Cheap laundry soap, better than Tide

Got this laundry soap recipe from Winona ECFE. A friend made up a batch for me last October, and it has lasted until now -- nearly ten months. Total cost of the ingredients for that batch (about 5 gallons of laundry detergent) was $10 or so. Works great -- a number of moms in my ECFE class swear by it, say it's better than Tide. Even a couple moms who say they're picky about their laundry, which I am not. And you can't beat the price. The only issue I've found is that when storing it in a five-gallon container, it needs to be stirred occasionally to prevent settling. (You can also store the concentrated form in empty laundry detergent bottles.) Here's the recipe, written up by the inimitable Jenah Hensel:

1 Fels Naptha bar
1 cup washing soda
1/2 cup borax
1 five gallon pail with a lid

All those weird ingredients are available at Hy-vee, or any other major store in the laundry detergent aisle.

Grate the Fels Naptha bar up. It will look like shredded cheddar cheese. In a sauce pan, melt together the bar and 4 cups of water. Stir, and it takes awhile, 15 minutes or so.

Fill the five gallon pail half full with hot water. Mix in the washing soda, Borax, and the melted Fels Naptha water mixture. Fill up the pail with more hot water. Allow sitting overnight, to gel.

The next day, mix up the stuff. I actually did it with my hand/arm. Just dig right in there! Spoon or even a joint-compound mixer would work well). Looks like egg drop soup, the picture is what is looks like at this point. Now use an old Tide container, or Snuggle, or whatever, fill it half with water, half with the soap mixture. Shake it all about.

For standard washing machines, use 5/8 cup. For high efficiency (HE) use 1/4 cup. Hot, Cold, Warm, whatever you wanna use for water, that is up to you. Use cold, it's cheaper.

Here is the breakdown:
Makes 10 gallons of laundry soap
180 loads for standard
640 for HE
Costs around $2 to make this much
No real smell after the clothes are washed, but smells like my grandma (which is nice) when making it

Grocery challenge update

A number of people have asked about how our strategic shopping is going. Yes, a year later, we're still clipping coupons and shopping as strategically as we can. As I suspected, it required a large investment up front in terms of learning all the ins and outs. Figuring out coupons, which local stores have the best regular prices, which have the best sale items, memorizing what a "good" price is for every item we routinely buy (with my poor eyesight, I used to just grab what we needed off the shelf without considering the price too often) . . . and then working out an efficient system for our particular family all took time, probably about three to five months. Now, a lot of that knowledge and research has become second nature, which really cuts down on the time we've had to invest in this. The other thing that took a long time to ramp up was our stockpile of deeply discounted sale items. That took about four months to top off.

But in the interest of accountability, and also out of curiosity, I decided to do an audit of last month's grocery bill. We kept every single receipt and added them up at the end of the month. In January, we spent $597 on groceries, and saved $42.06 using coupons. That compares to our average grocery bill of $850 when we started this project a year ago, and $567 when I last checked on this in April. Not bad, considering food prices rose by 1.7 percent last year . . . and also considering that I'm investing much less time in strategic shopping these days. Here's what we're doing:

