Tightwad Tips

Hi everyone!
How about some REAL Tightwad Tips this week?....
Vegetable Band Aids
Save the wide vegetable bands from bunches of asparagus, broccoli, and other vegetables. Put them in your kitchen drawer and bring-em out when you have a stubborn cap. Wrap the cap and twist away. The rubber band will grip the cap perfectly. These bands are also great for wrapping up cords or hanging up broom handles. Save the rest of these bands for packages and projects.
Cereal companies make tons of sugar coated profits on their artificially sweetened prices. Most of their rich tasting price is due to advertising
costs, so fight back! Get some of your money back by using every bit of
their product. The cardboard boxes are useful as project placemats. The plastic cereal liners replace what used to be wax paper. These liners have lots of uses, so always save these liners after the cereal is gone.
Carefully pull the seams apart and you'll have a long length of liner paper to use for baking, cooking, lining shelves or any other purposes. When making pastry crust, roll dough between two sheets, pastry pulls-up nice.
Liners can be torn into squares and used to cover items placed into the microwave oven. These liner squares don't catch fire and they keep moisture in the food and the splatters off the interior microwave walls.
It's amazing what a microwave oven can do to rejuvenate foods and various items. A short zap will rejuvenate a roll of old masking tape and make it
stick again. A short zap will make a lemon give more juice when squeezed.
A little zap will refreshen stale muffins and bread items. Microwave ovens
work by heating items from inside out. Many times items that appear to
have no moisture at all can be made to live again by just using from 10 to 30 seconds in most 600 to 1000 watt microwave ovens.
Fruit Smoothie: Salad Salvation
Nothing in the world is more ugly than a two day old fruit salad. Even when I use the old lemon juice trick, it still gets smushy and looks really bad.
Fortunately, there's a cool and trendy way to give a beautiful face to that old mess. Enter the world of fruit smoothes and natural "power drinks".
Simply take a cup of the old, but tasty, fruit salad and put it in the blender. Blend for a few moments until it's pureed then add a cup of ice cubes and puree again. Voila! You have a fruit smoothie that everyone will
love. The color is bright and the taste is always great. It's great in
the morning or before a workout, and it's a healthy drink that's loaded with fiber. Kids will even drink it as a treat. If you like, you can add extra
fruit or an egg for protein. But heed this warning: Never let anyone see
the pre-pureed ingredients. It's natural for fruits to shade brown as they
oxidize, yet most of us are too scared to venture beyond the artificial beauty of preservatives. As long as the salad is good, the smoothie will be great! Don't forget to freeze some as fruit cubes too.
If you’ve been making only minimum payments on your credit cards, things are about to change for you. Under an administrative direct from federal regulators, banks now have to charge you more of your balance each month.
Banks have always wanted you to have some debt on your credit cards. But the Feds have decided that is creating instability in the economy. So, if you’ve been living on fumes and have been unable to make the minimums, you may be in for a shock. But if you can make those higher minimums, you are going to get out of debt a lot sooner. Right now, you would remain in debt up to 45 years if you make only minimum payments on your cards. That’s without charging anything new on the card. Under the new, higher guidelines, you’ll be out of debt in 2013. You have to stop using your cards of course, and you need to stay afloat on your home and car payments first. But this is a good thing for people with credit card debt in the long run.
Hey, every penny adds up!
Have a wonderful fall weekend!
CENTSerely,
Sister Thrifty