You can save a ton of money during the winter by not using your central heating to heat your home.  There is this wonderful thing called the Sun and it heats the entire planet.  With a little bit of thought you can also use it to heat your home.

The easiest way it to open up the blinds or curtains on the sunny side of your home.  As soon as the sun goes down make sure to close them.  In fact, having curtains closed on the shaded parts of your home and during then night can work as an extra layer of insulation from the cold.

Now you can stop at opening your blinds and curtains during the day or you can take it to a whole ‘notha level.  We are going to turn the windows that are on the sunny side of the house into our own personal space heater.   Here is what you will need:

• 2 rods (curtain, dow, the lighter the better) that are the width of your windows
• Black sheets of plastic like what you would find under a house
• A stapler with staples in it

You can find all these items at Wal-Mart.

Next we are going to cut the black plastic to be slightly larger than the height of the window.  Once you have your plastic sheets wrap the each end around the dow or curtain rod and staple it so that it holds around the rod.

Finally we want to secure each rod to the window frame.  The most effective way is to nail it into the side of the window frame or, if you are using  actual curtain rods, to use the brackets that come with the curtain rods.  We want to make sure there is a gap of at least six inches between the window frame and the black plastic.  This will create enough space for the heated air to escape out the top.   So when we are done the setup should look and work something like this:

In my area of the country (southeast) you should be able to get heat in the upper 80’s in more northern location your temperature out the top should be somewhere around 80 degrees.  So give it a try and enjoy a little free heat during the day.

One of the major problems we have in using energy is that we heat and cool more space than we need.  This is very common when using central heating and air.  And I will admit it is difficult to reduce the cost of  of cooling without an unsightly window unit in your most used rooms.  However, with heating, you can reduce your costs very easily by turning down your thermostat and using an efficient space heater for the room where you spend the most time.

Even better, if  you have a room with a working fireplace you can make that your primary hang out room and heat the room by burning wood.  Wood can be relatively inexpensive if you have property with trees on it or friends who are trying to get a log cut up.  Just keep your ears open for when someone complains about a fallen tree and offer to help in exchange for some free wood.  Buying a good chain saw (on sale of course) and renting a log splitter are much less expensive than paying to heat your home for the rest of your life.

One of the main ways we waste energy is our use of hot water.  The hot water heater is a highly inefficient appliance.  There are some easy ways to limit how much your hot  water heater has to work and I promise not to criticize your one hour hot showers.

• If your hot water heater is exposed to the out doors (garage, crawl space, outside) you will want to get a water heater blanket.  This is an  extra layer of insulation and helps hold the temperature longer.  They are also fairly inexpensive.  I just bought a hot water blanket on Amazon.comfor $27.89 after shipping.  Of course I used gift cards that I earned on SwagBucks.com and paid nothing.
• Check the temperature setting on your water heater.  If you have a dishwasher then water needs to be heated to 120°.  If you use your children to wash the dishes you can cut that temperature down.
• Whenever possible wash your clothes in cold water.
• O.K. I lied.  You should not be taking one hour showers.  If you can cut your shower time in half, you can save as much as 33% on the cost of heating your water.

We will pick this topic back up on Tuesday and will have two more posts in the series.  The last one is a Saving Freak special on how to get free heat!

With cold weather coming to my area in waves this year it seemed like a good time to look into how to cut your energy costs.  This will be a four part series with two posts this week and two next week.

The first step to solving any problem is to form a plan.  The method I use for making sure my hard earned money is not getting wasted on heating and cooling my home is to perform an Energy Audit.  This means going around the house and finding any area that might have the potential to form a draft.  The most common areas are doors, windows, fireplaces, and holes in the floor for wiring (older homes).  I also check the insulation that is in my attic as well as what is pinned underneath my house in the crawl space.

When you identify a problem area, you need to get it sealed or fixed in the case of insulation.  If it is an insulation problem you can add more (fairly inexpensively if you do it your self), but for any type of draft the goal is to get it sealed.  The most common practice is to use caulk for windows and holes and possibly the fireplace (make sure to use the right kind) and for doors to use weather stripping and door sweeps.  In a pinch taping plastic over the problem will get you sealed until you can find a more permanent fix.

