AmericasCheapestFamily.com Member Archive with Q&A

When the weather is chilly, nothing warms up a house and your bones like a hot bowl of home made soup. Throughout the year, we save chicken backs, ham bones and turkey carcasses (all of the bones), in plastic bags in our freezer. We cook one turkey (bought at Thanksgiving time) almost every month of the year (except the really hot summer months). Annette boils the carcass to make the broth. 

Most of us are into convenient recycling—throwing your recyclables into the city provided recycling bin. But there are some commonly recycled items that can serve multiple purposes around the home as you creatively repurpose them. One specific item is the daily or weekly newspaper. We posed a question to our FaceBook Fan page and were pleasantly surprised with the ingenuity of their ideas.

 Here's what we wrote:

The slow cooker or Crockpot is one of the most versitile time and money saving tools we have in our kitchen arsenal. We use them so much that, over time, we've bought three of them to help on our once-month cooking day and daily needs.

This is a family tradition at the Economides home. Every year Annette
takes Halloween pumpkins (picked up for free after Halloween), cooks and
processes the flesh, then freezes it to be used in December baking. She bakes
close to 100 loaves of pumpkin bread (in various sizes) to be distributed to
teachers, coaches, mechanics and even the mailman and garbage truck driver. The
loaves are inexpensive (about $1 for a large loaf and about 25 cents for a
small one). She wraps them in aluminum foil and finishes it off with a simple
red or green ribbon.

If you planted a garden this year and have an overabundance of zucchini, you’re not alone. Zucchini is probably one of the easiest vegetables to grow. So what do you do with your bumper crop? You can make zucchini bread, muffins, and pancakes, or things like deep fried zucchini or grating it into salads. But once you tries all of these things, then what? One year in the midst of hundreds of pounds of prolific production, Annette called a friend about other options for eating up our zucchini. Sue recommended making zucchini relish.

Preparing your child to live an independent life may not be on the top of your to-do list, but if you knew the impact of the 5/50/500 money rule, you’d want to get started today. Here’s how we first learned about it.

Money is really tight and with unemployment on the rise, the number of people going to school to “re-tool” is also increasing. This means that students in service industries — hair and nail care, dentists, massage therapy and more — will need people to “practice” on. If you’re willing to take some risk, you can save a lot of dough. You may be surprised about the services they offer.