Treat Common Stains with Nontoxic Materials and Save Money

By admin, September 22, 2009 1:44 pm

Alcoholic beverages (including wine)

Blot spilled drinks promptly and sponge with cool water. This should remove most of the color, even if it has already dried. Rubbing alcohol or white wine may also work in a pinch, but they may affect fabric color. If clothing is washable, follow instructions for non-greasy stains.

Blood

First, soak or rub in cold water until stain is almost gone. Then, if fabric is washable, launder in warm water and detergent. On non-washable materials try a little borax or hydrogen peroxide to get the last traces out. Once blood stains set, they are difficult to remove, but a warm solution of trisodium phosphate will sometimes work on cotton or linen.

Coffee, tea

These are easier to remove if no cream was involved. Treat as non-greasy stain with cold water. If cream was involved, follow directions for combination stains, treating first with water, then detergent. A solvent may be necessary.

Egg

Never use hot water on an egg stain because it will set the stain. Scrape off as much as possible with a dull knife, then sponge or soak with cold water. Launder if possible.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Alternatives to Household Products that Can Save You Money

You use natural and less-toxic household products whenever possible. It’s a great way to save money and save the environment.

Instead of: Use
Air freshener A small dish of vinegar or lemon juice set out in a warm area
All-purpose cleaner One quart warm water, 1 teaspoon liquid soap, 1 teaspoon borax, and 1/4 cup vinegar
Bleach Borax
Carpet cleaner To neutralize odors, sprinkle the carpet with a mixture of one cup borax and 2 cups cornmeal or use baking soda. Let stand 1 hour before vacuuming.
Chlorine scouring powder Baking soda
Detergent Simple soap or phosphate-free detergent
Disinfectant Ammonia
Drain cleaner Plunger, followed by a handful of baking soda and a half cup of vinegar. Cover and allow to sit for 15 minutes. Pour in 2 quarts of boiling water, and the clod should disappear.
Floor cleaner Mop floors with a mild soap solution or 1 cup vinegar mixed with 2 gallons of water. Linoleum floors can be polished by mopping with skim milk. (No, it doesn’t smell.)
Furniture polish On unfinished surfaces, use natural oil such as almond or olive oil. On finished surfaces, dust with a damp cloth and wipe dry.
Glass cleaner Two tablespoons of vinegar to 1 quart of water.
Grease remover Baking soda paste
Mildew stain remover Vinegar solution
Mothballs Cedar chips
Oven cleaner Pour salt on fresh oven spills, and scrape the residue off when the oven cools. Ammonia can be applied t tough stains. A pumice stick, available at many hardware stores, will also work.
Pest control Make chili powder packets to keep ants out of your kitchen.
Stain remover Cornstarch paste
Surface cleaner Use a vinegar and salt mixture
Tile cleaner Scrub areas with baking soda and a toothbrush
Toilet bowl cleaner Baking soda or borax
Window cleaner Mix 1/4 cup of white vinegar or 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and a quart of warm water.

Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture

Save money each week when buying fresh bread

By admin, August 27, 2009 11:44 am

I save money each week when buying fresh bread. My kids do not like bread unless it is fresh but as you know fresh doesn’t last long. I now buy the freshest bread available, but freeze half the loaf right away, that way I can pull out a ‘fresh’ loaf without having to go to the grocery store.

Long term planning is very important to save money on groceries

By admin, August 21, 2009 1:41 pm

Long term planning is very important to save money on grocery. First you should make a list of complete grocery needs and then divide that list into your weekly, monthly and half yearly grocery needs.

After that break that list into two kinds of purchases i.e. Bulk purchases and weekly purchases. Always try to save maximum money on bulk purchases such as oil, cream, biscuits, etc. Also you should take care of various offers available in the store. You should various permutation and combination to gain maximum benefits from those offers. After some time based upon your experience, you will come to know how to select offers to get maximum savings.

Avoid doing shopping on weekend because on weekend there can be rush and you will not able to explore all the offerings of the store. Do not buy grocery on daily basis, because it increases spontaneous purchasing. Last but not the least you should prepare a proper list of your grocery needs before going for your grocery shopping. If you do not carry a proper list of grocery needs, then you will end up buying so many unnecessary things from the store.