• I shop at five different stores in order to get the best prices. We use the Holsum/Sara Lee bakery outlet to buy bread (the multigrain type) for $1 - $1.50 a loaf. We go to Rochester Fruit (another discount operation) for our very large fruit purchase. In terms of the "big" grocery shopping, I start at Target, because they are most likely to have the lowest prices on non-sale items -- sometimes dramatically lower than the grocery stores. Unfortunately, we do not have a Super Target in town, or I could probably do all my shopping in one place/ Instead, I head over to Midtown Foods (the local IGA) to pick up a handful of sale items every week. Everyone thinks they have high prices, but their sale items frequently beat Target and HyVee (example: Hormel turkey pepperoni for $2, or 50% off). Then I hit Hyvee, focusing on sale items and whatever stray items we might still need.
• As far as coupons go, we finally broke down and got a subscription to the StarTribune, because we were consistently finding the value of the coupons to be worth the price of the paper. Of course, I waited until they begged us with a discounted deal. When I began doing this, I started sorting coupons into little baggies according to their type. THAT was too time-consuming, as were several other methods I tried. Now, I sit down and quickly flip through the coupon papers every week, clipping only those coupons I know we will use, or that we might use if the item is also really on sale. All of these go into a big plastic bag along with the store coupons that print out with the receipt and the many coupons Target offers online. Yes, I'm forced to wade through all the coupons to find what I need -- but this also helps me keep on top of weeding out the ones that have expired, and it reminds me of ones that we need to use before they expire (for items we routinely buy anyway). I will be so glad for the day when paper coupons go the way of the paper newspaper -- extinct. Cell phone couponing is going to be so much easier.
• I still use CouponMom.com for weekly matchups between sale items and coupons. It's nice because you can sort by percentage saved. Back when we started this, the Coupon Lady told us that she never even bothered with anything less than 30% off, and I laughed at her. Now I see what she means. We really focus on stocking up on items that are 40 percent off or more.
• This means that our "pantry" (really the space on top of our cupboards) has exploded. We currently have about 25 bags of shredded cheese (for pizza) -- hey, they were going for 99 cents a piece, which is 67% off, or a savings of about $50. We also had guests over the other day and one said, "Wow, I have never seen so much peanut butter!" We do not buy peanut butter for more than $1.00 a jar (usually Skippy or Peter Pan). We also have a lot of cereal on hand, which we never pay more than $2 a box for.

We have our limits, of course. This family is big on sweets and snacks, and although I limit them as much as possible, that adds up. Also, someone in this family who shall go unnamed consumes an amazing quantity of pop. Also, we try to buy healthy food (multigrain, high-fiber bread and lots of fruits and veggies), and we try to buy responsibly (like cage-free eggs, because who wants eggs from a chicken that has spent its life in a cage that it can't turn around in???). Also, sometimes I am just too darn tired to deal with it all.

It's not "fun." I actually hate grocery shopping (and shopping in general) -- although grocery shopping with little Mudpuppy along is more enjoyable, both for his own sweet self and for all the reactions he gets. But we need that extra $200 - $300 a month, so until theologians start getting paid like lobbyists, we're going to be clipping coupons and stocking up.

April grocery update

Well, I said I would update everyone on my April grocery challenge. Our April grocery total was $561.43. Our coupon savings was $71.42. Compare to $679.81 and $33.66 for March. And, of course, our starting point was an average monthly grocery bill of $850.

The question people ask about this is, "Yeah, but how much time do you spend?" I have to say, grocery shopping has become a major chore and a major pain. I figure I probably spend about 5 hours a week, give or take an hour. If I eventually get to the point of saving $300 a month, that'd mean I'd be getting "paid" about $12.50 - $18.75 an hour. On the up side, it's getting more routine as I'm "trained in" on how to do this (e.g., focus narrowly on only buying items discounted 30% or more, plus whatever we absolutely need; never sort coupons in a windy parking lot; always read the fine print on advertised specials; not everything marked "sale" is actually significantly discounted, etc.). I'm also beginning to learn the pattern of how quickly we use stuff vs. how often those things are deeply discounted. Give me a year, and this stuff should be second nature.

My goal this month is to have a sub-$100 week. We'll see how that goes.

Strategic Shopping Update

Well, it was windy enough to fly our kite today, and I got some good photos and video of the kids doing just that. I will post them sometime when our media computer is free.

However, I am here to report the final results of our March strategic shopping experiment. Remember that our average grocery bill from a sample of three random months last year was about $850. That included household items that we bought at Target (since I couldn't separate those out from my data). Here are the results:

Week 1............$213.66
Week 2............$163.00
Week 3............$165.00
Week 4............$138.81
Week 5............$    3.57
TOTAL............$683.38

That's about $167 below our average. That includes about $36.79 in coupon savings. (That's a conservative estimate, since some of the coupons don't show up on the store receipts.)

All in all, not bad -- but not as good as I had hoped, especially given the amount of time I have invested in this. I'd like to see a $250 monthly savings -- as well as a decrease in the amount of time I am investing in it.

Since I am still on a learning curve with this, I'm going to try it for one more month. I'll report back at the end of April.

March grocery challenge: Update 2

Well, this week's grocery and household supplies total is $163 -- better than last week's total of $214, but not great. So far, we're on track to spend $829 for the month, just $30 less than our average month's spending. Not too brilliant, considering how much work is going into this! We did have a ink printer cartridge thrown in there, along with a birthday gift -- but there's always something going on, so I'm including it in the total anyway.

