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Life has been very busy in our home lately.  We have 4 children playing on different baseball/softball teams.  That means games or practices every night of the week.

This requires a whole lot of planning ahead to keep things frugal!  Isn’t planning such a key in saving money?

You might know that at Medium Sized Family, we celebrate Frugal Fridays by looking back over the past week at ways that we’ve saved money.  There is a whole series, so if you’d like to read more money saving tips, you can find a long list of them here.

Here are the 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week.

On the go foods.  With our busy ball schedule, we often find ourselves eating a quick meal on the go.  In the past, that meal might have come from a fast food sack.  But in the #yearofno, that just isn’t happening!

I’ve been making a lot of easy foods that we can eat on the run.  Burritos, sandwiches, and even mac & cheese from a Styrofoam cup!  All of this saves money, and helps to keep the complaining of hungry kids down.  (Notice that I didn’t say the complaining stopped.)

Borrowing ebooks from the library.  I’ll admit it.  I’m terrible at borrowing library books.  We forget them, we lose them, they’re often overdue.

I finally caved and asked for a Kindle this past Christmas.  I never would have considered using one in the past.  But one of the great benefits of reading from a Kindle is that you can borrow ebooks from the library.

What I love about borrowing ebooks is that I can’t lose it, I can’t forget to renew it, and I don’t even have to make any trips in the car!  Yet I can still borrow and read great books for free.

I encourage you to check and see if your local library has ebooks to check out.

Got a refund.  I am not a morning person.  Mama needs her coffee.  But I recently bought a Kroger brand coffee  that didn’t taste great.

I like my coffee brown.  I want caffeine, but it doesn’t need to walk over to me and serve itself.  Nothing strong!

I do typically enjoy Kroger coffee, but not this particular flavor.  After avoiding making coffee for two mornings in a row, I realized that enough was enough.  So I called the number on the can and explained that the product didn’t meet my expectations.

I have only done this one other time in all of my many years of grocery shopping at Kroger.  It’s not something I’d abuse to get free products.  But if you feel that a product really honestly didn’t meet your standards, you should make an effort to get your money back when you can.

Ice, ice, baby.  All of this running around requires a lot of cooler use.  Of course we aren’t going to purchase bags of ice!  I found a better solution from my childhood.

My own family growing up also spent a lot of time on the go.  I can recall my parents washing out our milk jugs whenever we finished them off.  Then they would fill them with water up to the handle.  This leaves a pocket of air at the top.  The jug gets put into the deep freezer.

Not only are you getting ice for the price of less than a gallon of water, but you also are taking up empty space in the freezer.  This actually helps to make your freezer more energy efficient.

When you need ice for your cooler, you take a hammer and bang up the sides of your milk jug.  The ice inside should break into many smaller chunks.  Once it’s nicely chunked up, simply cut the top with a kitchen knife and pour the ice pieces into your cooler.

Pay in bigger chunks.  I hate paying bills every month.  I always try to eliminate as many as I can.  One way is by paying off debt (and hopefully not replacing it with more debt!).

But another way to get rid of those monthly bills is to pay them all at once.  You can’t do this with everything, obviously.  We will always have utility bills every month.

But other bills give us options.  We pay many of our insurance bills either annually or biannually.  Many times we get a discount for paying all at once.  An added benefit is that we aren’t surprised to find that that fender bender isn’t covered by insurance because we forgot to pay the bill on time last month.  Oops.

You could set aside the money to pay for this each month.  But the way I like to handle it is by using those 3 paycheck months to set aside some extra money for those less regular expenses.

Those are the 5 Ways We’ve Saved Money This Week!

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I’d love to hear about your money saving ways this week!  Leave a comment and tell us all about it.