Thrifty Girl: Giving Generously

Giving and being thrifty are not usually seen in the same sentences, but there are some great ways to be thrifty with you giving. Here are my top five ways to give during the holiday season, and every other day in between. Perk, these charities and foundations are thrifty with their spending too. Everything on this list spends wisely and gives generously!

1) Grocery Giving

There are a great many grocery stores that offer holiday donation bags for purchase at the check out. These bags go to families who cannot afford a holiday dinner and most of them are well priced at under $50. To find out if your local grocery is offering any holiday donation bags, just ask your sales associate. Publix, the shop of choice in Florida, is currently running one for $39!

2) Giving a Donation

There have been a lot of foundations who have started offering charitable gifts. These are great ideas for the person who has it all or the person who loves to give. Instead of getting them something that could go in the back of a closet or returned, you give a donation in their name. The great thing about this is that they are tangible items. World Wildlife Foundation has a great gift kit for children. You adopt an animal and get the adoption certificate, photos, and a stuffed animal of the one you adopted. We did this last year through The Marine Mammal Center in San Francisco for our two year old niece and it was a big hit! World Vision also has some more adult options with buying chickens, goats, wells, etc. in a person's name!

3) Giving Instead of Getting

Charity Water is one of those fantastic companies with a great beginning. The founder used his birthday as a way to raise money for building wells in other countries. Now, they have a stream line foundation that is able to put 100% (!) of the donations to building wells and getting people clean water. And, they are still donating for their birthdays. The birthday donation drive is crazy awesome! The site is easy to navigate, you always know how much has been donated, and the e-mails that they help you create are super easy!

My husband did this for his birthday and the well is starting to be built! Knowing who is being helped is such a neat-o extra and something that every person who donates has access to!

4) Making Room for the New

The holidays are retail heaven, but not just for the new. People shop at Goodwill and Salvation Army through out the year and this time of year is no different. By cleaning out our closests, attics, and drawers, we can help someone re-use our donations and make room for our new gifts. Something too big for your car? Call them and schedule a pick-up time!

Trust me, you won't even miss that old stuff once the 26th roles around :)

5) Give, Twice

Make giving twice as nice! Shop at places like wildfiretees.com and United by Blue for things like uber comfy hoodies, bracelets, tees, bags, and such  and give in the process! Both of these companies give all the proceeds of your purchase to help places in need.

Wild Fire Tees was started while Colorado was burning as a way to bring aid in to the State. All of the proceeds from shirt purchases went to helping stop the fires and recovery. Now, they have also started helping victims of hurricane Sandy. There are tons of great shirt and hoodie designs that can still be guaranteed to arrive by Christmas and will help someone else get on their feet again!

United by Blue is a foundation that uses the sales of their super nice shirts and accessories to clean up our oceans. Every purchase cleans 1 pound of garbage out of our oceans, and now, they are also sending proceeds to hurricane Sandy relief. I love knowing that my purchase is not making our world more polluted, but it is actually helping clean it!

Thrifty Girl: Holiday Money Savers

The holidays are such a wonderful time of year! Family is together, people have a bit extra cheer, and friends get together for tons of parties! This is one of our families favorite times, but it can also be one of the priciest. Here are my top three tips for staying in budget and getting to January without going bankrupt.

Set a Budget and Stick to it

Budgeting for the holidays is a vital part of making sure we do not overspend. From little decorations that we must have, to the friends that we need last-minute gifts for, there are so many unexpected expenses that not having a budget is a sure way to sink. Usually we set out a budget for the holidays well in advice (like September advanced). We can pretty easily predict how much we will have to spend, and can start saving a little extra as needed.

When you are sitting down to do your holiday budgeting, first, write out a list of everyone who you will be buying gifts for and know how much you can spend total. Use 70% of the total holiday expenses for gifts, 10% for decorations, 10% to donation (trust me, this will end up being one of the best parts of your budgeting), and 10% for unexpected gifts needed or last minute add ons. It is always good to have a buffer zone. The goal is to not need to take money out of places that you usually spend it, like groceries. But, if you need to, plan out how much you will need to take out in December to be in the black come January. Then, divide that up between the weeks so you know exactly how much you need to save and how much you can spend.

Make sure to keep all recites along with a log of how much you have spent. Some people can keep a great log in their heads. If you (and I) are not these crazy talented folk, set up a separate "Christmas" note in something like Evernote and jot down how much you spent after leaving a store. Having to write down your spending can also work the same as writing down what you eat. Writing it down encourages less overspending and eating!