This past week was kind of a lousy sales week -- although I did pick up 3 "big" 12-roll packs of bathroom tissue for $6, two bottles of olive oil for $4 each, and string cheese for $2.50 (normally $3.49). So far, the coming week looks better. Target is selling four boxes of Kellogg's cereal for $1.25 each (after the free $5 gift card) -- which ends up actually being closer to $1 each if you throw in one of the many coupons for Kellogg's cereal. And you can actually make $1 by buying Colgate Total toothpaste at Walgreen's; they're offering a coupon for $3.99 off your next shopping order, making the toothpaste essentially free -- but if you apply the $1 off coupon from last week's paper to that purchase, you actually come out ahead.

My sister in Milwaukee reports doing quite well with her strategic shopping efforts -- she called to say that she spent less than $200 on her last shopping trip. Not bad for a family of eight!

March grocery challenge - update 1

This month, I'm trying to beat our average monthly grocery bill of $850 through "strategic shopping." I said I would keep you posted, so here's the first report.

This week we spent $213.66 on groceries and household items; according to our receipts, we saved $16.12 using coupons. (That savings doesn't include what we saved buying stuff on sale.)

At first I was pretty disappointed with that result, since obviously it's on track to hit our average monthly grocery bill. But then Starling pointed out that we do have a lot more food in the house -- probably a good two weeks' worth, as opposed to just a week. So we will see whether things even out down the road.

I know that we've been getting some good deals on stuff we use regularly:

• 24 cents for a 4 oz tube of Colgate toothpaste (reg. 2.99)
• $3.49 for a bottle of olive oil (reg $5.99)
• chicken quarters (leg and thigh) for 49 cents a pound; bone-in chicken breasts for 99 cents a pound
• peanut butter for $1.29 (stocked up - regularly at least $2.09)
• $1.50 on a couple boxes of Post cereal
• 8 lbs of oranges for 50 cents a pound
• 10 lbs of potatoes at 20 cents a pound

And I've continued to record all our prices in our price book. Seeing the wide variation in prices on so many items has been eye-opening -- a 50 percent variation is not unusual. We'll check in again next week.

Grocery update

Well, since I started on my new strategic shopping program, people have been asking how it's going...and my sister and sister-in-law have hopped on the bandwagon. My sister called me from the parking lot of a store to check in on coupons.... So here's an update, for anyone who is interested.

I've been taking this "grocery shopping as a part-time job" thing pretty seriously. Starling has been raising her eyebrows at all the time I've been investing. One question I get all the time is whether the extra time is worth the effort. I've got the same concern, so last week I sat down and added up all our grocery spending for the months of August, October, and January. It's not completely straightforward, because we do a lot of grocery shopping at Target, and it's possible that there are some non-food/household items (e.g., clothes) in my Target totals. But we don't shop for extras, really, so I don't think that's a big factor. Anyway, our average grocery bill came out to $850, which was a real shocker. I knew we were spending about $120, on average, during our one big grocery shopping each week. I didn't realize how much all those small, in-between shopping trips were adding up, though. Anyway, knowing our average monthly grocery bill is helpful in two ways: first off, it gives me a baseline to start from, so I can measure how effective allour "strategic shopping" is. Second, it is a real motivator to cut down on our regular shopping expenses. Paying that much in groceries is like having a second mortgage.

So during the month of March I am going to keep a running total to see how much I can cut down on that bill. I know I am already saving money. For instance, last week I stocked up on whole wheat spaghetti -- I bought eight packages at 77 cents a package (regularly $1.59), which will save us about $6.40 over the next two months. Same with hot dogs: Julia eats Oscar Meyer turkey hot dogs about every other day for lunch, so I stocked up on them at 50 cents each (regularly $2.99). I also combined a buy one get one free coupon (they call it "BOGO" in strategic shopping circles) with a local store's sale on Purex laundry detergent to get two 50 ounce bottles for $2.88. And I have also begun buying groceries at three different stores, buying stuff at the lowest possible price at each store. I'm only saving a few bucks here, a few bucks there -- but then, "a few bucks here, a few bucks there" on several hundred items is how you end up with a colossal grocery bill. I figure the same principle should work in reverse.

