Save Money by Cooking with a Crock-pot

First introduced in 1971, the Crock-Pot revolutionized the way we cook meals. The word Crock-Pot is actually trademarked by Rival Industries, but is used in every day conversations instead of the term slow cooker. Many recipes for the crock-pot require little preparation. The slow cooker can then safely be left to run unattended, making it a convenient cooking method.

Crock-pot meals can not only save you time in the kitchen, but they can also save you money as well.  The reasons are as follows:

1.    It keeps you out of the fast food line.  If you had not loading up the crock-pot with the ingredients this morning you’d likely be in the drive through line at the local fast food restaurant this afternoon after work, grabbing a meal for your family.  The average fast food meal for a family of four rings up over $20.

2.    Stretches your dollar.  Most crock-pot recipes and meals can truly stretch your food dollar.  Because you can put a whole chicken in the crock-pot to cook then cut it up for several meals, you can stretch your budget with the use your leftovers.

3.    Cuts your grocery budget.  You can save money at the butcher since the slow cooking process is especially useful to tenderize cheaper cuts of meat.

4.    Saves on your energy bill.  Instead of running a larger appliance like the stove you are running one small energy conservative appliance, the crock-pot, saving on your energy costs.

The convenience of the slow cooker not only saves you time, but will also save you money. Don’t you think it’s time to take it out of your closet (or wherever you have it packed away collecting dust) and make a Crock-Pot meal today?

About the Author:
Cara Mirabella is a WAHM with one toddler from New Jersey. She owns and manages TheHouseholdHelper.com – a site dedicated to saving your time, money and sanity when managing your household. Her site offers tons of information as well as e-books including <a href=”http://thehouseholdhelper.com/ebooks/CrockPotCooking.html”"Recipes For Every Occassion: 470 Crock Pot Recipes”.<a/>

Learning How To Save More

Once you’ve done this and taken some time to absorb it all, it is time to learn about valuable money saving tips to help you learn to spend less. Don’t be afraid, nothing discussed here will harm you in any way. These are basically a set of guidelines created to you through the process of spending less money.

Take the list of all the places you have spent money at for the time period you kept a record. Are there any transactions that you can cut? Maybe decide that instead of stopping at the coffee shop each morning, get yourself a coffee maker and make yourself a pot of coffee each morning. Put the coffee into a thermos and take it to work with you.

If you don’t want to do that, have it to where your coffee maker makes you two cups of coffee, enough to put into a cool looking cup with a lid to carry to work. You’ll still get your coffee, but won’t be spending five dollars a day to have it. You can also purchase flavored coffee from the grocery store and flavored creamer as well.

Are you able to take your lunch to work? Instead of spending seven to ten dollars a day on lunch out, grab lunch options at the grocery store. The same can be done for dinnertime. Look at the price of buying a frozen pizza at the store and buying one from the local pizza delivery store.

The difference is at least five to ten dollars each. If you do have to eat out, whether it’s for work or pleasure, don’t be afraid to use coupons for a percentage off or a certain dollar amount off the final price. It is best to save a few dollars than to worry what people will think of you and the coupon you just used. They might even be jealous!

Look back at your list and look at how you paid your bills. Did you mail them or drive to where they needed to be paid? Many companies give you the option of paying your bills through the Internet. Not only will you be saving the money on stamps, but gas as well. Some companies offer discounts on your monthly bill for paying them online as well as some banking institutions if you utilize their bill paying service.

Take a glance at the amount spent on fuel for your vehicle. Gas prices fluctuate often without warning which can cause your expenses to rise and lower at a moments notice. Think amount your travels for a moment. Is it possible to take public transportation to work or the mall? Is carpooling an option? The goal is to cut down on how much gasoline you use and easy ways include public transportation, carpooling and walking, which is good for other reasons.

One final example is looking at how much you are spending on things like renting movies, CD’s and DVD’s. Consider a movie swap night with friends. If five or six of your friends get together and borrow each other’s movies, you get to see several movies for free.

Instead of purchasing movies each month, check out one of the services where you can rent movies online for a flat fee each month, but make sure what your paying each month is less than your usual DVD purchases each month. This is helpful if you like to watch a lot of movies all the time.

The same could be used for CD’s. Feel free to swap with friends or look into the different online services where you can download a CD at a cheaper price than purchasing one brand new. Another resource for CD’s and DVD’s is your local library. Most now offer the ability to checkout the latest movies and CD’s for you to enjoy. Membership to the library is always free.

Hopefully these few pages have given you an opportunity to evaluate where you need to cut back in order to save money and to become more “frugal” without hurting yourself financially in the long run. This is a starting point, a jumpstart to a new life.

Tips for Staying Focused on Your Business

If you are easily distracted, staying focused on your business can be harder than doing the actual work of your business! It is very easy to procrastinate, especially when you are a WAHM. There are always ‘so many other things to do’.

Here is a secret that you may not have heard yet: The dishes can wait! The laundry can wait! So feel free to make those phone calls or answer those emails. The laundry and dishes will still be there, waiting for you! However, if you wait too long to call a client back, they may move on to someone who gets back to them faster than you do.