How to save money on grocery without cutting back

By admin, August 20, 2009 4:34 pm

1. If your grocer offers a club card, sign up for it. You will get better discounts.

2. Subscribe to your local newspaper and clip coupons. The coupon discounts will more than pay for the subscription over a year.

3. Many stores that offer Buy 1 Get 1 free specials do not require you to buy two in order to get the discount.

4. Subscribe to different grocer’s email specials. Then you’ll know if it’s worth the trip for a store you don’t normally shop at.

5. Frozen vegetables are cheaper than fresh and are usually frozen within hours of being picked.

6. When non-perishables are on special, stock up.

7. Don’t assume that giant box-stores are cheapest on every item. They’re not.

8. When buying paper products, divide the price by the square feet of product. That will give you a per unit price to use for comparisons.

9. Don’t assume a bigger size package is cheaper per ounce. Take a calculator with you and do the math.

Opt for a healthier lifestyle and save money at the same time

By admin, August 14, 2009 2:13 pm

One of the simplest ways to save money, and often achieve a healthier lifestyle is to cut back or eliminate personal vices. Do you really need that extra pack of cigarettes? Couldn’t you make through at least one weekend a month without buying a six pack of beer? If your personal vices tend to be illegal in nature, so much the better.

There’s plenty of money to be saved by for-going an ounce of marijuana. People tend to underestimate the amount of money they spend on their unhealthy habits. Perhaps they do not realize how much money they are spending because each outlay to indulge their vice is often relatively small.

If you are truly interested in saving money though, just take some time to do the math. For example, spending six dollars on a pack of cigarettes may not seem like much, but if you smoke a pack a day this amounts to forty two dollars. This comes to total of over two thousand dollars a year going up in smoke. By quitting your bad habits, not only will you save money directly, but you may be able to save money in other ways as well. For instance if you stop smoking, you may be eligible for cheaper health insurance rates.

How to cut down electricity bill in Summer months

By admin, August 8, 2009 6:13 pm

The costs of running air conditioning in the summer months can be as much as half of your monthly electric bill. To cut down the cost, you need to budget your air conditioning usage.

1. Never leave the air on when you leave the house. Why run it when nobody is at home?

2. Make sure air is well circulated in your house. Install fans and ceiling fans in the rooms that you spend most time in such as living room and bedrooms. The electricity used by fans are far less than air conditioning units.

3. If you live in a hot climate, be sure the house in well insulated. Check your windows and doors.

4. Use energy saving light bulbs and air conditioning units. Replace them if you can.

By investing in energy saving devices, you can save money in the long run.

3 Ways to Save Money Without Knowing

By admin, June 24, 2009 5:00 pm

Article by Neil A Bartlett

It is imperative in this day and age that we all buckle down and look for ways to save money. Even if you currently have a fulltime job it would be prudent to do a once over on your spending habits and check you budget to see if there are a few areas that you can save in. Most people are hesitant about giving up things to save money, not because they don’t want to save money but because they don’t want to give up their lifestyle. Which is understandable, no one likes to feel as though they have to do without.

To help ease that fear here you are going to find three tips that will help you save money, and you will only notice the plus in your checking account and not the minus in your daily life. These are three tips that anyone and everyone should be seeing if they can incorporate into their life.

Tip One: Eliminate Needless Driving to Save on Gas

While gas prices are lower then what they were a year ago, it won’t hurt for you to decrease the amount of driving you are doing. Yes, I said tips on saving money that you won’t notice so ask yourself how many trips you make in a day. If you are doing a lot of back and forth maybe it is time for you to look and see if there is a way that you can combine your trips out into one or two a day. If you have to go to the grocery store, and the movie rental place and the post office and pick up your kids from school see if you can make it a big loop so that you are hitting all of those places on the same drive.

Tip Two: Water Conservation to Save Money and the Environment

Do you realize that if could just cut two minutes out of our shower each day that we would save enough money to keep the Great Lakes filled with water each and every day? Not to mention the money you are going to be saving on your water bill and your heating bill. It may not seem like much but it will make a big difference in the end. Here are the facts, and how these were calculated can be found here at http://www.atsecosolutions.com/saveonshowering.html. Here are the numbers:

* Cost of electricity: $0.0944 per kWh
* Multiplied by the cost to heat one liter $0.1313685
* This gives us a heating cost per liter $0.0130054 (or a little more than one cent).
* Add the cost of water $0.0030274
* Total cost of one liter of shower water $0.0160328

Which means that if you decreased the amount of water you used in the shower you could save an average of 1.19 per shower. Doesn’t seem like much but if you shower every day and there are four people in your family you save 142.80 per month or 1713.60 per year!