What I don't know is how much all of this work is going to be worth, which is why I am tracking every grocery purchase for the month of March. Depending on how much I save (or, put another way, how much I "earn" per hour of work), I will either continue to invest a few hours a week in this or I will scale back. I will keep you posted.

I am still refining my approach, but here's what I've developed so far:

• Keep a pricebook. My sister and I have both started to compile a price book. Essentially, you take your receipts and record the price of each item at each store on a chart. In my case, I am recording the prices of everything I buy at five different stores: HyVee, Midtown Foods, Target, Walgreens, and Rochester Wholesale Fruit. I am recording the highest and lowest price for each of the items at Target and HyVee (where most of our shopping happens), and the lowest price at the other stores. Recording the highest price at each of the first two stores will give me a sense of where I can consistently find an item at the lowest price, even if it's not on sale. Recording the lowest sale price (excluding coupons) gives me a sense of what's a really good bargain, so that I can stock up on something if I see it near or below that price. Keeping a pricebook helps me plan a shopping strategy -- but more importantly, it is helping me learn (by heart) what the price range is on every item that we buy regularly. Buying stuff at the lowest possible price and stocking up on stuff when it's fifty percent off or more is where I think we will find our greatest savings. I've already learned: 1) Never buy brand name cereal for more than $2; 2) Never buy meat for more than 99 cents a pound; 3) Never pay for toothpaste (it's "free" at Walgreens every few weeks when you combine sales with coupons and rebates).
• Planning meals. According to CouponMom, the biggest expense in your grocery bill is impulse items. So I've started planning out every meal for ten days out. It's a hassle, but that makes it possible for me to buy only what we actually need -- plus any staple items that are on sale. I usually do this on Monday and Tuesday, before the grocery sale papers come out on Wednesday. I'll go back and modify the menu if something is deeply discounted, though.
• Making a grocery list. Once we have a meal plan, I have to go around the house and figure out what we have and what we need. I make a list of everything we need to buy. Then I have to divide that list up across the three or four stores I am shopping at. I divide the list up partially based on the sale prices listed in each store's ads that week. This is where CouponMom.com comes in handy. Rather than sorting through all of the sale papers, then checking the sales against coupons in the Sunday paper, then checking against all the online coupons, I just go to the CouponMom.com website and pull up the weekly listings for HyVee and Target. She lists everything on sale that week -- including, crucially, the percentage you're saving off the regular price -- and then matches the sales up with any available coupons, either referring you to the relevant Sunday circular or the location of the online coupon. So part of my grocery list is divided up based on who has the better sale prices. No one store has the lowest price consistently (not even WalMart). The rest gets divided up based on the price book -- which store has the lowest regular price on a particular item.
• Couponing. Even though most people focus on the couponing aspect of this, I don't think it's where the most savings will be. I estimate that we've only saved about $80 or so using coupons in the past two weeks (including store rebates at Target and Walgreens). Rather than cutting coupons every week, I save the sale circulars and then go back and clip the relevant coupons when they're matched by a sale in the CouponMom.com database. I'm finding that it pays to save the Sunday circulars for several months in order to combine them with sales, so I now have a box for keeping them. I write the date on the front of each circular in order to find it quickly down the road.
• Buy only what we need. I have some other "ground rules" in this project. First off, we're not buying anything that we don't normally buy or actually need, no matter how much we might "save" in the process. I'm talking in particular about snack items or discretionary non-food items (body wash, etc.). That's not to say we won't try a new kind of meat if it's on sale, or a different brand of something (bread or yogurt or cereal) -- just that we can't get sucked into buying stuff for the sake of "saving" lots of money.
• Stay healthy. Second, nutrition and a healthy diet are priorities. We could save bundles by buying sugar cereal or white bread, or by skipping yogurt or fresh fruits and vegetables; we pay a premium for the healthier foods because it's worth it.
• Stay sane. We could save a lot of money by cutting out discretionary food items, like soda and snacks. But this experiment wouldn't last longer than a week if we did that, so we're not going to go there.

