Frugal Framnett

Today’s coupons savings were from purchasing five cans of soup. The offer was good on five cans get $2.25 off (five cans for four dollars). Fortunately, the offer was on cream of mushroom and cream of chicken. We purchased four cans of cream of mushroom (used in our tuna noodle casserole dish) and one can of cream of chicken (used - ? I don’t know Lorie will find a good place for it).

So now we have $46.68 to go to pay for our newspaper subscription.

Fell for this gimmick the other day. Now, mind you I believe the item we were buying to be a tremendous value and we have room in our freezer, but I felt so manipulated.
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But often times events around us make money seem so insignificant.
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One thousand one…
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Anyway, the purpose here is not to circulate jokes that I would not tell at work (for fear of the HR Police and EEOC attorneys), but to discuss the idea of how to best take advantage of coupons and specials.
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What you are looking at is one of my expense detail tracking sheets. It is one of many and is full fledged, no other sheet has more fields than this one does!

Each sheet contains a number of data points, such as date, the location (or vendor), the total amount spent, sale-tax, realized coupon or rebate amounts (i.e. rebates & coupons actually resulting in savings - brainstorm I am going to add a coupon & rebate potential to try to track rebate conversions), and description of the purchase. I then have fields where I total by year, month, and week spending. Click on the sheets to see them close up.

How do we add up the totals? By using the sum formula. in my case that the annual total is =sum(c4:c999) and the monthly & weekly totals are similar. I have yet to add averages, however it will be a bit of time until average numbers are helpful and I have not yet added in the potential coupon savings.

Is possible, but it takes some guidance and some guts.

In this category I plan to discuss traveling and how you can make it cheaper. The trip of a lifetime does not (it can if you really want, but I have a feeling you are not here to read about how to blow your savings by travelling) have to cost the savings of a lifetime, but you need to understand a few things, study, study, study, consult, consult, consult, and plan, plan, and plan.

This is where I have some experience. I have traveled to four of the seven continents – Asia (where I resided for six years), Europe, North America (well duh!), and Africa. Most of my valuable savings experiences came from the African trip and the Ireland trip.

May be found here. Open Office’s Calc spreadsheet. What is the cost of obtaining the software? The cost of downloading and installing it, it is free for the download.

In addition, you can open and save Excel spreadsheets. Compatibility is not 100% but darned near, the only time I have compatibility problems is when attempting to open Excel sheets with macros.

The formulas are not quite the same, but all is close enough you can readily transfer your knowledge of Excel to Calc.

What you are looking at in the above screen grab is the summary sheet from my expenditures spreadsheet. There are roughly 14 sheets, each sheet tracks expenditures by category, for example there are sheets for utility, grocery, and clothing expenditures.

The summary sheet gives at a glance the grand total, and totals broken down by category, and month.

Partially visible are the numbers rendered into percentages against the particular total and not visible are pie charts, both year and for January. Of course, as the year progresses I will create pie charts for each month.

Next posting I will show a pie chart. My Lord, I can almost see this transforming itself into a full fledged web-based application.