5 Ways to Save on Sports Gear

Do you have a sports guru in your family? Or do you have little ones starting out for the first time. I have a son who really wants to play but is too scared to venture out onto the field. I don’t have the money to buy new nor to pay for him to play so I looked for some alternatives so I wouldn’t break the bank.

Here are my suggestions.

1. Thrift Shops.

You never know what treasures you can find at Thrift Shops. Thrift Shops are no different than hand me downs. Not to mention items donated to Thrift shops typically means the persons donating took the time to set the items aside to be donated and you can sometimes find brand new items with tags.

2. Clearance Racks.

If you are like my first order of business in big box stores is to scour the clearance areas. Not often but you can find clearance sporting good items. Sometimes it could be that a tag was pulled of or a ball is going slightly flat but still in good condition.

3. Sports Equipment Stores.

Sports stores like Dick’s Sporting Goods have sales and sometimes those sales are worth the wait for brand new items at half the cost. Most deep sales occur 2-3 weeks into the season and then again at the end of the seasons.

4. YMCA Trades.

Sometimes at the end of the seasons YMCA will put out a table and have an exchange. You bring your unused pair and exchange for another pair that you need. Sounds great to me unfortunately I wasn’t able to find the sizes I needed for my kid.

5. Friends and Family.

Check with friends or even your family! Someone might have some sports equipment not being used that you might be able to ask to have! Why spend money if you don’t have too!

That’s it! I’m sure there are many other ways as well to save on sports gear like online shopping but often times you can’t wait for shipping and have the product arrive in time for when you needed.

Good Luck and have lots of fun making some memories with  your kids.

Welcome to Rebecca Autry Creations formerly known as Moms Saving Money! Thank you for visiting! Below you will find a helpful free coupon 101 guide for new users and seasoned couponers. We all need a little reminding once in awhile to refresh us.

Free Coupon 101 Guide

If you need help getting started with coupons then this is the book for you.

This guide is formatted in Kindle version however you do not need a Kindle to purchase this book.

Simply download Kindle for PC or for any other device HERE for free.

Moms Saving Money Coupon 101 Guide

Cost: FREE

Yesterday, we were in a time crunch as we had been waiting for someone to send us an important document that needed to be printed

Have you learned about the services your Local  Library provides?

Did you know you can print, fax, use a computer and search at a Library for a very inexpensive amount.

Did you know that you can also get papers notarized as well? You may even can attend basic computer and other courses FREE of charge.

Check out your local library for services they provide.

Topic: Services at your local library

Ok typically I share from my own experience or from those around me because I am a real person and I have trials and hiccups in life that I know that even just one of you can relate, I have succeeded.

You are probably wondering why am I saying this or whats the point, but I recently got a comment suggesting I should keep something to myself and that coupon bloggers is meant to share ideas.

Yes I agree that sharing ideas is what I am here for and sharing with you how to save is my mission. Have you ever looked at my tag line? It says, “Helping Others Save Money.” That is just what I try to do. I recently wrote a post about something I learned to do and I wrote it to pass it on to others that they may also do the same to help save money.

It’s important to me to help others and if I open my mouth to help others that is what my intentions are. It has taken me over 3 yrs of couponing to be where I am today.

I don’t have to cut every single coupon, I can look at a coupon and realize whether it is a valuable coupon for me, I know the typical sale cycles and I know how much we use and how much we need between sales so our family can save effectively. I did not learn this over night and I am still learning. Whenever I learn something I will pass it on.

I am not most coupon bloggers, I am myself. Many large blogs my size and larger have teams who work on their blog. I can Stand HERE and say I am a ONE person show. I type my own reviews, I do my own posts, I do my own matchups with the help of a Wonderful Company. I taught myself CSS and HTML, I designed my own blog and if you ever asked me how much I put into my blog, my answer is my time. I rather learn to do something than to pay for something for my blog and yes that may show but right now every penny we bring in is vital to our home right now.

I pay monthly for my little corner of the web. I host other blogs under me even though I am not the owner but I have them for no expense to the owners because they have their own stories to share and I can afford to do that its not much but I’m happy to do it.

I have full control of what comes on my site from paid posts, sponsored posts, giveaways, and any other helpful things I feel fits my site.

I don’t tell people they have to come to my site to get the deals or they have to listen to me. I rather have fans who are eager to learn and want to be here than those who feel I am not doing a good job. There are 100’s of frugal bloggers and everyone of them is unique and has their own voices.

So sorry for my rant but this is my blog as long as I have control and I pay for my hosting and domain!

Thanks for reading and I hope you stay with me but if you feel you need to leave don’t worry I understand.

