Sisterly Savings

A cuter paper retriever.

It’s simple: Paper Retriever provides a huge recycling bin for your school or non-profit to collect all their paper recycling.  When it’s full, they pick it up and pay your organization for the recycled paper.

Talk about a win-win fundraiser!

This is in operation at my children’s school; in each classroom, they have a small bin for paper recycling.  The students all get involved in sorting and toting the paper to the big bin.  It’s been a great hands-on lesson for them in how much paper we waste every day and how easy it is to simply recycle it.  And they’re excited to be doing something tangible to help earn their school much-needed funds.

In these tough economic times, many schools, churches, and non-profits are feeling the pinch.  This fundraiser offers an easy way to put a few more bucks in the “Improvements” or “New Textbooks” fund.

To see if Paper Retriever is available in your area, click here.

And to see the FAQ sheet for Paper Retriever, click here.

What creative ways are your schools and churches using to raise money during this challenging economy?  Share in a comment!  Your ideas may help another reader!

One of the biggest challenges we moms have is keeping everyone in our families organized, on track, and on time.  If you’re like me, you’ve got a wall calendar or refrigerator calendar that’s packed with events, appointments, and scribbled notes.

Time management is an important component of going frugal because your time is more valuable than your money; once spent, it’s gone for good.  You can’t “make” more time. 

But you can organize and manage your time and your family’s time more efficiently, especially with the use of free online family planners.  These tools are far more than just a simple calendar; they offer tools to help organize all facets of your household management. 

Let’s take a look at three  online family planners.

Famundo is a free and comprehensive family planner that offers not just a calendar, but also the ability to import your child’s school calendar.  You can invite family and friends to share and contribute to your calendar as well as send messages within Famundo to other members.  Love lists?  Create to-do lists for yourself and family members as well as a grocery list.  And you can take it to a more personal level by creating a family blog as well.

Mediabee bills itself to be, “…as easy to use as a wall planner.”  Like Famundo, you can create to-do lists for your family and offer feedback when the jobs are done.  Share some love and kindness with a quick note during the day from your cell phone.  Save all those original works of art from your kiddos and create a Web Player digital gallery of their creations.  Mediabee is still growing and adding new functions so you should expect updates and changes if you opt for this online planner.

Google Calendar is a natural choice if you’re already heavily involved in Google Apps (like most of us on Blogger).  View your calendar by month, week, or day and highlight those days that are critical to remember.  You can also integrate your @gmail.com account into your calendar as well as easily import calendars from other apps like MS Outlook.  Google Calendar also has a feature similar to Evite.com where you can not only plan events, but send invitations to guests as well as see their RSVPs and comments.  You can also create multiple calendars for different facets of your life (home, work, sports, school) as well as subscribe to other user’s published calendars.

I’m hoping that using one of these online organizers will make planning and organizing my family’s life and my own workload as a blogger more streamlined and more realistic.  It’s awfully easy to get overwhelmed when you keep piling on the tasks and jotting to-do lists on scraps of paper; using an all-in-one online planner may help you (and me!) see the bigger picture and schedule your days to be more aligned with your true priorities .

Do you have an online planner that you use and would recommend?  Please share so everyone can check it out!

Catch up with Marianne online at her frugal living blog, The New Frugal Mom or her personal blog, Writer-Mommy.

I’ve considered myself to be frugal and environmentally-friendly most of my life. But as I’ve made a conscious decision to live more frugally, I see how that choice impacts and improves how environmentally-friendly (or, “Green”) I am.

Buying Less

The simple fact of not buying as much stuff means I have less stuff to dispose of later. Along with being less “stuff-oriented” myself, my children are less so themselves. Giving up the race to see who has the most stuff in the end is both liberating and a step toward living greener.

Re-using More

This is a big part of frugal living for me. I don’t just toss something in the trash or the giveaway pile before looking hard at it and thinking if there’s some way I could use it in a different capacity. From boxes of all sorts (madeover into storage container for toys, office supplies, files) to jeans with holes in the knees (patched so they’re good enough for gardening or tough playing), I try to make things last longer. And when I can’t seem to find life in them anymore for me, I pass them on to charitable organizations like Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul because they might just be exactly what someone else needs.

