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Subscribe to RSSTODAY's financial editor Jean Chatzky explains that you can avoid overspending by thinking about what matters most in a product and shares tips for getting great deals this weekend.
Happy Frugal Friday! How far will you go to get that last smidge of toothpaste hiding in the tube? Or makeup lying tantalizingly out of reach of the applicator wand? If you only use the containers the way the manufacturers designed them, you could be throwing away a few days worth of product.
Do you have any great ideas for Frugal Friday? Send us your tips!
For instance, Consumer Reports found that 17-25% of a container's lotion is still inside a pump bottle after the pump action no longer works. With a little bit of craftiness, and a good pair of scissors, you can extend the life of your health and beauty supplies, and put off that run to the store by a few days.
Deodorant
How a cheapskate gets every ounce of deodorant from a stick of Speed Stick deodorant.
At the bottom of a stick of deodorant is a little curved well. When you turn the screw at the bottom, it pushes up the stick of deodorant. The bit of plastic form at the bottom uses some of the deodorant itself to hold up the rest of the stick. Eventually you get to a point where there's some gel left below the applicator lip. What you can do is place this register in the microwave for a few seconds, liquefy the gel, then pour it into a new stick of deodorant that you've screwed down as far as it will go. The gel will harden and you've just buffed up your deodorant supply by a couple of days.
Plastic bottles and squeeze tubes
How to get every last drop of product out of its plastic bottle.
After the bottle or squeeze tube is "done," after you've squeezed, ironed, and banged it as much as you can, carefully use scissors to cut the bottle or tube across the middle and you'll find a rich vein of product stashed inside. Score. Use, then store the remainder quickly so it doesn't dry out. There's several tactics, like tapping it out into a cleaned jar with a lid, sealing it in plastic wrap, or just drop it in a Ziplock bag. If there's still some clinging into the sides after you scrape it out, zap the container with a hair dryer for 30 seconds so it warms up and flows out more easily.
Lipgloss
After the tube seems to stop dispensing, there's still a few uses left, it's just hiding. Stand the lip gloss vertically in a coffee cup of hot water for 30 minutes. The gloss will drip down and give you some extra applications.
Eye cream
Scoop up the extra bits hiding in the crevices of your eye cream pots with a cotton swab.
Pump bottles
After the pump action is no longer bringing up lotion or cream, it's time to ditch that top. Swap out the pump with a regular lid or flip-top saved from another empty bottle (Oh yeah, by the way, you're going to start saving tops from other bottles now.) Turn the bottle upside down to let the material flow down. You can also add a tiny bit of water or apply heat to eke out those last drops.
Do you have any great ideas for Frugal Friday? Send us your tips! Or leave a comment below.
Leave a Comment:
It's just a fun game to see how much one can save from the above methods but that's just it, a game. To do real savings, one should look at big ticket items. These saving tips are useless to me.
What's sad is that stuff like this is considered news.
What is sad is that there are so many people that are so wasteful that you have to give tips like this that have been around for years, as if it was some new idea!!!!!
I love Bed Head and Humectress conditioner, and I HATE the pump bottles. I wish the manufacturers would stop making them and just put a cap on it.
The Bed Head bottle is translucent and there is a LOT left after the pump stops working. At $20 per bottle, I get every drop. Then I add water and shake to make sure.
One really BIG way to save on many of these items is to just NOT buy them in the first place.
Some things, such as toothpaste and shampoo, are pretty goodly used. However, there are a plethora of useless products that people buy. Some people use so many of them at one time that they are a walking chemical cloud of miasmic vapors.
I advise one to take an honest and eye opening assessment of just what it is that you are buying, and why you are buying it. Most people have their bathrooms and dressing areas just chock full of pump bottles and tubes. Is all that really necessary? Was there not life before "product"?
Then, take an honest account of how much of your hard earned income you have spent on all of those tubes and bottles.
I suggest that the first thing you eliminate from your shopping list is the pump bottle of soap. What a costly item that it! it is costly not only to you, but also to your environment. Think of all the fossil fuel used to transport all of that excess water around and the fossil fuel used to make the pump bottle to sell it in. Something as simple as a bar of soap wrapped in a paper has sufficed for so very , very many decades. It is only marketing and advertising that has created a need for such a thing as liquid soap. The same can be said about many of the other products that are under you bathroom sink, and your kitchen sink, also.
Save on these products, indeed! Just quit buying them!!!!
I'd love to buy large sizes of items such as lotion and shampoo that I could use to refill those pump containers. Better yet, make your own products. It's easy and there are recipes all over the i-net and it's a great way to save money.
Intense advertising has conditioned us to buy what we see. We pay for all that advertising with expensive, and for the most part, useless products. I refuse to pay $5 for a large tube of toothpaste; $90 eye cream, really?