Ok here is one of the times I will be brutally honest with you all. We are in a financial hardship right now. I’m not going to sugar coat it or anything. I know many of you are struggling just as much as us.

A couple months ago my husband’s job changed making earnings way less than what we were getting. I’m not talking about Obama’s new taxes or anything to that end. Circumstances just changed. We have been filling out applications, going to interviews and I thought I had a job but it did not pan out as what we needed nor did it work out.

The plus side is my hubby has gotten more hours, I’m making a bit more blogging and we do get to spend more time as a family.

So with a financial hardship comes bills and trying to juggle everything is very crazy. When there is no money there is no money.

So why is this entitled Paying for the Wrong Meter? Because we had a electric issue and thought that it has been resolved. If you saw my post back in December on facebook I had asked what the cause for use of 12K KWH in 5 days. Well we have 2 units and it had nothing to do with the well water we just needed Freon and both units were running on auxillary which we did not know that at the time.

I had made the initial call the power company to see what arrangements we could make on our bill since we could not pay it in full. With the work of getting the rental group to fix our problem of Freon and AEP we made arrangements and thought the whole situation was fixed. Now we did know that on the new bill we would see the extreme high usage because of the problem so when I looked at our bill this morning yes it was high but not nearly as high as we thought. So looked closer.

The usage should have been 12K plus the just about 2K we used in those 31 days between Meter readings but here is where I found the incorrect information.

The meter on our bill said 47036 as read on Jan. 4th Today Jan. 6th it read 57527. No we didn’t use 10K in 2 days. When I read the meter on Dec. 8th our reader said 55587.

So you see from Dec. 8th to Jan. 6th we used 1,960 KWH according to the meter on our house that we have pictures of.

So I called our power company to once again see what re-arrangements we can make and to ask about the Meter.

They had me go outside and read off the Meter Id # and guess what we found. The one they are reading is not the Meter we have connected to the house. So they asked us if we are in a apartment complex or have another home connected to ours which we don’t. So the long short of the story is they are sending a technician to take a picture of the Meter connected to our home and trying to locate the Meter that they have been reading for our home.

So as for arrangements right now they have locked our account until they can locate the misreading and credit us on our actual reading. Thankfully the Meter we do have they have the meter reading each month from when we moved in so the representative said there is a definite credit to be issued to our account.

So I am very thankful that I do not need to make a payment until its resolved because we certainly do not have any to pay right now.

They told us it will take 2-4 weeks before they can resolve the issue. so yeah now we wait but atleast that’s on thing I don’t need to worry about for a few weeks.

Sorry to vent but this season of our lives seem very scary to me. I know we will get passed it.

Here is something I learned today. Our living room has been a bit chili even though our inside temp says 75.

Well while we were waiting on snow to appear we had the curtains pulled back and I went to shut them a little and noticed the breeze coming from the top of the window. Sure enough it was open.

I then decided to check the other window. Same thing it was open at the top.

About an hour later after dinner we decided to get the kids ready to go play outside in the snow, as I went to the restroom I felt another draft similar to the one before. I checked the window and yup that one too was open.

I then decided to check our bedroom windows and yup those were open too! So guess what I decided to go through out the house and check them all.

Most of the remaining windows were also open at the top.

The odd thing is all of them were unlocked and opened about an inch each.

So do me a favor and go take a look at all your windows and make sure they are open or shut to your liking because you might feel an unwanted draft!

Thanks for reading.

Topic: Do you feel a draft?

>Welcome to Moms Saving Money! If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to the free, daily e-mail newsletter , RSS Feed, follow on Twitter or fan us on Facebook Thank you for visiting!

So I read a blog post earlier today that inspired me to write one of my own. The topic was “Why start a deal blog”

So here it goes. I have been a stay at home mom for over 3 years now and my hubby would joke around about me becoming a mommy blogger. I kept refusing to do so. He thought it would be a great outlet for me and have a little time away from the kids.

Well last March 2010,  I became heavily interested in coupons and online deals. My firstt introduction was Swagbucks and I was really scared to give my information because I didn’t like the idea of sharing my personal information on the internet. It took me over two months to get enough Swagbucks to redeem for a $5 Amazon Gift Card. Once I recieved it I was still not sure that it would actually work, but it did. To this day I have redeemed for over 20 $5 Amazon Gift Cards. Most of it was used to pay for Christmas and birthday gifts.

Just after my daughters first birthday in June I realized that what if I shared with everyone how to save on themed birthday parties. I had done about 4 parties already for all under $50. So I originally posted on my personal facebook page but then decided to make a Fan Page.

