Frugal Friday

 It's been another busy week, with lots happening with work + commuting to the office & just an overall intense schedule. As a result, not as much frugality as I'd like, but we made it through another week!

Saving on things we buy

• Used a $100 flight credit that was expiring to (slightly) offset the cost of Nick's spring break flights.
• Went through all of our United accounts (the four of us) & tracked all credits + expiration dates & other details, so we can now see what we have available & when we need to use it. 
• For all Christmas gifts, looked for sale prices, and clicked through Rakuten first to save a bit more. We don't buy for that many people, but there are usually bigger cash back offers over the Black Friday weekend, so we took advantage of that. 

Earning money

• Cashed out $21.46 on iBotta. We don't buy most of what is offered, so this takes a while to add up.

Avoiding spending

• Drove our electric car to/from the office each day, saving on gas. 

Eating what we have

• I was really not feeling it with a rotisserie chicken (just due to timing & a bunch of other things going on), but I did strip it and put the chicken in the freezer & then make broth out of the bones. I felt like a hero, given how much I didn't want to mess with it. ;-) 
• I then turned a bunch of the broth into chicken noodle soup, which helped use up an open bag of pasta, as well as some carrots that were getting old, plus some of the chicken mentioned above.
• I also roasted a ton of vegetables, including almost all of the zucchini (just a few more to go from a huge bag M bought), onions, more of the aforementioned carrots, and chicken sausage. I did a separate pan of roasted potatoes, leftover from the bag we bought for mashed potatoes.
• M made rice, which we used to round out a container of Korean beef from the freezer. 
• I dug out a naan bread from the freezer, and toasted that up for Sam, to go with his chicken noodle soup. 
• Sam ended up really liking the chicken noodle soup, so he ate that several times, and found another bag of naan in the freezer & had that as well. The naan served as a good dipper to the salad olivieh (a Persian dish) that we were sent home from the Saturday party with.
• Our freezer is in decent shape, after some intentional efforts to clean it out. 

For others:

• Researching a Donor Advised Fund creation, so we can maximize our charitable giving moving forward

That's about it on our side. What about you? Any frugal wins to share?