Tip Three: Eat at Home More

There is nothing like a night out with your family. I mean that in two ways, the enjoyment of being with your family sharing a good meal laughing and no one has to clean up afterward. The second way I mean that is that it can certainly do a number of the pocket book. Depending on where you live, the average night out to dinner for a family of four can run anywhere from $45 – $80. That is one meal for each of you. Where as if you took that money and went to the store and bought the food and made it yourself, that is enough money to buy almost a week’s worth of groceries. Eating at home more is more cost effective, allows for better quality time for the family and nine times out of ten… offers you better cooked food. Cut out one meal a week that you eat out and you are saving that $45 – $80, remember you have already gone grocery shopping. That can equal $180 a month (on the low side) and $2160 a year!

Taking a look at the three tips, even if you estimate on the low side you can save a little over $4000 a year! I promise you will not even notice that you are making these money saving changes.

Neil Bartlett is the founder of CheapInsider.com. Cheap Insider provides everyone with Tips and Techniques for saving money and finding bargains. To learn more and INSTANTLY grab his FREE report “10 Money Saving Tips” go to http://www.cheapinsider.com/specialoffer

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

8 Ways to Save Money and a Different Approach to Saving Money on Your Mortgage Loan

Article by Chris G Bell

All loans based on 100,000 at 6.50% fixed for 30 yrs. That’s a fairly small mortgage loan in today’s world, so realize, the bigger the loan, the more savings in interest there will be!

1) I’ll start off with the simple method to save money by not spending any extra money of your own and saving $400.00 because it’s the easiest savings plan there is!

Let’s say your monthly mortgage payment is $1000/month for round figures. If you pay the same amount 4 times a month ($250.00 four times) instead of 1000 at the end of the month you’ll save roughly .50/month = 400.00 for the entire mortgage loan. That’s not doing anything at all! Just pay your monthly mortgage weekly instead of monthly, but don’t pay the extra week when there’s a 5 week month or you will be paying an extra $250.00 four times a year. This method simply gets the money to the bank faster which means you don’t pay interest for as long. There’s no reason not to save that money!

2) Take a look at your calendar and you’ll realize if you pay the $250.00 per week instead of $1000.00 per month you will end up making an extra 4 payments of $250.00 by paying weekly. 1000 x 12 = $12,000 vs. 250 x 52 weeks = $13,000. By making those few extra payments per year you will save $40,000.00 on your mortgage! There’s big savings available when dissecting your mortgage payment and I’m going to prove it right now for free!

Now for some ways to come up with that extra cash to pay down that principal:

3) Sell a little bit of junk that you have lying around the house once a month. Even if you manage to scrounge up $20.00 worth, you can put that toward your monthly mortgage and save over 13,000 over the course of the loan!! Even a small amount of $10.00 per month will save you over $7,000.00!!! When all it takes is a simple 10 dollar bill per month to save $7,000.00 you start to really save those pennies!

4) Speaking of pennies, don’t forget the oldest trick in the book to save money – saving your change! Save it in a jar and come up with another $10.00 per month and save ANOTHER $7,000.00 on your mortgage! Keep your eyes open walking through stores, or down the street for change. Come up with an extra dollar per month and save $745.00! How many ways can you think of to save $1.00 per month to put toward your mortgage?

There’s been a lot of numbers given out so far so here’s the easy thing to remember…$10.00/month = $7,000.00 on a $100,000.00 mortgage loan over 30 yrs. However it doesn’t increase that rapidly, meaning every $10.00 isn’t “another” $7,000.00. In fact, 100.00 = $45,000.00, so I’ll keep throwing out these numbers for you to realize how easy it is to save thousands!!

5) Here’s an easy one! Work ONE extra hour per week doing whatever you can. If you’re allowed to at your current job then do that. If not, find something some thing else, such as asking your friend to clean out their basement or garage for an hour or two at 10-15 dollars per hour. If you make $10/hr for 1 hour, once a week minus taxes you will end up with roughly 7/wk – times 4 weeks = $28.00 toward your monthly mortgage per month and it’s a savings of $17,500.00! If you can only manage to work 1 extra hour per month and receive $7.00 it will still save you $5,000.00 on your mortgage!