As I got more understanding how coupons work and matching them up to sales ads and our finances became tighter and tighter while still wanting to meet our goal of paying off our credit card debt, I figured the only way to keep me acountable with coupons was to start a Facebook Fan page. I thought that if I posted my great finds that just maybe others would want to learn how to save as well.

I was a little discouraged ok a lot discouraged at first. My fan page was still under 25 after two months of posting. Then I learned about blog hops and noticed that in order to participate you had to have a blog. Well the first ones I entered. So I decided to create Moms Saving Money blog but because this was a hobby I wasn’t willing to put any money in it since the whole point was to save money and get out of credit card debt. So I started on Blogger even though I did create a word press. I saw a blogger and I can’t remember who posted it but GoDaddy.com was offering domain names for 99 cents for a year. So I jumped on the deal but was disappointed that momssavingmoney.com was already taken so it took me a couple days to finally decide on www.momssaving.com which is where we are today. I spent less then $4 to certify and have the domain for the year.

That today is still the only money I have spent out of my own pocket. After blogging for a month I learned how to make money off my blog so I started signing up for affiliate programs and today I have about 15 affiliates. Everything I have made thus far has gone back into paying for shipping on prizes, a new domain name and renewel of momssaving.com plus custom design to WordPress which we will be making the move soon. I also learned about companies that offer product for review and for giveaways.

I recently opened an etsy shop so you can see all my pretty Character invites and purchase if you’d like and this makes it more secure for the both of us. I published my Coupon 101 guide on Amazon Kindle cost only 99 cents and have sold more of those than the book I went through a publisher to print! MSM fan page has grown to close to 1600 fans most of which have been recently. I was approached by another blogger who essentially was the found of “Bargain Network” in which us bloggers all offer a Store coupon match-up for each other as well as advertising. If you are interested in joining we are always looking for more bloggers just email me at momssaving1@gmail.com. We have grown to 11 bloggers of right now with a couple more potentially joining in the next week. I was able to interview Nathan Engels founder of WeUseCoupons.com

From the time I got serious about blogging I also got really serious about coupons and was able to have a 3 month stockpile which my family almost went through its entirety when we had a death in the family. We were able to stay above water and still be able to finish the rest of our credit card debt as well as get a newer vehicle our old van cost more to repair then its worth. We are happy with our new one.With using coupons in 2010 I estimated we save nearly $8,000 and so far in 5 short weeks of 2011 we have saved over $1,100. So here we are today growing and offering more. Because of you I am able to sustain this website and it has become more than a hobby and I hope that it will become a way of life.

I get so excited when I hear how people have saved even if it is just a few dollars. I like sharing with my hubby all your stories. I know he really doesn’t understand but he does now that are family is able to do more things and we have freedom now to get a cell phone. If you don’t know the story of why we don’t have a cell phone here is a short version. We don’t want to stand in front of a judge some day and say we can’t afford to pay our debt but have a cell phone in our pockets.

It has taken us a little over two years of getting serious of paying it all off that our way to celebrate is getting our first cell phone. We like to take our time so it has been over two weeks now and we still have not gotten a cell phone because we are still trying to figure out what the best one will be for us. If you think we are crazy it took us 4 days to sign the papers on our van. We have learned better to sleep on the idea of a big purchase as well as seeking God for guidance. We don’t make any sudden purchases that are large costs. This really has freed us.

Thank you for reading how Moms Saving Money got started.

Are you trying to save money? Are you starting your own stockpile? Let me help you by showing you  the items that will go to their lowest price in the month of September. Check out the September Stock-up Items. Coupons added make an even better stock-up price! September Stock-up Items that you will find at stores on clearance, sales but most definitely at their lowest price this month. Happy Shopping.

Please feel free to comment below other items you would like to add to this list that may help other readers about stock-up items in September.

SEE ALSO

September Stock-up Items!

September everyone is back in school so many of the following items relate to school lunch and snack ideas.

• Capri Suns
• Pudding Cups
• Cereals
• Peanut Butter
• Jelly
• Canned Soup
• Snacks i.e. Chex Mix, Bugels, Crackers (Gold Fish)
• Lunchables
• Spaghetti Sauces
• Canned Foods
• School Supplies
  • Notebooks
  • Pens
  • Pencils
  • Color Pencils
  • Binders
  • Markers
  • Glue
  • Crayons
  • Erasers
• Summer Clothes goes on sale
• Summer Clearance Items and Labor Day Sales

*Please note that some items will vary depending on regions but over all these items listed above will be at their lowest price.

When checking for items lowest price be sure to take into consideration of stores that already have low prices such as Dollar Tree, Aldi’s and many more.

Topic: September Stock-up Items!