Recycling

I’m lucky to live in a community with free curbside recycling. We even have huge toters to use rather than just the small bins. I’ve found that I fill my toter up with all sorts of recyclables; one day, as I was taking the trash out, I realized our recycling toter was filled to the brim but our trash can had only (2) full kitchen trash bags in it. I know that I’m more dedicated to recycling now that I have the bigger toter and my kids remind me to toss things in the recycling bin rather than the trash as well.

These are just a few of the ways that living a more consciously frugal life has helped me – sometimes by accident – live a greener life.

How has living frugally impacted your choices to live greener?

Catch up with Marianne online at her frugal living blog, The New Frugal Mom or her personal blog, Writer-Mommy.

Kids haircuts can be spendy and stressful; many times, your little one wiggles and squirms and fusses so much in the barber’s chair that the haircut for which you paid top dollar ends up looking awful.

One way we’ve saved oodles of money here over the last several years is by cutting our children’s hair at home.  With my daughter, trimming her hair has been very easy since she wears it long and all one length. Trim the ends, fluff it up, and poof! Good to go!

But as my two boys started growing out of their baby fine hair and into unruly boy cowlicks and curls, I knew it was time to step up the game. Rather than trotting them off to the latest kiddie-trend haircut joint for $15.00 each. Instead, for about $20, I bought a clipper set.

When haircut day rolls around, my hubs does the fine work with the clippers and I do the clean up work with the scissors. It’s saved us a lot of money over the last four years and both my boys are now old enough to sit still well and let us work quickly. It wasn’t always that way!

If you’re thinking of starting a home salon for your smallfolk, you’ll want these supplies:

::Quality haircutting scissors (anywhere from $5-$20)

::Hair thinning shears (adds texture to layers; $5-$20)

::Clipper kit with multiple attachment combs ($15 and up)

::Clips for holding hair out of the way

::Water bottle

::Combs

These are available at just about any drugstore, major retailer, or online at Amazon.

Looking for help with a starter cut for those cute locks? Check out this video from YouTube:

If this still seems too daunting, don’t forget to check out the rates at your local vocational/career training center or Google “beauty schools” in your area. Chances are you’ll pay about 50% less than you would in a traditional storefront salon or barber shop.

Do you cut your children’s hair? What’s your best bit of advice?

Catch up with Marianne online at her frugal living blog, The New Frugal Mom or her personal blog, Writer-Mommy.

I was chatting with a couple of bloggy friends of mine, Alyssa and Denise on their BlogTalkRadio show a few weeks ago.  The topic was CVS, but what I said (I’m parsing below) is true for anyone out there who’s just stumbling into this “couponing” and “frugal living” thing:

It’s easy to forget how challenging this is when you’re a beginner.

If you’re just starting to consider how you can cut costs and save money – whether because you’re trying to get ahead a bit or as a response to the current economic realities of job losses, dwindling home values, or vanishing retirement investments – start with some small steps like these:

1. Breakup with Starbucks. Even a cuppa joe at McDonald’s ($1.06 for a small when I was there on Saturday as a treat for my kiddo) is far more than you’d pay if you brewed your own coffee at home. Depending on the type and the cost of the coffee you use, you can brew your own coffee for nickels and dimes at home and save the dollars you’d have spent on a cappucino in your piggy bank instead.

2. Divide and Conquer. If you use fabric softener sheets, double your money by cutting them in half. You probably won’t notice much, if any, difference at all in how your clothes smell and feel.

3. Zip Twice. Those plastic storage bags – the zippy ones for your freezer and the regular ones for your pantry – can be washed out, dried inside-out, and re-used. I do this with *most* of mine; if I’ve used them to defrost meat, I pitch them to reduce the chance of cross-contamination.

