Clean on your own terms, and save a bundle

If you are like the average American household, you don't worry a bit about dropping 4 or 5 dollars a month on cleaning supplies.

After all, a clean home is a healthy home, and a healthy home is a happy home!

But if you are regularly buying an average household's worth of home staples, you might be able to save about 50 dollars a year by using them to clean your home too.

Distilled vinegar, baking soda, used tea bags and a few other common household ingredients can do wonders around the house, and are useful for cleaning tile, glass, metal, and even hardwood surfaces to shining glory.

For more information, check out The Green Guide, but you can also look into Pinterest for a ton of great recipes for home-cleaning solutions that you can prepare yourself!

You'll be squeaky clean while you laugh all the way to the bank.

Pre-Pay your Bills and Debts to Save Fees and Interest

If you have a particularly good month, quarter, or year, there are a number of options to take.

You could increase your savings rate, and bank the money.

You could increase your spending rate, and improve your lifestyle by purchasing goods and services you want or need.

You could invest the money, and try to build wealth for the future,

Or, if you carry a large debt burden, you could try to pay down debts faster.

I like the idea of getting a guaranteed return on my money, and by paying down my loans faster I can reduce my principal and cut down my payments overall.

Even other bills, like rent, insurance, and phone service, can usually be negotiated ahead of time and paid for, so that it is possible to go for a considerable length of time with no impending bills other than utilities and unexpected expenses.

While you might be sacrificing some flexibility with that money, you are gaining security in that you are guaranteeing that you will have no late fees, no lapses in coverage or service, and a better track record with those companies.

The best part of paying down a loan early is that you are reducing the overall cost of that loan. Especially early in the repayment process, reductions in the principal, or amount of money that is accumulating interest, can drastically reduce the amount of interest paid. For my student loans, for every dollar that I pay down now I am saving 2 dollars in interest payments over the term of the loan, and for people with mortgages and lines of credit, this is doubly true.

Save Money by Buying Items in Stock

I've got no qualms about saving 50 dollars and buying an open box appliance instead of waiting for an equivalent device that is more expensive to arrive, and if the savings could be as high as $300 on a big ticket item like a dryer or washing machine, then it is probably worth at least comparing in store prices with what is available online.

Even better, when you are in the store you can look over items before buying, point out any cosmetic or structural flaws to a sales associate, and identify any discounts or price reductions in real time.

Save $500 By Paying Your Own Property Taxes Every Year

For a homeowner of good credit and great frugality, it should be more than possible to pay your taxes when they come due. However, for those who have been lucky enough to sign up for a mortgage, most banks will be administering their property taxes, home insurance, and miscellaneous expenses of home ownership through an escrow account, which earns little to no interest and requires a deposit to maintain.

For a borrower with good credit, it is possible to set up a brokerage account with the equivalent of a year's property taxes held in fief, at rates of up to 3% interest at a service like ING or Capitol One. Currently Capitol One is offering a bonus for opening any kind of account, between $25 for a simple savings account to $50 for a checking account and $150 for a Sharebuilder account.

Once you have that bank account set up and funded, you can use it as a guarantee that you will be able to pay insurance and your mortgage servicing bank will release your deposit back to you, usually a check for $500 or more, as well as the balance in your escrow account at that time.

From then on, you can just put that money into a dedicated savings account and earn interest on it during the year, then use it to pay your homeowner's insurance and taxes every April. If you would like, you can even pay your taxes in quarterly installments under this scenario, just like one would do with a small business or contracting income.

Not only do you save money, earn interest, and receive a big fat check, you get to be more responsible for your own finances!

Now all I need to do is pick a house to live in, and I can start using all of these cool tricks.

Saving Money with a Newer Water Heater

For a homeowner, which I currently am not but hope to be in the future, one of the more energy intensive tasks is heating and cooling. There are a number of different devices and technologies available to heat and cool the air and water supplies in a home, but most American households have central water heaters, fueled by either electricity or natural gas.

A new water heater can cost you between $500 and $3000 dollars off the shelf including installation, but Americans may qualify for up to $500 in federal tax credits, in addition to possible rebates from your electric company for the old water heater (anywhere from 100 dollars up), state tax incentives or grants, or in the worst case the scrap metal value of the old tank.

If you are curious as to whether or not you qualify for any additional credits and rebates, take a look at the national Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency, available online at Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency | Department of Energy

I could Always do More: the 50 Tricks edition

I love to learn more ways to save money, and while I was trawling the web looking for things to learn I found a great article on plash about frugality. The article is titled "50 nifty DIY tricks that save you $50-$500 ", and while it seems clear that most of the measures are directed towards homowners with lots of appliances and likely $2,500-$25,000 of waste in their budgets already, I'm still hopeful that I could potentially use at least some of them.

In pursuance of this goal, I'm going to start trying out the methods on and off, and seeing what happens.

Who knows, I might save myself an extra $2,500, but I'd be happy if I could save an extra $50.

Update on some Writing Sites

As I mentioned about a week ago (http://www.bubblews.com/news/9723786-signing-up-for-some-writing-sites), I signed up for a number of writing sites and I've been building up work there.

I managed to get to the point where 5 of my Hubpages Hubs were featured Hubs, and that means that I'm on the map for search engines.

I have active accounts on seekyt and wizzley with a couple of live articles each, and I still have a lot more that I want to write and adapt from my bubbling with the rest of my week off.

I haven't made progress on Zazzle, but I managed to figure out the processes of registration with Viglink, Chitika, and Amazon for the newer sites.

Hopefully this will turn out to be a good decision for me.

As of yet I haven't made any money on them, and they've consumed a lot of time.

Initially posted to bubblews at http://www.bubblews.com/news/9757880-update-on-writing-sites