I am not especially frugal. I’m not a spendthrift (though I used to lean that way), but I’m not super good at saving money either… I fall somewhere in the middle, but I want to start trying to celebrate my frugal wins. Every so often I will write a post about ways I saved money, or maybe just ways I didn’t waste money. I think the more mindful I am of some frugal wins, maybe the more I will see.

I have 29 nieces and nephews and there is nothing frugal about that, but I do look for ways to cut costs. One of my nieces, whom I am very close to is pregnant. I wanted to get her a nice shower gift without having to pay too much for it. I went to her registry and picked out what I wanted to get her and put it in my Amazon cart – to the tune of $90! Eek! Before checkout, I realized I had points (from our insurance) that could be redeemed. We always redeem our points for Amazon gift cards. We had (more than) enough points to cover the entire cost of the gift! I know I still paid $90, but it wasn’t $90 out of my budget. To us it was “free” money.

I was given 2 large shopping bags of figs, which I love. But there was no way I could eat them before they went bad. We kept a few aside to eat, used 32 cups of figs to make fig preserves, and we dehydrated the rest. We now have 6-pint size jars and 9 half-pint size jars of fig preserves and a quart sized baggie of dried figs! They turned out really well and taste so good! I will be giving a couple jars to the woman who gave me her figs!

For Christmas this year, I am giving all the males in my family homemade wood butter, a wooden spoon, and a buffing rag to go with it.  I have several candle jars that I have been rinsing out and keeping and they are the perfect size! I don’t have nearly enough to exclusively use candle jars so I will put the rest in mason jars, but it is a good reuse of an item that would otherwise be thrown away and I won’t need to buy as many mason jars to fill.

We had to put our dog down about 2 months ago, but we still had all his stuff. Recently, our neighbor got a chicken and they needed a home for it. We offered them our dog crate. We were happy to pass the crate on to a new home and they were grateful for an immediate answer to their needs. It was a win-win, and we were glad it found a good home.

Every year we have a huge Christmas party open house. Planning ahead, I just ordered the invitations. My credit card had a special deal that if I ordered from zazzle.com I would get 10% back in the form of a credit on my credit card, so that is a savings of $5.40. There was another deal for Autozone of 1% cash back. My husband just bought some of the parts to replace his breaks from there so we will get another .60 back. (I know that’s not much, but when you are on a debt payoff journey, every little bit helps!)

Those are all I can think of right now, but I’m going to try to notice my frugal wins!