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99 Ways to Stretch Your Home Budget, by Cheri Gillard

As the title indicates, 99 Ways to Stretch Your Home Budget, by Cheri Gillard, offers 99 tips for stretching your home budget. Most of them are logical, sensible and easy to implement. I did find a few that I believe require rethinking.

The tips are divided into seven categories:

Food for Thought offers 16 tips for getting the most out of your food budget. One of those tips is: don’t buy in bulk if you aren’t going to eat all of the product before it goes to waste. This is something I’ve applied to our budget. By the ounce, a gallon of milk might be cheaper than a quart, but for Amoeba and I, the quart is the wiser money investment because,ven though the quart costs more by the ounce, it is cheaper than buying the full gallon and letting three-fouths of it spoil.

Passion For Fashion offers 16 tips for getting the most out of your clothing budget. One of the tips I have always used is off-season shopping. For instance, the time to buy your new bathing suit is at the end of the summer season, not the beginning.

On The Go offers 14 tips for getting the most out of your transportation budget. Amoeba has certainly done this for us — most days he bikes to and from work. That cut down on the gas expenditure and the wear and tear on the car — plus it helps with his over-all health and fitness, too!

About The House offers 15 tips for getting the most out of your maintenance budget. There’s a tip here that seriously made me cringe. You can save on the maintenance costs on plumbing and septic tank issues by using personal wipes instead of toilet paper, and tossing them in the garbage can rather than flushing them. The hygiene implications here appall me. Bodily waste is a bio-hazard. It needs to be properly contained. Can you say Bubonic Plague?

Plug and Play offers 13 tips for getting the most out of your technology budget. Amoeba and I have no problem with the turn off the TV one night a week. We pretty much only turn it on one night a week. We also don’t have to worry to much about finding a video game swap club since we don’t do video games.

Stile Wiles offers 12 tips for getting the most out of your cosmetic & beauty budget. Amoeba agrees with the forgoing the barber suggestion. For the price of a hair cut he bought a pair of styling clippers and he buzzes his own head. I am just fine with doing my own coloring, but I do visit the salon for my hair cut. I keep a style that allows me to go several months between cuts.

General Hospital offers 13 tips for getting the most out of your health care budget. Once again, a couple of these suggestions appalled me. One suggestion is that you discontinue your medical doctor in favor of visiting a chiropractor. Following similar advice led to my aunt’s and my mother’s death. The natural remedies “physician” (no licence to practice medicine because he wasn’t a medical doctor) treated the sisters with chiropractic manipulation and herbs. My aunt died of tuberculosis long after such deaths were almost unheard of and my mother died of breast cancer. If you wish to see a chiropractor do so — but please make certain he is legally licensed.

Despite a few doozies, the majority of the 99 tips were indeed logical and useful. I also liked the chapter summaries at the end of each section of this book. Look for these books in the WaterBrook Press 99 Ways Series

99 Ways to …

  • … Stretch Your Home Budget
  • … Increase Your Income
  • … Fight Worry & Stress
  • … Entertain Your Family for Free
  • … Build Job Security

&

  • … 99 Bible Promises for Tough Times

I would like to thank the WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group for providing me this book for review.

5 Comments

    1. Nessa — another tip was not not take your kid to the emergency room for stitches, but to patch him/her up with butterfly bandages instead. Such advice will work for a sensible person, but those that think “if it’s in print, it’s good advice” could end up with, at best, a child with a horrendous scar and, at worse, a kid dying of lockjaw.

  2. Sounds like some good advice in there and (as you pointed out) some doozies! The butterfly bandage advice reminds me of my husband who ‘saves money’ by running his tyres to a brutal level of baldness—one day when he wrecks the car this way I hope he lives to learn it’s not so great an idea.

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