Why did you become a WAHM in the first place? Did you need to bring in an extra $500 a month to pay off credit cards? Was it to put money away for your children’s college fund? Or was it to save for retirement? Whatever the reason, write it down and put it where you will see it on a daily basis. When you are feeling distracted, look at what you wrote down. It will be easier to work when you remember why you are working in the first place.

You may want to team up with another WAHM. Send each other your goals and keep one another accountable. Call each other at the end of the day and discuss what you accomplished; you can share your successes or lend each other a sympathetic ear over things that didn’t go as you planned.

Stay motivated by setting daily, weekly and monthly goals. If you “work backwards” you will create a road map to your success. For instance, if you are in direct sales and your financial goal is to sell $1500 in product that month. Do the math and you’ll see that you need to sell $375 of product each week. Now, how many home parties do you need to hold each week to accomplish that? How many phone calls do you need to make each day in order to schedule those parties?

When you accomplish your goals, give yourself a little treat to remind yourself that you worked hard and achieved success!

Tips for Staying Focused on Your Business

If you are easily distracted, staying focused on your business can be harder than doing the actual work of your business! It is very easy to procrastinate, especially when you are a WAHM. There are always ‘so many other things to do’.

Here is a secret that you may not have heard yet: The dishes can wait! The laundry can wait! So feel free to make those phone calls or answer those emails. The laundry and dishes will still be there, waiting for you! However, if you wait too long to call a client back, they may move on to someone who gets back to them faster than you do.

Why did you become a WAHM in the first place? Did you need to bring in an extra $500 a month to pay off credit cards? Was it to put money away for your children’s college fund? Or was it to save for retirement? Whatever the reason, write it down and put it where you will see it on a daily basis. When you are feeling distracted, look at what you wrote down. It will be easier to work when you remember why you are working in the first place.

You may want to team up with another WAHM. Send each other your goals and keep one another accountable. Call each other at the end of the day and discuss what you accomplished; you can share your successes or lend each other a sympathetic ear over things that didn’t go as you planned.

Stay motivated by setting daily, weekly and monthly goals. If you “work backwards” you will create a road map to your success. For instance, if you are in direct sales and your financial goal is to sell $1500 in product that month. Do the math and you’ll see that you need to sell $375 of product each week. Now, how many home parties do you need to hold each week to accomplish that? How many phone calls do you need to make each day in order to schedule those parties?

When you accomplish your goals, give yourself a little treat to remind yourself that you worked hard and achieved success!

Weekend Cooking Frenzy

Busy days can lead to frustration when it comes to making dinner. Who has time to fix a meal when they don’t get home until 6pm or later? Better yet, who feels like cooking a meal after a hard day’s work?  So, what’s a girl to do in order to avoid frozen dinners or worse yet, fast food?  Use your weekends off to prepare all your meals for the upcoming week.

We’ve all been there at least once and if you’re like me, more times than we wish to admit.  We go to the grocery store and spend a ton of money so that there will be food in the house. We then make a promise to cook each and every night since the food is already there and ready to be consumed.

But, guess what happens? I come home from work late and I am tired. Everyone else is tired from work and school and no one wants to cook. It falls on me to cook so I suggest that we order take-out food. We spend twenty or thirty dollars on food for one meal when we have a freezer full of food. Have you been there, too?  Not a very good choice when we’re trying hard to save money, right?

One way I’ve found to stop this endless cycle is to pick one day on the weekend and have a cooking party. Yes, you read that right – a cooking party. I make a menu for the week and thaw out the food on Friday. Then, on Saturday morning I get to work. The kids can help me if they choose and when they do, they get a say in what we will be eating.

For your weekend cooking party, decide on the menu early. This ensures that everything needed is present and accounted for. Start with the meats. They will take the longest to cook so get that going and try to have a variety so you’re not bored with the same meats all week long.

Side dishes should be prepared, too. It seems like such a small thing to cook the main part of the meal and save the rest for later. What usually happens is no one feels like cooking anything. Avoid the drama by cooking everything at the same time.

Cooking that much food for later requires containers to hold it all. There are two ways this can be done. One way is to use containers that are large enough for each side dish and the main meat courses. Each day, take a meat and two sides out of the fridge and heat it up for dinner.

The second way gives the family a little more of a choice each day of what they want to eat. When the food cools (everything needs to cool before placing it in containers), have each person scoop what they want to eat into a serving container. Have one meat and two sides per container. In the absence of the family you can do it yourself. Label each with what is inside. During the week, everyone can pick from a variety of dinner combinations.

Each works, but it is up to you to decide which is better for your family. Cooking on the weekend saves time and money because you’ll be less tempted to go out when you’re tired from working all day.  Not to mention, for once you’re sure to use the leftovers!

If your food makes more meals than you could eat in a week, freeze several of them for another time. Simply thaw each meal the day you plan to serve it.  Yes, you will have to make an investment in dinner size containers, but it pays off the more you use them.  Once you see how much stress you relieve and healthier your family is eating it will be well worth the initial cost.

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