Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies: Show, Shipping, Shopping, and Sleeping

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In addition to sharing ways to save money, budget, and reach your financial goals, I love sharing our day-to-day frugal adventures. The frugal life is full of ups and downs, some of which can only be appreciated by other frugal-minded people.

Do you have friends or family who also live frugally? Maybe you have certain friends that you call whenever you find a great deal. Or a sister that will celebrate your awesome thrift store find. I’m grateful to be surrounded by great people who share my appreciation for saving money.

If that’s not the case for you, then consider this the place where you can brag about your frugal wins, vent about your frugal flops, and laugh about your frugal funnies. Together we can encourage each other to continue living the frugal life to reach our financial goals.

With that, it’s time for another installment of Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies! I’ll share mine, then I’m excited to read some of yours in the comments!

Frugal Feats

Field Trip Reimbursements

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One of the gifts of experience that we gave our kids for Christmas was tickets to go see Annie at the Orpheum in San Francisco. I bought the tickets during their Black Friday sale, so I got a great deal at $25 per ticket ($32 after taxes and fees). I used our Christmas sinking fund to get tickets for all eight of us. I made a little certificate to wrap up for them to open and get excited about on Christmas morning.

It was only a few weeks ago that I realized that I could probably get reimbursed for the ticket for our youngest who is in a homeschool charter. During covid, we had four of our kids in a homeschool charter where we got state funding to use for curriculum, school supplies, field trips, and extra curricular activities . While the older five are back in regular school or a hybrid school, our youngest is in the homeschool charter where we get funding.

After looking into the field trip reimbursement requirements, I found that I could get reimbursed for my son’s ticket and my ticket (because I can’t send him by himself). There are some hoops to jump through like sending in our receipt and credit card statement with the transaction on it, but it was worth doing for a $50 reimbursement!

Shopping for free

Speaking of homeschool, another recent frugal feat has been the useful things I have ordered with our homeschool money. The deadline for using funds is in a couple of weeks. Since any unused funds will be lost, I’m working on spending our remaining funds. We can’t just spend our funds on anything we want. There is a extensive direction on what can and cannot be purchased with homeschool funds and how much can be spent in certain categories of things.

I love using homeschool funds to stock up on things that our family regularly uses like printer paper, ink for our favorite printer/copier, Scotch tape, and the best pencils. I also love getting these that my kids love for car trips or sitting quietly in church.

I looked through the list of things that you are allowed to order with homeschool funding and found things that our family would be buying anyway. For example, I ordered these heirloom vegetable seeds for our garden along with this collection of tomato seeds.

My husband is kind of a snob when it comes to technology, so he would never think of buying a projector in the “under $50” range (which is the limit the charter gives). I used our homeschool funds to buy this one and I am happy with it! My kids are looking forward to outdoor movies in the summer with the screen that I got to go with it.

If you homeschool without the support and funding of a charter, I shared other tips for saving money on homeschooling a couple of years ago.

Frugal Flops

Paying for Shipping

I do what I can to avoid paying for shipping. Sometimes that means waiting to order something until I have a big enough order to qualify for free shipping. For example, Walmart does free pick up or free shipping for any orders over $35. It doesn’t matter if you pick up some items and have others shipped. As long as the order total is over $35, any part of your order can be shipped free.

In the past, I have made the mistake of checking out when my total for on an online Walmart order was $38, not realizing that the $38 included a shipping charge (the subtotal was only $30 or so). Had I noticed the shipping charge, I would have added a few more things to bump the total over $35 so that shipping would be free.

The key is double checking that you aren’t charged an extra fee before you check out.

I made a mistake this week. I was placing an online Sam’s Club order for some things for my quilt guild, like lemonade mix, coffee cups, and hot chocolate. I have a Sam’s Club Plus membership, so for years this meant free pickup and free shipping with no minimums. Recently they have changed to a $50 minimum for free shipping. In my mind I was thinking it was the same as Walmart though, where it doesn’t matter if you pick up some items and have others shipped, as long as the total is over the minimum (which I also thought was $35, not $50).

Apparently Sam’s Club is different. You have to have $50 of shipped items to get free shipping, so I was charged $8 shipping for one item (not available in-store). I should have noticed that shipping fee before I checked out. If I had, I would have added something to reach the $50 threshold and had them ship everything (instead of doing pick up) so I wouldn’t have to pay for shipping for the one item that wasn’t available for pick up.

The lesson: always double check that you aren’t being charge an unexpected fee!

Frugal Funnies

Van Sleeping

Even though we set aside enough money to get two motel rooms the night before we leave on our cruise when we planned the trip, I thought it would be “fun” to sleep in the van and save the $200+ for our next adventure. Let me explain.

The only vehicle we have that fits our entire family of eight is our 15-passenger van, so that’s what we’ll be driving when we go down to Southern California for our cruise. With only 8 of us, there will be plenty of space to spread out, so I figured we could easily make it work for one night. I don’t mind roughing it and everyone in the family is generally pretty low maintenance, so I thought “why not save some money?!”

The more I looked into where we could actually park legally and undisturbed overnight in the Los Angeles area, the more I saw that this would be tricky. It’s one thing to be stealthy when you’re a single person or a couple, but it’s quite another to have six kids in tow in a huge city with tons of restrictive ordinances. Once it gets dark we wouldn’t have anywhere to go except the van. Plus, we plan to go to the beach during the day, so having a shower would be really nice as we’ll be getting up the next morning to go to church before leaving for our cruise. It would also be nice to not have to bring a bunch of sleeping bags and pillows with us.

Ultimately I decided to scrap the van sleeping idea and look for some accommodations instead. After some thorough looking, I found a basic Airbnb for $244 for the night, which is about what two super cheap motel rooms would cost us (and less than what a decent motel/hotel would cost).

When I told a friend about my idea to sleep in the van (after I had pretty much decided to go ahead and find accommodations), she thought that sleeping in the van sounded absolutely miserable. That just goes to show you that one person’s adventure to save $200 is another person’s miserable.

What do you think? Does spending the night in a big van with your family sound like a nightmare or a great one-time way to save $200?

It’s Your Turn

What frugal feats, flops, or funnies have you had lately?

See the Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies Archives for more adventures in frugal living.