend that local festivals can score us some great freebies (assuming we don’t cancel it out by spending tons on concessions and rides!)
We spent a couple hours at one of those countless little festivals this past weekend. I think we visited every booth, and took advantage of every opportunity to “spin a wheel” or putt a golf ball or whatever for prizes (these are not the ones you pay for, but the stuff businesses have for free to promote their products). We ended up with:
- Bottled water (drank it pretty quickly)
- Magnetic chip clip
- A couple of nice pens
- Coupons for free roller skating
- Coupon for a free game of lazer tag
- Coupon for 2 free weeks of tae kwon do lessons, uniform included
- Various candies (which kept us from having to get our kid an expensive treat!)
- A couple fun gold necklaces (good for dress-up play)
- Two purse-size packages of wet wipes – we use tons of these!
And it was all fun, and free too. Sure beats the “real” games, where you pay someone $5 for the chance to win a toy you didn’t want to begin with… :-)