One last thing to check in your energy audit is weather the bathroom fans are being left on.  This is a great way to loose heating or cooling in your home.  A bathroom fan in the average home can completely move the air out in a little over an hour.  So make sure the kids are turning the fan off once the bathroom is no longer in use.

I have been a fan of sites that pay you to use their links for a long time.  The one I most recently have come across, and my new favorite, is BigCrumbs.com.  It has been a while since I have written about one of these sites so let me explain how they work:

Advertisers are willing to pay these types of sites a percentage of their sales in order to gain traffic.  BigCrumbs then turns around a returns the majority of that commission to its users for clicking on their links.  Lets use a practical example:

1. I need to order new ink cartridges for my printer
2. I log into big crumbs and do a search for ink
3. I see that the 123 inkjets link will give me 25.2% back on my purchase
4. I click on the Shop Now button and purchase my two cartridges for $30.13 after shipping
5. If this is the only purchase I make through Big Crumbs in the month of October I will receive a check for $6.35 in December (math ($30.13-$4.95 shipping) x .252 = $6.35) making my total cost for a color and black ink cartridge $23.78!!

The percentage back varies greatly by retailer (25.2% is much higher than most), but the savings are always significant.  For instance, when I was about to get married my parents offered to purchase a washer and dryer for us.  I found a good deal and got them both from Sears for $550.  I purchased them online because they were clearance items and the local store was out.  If I had known about BigCrumbs at the time I could have gotten 1.8% back or $9.90.  This seems small but if I keep doing this on most thing I purchase online the savings add up.  It may also push you to purchase online and then choose the pick up in store option (which saves you the shipping cost).  This option is available for Target (6.3%),  KMart (1.8%), Best Buy (2.7%), Wal-Mart (3.6%) and many more.

There are three  reasons I like BigCrumbs more than the other sites that it competes with is that there is no minimum for payout, it pays directly to my PayPal account (if you do not have a paypal account you can get one here), and it has an ongoing payout for referrals.  So if you refer Aunt Bertha to Big Crumbs you will get a small percentage back for whatever she purchases through the site (in the ink cartridge example you would get 70¢).

You can sign up for Big Crumbs by clicking here and start getting cash back for almost everything you buy.

My wife collects the address labels that we get free from different advertisers trying to get us to buy their product.  This makes it easy when we actually need to send a piece of snail mail.  The thought has crossed my mind recently of what would we do if we ran out of those freebies?  Of course this got my frugal juices flowing and I came up with this question: “What do I get all the time that has my name and address on it?”  And the answer is JUNK MAIL!!

This gave me the idea that I could harvest the address that comes on the junk mail (or even bills and personal mail) and then attach that to the envelope in the return address slot.  I think the best method for attaching the label would be a glue stick since that would create the least mess and have little chance of coming off.

I have a good number of friends and one family member (my brother black sheep) who refuse to use coupons.  They see them as a waste of time.  I, on the other hand, do not see why you would  not use coupons when shopping for groceries or in any situation you can find.

In the last few days I have used coupons to purchase $139.66 dollars in groceries for $54.22.  That means I am getting an average discount of just over 61%.  Now this allows me to do a few things:

- I have a much lower than average grocery budget.  So I can spend my money on other items that are of greater importance to me.  If eating out is important to you this would allow you to eat out more often.

- Because I save so much on every day items I can afford to purchase a little more expensive items.  Like these beauties

That is 2.7 lbs of sweet Angus Porterhouse goodness.  So I guess the real reason I use coupons is to allow me a higher standard of living than I could otherwise afford.  Ultimately that is why I am frugal.  It isn’t being cheap for cheapness sake.  It’s about managing my money in such a way as to gain the maximum benefit.

The key to getting a good deal on any product is knowing the best “regular” price on any item.  With groceries this has become easier with Wal-Mart and Aldi being the low cost leaders on pretty much every item out there.  In fact, if you do not want to play the coupon game you can  save about 20%-30% off the regular prices at the grocery stores just by shopping for groceries at either of these two stores.

