1. Kindle
My son’s kindle had been limping along for the past few months, but I knew that because the holiday season was fast approaching, Amazon would reduce their prices soon…and they did. Luckily this coincided with his November 10th birthday, so he is now the recipient of a non-cracked, glitch-free device. **I made sure to get the kid-friendly foam case, so hopefully this one will not get damaged as easily as his last two…
2. Drawing sites
My son loves to draw. He can sit for hours each day drawing and coloring, so when one of my Facebook friends mentioned some free drawing sites, I knew he would love them. His favorite site so far is cartooning4kids on YouTube. It really helped him to learn how to make more definition in his drawings and gave him more confidence in creating new characters. Oh and its free, so that makes it frugal:)
3. Gift cards
I am a recovering gift card hoarder. Normal people spend their gift cards right away…but not me. I like to save them so they last over months (or in rare occasions…years) so I have many gift cards with amounts ranging from $.34 up to $100 on certain cards (sad but true) After having a conversation with my mom recently about this issue, I decided to finally clean out my wallet and try to use up every gift card before the end of the year. **Apparently this gift card issue happens to a lot of people. In fact, companies count on people to not use up all of their gift card balances, so they push deals on the cards for that very reason (one report found that $1 billion dollars in gift card balances go unspent each year!)
4. Firewood
My husband had cut up a tree two years ago into big logs that he had planned on splitting for firewood, but never got around to due to various reasons. This week, with temperatures looking to plummet into the teens he decided to replenish our wood pile and chopped for many hours over the span of a couple of days. So now we are sitting in our cozy living room being heated by that very wood (which should help to keep our heating bills down to a miniscule amount)
5. Credit card reward points
This past month I have accumulated $17 in credit card reward points by simply buying things that we needed (and things that we didn’t…lol) But since we pay our balance off each month, I consider this free money. **I have let the reward points accumulate for the past few months and plan to buy some Christmas gifts over the next month with the “free” money.
The Thrifty Educator 