4. Get Clipping. Coupons will save you TONS over time once you master how to use them effectively with sale items and start shopping with a stockpiler’s mentality. But even if you’re brand new to coupons, you can save a few bucks a week while you learn the ropes; you’ll get hooked quickly once you get the hang of it!

5. Make Family Dinner Nights the Norm. Eating out costs serious cash – even at fast food joints – when you stack the cost up against cooking a meal at home. If you’re living a drive-thru dinner life, consider planning ahead to cook at least (1) dinner at home a week. Visit $5 Dollar Dinners for help with planning nutritious and inexpensive family meals. Already kitchen savvy? Step up your game with the whizbang girls over at Once A Month Mom; Tricia and Cortney will show you how to cook a MONTH of meals in one day, saving you serious time, money, and stress!

Going frugal doesn’t happen overnight. Take small steps to change your day-to-day spending behavior and start looking at what you have with the idea of making it last for the longest time possible. Before you know it, you’ll be a bonafide frugalista, too!

Catch up with Marianne online at her frugal living blog, The New Frugal Mom or her personal blog, Writer-Mommy.

When I first stumbled across blogs detailing how to use coupons and store rebate programs to get items for pennies on the dollar or free, I was amazed and instantly hooked. I checked for new deals daily and made more trips to CVS in a week than I now do in a month.

It’s thrilling, this couponing gig. It’s exciting to see how much money you can save – money that can be devoted to more important categories in your budget. And it’s a great feeling to walk out of a store with bags of goodies you were paid to buy after all your coupons, store rewards, and rebates are added up.

But there comes a point where you realize that you’ve got what you need. More than what you need, in fact. So much so that you’re giving away those goodies to whomever you can find that needs them. Your stockpile of necessities is healthy and your freezer is bursting. You sigh with relief and say a prayer of thanks for all that is good in the blogosphere.

And then you catch word of a hot new deal at one of your stores. A moneymaker. A seriously fabulous moneymaker that everyone is a-twittering about. You don’t really need it, but you find yourself reaching for your coupons and thinking about when you could squeeze in just one more quick trip.

Can I offer a suggestion?

Let it go.

There will be other deals; the next great find is just a day or a week away. You’ll stumble across it yourself or read about it in the blogosphere. It will be there just when you need it and you’ll be ready for it.

But your life, your time – well, that is a precious commodity indeed. Time, once spent, is lost. You can’t make more. And while many people fade into the last part of their lives with worries that they didn’t spend enough time with family or friends or engaged in helping others, I sincerely doubt that any of us will rue those once-fantastic deals we never grabbed.

Your life should be helped by finding deals, not ruled by the thrill of the deal.

Spend some of that precious saved time investing in what truly matters to you; trust me, you won’t regret it.

Catch up with Marianne online at her frugal living blog, The New Frugal Mom or her personal blog, Writer-Mommy.

It’s finally here!  The last week of our  (3) week Oscar Mayer Deli Creations Giveaway featuring tips from Ellie Kay, America’s Family Financial Expert.

Remember, this is the LAST week where  (1) lucky winner will win (7) coupons for FREE Oscar Mayer Deli Creations – that’s a week’s worth of lunch! Goodbye, PB&J!

This week’s Ellie Kay Tip is all about price matching:

Play the Price Matching Game –I’ve worked 40+ hours a week for years with a house full of kids, so I don’t have time (or energy) to drive all over town to shop various sales. I can benefit from all the sales though, by going to a store that matches the lowest price. I save gas, time and money by going to a store that will match competitor sales.

Do you price match? Which store have you found to be the *best* for ease of price matching?

Leave your tip in a comment below to be entered into Week 3 of the Oscar Mayer Deli Creations giveaway.
Remember, you can come back and leave a comment every day of the giveaway for a total of (4) chances to win.

This giveaway will close on Thursday, February 26th, at 10:00 pm EST. Winner will be picked by Random.org and announced on Friday, February 27th.

Good luck!!