Figuring all this out has been kind of exhausting -- both on the front end, with all the planning, and on the shopping side, since it's meant multiple trips. (It doesn't help that I am totally unfamiliar with our local HyVee and have to learn where everything is.) I'm counting on it getting easier once I have figured out the best use of my time and have a more intuitive sense for where to get the best prices. But if we're able to consistently cut, say, $300 off of that $850 grocery bill, it will be worth it. I'll keep you posted.

p.s. Starling just found a really good program (that my mom told us about) in the Twin Cities called Fare for All. It bills itself as a cooperative food purchasing program. Basically, they purchase groceries at wholesale prices; you buy a subscription to get a package of food every week at 30 - 40 percent off what you'd pay for it in the grocery stores.

Saving money the new old fashioned way

Between having a new baby, the ongoing salary freeze at Starling's school, and the many deferred maintenance projects around here, we've been racking our brains for ways to make/save money. One of the options on the table has been for one or both of us to get part-time jobs, not a prospect that either of us really relish.

Before we go that route, however, we're going to take a crack at saving money the old fashioned way -- couponing and strategic shopping -- with a new twist. This is something that we haven't really tried before because of the time commitment, but if the choice is between this or going out and finding a part-time job...well, strategic shopping may be time-consuming, but at least it has flexible hours.

This was sparked in part by a friend we know through church. Around these parts she's known as "the Coupon Lady." She's been giving classes on strategic shopping around town, so I asked her to come over to our house for a personal seminar, which she did on Saturday.

One of the things she brought with her was a Walgreen's receipt that she'd gotten the day before. It showed a total amount paid of $1.57. Underneath that, it said, "You saved $60.24." Wow. She also told us about walking out of Target with a cart full to overflowing with stuff that she paid a total of seven cents for. She says that she's reduced her household shopping budget from about $600 a month (for a family of five) to about $250. And she spends about an hour a week planning her shopping. Still, that's pretty good money -- something like four hours to make $350. It's even better when you consider that none of that "salary" is taxed.

She explained that she didn't come up with this stuff on her own -- she basically follows the program laid out by the author of "Top Secrets of the Coupon Mom." This is a former marketing professional turned stay-at-home mom who started a website called www.couponmom.com. The book is full of lots of useful tips, but here's her basic method:

• Never go shopping without a list, since impulse buying adds substantially to your grocery bill.
• Keep track of the fluctuations in the prices of the most expensive items in your typical shopping basket (this is called creating a price book). Typically, grocery prices fluctuate. Also, many items go on sale at regular intervals -- typically about every three months. Stock up on items when they're at their lowest price or on sale.
• Research your store's savings program and take advantage of it.
• Use coupons to buy items when they're on sale.
• Be flexible about where you shop and which brands you choose.

She says the typical family can cut their grocery bill in half using this method. (There's a lot more to it than this, but that's the bare outline.)

None of these methods are really "new" -- our parents and grandparents did a lot of this because they were forced to. Most of us don't do this sort of thing anymore because it's so time-consuming. But there's a new twist on all this that makes it easier to do. Basically, you take advantage of the many websites that track store prices and offer online coupons.

At www.couponmom.com, for instance, you look up the stores you typically shop at. For each store, there's a list of all of the items on sale -- along with information about coupons that can be combined with the sale prices. You put a checkmark in front of every item you want to buy on your next shopping trip, and it will print out a list of all of those sale items; you also get linked to any online coupons, or referred to the location of any print coupons. Since we shop at Target and HyVee for groceries, we'd just check the lists for those stores and be sure to stock up on any items that we normally buy that happen to be on sale.

Two other websites that she pointed out to us are www.winonadeals.com (a community blog where people post the best sales in the Winona area) and www.totallytarget.com (a blog that tracks sales and deals at Target).

Coupon Lady wanred us that it took her a lot longer to get started on all this than an hour a week, which I believe. And I don't expect to cut our shopping bill by as much as she did, in part because I think we're already pretty frugal -- but I'd settle for saving $200 a month (that would be $2,400 a year). That's a third of our grocery bill. Can we do it? I'll let you know. But this morning, I bought ten boxes of Life and Quaker Oatmeal Squares cereal at Target for $2.75 each, about 60 cents less than the normal price. And since Target had a deal where you'd get a $5 gift card for every five boxes you purchase, we got $10 back, effectively reducing the price to $1.75 per box. So we're going to feed our kids breakfast for $17.50 rather than $34 this month, which seems like a good start.

Now, I don't expect