If you are looking for the absolute best prices on groceries coupons are the way to go as long as you know that you aren’t paying more just to use a coupon and get a name brand item.  Now I tend to know what a good deal is on any product due to my diligence in understanding prices across the markets, but  I am coming across many items that I have no real basis for how much they cost as my wife and I prepare for the birth of our first child.  In short, I have no clue how much baby supplies should cost.

I saw this as a great opportunity to share how I create a pricing strategy for any item.  So for this example we will be using diapers, but the method can be used for any item that you purchase at retail stores.

Diapers turned out to be a little more complicated than I originally expected because there are so many different sizes (which makes sense when you think about it but I never had).  So I headed down to my low cost leaders (Wal-Mart/Aldi) and priced out diapers.  Now if this were electronics I would have spent more time online than in the stores.

Next I take the prices and put them into a chart that looks something like this:

Now as I was looking for the best prices I noticed that none of the companies had the same quantity of diapers in their packaging.  So instead of being able to rely on the data above we have to take another step and add a per unit column.  This makes the chart look like this:

Very simple concept, just divide the number of diapers into the total price to get the cost per diaper.  Using this number I can easily whip out the calculator on my cell phone and determine if this weeks special really is, all that special.

Anyone who buys in bulk or stocks up on sale items runs into two problems.  The first is running out of space.  I don’t tend to have this problem because my wife cuts me off from purchasing more before all the storage in our house is gone.  The second, is not realizing that you are running out of a product that you had a ton of.

A good example for me is that we are now down to three rolls of bath tissue.  This creates a problem; I now have to settle for the best deal available instead of the best deal possible.  Meaning I am spending more money than I want to on bath tissue.

Like most people my life is really crazy.  This means I have to force myself to take an inventory of the non-perishable items in my house. I tend to put this off because it is not a fun job but the latest oversight of bath tissue has forced me to go ahead and take inventory in my house.  I know this will please the few of you who have asked me in the past to let you know what I stock up on so here is my list of stocked items, with the quantities currently in storage.

Shampoo – 7 and 8 free sample packages

Body Wash – 5

Bar Soap – 5

Deodorant – 1

Toothpaste – 5

Toothbrush – 2

Mouthwash – 2

Moisturizer – 6 free samples

Bath Tissue – 3

Since it is just my wife and I this list tells me that I need to look for a great deal on deodorant toothbrushes and, of course, bath tissue.  With a new baby less than a month away I have started looking for baby products that I need to take advantage of the best possible deals.  I am told that the stock pile of diapers we have received will be gone in a few days and I should look to have as many on hand as possible.  Any other advice from you seasoned parents out there?

I have noticed an interesting trend in various public bathrooms.  Instead of a soap dispenser they have switched to a foamy soap dispenser.  This means that people use less soap and thus cost the company less money.  Shortly after I noticed this I started watching these little wonders pop up in people’s homes also.

This got me to thinking, “how much soap do I waste at home by not using foam?”  As I started to pay attention I realized that the amount was quite substantial.  The biggest culprit being in the shower with body wash and Shampoo.  No I have managed to cut down on my shampoo usage by trial and error of how much I need based off of the size of the drop in my hand, but body wash has been really hard.  So I decided to make my own foam.

I did this by taking my last (and now empty) bottle of body wash and filling it 1/3 full from the new bottle.  I then filled it another 1/3 with water.  I left the rest of the space for the foam that will form when I shake it.  Now this may seem a little extreme since I have at least four more bottles of body wash sitting in storage (especially since I got them all for free using CVS Extra Bucks), but I just do not want to spend my money on things that are vital but do not make my life better.

Of note, my wife quickly mocked me that I was watering down the soap.  Which I see as an OK alternative since that too would make the soap last longer (as long as I am still getting squeaky clean).  After my first trial run I am pleased with the early results and will update you in a couple of weeks with how this experiment worked out.