I am no expert gardener; I think I should tell you that before we I go any further. I don’t have a garden patch in my backyard right now, but I have in the past (at other homes). Gardening a large plot is a time-intensive job that requires a bit of love and attention every day, something I’ve lacked over the past two years.

I have, however, grown container tomatoes and peppers and strawberries during the past two years; these are easier to maintain and are less time-intensive to plant and maintain.

With the end of February coming, this is a great time to consider ideas for creating a small garden plot in your yard (unless you’re bound by a home owner’s association, it doesn’t necessarily need to be the backyard) and/or setting up a few container gardens for fresh goodies during the summer. With the right mix of plants through the season, you can harvest fresh veggies from late spring through fall. Yum!

Here are some resources on container gardening guaranteed to give you a bit of spring fever!

Garden Guides: Guide to Container Gardening (see p. 2 for a great list of vegetables that are container-friendly)

The Backyard Gardener has some tips on container gardening and is another great resource for newbie green thumbs.

Design Gardens also has some good planting tips for container gardens.

And, if you just want to see it in action, go watch this video from the Today Show where they actually plant a container garden on air.

Are you an experienced gardener?  What’s your best bit of advice for readers who might be considering getting their hands dirty this spring?

Catch up with Marianne online at her personal blog Writer-Mommy or her frugal living blog The New Frugal Mom.

Hurray! It’s Week 2 of the (3) week Oscar Mayer Deli Creations Giveaway featuring tips from Ellie Kay, America’s Family Financial Expert.

Remember, each week, (1) lucky winner will win (7) coupons for FREE Oscar Mayer Deli Creations – that’s a week’s worth of lunch! Goodbye, PB&J!

This week’s Ellie Kay Tip is all about involving your older kids with deal hunting:

Stay Connected –When I send my teenage kids to the grocery store, I ask them to “tweet” or text various product and price options to me so I can help them select the best options for the money. It’s a great way to stay in touch with my teens, and help then learn how to save money at the grocery store.

What’s your best frugal tip to teach your kids how to be savvy shoppers?

Leave your tip in a comment below to be entered into Week 2 of the Oscar Mayer Deli Creations giveaway.
Remember, you can come back and leave a comment every day of the giveaway for a total of (4) chances to win.

This giveaway will close on Thursday, February 19th, at 10:00 pm EST. Winner will be picked by Random.org and announced on Friday, February 20th.

Good luck!!

fru *gal /?frug?l/ [froo-guhl]

–adjective

1.	economical in use or expenditure; prudently saving or sparing; not wasteful: a frugal manager

-from Dictionary.com

When I first started writing The New Frugal Mom last March (the version I deleted in June, overwhelmed by the time commitment), I had this definintion of frugal as part of my blog header.

Last March, gas hadn’t yet jumped to over $4.00/gallon. Nor had our entire banking system began it’s slide downward toward utter failure, riding on the speeding sled of bad mortgages.

Going Frugal was still a bit, well…, a bit out there.

Stretching dollars until they squeak has become more and more the norm now, mostly out of sheer necessity than any other factor. Yet there still exists couponer stereotypes (we’re working the system; we hold up the lines; we have stockpiles of deals we found filled with items we’ll never use), and with the drop in gas prices and the potential for more tax dollars in our pockets, we’re being urged to spend that extra money to help the economy recover faster rather than pay off debt or *gasp* save it.

Going Frugal will never be the popular choice; there’s little flash and fireworks when you chose to live smaller and more frugally rather than blow every dime in your pocket (and some dimes you don’t have) on a an armful of bags filled with pretty things or a top-end luxury car.

Frugal is often associated with cheap, but you and I know that’s a bunch of bunk.

Going Frugal truly means making every spending decision – from buying a house to buying milk – the smartest one possible. Every dollar, every quarter, dime, and nickel, should be working to get you more for your money so you can achieve your financial goals.

I’ve had friends look at me strangely when I’ve tried to pass them coupons for items I know they use.

I’ve heard, with some small amount of disdain, “Sorry, I don’t do coupons.”

