Stop buying paper products for your home. No paper towels (we use re-usable kitchen cloths), no paper plates, no kleenex (handkerchiefs instead), no paper napkins (use cloth!)
Turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater and good socks. Make sure your home is well-insulated. The windows in our home are AWFUL and are going to be replaced in the spring, but for now we have blankets thrown over the curtain rods in the bedrooms. How about an insulating blanket for your hot water heater? (Not the same as a blanket you’d put on your bed, but a blanket of insulation sold at a hardware store, specifically for hot water heaters.)
Hang clothes to dry, even in freezing weather. Never use the oven to bake just one item - always double up. (I usually throw banana bread in with casserole.) Use the library for entertainment. And for goodness sakes, make your own cleaning products! (I suggest “Clean House, Clean Planet” from the library. GREAT book!) Reuse sandwich bags until they have holes. Only buy in bulk when it will save you - check the per-serving price and make sure your’e really getting a savings. Group errand-running (when possible) to save gas. Only run the washing machine when you have a full load (does anyone with 8 folks in the house NOT have a full load all the time?
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Hope this helps! Prayers!
I also love The Tightwad Gazette. It has helped me so much. When I first started reading Amy’s books, there are so many ideas in there I didn’t know what to do to get started. There are 8 of us now, and we have to save money any way that we can.
When you are shopping for say, tomato sauce, someone had mentioned the per-price item. When you are looking at the different brands of tomato sauce, and the price tags on the shelves, along with the total price, there will be a per/ounce, per/pound price, such as 15.5c/oz.or 10.7c/oz. So, look at these numbers! It is amazing how much you can save. When I first started looking at these numbers and buying the products with the lowest unit prices possible, I immediately saw a $40/week savings - wow!!
We ordered the newspaper where we lived, and then I got to the point where I could figure out the loss-leaders that the different stores had, and that is what we ate for the next week. If there were 3 stores that I wanted to stop by to load up on the items that they had - grapes for 99c at one, margarine for 15c at another one, etc. I would just stop at one store each day as I was making my runs. It saved gas, and made it more manageable for me. If round roast was on sale for $1.49/pound, we had that, in as many different ways as we could - crock pot with mushroom soup, sliced thin for stir fry - which are very healthy and fairly inexpensive. I just saute up some garlic, onion, celery and carrots cut on the diagnal after I saute a couple of chicken breasts in small dices. I start the rice before I start prepping my veggies, and at the same time defrost the chicken breasts. Then, after I have stir-fried the chicken, taken it out, stir fried the vegetables, then, I put the chicken back in, and use a mixture of 1 cup chicken broth, about 3 Tbsp soy sauce, few drops of sesame seed oil, and 2 Tbsp cornstarch. Stir together, add to chicken mixture, stir until thickened, and then put on top of rice. My children/family loves it! They keep coming back for more until it is gone.
You might want to reconsider the paper plates. If you can get them at Walgreens 100 for about 99c, I found that if I used those so that we could run the dishwasher during cold/flu season only once every 3 days, then we saved $30 off of our water bill per month. Since they are paper, and where we lived you had to recycle, I just put those in with the paper products.
Use cash! It is a pain at times to go to the bank once a week, but pull out a set amount, be sure to include money for gas, and then use that until it is gone, and then just figure out other things to do or use that don’t cost any money until the next week rolls around. We saved lots doing that!
When looking at coupons, consider Albertsons if you have one available. Go through the Sunday paper (I did this on Monday mornings so that I wasn’t working on Sunday), and cut out all of the coupons that you might use. I got a plastic coupon organizer/3x5 holder, whatever, that I used to sort my coupons into. At Albertsons, you might find a deal where you buy 10 boxes of cereal for $10. So, if you have a couple of 50c/off coupons for that brand, you can end up saving lots of money on that. I got to the point that on the bottom of our receipts they show you how much you saved and how much you spent, I was saving more than I spent. Yippee!!
Prepay your mortgage off early. See how much you are paying on the principle monthly, perhaps $100. Just add another $100 to your payment. You can literally save 10’s of thousands of dollars over the life of your loan.
Hope these help!
God bless
Well, if you have good credit, you could always try cashing the credit line and investing it in a high-return money market, then withdrawing before the promotion is up, paying the credit card off and reinvesting the remaining profit. 
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