Lauren at Path Across has an article on four ways to save money and time. To summarize:

• Use smaller amounts of cleaning products
• Eat leftovers and use up less-than-crisp vegetables
• Cancel the cable TV
• Grow a few houseplants and feed then kitchen compost

Read the whole article for details. These are good ideas, though we already do most of these. In our case our kitchen scraps already go into some composting bins I made a few years back. We never have had cable TV, and I am the “Leftover King”. Quite frankly it boggles my mind that people could actually throw away perfectly good food just because it’s leftovers. Some food tastes better the next day and beyond.

So the only one that we aren’t already on top of is the first one. I’ll have to check with my wife, as she handles the laundry. I know I could probably go a little easier on the cleaning products in cleaning the bathrooms.

That’s one problem with being frugal–it’s hard to cut back any further. Yet somehow we managed. When I lost my job we cut our budget by a third, and not all of that was the money we no longer put into savings. On the whole our lifestyle has not been impacted that much. On the other hand, I do pray regularly that none of our major appliances decides to go out before we get a solid income stream going again. When I get my first paycheck I intend to not mention it anywhere near the kitchen!