It can be hard in our overspending culture to be frugal day in and day out, but the payoff – reaching those personal financial milestones – is more than worth it.

So go be frugal, you smartypants! And when someone gives you the look in line at the store, tell them just how much you save with those *silly* coupons. They might just ask you how they can do it themselves!

Catch up with Marianne online at her personal blog Writer-Mommy or her frugal living blog The New Frugal Mom.

Hurray! It’s Week 1 of the (3) week Oscar Mayer Deli Creations Giveaway featuring tips from Ellie Kay, America’s Family Financial Expert.

Remember, each week, (1) lucky winner will win (7) coupons for FREE Oscar Mayer Deli Creations – that’s a week’s worth of lunch! Goodbye, PB&J!

This week’s Ellie Kay Tip is all about those brown bag lunches:

“Big to Little” Brown Bag Tips –Any time you can divide menu items from a larger quantity to a lunch bag size, you will save BIG! For example, I buy a two pound bag of mini-carrots, then divide them into snack size plastic bags ahead of time. In the morning, I just grab and go, knowing that I’ve saved as much as 40% off buying prepackaged, smaller baggies of carrots. Do this for fruit snacks, raisins, grapes, sweet snap peas, celery, cherries, and anything else your family enjoys!

What’s your best frugal tip on saving money brown bagging your families lunches?

Leave your tip in a comment below to be entered into Week 1 of the Oscar Mayer Deli Creations giveaway.
Remember, you can come back and leave a comment every day of the giveaway for a total of (4) chances to win.

This giveaway will close on Thursday, February 12th, at 10:00 pm EST. Winner will be picked by Random.org and announced on Friday, February 13th.

Good luck!!

Oscar Mayer recently launched a new and easy way to fix a hot lunch in a flash: new Deli Creations!
With (10) varieties, including (5) Hot Flatbreads and (5) Sensational Subs, your days of munching on ho-hum PB&J for lunch are over!

Oscar Mayer has also partnered with Ellie Kay, America’s Family Financial Expert, and has also launched a tip sheet from Ellie Kay: Get Savings Savvy. Ellie Kay offers practical advice for ways to trim your grocery budget.

Sisterly Savings is thrilled to offer you not just one, or even two, but THREE chances to win (1) set of (7) coupons for FREE Oscar Mayer Deli Creations!

That’s lunch for a week for three lucky winners!

The (3) giveaways will be posted on the remaining three Mondays in February: Monday, February 9th; Monday, February 16th; and Monday, February 23rd.

Each giveaway will include a tip from Ellie Kay on how to trim your grocery budget. All you have to do to enter is comment with your best frugal tip for that week’s topic.

The giveaways will run Monday through Thursday, with comments closing at 10:00 pm EST on Thursday. Each winner will be selected by Random.org and announced on Friday.

Want to increase your chances to win? Come back each day of the giveaway and leave a new comment! You don’t have to have a tip each time unless you’re brilliantly frugal and helpful! If you comment every day, you’ll have (4) chances to win.

If you don’t have a blog, be sure to leave your email address in your comment so we can contact you if you win.

We’ll see you Monday, February 9th, for the first giveaway!!

If you made it out to CVS on Sunday or Monday of this week, you may have picked up some of the near-FREE Hershey’s Kisses priced at 2/$3.00 for the special 2-Day Sale at CVS.

With the $1.00/1 Hershey’s Kisses Special Dark Coupon from the 11/09/08 SS insert, the final price came to $0.50/bag – a GREAT price for chocolate. Not as good as FREE, but hey, we’ll take it, right?

So, other than save those Kisses for Valentine’s Day {or *a-hem* eat a handful or two}, what can you do with them?

One of my fave things to do with the free or nearly free chocolate I get with couponing and drugstore deals is to make cookies for my kids. I’m that mom who makes cookies just about every week for my kids to munch on and take to school in their lunches; they love them and, quite honestly, I’ve never met a cookie I didn’t like!

