OpinionMom

The 92nd Festival of Frugality is up over at No Credit Needed. This festival keeps getting bigger and bigger and is a great way to find tips for saving money if you’re on a budget.

As usual, I had a few favorites:

• Hidden expenses – leaky faucets and running toilets posted at Live-Frugal. This actually happened to us. We had a leaky faucet that was adding over twenty dollars a month to our water bill.
• How to save on realtor fees posted at freemoneyfinance. I read this with interest since we’ll be moving soon.
• Read a Book fro Free posted on PiggyBankBlues. Since I love to read, this post about the library caught my eye.
• Fifteen Ideas For a Deeply Fulfilling Money Free Weekend at the simple dollar  also caught my eye. This a great list of ideas that don’t involve spending even a dime.

These are just a few of the money-saving ideas to be found in the festival. Don’t take my word for it, find your own favorites!

I was invited to review a new online community for moms. The community is called Pajama Mommy Community. It’s a great place for all women to visit, whether they are moms or not. Pajama Mommy began as a popular blog, but now there’s so much more!

I found the following exciting features at the Pajama Mommy Community:

• Fun and informative blog entries in a wide variety of topics – One of my favorite posts was this recipe for Pumpkin Bread. Yummy! Doesn’t that sound good? There are twenty-five different topics – whatever your interest, you will find a post about it here.
• Pajama Mommy has a brand new community forum with a variety of topics. You can sign up to visit with others who have similar interests. I found topics ranging from advice and support to entertainment to mindless chatter.

• Pajama Mommy offers a weekly newsletter – you can join the newsletter to win prizes. (You know how much I like giveaways, this is definitely worth looking into.)
• There’s even a job board at Pajama Mommy for those of you who are looking for work. When I checked the job board I found recently posted jobs in several different categories. I really liked that you could filter the jobs by occupation or job type.

If you are looking for a fun, informative site, Pajama Mommy may be for you.

This is a sponsored review purchased by Pajama Mommy through SponsoredReviews.com.

My post on what it’s like to juggle running a home business with overseeing the care of my father (who had Alzheimer’s disease) is up over at Home Biz Notes.

You’re all invited to drop by and say, “hello.” Here’s the link.

If you live in the United States it’s probably safe to drink the tap water. You can read about it in this Newsweek article.

More importantly for the purposes of saving money, it’s cheaper to drink water, especially when you consider the cost of the alternative beverages. Drinking water can save you a small fortune!

One alternative beverage is soda. My family of four can easily consume a two-liter bottle of soda at a single meal. In my area a two-liter bottle retails for about a $1.50. So, to keep my family in soda for a year it costs $546 ($1.50 x 7 x 52).

Fruit juice is another alternative to drinking water. The cheapest way to buy fruit juice is typically to buy the concentrate. Fruit juice concentrate sells for about $1.00 in my area and a can of concentrate typically makes a gallon of fruit juice. If that gallon lasts for two meals, it still costs my family about $4.00 a week or $208 a year to drink fruit juice.

Drinking water also saves you money when you eat out. We’ve found that a large fountain beverage can cost up to $2.50. For my family of four, that means that drinking fountain beverages instead of water can add an additional ten dollars onto the bill. Even if we only dine out once a month that’s still $120 a year!

Drinking water also saves you money at the dentist’s office. Everyone knows that sugar is bad for your teeth. Both soda and juice contain sugar. The carbonation in soda can also damage your teeth.

The bottom line is: if you’re thirsty, drink water! 

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

I’ve been a little bit slow to acknowledge the latest Festival of Frugality and I apologize for that. The festival is up over at stop the ride!

If I’ve counted correctly there are over fifty frugal ideas in this week’s festival. Some of my favorite entries include:

• Stop Going Crazy With Birthday Parties for Kids – musings on the high cost of kids’ parties.
• 12 Meals that are Easy, Cheap, and Healthy – what a great list of meal ideas!
• Bad Vitamins & Other Dollar Store Duds to Avoid – when shopping at the dollar store is NOT a bargain.
• Save Money on Cars – when to buy, when to sell, and how to know the difference.
• 7 Ways to Plan a Simple Holiday Season Now – yikes, it’s already getting to be that time of year …
• 7 Ways to Avoid Overspending – classic money-saving advice.