6) So, get up! Do something! Move around! Skip that coffee every other morning at $1.00 each…Let’s say you can skip 15/month! You know it, that’s a savings of over $10,000.00!! Thinking of any ideas on your own yet? Skip 3 packs of cigarettes per month! There’s another 10,000.00 in savings!

7) This list can go on and on! You just need to think of you money differently. Here’s an example; Every week you buy a gallon of milk at roughly $4.00. Let’s say you come across a coupon for $1.00 off a gallon of milk. Chances are you’ll skip over it or even throw it away. Well what if the coupon said, Save $745.00 on that gallon of milk? It might catch your eye then, right? Here’s the math…$1.00 per month toward your mortgage is $745.00 off of your loan! So find a $1.00 coupon once a month and save $745.00 by putting that extra dollar toward your mortgage! Maybe you’ll start seeing coupons as hundred dollar bills like I do!!

8) To everyone involved in the bar seen buying a beer for $3.00 each (usually more); that’s $2,300.00 off your mortgage if you paid down $3.00/month! This isn’t meant for you to cancel all the fun out of your life, but simply pick a few things that you can do every month and put a few extra dollars toward your mortgage….You’ll save thousands!! That’s why I haven’t told you to cut ALL of the cigarettes or ALL the coffee out of your life because you might not want to. However, a few little things can add up to a lot when talking about a 30 yr mortgage!

There are a bunch of ways to save money and this one of the best in my eyes. Putting money into your mortgage is like a double savings plan. In a 30 year mortgage there is 360 total payments. Meaning, if you put $1.00 toward your mortgage every month it would be a total of $360.00. But the savings on interest adds in and you end up saving $745.00! No one cares about putting an extra $1.00 bill into their savings account, but when you see it as a bigger picture you start to realize how important every dollar is.

If you come up with any new ideas to add to my list please email them to me and I’ll add them to the list! Help everyone save some money on that monthly mortgage payment!

There are a bunch of Ways to Save Money on your mortgage by putting a little bit of principal toward your mortgage each month. The Free Mortgage Calculator has many different methods to come up with that extra cash each month and many other ways to save money on your mortgage loan. I offer free information, Free Current Interest Rates, and I’ll do my best to answer any questions you might have on your mortgage.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

Homeowners Insurance – The Money Saving Plan

By admin, June 17, 2009 4:52 pm

By Victor Chukwueke

In property insurance there is what is called home insurance. This plan deals with the coverage of private homes and provides liability coverage for home accidents/damages. This policy is based on a claim fixed period of time. It is true that a person can own a house without insuring it. But always remember that all mortgagors can only do business with you if you have an extensive insurance.

There are certain information’s that you are expected to provide when applying for home insurance. These information are the cost of your possessions (approximately), the type of coverage you desire and the kind of house you rent or own. All the info and others determine your rate.

There are 7 major types of insurance policies and they are as follows:

1. Complete risk coverage for both the building and its property
2. Coverage for older houses with historic value. This coverage is limited to cash or repair values of the items involved.
3. Renters’ insurance coverage which covers and protects personal property.
4. Condominium coverage and it covers personal possessions from disasters.
5. Basic homeowners insurance covers the home and property against losses from 11 types of disasters only-vandalism, aircraft, self damaging instances ( part of building falling on itself etc) theft, wind, civil unrest, vehicles, explosion, fire/lightening, volcano eruptions and smoke.
6. These includes coverage for both homeowners plan and damages by falling objects, electricity damage, snow and water.
7. This cover combines the first two plans and protection for extended/specialty item.

To get a deal at a cheap rate, all you need to do is to collect different quotes from trusted companies. Compare them and choose the one that suits your need. The quotes are free, easy and reliable.

Where to Get the Best Quotes From the Trusted Provider? Here Are My Favorites: CONTENTS HOME INSURANCE
PREFERRED HOME INSURANCE DEAL

FREE QUOTES FROM LEADING HOME INSURANCE COMPANIES. SERVICE AVAILABLE IN ALL STATES IN THE UNITED STATES! by VICTOR CHUKWUEKE

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