Thrifty Thursday Roundup

This week I…

• Bought all this (74 cans!) for $30.

I’ve never done a Safeway pickup order – I don’t trust other people to pick out my groceries – but there were a couple huge digital coupons for placing your first online order, so I figured cans were a safe bet and went for it. I received a few cans of the wrong tomatoes, but everything else was correct. I took the wrong tomato cans back to the store and exchanged them for the right ones and somehow got $2 cash back in the process. Beans and tomatoes were on sale to begin with, and I also redeemed $20 in grocery rewards, so my total savings on all these cans was ✨$83.48✨ (or 85.48 if I include the two dollars I got back exchanging the tomatoes).

• More cans. I checked the Safeway clearance shelf and found some diced green chiles, which I use in one of my favorite recipes.

• I froze leftover tomato paste in tablespoon-sized cubes.

I opened a can of tomato paste and only needed a little bit, so I used my tablespoon cookie scoop to freeze the rest. Once frozen I transferred them to a Stasher bag to keep in the freezer. No more mostly-full cans of tomato paste growing fuzz in the refrigerator in this house!

• I took B to the aquarium. We have a membership and brought our own snacks for the outing, so it cost us nothing but our train fare. A fun way to spend a rainy day.

• I took B to the Burke museum (twice!). It’s been disgustingly wet and rainy, so we’ve been visiting a lot of our indoor favorites. Again, we have a membership and brought our own snacks. Although one of the two days my husband came along and we went out to lunch too. 🙂

• I saved over $80 on a trike stroller. I thought it would be a good transitional item as we move into the wants-to-walk-but-only-for-a-few-minutes age, and I also thought it would help us prolong the life of our main stroller, which is starting to fall apart on account of we’ve put literally thousands of miles on it. Most of the trike/stroller combos I’ve seen really suffer on the trike side or the stroller side or both, but extensive research led me to believe this one was pretty good. The jury’s still out on whether or not that’s true, but I found it on a site that sells returns, floor models, etc., at a big discount. I’ve bought from this site before and I love them for helping unite things that are still perfectly good with people who want them. The cherry on top is that we didn’t technically pay for it at all – a generous family member sent us a check for B’s upcoming birthday, knowing we’d use it for this stroller.

• I bought this four-pack of holiday hand soaps at Costco for $3.97. I don’t know what they cost leading up to the holidays, but I’m guessing significantly more. Soap is soap, you know?