#5 - Buy A Bread Machine

Two or three times a week, I load up about 45 cents worth of ingredients into our trusty Cuisinart Convection Breadmaker, press a few buttons, and then sit back and relax... Two and a half hours later, out comes a beautiful loaf of fresh homemade bread! And with a typical loaf of bread from the supermarket costing nearly three dollars or more nowadays, you can recoup your cost of one of these babies in about six months flat! As an added bonus, every Friday we use it to make pizza dough for delicious home baked pizza! This $160 or so investment easily saves between $200 and $400 per year, or more!

#4 - Buy The Ugly House, Silly!

It never ceases to amaze me when I watch these home renovation / house flipping / real estate shows on HGTV. Time and time again a property sits around until somene drops a few thousand bucks on paint and repairs, stages the place, and then buyers are all over the place, and a bidding war ensues! If you take any notice of these shows, they illustrate the simple fact that when buying a home, a purchaser is willing to spend up to five or even ten times the money that a seller will put into fixing a place up! Does it make any sense to buy a house for say $350,000 that is nice and pretty and staged, when the same place could be had for up to tens of thousands of dollars less because it is in need of paint? Save yourself tens of thousands of dollars by not getting sucked into the real esate buying phenomenon of staged homes. Find the right house, and get a better price because it is a bit dumpy!

#3 - Composting At Home

Virtually everything organic (except meat) can be composted. Save yourself between $20 to $60 year on garbage tags or pickup fees by reducing the amount of trash you place at the curb. Additionally, don't give away your compost to the city for free for their 'green bin' program, as your home made compost will save you from buying fertilizer next year! Get a cost-subsidized compost bin from your municipality, find a home for it in your yard, and make your own fertilizer!

#2 - Garbage Tag Sharing

Okay, I will admit this one is pretty darn cheeky! Many smaller municipalites use a paid garbage tag system for trash collection. Well wouldn't you know it, but I have a neighbor a few doors down who has a habit of putting out barely half a bag of garbage every collection... I think you can figure out what I do to save anywhere from $20 to $40 a year! Hey, their garbage gets collected, my garbage gets collected, and the municipality gets paid for their sticker: Everyone wins!