Hard Times Call For New Habits

There's no question that times are tight, the economy's down in the dumps and people everywhere are thinking twice before spending money on anything. Enter me - the stay at home - feel it is part of my job to be a good steward of our resources and save money - domestic engineer.

Sure I've taken to selling my children's clothes on EBay - which I highly recommend if you have the patience and the entrepreneurial spirit. I've also started shopping more at Wal-Mart, less at my grocery store and never pay full price for anything anymore, waiting until it's really on sale to jump at it (my husband warns me I'm contributing to deflation by doing this last bit).

However, I have also taken up some new habits I thought might be worth sharing - and certainly, if YOU have any new fun habits you've taken up since the bottom fell out of the market, please feel free to share.

1) I've started using the rewards program that my grocery store offers for discounted gas. And not only do I use it for my car, but my husband and I will take TWO cars to the gas station at the same time to fill up (because you can only get 20 gallons at a time at the discounted rate and my car takes about 15 - so no point letting 5 gallons of discounted gas go to waste! Put it in the other car!)

2) I've been using more "off-brand" brands. I've found that the store brand is just fine for frozen garlic bread, ....okay, so frozen garlic bread is the only one I've found acceptable so far. I wouldn't recommend trying frozen peas (that was disappointing) and frozen store brand eggos taste like cardboard (how hard can it be to get that right?). I am using store brand oil - like olive oil and vegetable oil - and that seems okay. But that's the extent of it for now.

3) I've started playing a little game called "eating out of my house". This means that each week, before I go to the grocery store or even make my list, I look and see what's left in my pantry and see if there's anything I can make a meal from. Sure, I might need to buy a couple of ingredients to go with what I found, but somehow I feel like I'm "cleaning" out my pantry by putting those items that have been lingering in there to use.

4) I try to have one day a week when I don't spend money. This is a lot harder than it sounds. If you count driving as spending money (which uses gas) this means staying in the house all day, eating in the house all day and coming up with things for your 2 year old to do that don't cost money - all day.

SO those are my new habits. I wish I had new habits like working out every day and eating really healthy food, but alas, my current situation does not allow much time to put toward either of those goals. For now, I will be counting pennies instead of calories and pumping cheap gas instead of iron and hope that pushing a double stroller with 60lbs of kids and 30lbs of car seat and equipment will have the same effect.