Well, I could go on and on — but I’m sure that you get the point. There are a lot of interesting and informative ways to save money in this festival.

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

Buying used books is a great way to save money. (Of course, using the library is even cheaper.) However, if you’re a bibliophile (like I am), then you probably can’t own too many books.

Of course, you can always go to your favorite bookstore and pay anywhere from $8 to $30 for a brand-new book. Or, you can do what we do and buy used books.

If you are fortunate enough to live near a good used bookstore (ours is Half-Price Books), you can pick up some pretty good deals. Last weekend we bought eight books for only $50. Brand-new, the books would have retailed over $160.

(They were titles we wanted, too. My picks were Stephen King On Writing, Author 101 Bestselling Book Proposals, and Marketing to the Social Web.)

What types of things are you like to find at a used bookstore? You can buy anything from classics, to children’s books, to last year’s bestsellers.

Here are five tips for getting the most for your money from a used bookstore:

1. Pay attention to the topic and date. A book about Shakespeare from the 1970s is probably still useful. On the other hand, a book about computers from the 1970s is probably of no value or of limited value.
2. Classic authors are usually timeless and you can find good values on the classics at most used bookstores. Charles Dickens is Charles Dickens, whether the book was published in 1967 or 2007.
3. If you are buying a nonfiction book, scan the table of contents to discover if the material inside will really be useful to you.
4. Scan children’s book to make sure the topic is appropriate and the pages are in correctly. Sometimes there’s a reason that the books were turned in. (We once bought a picture book with pages missing from the middle.)
5. Cookbooks can be a great buy at a used bookstore.

Enjoy your new books!

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

I may not have mentioned it, but we do product reviews here at OpinionMom. I have five eager tasters testers, willing and ready to gobble up test whatever you might send our way.

Our family is very representative of the teenage girl demographic, since I have a younger teen girl and an older teen girl. Of course, the adults in our family like to test products too …

If you would like OpinionMom to review your family-friendly product, contact me at laura [at symbol] opinionmom [dot] com.

You can read some sample reviews below:

• Go-gurt Fizzix — A Product Review
• Skin MD Natural — Product Review

Note to my readers: I will always try products that I say that I’ve tried and reviews will be my own opinion. Sponsored reviews will be clearly labeled with the tag “sponsored review.”

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

We were sent a case of Yoplait Go-gurt Fizzix to try so that I could review this new product for you, the reader. (Thanks Char at Weary Parent for passing my e-mail along!)

For the past week or so we’ve been testing Go-gurt Fizzix. (For the record, our flavors to test were Strawberry Lemonade Jolt and Wild Cherry Zing.)

Fizzix is a new concept in G0-gurt. The Fizzix flavors are tangier than regular Go-gurt. One of my kids compared the Fizzix flavor to the taste of a Sweet-Tart candy.

We tried the product two ways: refrigerated and frozen. Five different people sampled (and are still sampling) the product. The five “taste testers” were myself, my DH, my two teenaged DDs, and my brother (who doesn’t live with us, but is close by and comes often enough that he got a sample).

My taste testers had mixed feelings about this product. Three of the taste testers (myself, my brother, and my youngest daughter) liked the product both frozen and refrigerated. My DH and oldest daughter would only eat the product if it was frozen.

As a mom, what I really liked about Fizzix was the fact that each serving of Fizzix provides 10% of the daily recommended allowance for Calcium. Each Go-gurt tube is also only 80 calories, so there is good portion control. The Go-gurt also contains live and active cultures, which can be beneficial to the health.

What I didn’t like about the product was the sugar content (11 g is a little higher than I would prefer) and the high sodium content (35 mg).

Since everyone likes these frozen (and they really do taste good that way — I’d much rather the kids eat these than popsicles), I’ve stuck a bunch of them in the freezer. They make great afterschool snacks and I’ve even served them to the kids as a dessert and for breakfast.

I think we’ll be buying these again.

(Disclosure: Product samples were provided by an agent for Go-gurt Fizzix.)

Contents (c) Copyright 2007, Laura Spencer. All rights reserved.

Okay, I was visiting a fun new blog today (Mom Coming Home) and she had a link to a site, Reasonably Clever, that allows you to design yourself as a plastic children’s toy.

Naturally, I couldn’t resist and you see the results below (I’m taking some editing outdoors 🙂 ).