This week we received a king size air matress and 8 pcs. of old cast iron cookware from our aunt.  Cast iron used to belong to DH grandma.  I now have it all seasoned and ready to use.  Many were different size skillets, but also a 10" chicken fryer and a dutch oven.  I also freecycled a bunch of delivery boxes and peanuts for my MIL this A.M. (She does e-bay)  I just love FREE

If any of you belong to any kind of 'group', the sampling companies are constantly looking for people in various demographics to distribute samples and/or coupons for whatever product is being promoted at the time. 

The sampling company that I am most familiar with is TALK Marketing based in NJ (http://www.talkmarketing.com/home.htm), and I have received samples and/or coupons for everything from tooth whitening strips, cosmetics, and body wash, to Glad bags and disposable containers, to salsa, juice drinks, and everything in between.

 Yours in frugality,

Miserly Maxine

The school district where I teach has an email intranet (an in-district email system) that includes a section called the Employee Marketplace; it's kind of like Craig's List on a smaller scale, an electronic yard sale.  Someone I used to work with was reducing a retaining wall at the back of her property and posted the extra paving bricks free to whomever wanted them; I was the first responder, so I now have 152 garden pavers (which I had been planning to buy) for the cost of gas to haul them home (at 26+ pounds/paver, it took me 3 trips) and the time to load and unload them - now I have all the pavers I needed to work on my landscaping, and one of my neighbors stopped and asked me what I paid, because those are the exact pavers she wanted to buy, and she wanted to know if I got a good deal!  She was very jealous of just how good a deal I got.

karenteacher that is a great deal.  Even though you had to make 3 trips, you probably would have had to do the same to/from the store, plus pay for the pavers!

The only reason I have a koi pond is because my mom & dad upgraded from the preformed to a larger one the designed themselves.  They gave me the preformed one and even gave me rocks for around it.  The only thing I had to buy was a pump & filter (bought on sale), the fish (6 picked out by DDs - also on sale), and the food (cheap pellet type).  I keep it filled nicely with rainwater.  It isn't a necessity, but anything that keeps DDs off of the computer or away from the TV for awhile is a good buy IMHO.

We moved my Daddy to town from out in the country in January.  When my brother went out to get his lawnmowers and bring them to town to sell--Daddy gave us one of them.  Nice Murray riding mower so now DH doesn't have to puch mow this big yard in the heat!  And we didn't even ask for it!

re-tired

 

We just got a perfectly good lawnmower (seems to be the freebie of the day LOL) and I'm going to get a free breadmaker from a parent of a kid at my DDs school.  Woohoo!

 I got a free dehyrator from a parent at moms group a couple of months ago. haven't tried it out yet.   free flour from my mom yesterday, don't know if that counts because free stuff goes back and forth all the time.   got 2 minor dented cans of whole mushrooms for .29 cents each today.

I went to the local salvage store yesterday & I've never seen their shelves so bare! With money so tight I guess more people are shopping there.

I got individual size fruit cups for .25 each, bottles of salad dressings 4/.99, small individual serving cans of veggies for .25, Quaker Breakfast Cookies .99, Texas Pete Honey Mustard 2/$1, Campbells Supper Bakes $1.29, Sunmaid Yogurt covered Cranberries $1.49, Thermasilk Conditioner $1.79, cupcake sprinkles .25, Keeblers Toasted Crackers $1.29. I got some other things but that's what I can remember off the top of my head. I spent $25.55 & came home with 3 brown paper grocery bags of stuff.

I buy a lot of individual sized stuff & snack stuff there when they have it because my hubby is a trucker & I send those things with him so he doesn't have to spend the money eating out. So even if it cost me a little more to buy small sizes we are saving big $$ in the long run.

This may not be quite what you had in mind, but we have been getting some great stuff from our local blood donor room. They always give you some sort of gift when you come in to give blood, but unfortunately, it's usually some kind of cheap item that we didn't really need another one of: so far we've received two water bottles, two travel mugs, two fleece throws, two umbrellas, two desktop notepads with pens--all emblazoned with the name and address of the blood center. However, they occasionally offer *really* good incentives for platelet donors. Platelet donation is a more complicated procedure than giving whole blood (they have to extract some blood, sift out the platelets, and feed the rest back in), and it takes about two hours--so to encourage people to donate, they sometimes give away gift cards to successful platelet donors. Since the beginning of this year, we've received $275 in gift cards from Target, Barnes and Noble, Shop-Rite, and Wawa (a convenience store where we don't usually shop, so we took our gift cards there and used them to buy gift cards to other stores!). I like being a blood donor just for the satisfaction of knowing I could help save a life--but hey, if they're going to offer me something free, I certainly won't turn it down!

This weekend we went on a major sale-shopping spree. Usually we buy most of our groceries at the store in town, since its prices are generally pretty good and we don't need to drive there, but this week the sale flyers for two other area supermarkets listed some prices that were too good to pass up. So we made an excursion and hit both of them. Here's what we got:
Two pounds each of cheddar cheese, part-skim mozzarella, and Monterey Jack
Two pounds of unsalted butter
One pound of Blue Bonnet margarine
Two pounds of pasta
1.78 pounds of organic red seedless grapes
Three liters of seltzer water
One can of iodized salt
Four boxes of brownie mix
One bottle of St. Ives body wash
Eight limes
One carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream
To buy all this at our local store's regular prices would have cost us about $55. Our total for both stores was $36.47--but $26.59 of this came off the Shop-Rite gift cards that we got from the blood bank, so we ended up getting $55 worth of groceries for less than $10 cash. Go, us!