I’m naturally frugal.
As in, the coupon thing wasn’t a whole new way of life, it was just a method to support my already-existing cheapness.
Another characteristic of my frugality is that I’m always looking to stretch any blessing as far as it can possibly go. Until sometimes it’s not such a blessing.
When I receive a giftcard, I hit the clearance racks. You can know I’ll always choose the item with the “free gift” attached. When my daughter won three coupons for free large pizzas at a school raffle, we didn’t throw a party. We used them one at a time so we could just pay for one pizza, but get two, and have enough for a meal.
That pizza-thing was my husband’s idea.
I was so proud.
This next example was his idea too. (Though I was naturally supportive.)
Here’s the thing. I recently experienced my biggest blog-perk to date. After meeting The Smile Generation at the Savvy Blogging Summit, they offered to give me tickets to a Rangers baseball game. Ummm . . . sure!
My husband and boys are all-around sports fans, and the Rangers are at the top of the list. I was happy to blog for something that would be such a fun family experience.
When they emailed me with possible dates, my husband immediately went to the Rangers website to see which nights included a freebie. They often give out t-shirts or baseballs or some other such totally-necessary-stuff.
We decided that the 7th was a good date for us because the kids would get school binders.
And . . . it was dollar sundae night.
Yes, we were getting free tickets for our entire family of five. Yes, we were excited and grateful. But we couldn’t help ourselves. We had to try to find a way to stretch this opportunity and . . . . get more stuff.
Stuff that we might use, but that we’d never miss if we didn’t have it.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure this mentality is one reason I struggle with slob-issues.
And just so you know, we were surprised and excited when we received the tickets (and t-shirts, and a giftcard to spend on snacks at the game) and found that our seats were on the second row . . . directly behind home plate.
(Not my husband’s head.)
We’ve been to Rangers’ games before. We’ve never sat there.
But we were still excited about the free binders.
I received the awesome tickets, shirts, and a gift-card from The Smile Generation. They provide an online service to help connect people with dentists, and offer online appointment scheduling. A perfect resource for people who move to a new town and put off finding a dentist until they need it and then are embarrassed to ask friends who could easily figure out that they must not have been to the dentist in the two years that they’ve lived in this town. (Not that I would know anything about that.) The opinions, the issues with “stuff” and the non-bald-soul-mate hubby . . . they’re all mine.