Save Money with these new tips and you can also help save the earth. Living green is easy to do if you take it in small steps . We can all save money by incorporating a few simple steps into our lives and by doing them gradually we might not even miss the little things we had to give up.

I have followed some of these tips in my life in the past and I currently use some of them today still.

Collect Water

You can collect rain water if you live in your own house and use the collected water for things like watering plants and washing the car. When I lived in my mother’s house we had barrels at the back of the house that collected the rain water and we used that to bathe the dogs and water the garden.

Every so often my mother would use the water to flush the toilets by manually filling up the tank, instead of allowing the water tank to fill up from the main pipe. This saved a good deal on the water bill because we all know how much water it takes to fill up the toilet tank.

I live in an apartment complex now and no longer collect water but I do think this is a handy tip for those of you who have a house.

Freeze Food

Another thing that we used to do when I was growing up was to freeze food. We would cook a huge batch of food on Sundays and freeze the rest of it to be used for the next few days.

I remember that I hated this because it meant that we would be eating the same thing for at least three days.

I remember now that I also loved it because when it was my turn to ‘get dinner ready’ all I had to do was take a few plastic containers out of the freezer and pop plates in the microwave. Even today I will cook a large amount of food on Sunday and then put stuff in the freezer to use on Tuesday. It saves me from having to cook every day and I just pop a plate in the microwave and I am ready to eat in a few minutes.

If you have large amounts of uncooked food then a freezer is your best friend. We had a deep, chest freezer that my mother used for large meat and fish purchases, which brings me to the next point.

Bulk Purchases

I know I have spoken about buying in bulk before (see 25 Ways I Save Money: part1 ) but it really does help if you use bulk purchases of things you use a lot. We drink TONS of milk (well at least I do) and instead of buying individual cans of milk we would go to the store and get a case of canned milk. The unit cost for the case of cans was much less and we used up all the milk before it could ever go bad.

What tips do you remember from your childhood that you used to save money? Share them here with us so we can all reminisce.