My very best money saving tip: Re-use!

In our house, we regularly re-use a number of things. This is good for the environment and good for the wallet. Here's a list of some of the ways we put stuff to work for us over and over again.

Food containers. Yes, we do own some tupperware that we purchased. But most of our storage containers for leftovers or for bag lunches come from the groceries we buy. Plastic pint containers, glass peanut-butter jars, and my personal favorite, baby food jars (great for hair bands, screws, leftover slices of lime, and other tiny things). Now that our kid is long past the baby-food stage, I'm going to have to hit up a friend with younger kids to replenish our supply.

Sponges. We use new sponges for our dishes. When they start getting a little old, they go into a different part of the kitchen and are used to clean the counters. When they get too greyish, they become kitchen floor sponges. When they're too icky even for that, they get used to clean the bathroom.

Ziplock bags. We only have to buy boxes of ziplock sandwich bags a couple times a year, because we wash them out between uses and hang them to drip-dry in our kitchen. The heavier freezer bags cost more but can be washed out and used virtually forever.

Office paper. Old print-outs of articles from the internet, etc, make great notepaper. We cut them up into eight or ten small rectangular pieces and use the blank side for grocery lists, telephone messages, and love notes. :) Leaving lots of love notes for your sweetie saves on counselors' fees, too.

Shoeboxes. I'm sure almost everybody thinks twice before throwing out a perfectly good shoebox. We use them to store toys (trains in one box, plastic animals in another, etc). We also use them to store things on the shelves in the basement--tools, rags, rolls of packing tape, etc. The smaller shoeboxes that toddler shoes come in are a great size for reducing clutter also.

Magazines. We save small brightly-colored pictures from magazines to make handmade cards and other gifts for our family. M is especially good at making cards. His cards are beautiful enough that nobody expects an additional gift.

Wood scraps. You never know when you're going to need a small sliver of wood to shore up an uneven bookcase, to level out a window air conditioner, or, in our case, to provide a budding handyman with something to practice on. Our son likes to pound on nails with his little kid-sized hammer. We keep some scraps of lumber in--you guessed it--a shoe box and he's allowed to thrash away at it whenever we have time to supervise.

Water. This is a weird one. When we steam vegetables, I often save the water. I let it cool and use it to water plants, or to moisten my compost pile. In past years I have even kept a bucket in bathroom. When I'm letting the shower or tub run to get the water hot, I collect the water in a bucket. Then I pour it into the toilet's reservoir and use it to flush with. But that's a little extreme. I've lived through several droughts and I'm always ready to pull out my crazy water conservation methods, but at the moment I don't use this one.

Clothing and fabric. We buy a lot of our clothing at thrift stores and we get and give a ton of hand-me-downs. That's the first way we re-use clothes. But we also turn old clothes into rags (M saves old socks to use when polishing his shoes.) If I feel sentimental about a particlar piece of clothing, I'll save a piece of the fabric and incorporate it into a quilt some day. (Not doing much quilting nowadays, but I will be an empty nester eventually and then, watch out.)

Envelopes. Padded mailers can be re-used at least once. Just slap an address label over the original address and you're all set. I also use manilla envelopes I've received in the mail to store papers.

Visit the meme at No Credit Needed to read everybody else's very best money-saving tip, and leave a comment to tell me what else I could be re-using to save money and resources.