But finding deals on chocolate chips can be tough when the calendar isn’t approaching a big baking holiday (think Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter). Since I do bake cookies every week, any money I can save on the most expensive ingredient – the chocolate – puts $$ back in my pocket. Every bit counts!

It’s easy enough to chop up your freebie chocolate for cookies if you have a Cuisinart; I usually have one of my kids help me unwrap the Kisses to make the job faster:

Be aware that using a Cuisinart to chop up your chocolate means it won’t be uniform – you’ll have some big chunks as well as some near-pulverized powdered chocolate. I usually add a little extra flour to my cookie recipe to offset the melting effect of the powdered chocolate in the cookie dough.

But the powdered Chocolate does make those cookies extra good! See?

I made these Monday and there’s NONE left! Seriously yummy! Here’s the recipe I used:

1 1/4-1 1/2 CU Flour
1/2 TSP Baking Soda
Pinch Salt
2 TBSP Butter
2 TBSP Shortening
1/2 CU White Sugar
1/4 CU Brown Sugar
1 Egg
1 TSP Vanilla
1 Bag Hershey’s Special Dark Kisses, a la Cuisinart!

Oven @ 375 F

Cream butter, shortening, & sugars. Add egg and vanilla; cream until fluffy. Add dry ingredients; mix well. The cookie dough will be thick, almost crumbly. Add crushed Hershey Kisses; mix well. Again, cookie dough will be thick/crumbly, not sticky.

Using a spoon, scoop up dough and round into 1 inch balls; place on cookie sheets. Bake at 375 F for 8-10 minutes (mine took 10 minutes; every oven heats differently – watch carefully).

Cool ‘em and eat ‘em!

What’s your fave frugal cooking or baking tip? I’d love to know!

Catch up with Marianne online at her personal blog Writer-Mommy or her frugal living blog The New Frugal Mom.

I’m not big on over-the-top birthday parties for kids; I think the money spent on bigger-than-big parties could be put to better use for that sweet kid, especially when they’re so young that they probably won’t remember the party at all.

But celebrating birthdays is still a big part of our family fun – we love any reason to have a party!  We hang some streamers and balloons, cook up a bunch of family favorite foods, and have a special cake for the birthday boy or girl.

There have been times when life was so hectic that I opted to spend the $15 or $20 on a store-bought and decorated cake. But for the past several birthdays in our home, I’ve made each child’s cake for less than a few dollars each.

Some cakes I’ve made:

A princess castle cake for my daughter.

An Oswald cake for my younger son.

A SpongeBob cake for my older son.

Are they “perfect” cakes? No – not by any stretch of the imagination. One thing you learn to let go of if you’re going to live life a little more simply by going frugal is the idea that *everything* has to be perfect.

Each of my children *loved* the special cake that I made for them; making your kid feel loved and extra-special on their birthday is what it’s all about.

And for those of you out there with children on special diets, making your own birthday cakes can literally be a lifesaver.

Where to find ideas and directions to make your own special birthday cake? Visit my fave birthday cake resource, Family Fun. It’s been a great help to me.

What are some of your best tips for having a fun and frugal kid’s birthday party? Share ‘em!

Catch up with Marianne online at her personal blog Writer-Mommy or her frugal living blog The New Frugal Mom.

If one of your New Year’s Resolutions was to get your financial life organized for once and for all, click over and take a look at the money management features offered for FREE at  Mint.com.

From easy budgeting to helpful graphs, Mint.com offers you a real-time view of all of your financial accounts and activities.  It’s fully secure and accessible anywhere, including on your iPhone. 

Mint.com will also analyze your current credit card interest and tell you how much you’d save if you switched to a card with a lower rate; the savings in interest could help you if you’re trying to eliminate your credit card debt this year.

Now it’s time to hear what YOU think:  if you use Mint.com already, share in a comment what you like about it (or don’t like about it).  How has it helped you the most?

One of the gifts I received for Christmas was a trio of Tastefully Simple products, including their infamous Bountiful Beer Bread mix.