Use Those Wonderful Trial Perdiods

This is a great time to use up some of those fantastic free trial periods companies shell out. One of my favorites is Amazon's Prime trial. For about 2 weeks, you are able to try out Amazon Prime for free. This could, literally, be a wallet saver if you do a lot of online shopping. Free 2-day shipping on prime products and free books and videos through Amazon. Just make sure you are prepared to continue the membership if you fall in love (cough, cough, me) for $79 per year, or set an alert in your phone or calendar a few days in advance of the trial ending so you can cancel. No need to incur an unwanted charge if you won't use it the rest of the year. 

If you are more of the store shopper, start well in advance. This is not the greatest tip come December, but it is good all the same! Last minute shopping will usually cost you more than a few minutes of stress. When people last minute shop, they tend to pick the first thing they see and overspend. By taking your time and starting in advance (and not on a Saturday), you will save some stress and, maybe, some money! Plus, there will be more time to pick the perfect gift that your special someone will love.

Shop Dollar Tree

Dollar Tree and, sometimes, Dollar General are my favorite places to get Christmas decorations. A good portion of our tree is from the dollar store and no one is the wiser. They have surprisingly nice things that can either complete a tree or be added as the "filler" for cheap. Goodness, I just bought a tube of gold sparkly balls for $1! That seriously cannot be beat.  Dollar stores are a great way to shop for the little extra pieces. There is no short supply of simple wreaths that can easily be added to for a beautiful and hand styled design, plus lots of cute little extras (got some fantastic silver snow flake chargers last year).

This extra saving will also leave more money for the really pretty Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn decorations that are like 20x the price!

Side note, Target also has some really cute ornaments this year!

Thrifty Girl: Money Saver Apps

I am no coupon clipper. There is far too much patience and paper for me to ever aspire to that level of money saving. Fortunately, there are a few apps that feel my pain and help me save sans the clippers. The extra nice perk, they are free! No "spend money to save money". So, here are two of my favorite money saving apps!

Publix Ad

This app is free from Publix and has all of the weekly deals along with special offers that may not be displayed in the store. When you open the app, you choose your store from the nearest to your zip code, and look at the weekly deals! It is a pretty easy app to understand and your store can be changed at any time. The app has four main categories: the store selector, offers, brands, and the weekly add. I mainly use it for the weekly add, but the "offers" tab is pretty neat too!

Offers show you all the offers that are available in the different areas of the store i.e. groceries, pet care, pharmacy etc. For a free app, it is nice, although I do wish that there was a way to collect or copy the offers you are interested in. All that is available now is memorizing what I want and adding it to my grocery app... pretty time consuming for something that was made to make my life easier. Overall, I would give it four stars. It is a solid app for the purpose, just wish it had a few more bells and whistles.

Target

Oh, I love Target and this Target app is wonderful for those who love Target and saving money. Not only does it give you all the weekly ads of your nearest Target, but it also tells you about upcoming events. I have actually found myself using this app more than Target.com and for pretty good reason. It shows all products available, featured products, weekly ads, a list option and a way to check up on gift cards and their balances. Pretty neat! What I love most about the list option is you can create as many lists as you want. Oh boy will this be helpful at Christmas!

The Target app is also compatible with Passbook and works pretty well with it. Although I have still not become a firm lover of Passbook with it's funny quirks, I do love using both these apps together! This app definitely gets five stars from me!

Thrifty Girl: Farmer's Market

After sifting the internet for ways to get the same quality produce without burning holes in our (somewhat flammable) wallets, I found a couple of great farmers market ideas. We try to get to the farmers market at least once a month so a tip for saving there minus the coupon clipping was more than welcome!

The farmers market thrifty tip that I have used and love is to go to the farmers market later in the day. A lot of the vendors are wanting to get rid of the merchandise and may be willing to bring down the price to make sure it gets sold. Something I learned with this method is that a lot of the seasonal fruits and things are more likely to be sold out the later you go, but, if you just want some bell peppers and broccoli for the week, this could be a great way to reign in the budget. I have also heard that you can talk to the vendors and find out if they give reduced rates for going to their own farms. Although I have not tried this method yet, I know people who have and love it. You get the pick of what you want and at a discount- foodie discount win! This may not be a good option if the farm is an hour away, but for a fifteen minute drive, why not?