Frugal Friday
Oct. 27th, 2023 03:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change as we proceed. Rule #1: this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc. I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.
Rule #2: this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.
Rule #3: please keep it to one tip per person per week. Data dumps are tedious for me to moderate and also for readers to use. If you have lots of tips, great -- post one per week. This is an ongoing project. If you want to comment on someone else's tip, that's welcome, but again, don't use that as an excuse to post a second, unrelated tip of your own.
Rule #4: please keep your contributions reasonably short -- say, 500 words or less. If you have something longer to say, please post it elsewhere -- a free Dreamwidth account is one option -- and simply put a link here. Teal deer comments won't be put through.
Rule #5: please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about. Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.
Rule #6: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.
With that said, have at it!
Re: The Gifting Season Approaches...
Date: 2023-10-31 05:09 am (UTC)One big problem I noticed was the cost of cookie tins/snack packaging for Christmas was going way up, taking away the financial gain of making snacks as gifts. I recently learned you can just decorate coffee tins. I am an avid crafter, so I now have enough supplies to give cookies to my entire town (don’t worry, it’s a small town… and I probably won’t give EVERYONE cookies this year).
When making cookies I make a big batch of plain (like chocolate chip without the chocolate) then cut that into smaller batches to add the fixins: white chocolate cranberry, mint chocolate, double dark chocolate, white chocolate lemon, m&m, candy cane… etc. so I end up with a half batch of each flavor. I also figured out if you want showstoppingly beautiful cookies, don’t mix them in. Put the cookie dough on the cookie sheet in whatever size and spacing your recipe calls for AND THEN stick the chocolate chips to the cookie dough. You get a more even amount and they just look better, especially the m&m cookies. But it’s a lot of extra work that only makes sense if you’re selling cookies for money or trying to show up some in laws ;)
Re: The Gifting Season Approaches...
Date: 2023-11-01 02:19 am (UTC)