Simply Frugal

I love reading with my kids.  Sometimes when they struggle with a word I show them a word within a word.  In the word "Simply" is imply.  My behavior is Simply Frugal these days, this may imply to some that I am cheap.  Maybe, but I like to think I do more with less so that I can do more later.  After all, I have big plans for my kids as I am sure you do too!

What my kids frequently see are the "bad parent nights" and "woohoo Groupon $5 for $10 worth of SnoCone" nights.  In fact, I frequently bump into certain PTO other mothers while being frugal.  My "bad parent" night is taking the kids to McDonald's on Tuesday nights for half priced Happy Meals and then we go to the Library! for a huge stack of books.  Cheap, not healthy but tons of fun for around $5.91. 

A few weeks ago in a group PTO brainstorm email, I suggested we find an EXTREME couponer in the Whitney School family and start a pantry.  Principal Lovelace is looking into it.  Meanwhile, I have been keeping up with my Simply Frugal mode and collecting free and nearly free toothpaste and toothbrushes with my own coupons.

I'm not an extreme couponer but I value the coupons as if they were actual cash.  I began thinking about the pantry idea and thought, what if we kept the items at the store and just taught the practice of couponing and being Simply Frugal to the rest of the school community?  We are not talking about everybody in the school wiping out the shelves every week but just taking what we all need.

So what happens when you have 25 tubes of toothpaste and no mustard?  We trade.  There will be weeks when I am out of town for work and will not be able to take advantage of a sale.  Those weeks I may not be able to stock up on what my family needs and I will need to make a trade.  Let's face it, everybody has been hit by this recession but if we work together we can further our individual goals.

Our own Blue Star and Gold Star families have shouldered an incredible burden during this recession.  Food prices have gone up, wages have gone down and when we asked our service men and women to go to the front lines for us, they did, often leaving behind a tremendous financial burden.  If we can relieve that burden by helping one another out, why should we not find everyway possible to accomplish this.

One way to help military personnel overseas is to collect all of your EXPIRED coupons and send them to bases overseas.  That's right, expired coupons.  Military bases overseas can use the coupons for up to 6 months after their expiration date!  As soon as school starts up you can bet I will have an efficient method for collecting expired coupons if you're interested.

As a community, we should look beyond all of our differences and find ways to shoulder our burdens together.  In the coming months and in the first PTO meeting, I want to find a way we can get together as a community of Simply Frugal people and cut down our grocery spending so that we can do more with less. 

What are YOUR ideas?  Monthly coupon club where we can share ideas and maybe trade some of our cache of freebies in exchange for something we really need?

In the meantime you will find a few additions to this blog, some of which are links to printable coupons and others are great resources for teaching you how to coupon and be Simply Frugal.  The links for the coupon sites DO GENERATE money and in all of the great Nikki blogs with link ideas, everytime you click on a coupon link on this blog, it will hopefully send you to a site that will give us a few cents back for Whitney's PTO.

I will also spend some time trying to direct you to bargains to get your kids back to school like the savvy shopper I know you are.

Simply Frugally Yours,
Nikki Rutledge
-Whitney Parent