From the category archives:

Frugality

Why the Gym is a Waste of Money

March 4, 2010
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This is a guest post from Darren Norman, a new blogger at Enter The Norman. Darren writes about his experiences and struggles with exercise for the lazy and weight loss in an ever fattening world. He was featured for his extraordinary weight loss on NBC’s Today show be sure to watch his story [...]

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A New Way to Save When Grocery Shopping

January 31, 2010
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My wife and I have never been big couponers. Is that even a word? No matter. I certainly don’t have the patience to try and match what we are buying to coupons and then figure out what we could make based on those choices. I know there are volumes of sites [...]

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Free Gift Wrapping Using Unconventional Materials

December 21, 2009
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Let’s face it, we all forget wrapping paper or don’t want to go the expense of purchasing yet another roll of ugly paper with a Bizarro world view of Santa and his reindeer.  Here at FiscalGeek labs we’ve been working on some inventive ideas for covering your gifts.  Notice I said covering, those may appeal [...]

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10 Things Your Baby Doesn’t Need that Can Fund Their College Education.

November 9, 2009
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I want to share my sage parenting advice to you would be or soon to be parents. The amount of products the corporate juggernauts are advocating for the health and well being of your baby is staggering. Here’s a secret: You don’t need most of them. I’ll never forget the day [...]

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24 Ways to Help you Buy Cheap Used Books

October 29, 2009
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Books are a guilty pleasure of mine.  Frankly I don’t feel that guilty about it, most everything I’ve ever learned has come from a book or augering in spectacularly in a heap of flames and rubble.  The book route is much less painful.  To that end I love a good book that I can refer [...]

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Dutch Oven Cooking: 2 Mega Easy Recipes for Frugal Camp Cooking

August 21, 2009

My family and I enjoy spending time in the great outdoors.  We are fortunate enough to live in the Pacific Northwest so our camping options are many.  Last year we scored ourselves some cast iron cookware including a dutch oven for outdoor cooking.  A dutch oven or camp oven is really just a cast iron [...]

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10 Reasons County Fairs are Better than Disneyland

August 12, 2009

It’s fair time, complete your staycation with a trip to the carnival to eat some deep fried pixie sticks, ride the Zipper and listen to some Def Leppard and enjoy 10 ways that the County Fair is better than Disneyland.

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How To Make your Own Homemade Air Conditioner

July 29, 2009

Okay technically it’s not an air conditioner it’s an evaporative cooler aka a swamp cooler but definitely provides a level of cooling to your room.  I’m not going to lie to you.  This is not a 2 minute fix, nor is it for the faint of heart, and finally it’s not the most attractive of [...]

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Speed Kills…Your Gas Mileage that is. Hypermiling for Noobies.

July 20, 2009

On my recent good old fashioned family trip to the Oregon Coast we roadtripped down in our VW SportWagen TDI.   I had hundreds of miles to cover and while on the freeway I figured I’d test out some different techniques to see if I could maximize our already excellent gas mileage. We normally [...]

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Are You Fiscally Negligent? Did Netflix Cancel You Because You Never Swapped Movies?

July 13, 2009

I’ve done a variety of things to sabotage my own budget so much so that I wanted to share them here as not really savings tips but more like financial penalty avoidance (FPA). When you look at the potential expenses you could literally save hundreds a year by avoiding these traps so take this as an opportunity to learn from my mistakes or celebrate our financial failures together.

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