While I’ve gone to my share of Tastefully Simple parties and purchased their products, it’s been years since I’ve bought this mix.   I like the bread, but I’m not crazy about the price tag.

At $5.49 per mix, it’s not a very frugal choice.

Besides, if you type “Copycat Recipe Tastefully Simple” into your Google searchbox, you can find recipes and instructions to make this bread and some of their other products at home for a fraction of the cost. 

Here’s the copycat recipe for Tastefully Simple  Bountiful Beer Bread.   Remember, you can substitute just about any 12 oz carbonated beverage for the 12 oz beer.   As long as it’s carbonated, it will work, though the taste may vary a bit.

Ingredients

• 3 cups self-rising flour
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 12 ounces beer
• 2 tablespoons melted butter

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350°F.

2. Mix all ingredients except melted butter together-stirring just until blended.

3. Pour into greased bread loaf pan.

4. Spread melted butter over the top of the bread during the last 10 minutes of baking.

5. Bake at 350°F for 1 hour.

Recipe courtesy of RecipeZaar.

A great resource for copycat recipes is right here; if you don’t find a recipe for the famous foodie product you’re craving there, try searching Google for it.  With enough patience and the right combination of keywords, you’ll probably find one or two recipes to try at home.

Do you have a favorite copy cat recipe?  Share the link in a comment below and tell us if it tastes just like the real thing!

~~~You can find Marianne online at her personal blog, Writer-Mommy, and her recently re-launched frugal-living blog, The New Frugal Mom.~~~

We’re inching closer to the end of 2008 and the beginning of a new year.  Many of us have time off during the next week, time to spend with family and friends in celebration of the holiday season.

My suggestion to you is to block off an hour or two of that time to sit down and have an honest reckoning with yourself or with your spouse about your current financial situation and your future financial goals.

It’s easy to make a vague New Year’s Resolution to save more or to spend less; I’ve done it myself.  But without a plan in place, and without a full acknowledgement of the state of your financial health, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

With that in mind, I’m going to send you to these great links to help you jumpstart your financial resolutions for 2009; I’m sure there’s something here that you’ll find useful or eye-opening.

And if I don’t chat with you here at Sisterly Savings before next week, I want to wish you and yours a very merry Christmas!

As presented by the M-Network, here are the 12 Days of Christmas, Personal Finance Style for 2008:

• Day 1 – The First Rule Of Personal Finance @ Paid Twice
• Day 2 – Two Financial Goals – Less Debt, More Income @ Cash Money Life
• Day 3 – 3 New Year’s Worksheets @ Mrs. Micah
• Day 4 – 4 ways to be better prepared for Christmas next year @ Gather Little By Little
• Day 5 – 5 Golden Rules To Follow During The Holiday Season @ My Two Dollars
• Day 6 – 6 Ways To Give@ Moolanomy
• Day 7 – 7 Savings Strategies @ Being Frugal
• Day 8 – Eight Simple Snowflakes @ Paid Twice
• Day 9 – 9 Year-End Money Moves@ Moolanomy
• Day 10 – 10 Personal Finance Essentials @ Cash Money Life
• Day 11 – 11 Ways To Decorate@ Plonkee
• Day 12 – 12 Steps to a Prosperous New Year @ Being Frugal

While I’m constantly trying to stretch our dollars and eliminate our debt (oh yes, we frugalistas sometimes have debts to pay, too!),  I try to also be frugal with my time.  I don’t chase every deal or visit every blog nor do I make everything our family needs from scratch.  I simply don’t have the time.

As Christmas draws nearer, many of us are feeling pinched on time; there are so many tasks on our Christmas To Do lists and never enough days to get them all done.

One thing we do every year is make batches of cookies for friends and family and those that serve us during the year (local firefighters and police).  It’s fun to do, but it does take a lot of time to bake them.  And there’s also the many trips to Kroger for ingredients, too. 

I’ve been looking for a simple cookie recipe that I could use as a base, then add in extra ingredients to make lots of different kinds of cookies.  This way I can make several large batches of dough and freeze them until I have a free hour or so to bake a batch of cookies.

I finally found what I was looking for over at RecipeZaar and I thought it would be a great idea to share with all of fine frugal folk!

The recipe base makes ten different kinds of cookies all with an international flair and the basic cookie recipe is repeated at the beginning of each of these posts:

Cookies Around the World, 1 of 5

Cookies Around the World, 2 of 5

Cookies Around the World, 3 of 5

Cookies Around the World, 4 of 5

Cookies Around the World, 5 of 5

I hope these recipes help you spend a little less time in the kitchen this year and a little more time enjoying Christmas with your family!

Do you have a basic cookie recipe you use to make different versions of cookies?  Share the link in your comment and help another busy frugalista this Christmas!

Hello everyone!  I’m Marianne Thomas, author of Writer-Mommy and author of the former frugal living blog, The New Frugal Mom.  I am so pleased to be a feature article writer here at Sisterly Savings!  SS has been a great resource to me and Jennifer is someone I’m delighted to have in my circle of bloggy friends.  Thanks so much, Jennifer!

Imagine this: you’re scouring the blogosphere, looking for the best and latest hot deals.  Maybe you’re new to the world of personal finance blogging or maybe you’re publishing your own blog featuring deals.  You happen across a blog loaded with resources, links, and great ideas for saving money.  Wonderful! 

But then you happen to notice a post about that blogger’s monthly grocery budget (it’s much lower than yours).  Or you follow a link and see a post by another blogger about how they just paid off all their credit card debt (you’re still hacking away at yours, month-by-month).  Maybe you click through to another blog and see a post about how much money someone has made through their online endeavors (between your family, job, school, or volunteering responsibilities, you simply don’t have the time to devote to pursuing those opportunitites, too).

Do you (like me) suddenly feel a huge wave of guilt wash over you?

Well, I’m here to say one thing to you:

Stop measuring your financial success against other people’s financial success.

The Frugal Yardstick

It’s so tempting to compare yourself to Blogger A or Blogger B and say, “I’m just not doing enough.” Or, “I’ll never be able to do that.”  Or, worse yet, “I can’t do this!”

I know, because I’ve done it myself.

What you have to learn to do is to measure your financial success today against your financial habits in the past.

Against yours, and no one else’s.

Ask yourself these questions:

*Am I more aware about how and where my money is spent today than I was last year?

*Do I have a plan (no matter how long it may take to achieve) to get out of debt/save for an emergency fund/save for retirement/save for my children’s college education, etc?

*Do I actively search for the best deal possible on all of my expenses in order to stretch my dollars further?

*Do I feel more confident about my ability to get financially healthy now than I did last year?

If you’re actively pursuing a more frugal lifestyle and trying your best to stretch your dollars and learn new ways to save and earn that work for your family, then you’re succeeding. 

And if you’ve succeeded in a few small efforts already, it’s time to raise the bar.

Challenge Yourself

Just like athletes push themselves to run a little faster or jump a little higher, you should look at your frugal yardstick as a measuring tool. 

If you find it’s become easier and easier to measure up against your past successes (coming under your grocery budget for a month or saving extra money for one of your future goals), it may be time to reassess your goals and needs and challenge yourself to one new goal.  See if it works.

And remember to measure that new goal up against your past efforts, not against someone else’s. 

Small Victories

It may take you years to achieve all of your long-term goals, but along the way you’ll have many moments of small successes that help you get to your personal finish line.  Remember to celebrate them! 

Achieving a more frugal lifestyle, one day at a time takes discipline and planning,  When you cross one small goal off your list, give yourself permission to savor that moment.  Maybe it’s a simple as indulging in something you’ve given up in order to get to your goal.  Maybe it’s something bigger, like a family vacation.  Maybe your version of a celebration is to fiercely attack your next goal.  Again – this is your frugal lifestyle, what works for you and your family.

Embrace it!