Frugal Friday: Celebrating Our Wedding Anniversary!

Back in January, I was really excited. I had just jumped on the Swag Bucks bandwagon to the extreme. I had used Swag Bucks to pay for all of our Christmas gifts, and now I was saving them up for Southwest airline tickets. Why? Because I was going to make certain that Kyle and I celebrated our anniversary with a nice weekend getaway. I didn’t care what it took – I needed a vacation.  Need?  No – want. We don’t NEED many things to be happy.  But I do slip up and use that word liberally sometimes.

Oh – I still have about $300 worth of Southwest gift cards in my Swag Bucks account. Okay, so free airfare? Now what? We’d have to rent a car, pay for accomodations, pay for food, etc. Even if we just went to a cabin, stayed in the whole time, and bought cheap groceries with coupons…it was still going to sky-rocket over and above our budget. Not happening…

Our next plan was to have a long 3-day weekend, spend all of our time together – no blogging, no guitar playing, no art making, nothing. Just us two. That’s great! However – our one splurge? We wanted to go to the Melting Pot. I was extremely excited, because I have never been there. Well that plan fell through when I called and asked about the wording of their online menu stating “Individual Entrees.” My husband and I always split an entree. You can call me cheap, but it’s just what we do. We order an appetizer and split an entree, and we always leave with our bellies stuffed beyond words. So I started adding up what we would order at The Melting Pot. At the bare minimum, it was going to cost about $80 or something like that – and that was after a $10 coupon!!! They would not allow us to split an entree…

We just couldn’t do it. We decided to go to dinner at Outback, for which we had gift cards. So we went out to a nice place for our anniversary dinner – for FREE.   Here’s a picture of us before we headed out for our yummy dinner.

How else was our anniversary weekend frugal? Oh – you just wait and see. It gets even better. 

First of all, we decided to make our OWN dessert fondue. Check it out! Yum! (We didn’t use the fondue pot, because Kyle says it’s “the most annoying gadget in the kitchen to clean”…)

Second of all, check out the gifts we got each other. I, of course, used my Swag Bucks and got him this awesome Duo Nintendo/Super-Nintendo game system for completely FREE.

I was really proud of my frugal hubby. Check out this AWESOME Espresso machine he bought me. It works perfectly, seems brand new, and makes delicious drinks. Guess how much it was? Are you ready for this? $7 at the Thrift Store! Yeah! A nice Espresso machine like this would cost well over $100 – $150 brand new. Kyle is pretty convinced that they just thought it was a good ole everyday coffeemaker, or it would have been priced much higher.

Kyle used to work at Starbucks, so he knows how to make ALL the good stuff. My favorite drink is an iced Caramel Macchiato. So that’s what we broke in the machine with!

And, of course, we had a few other frugal outings - such as Barnes & Noble, going hiking at the park, taking some walks together, and going to Panera for breakfast.

All in all, I think it was a fabulous anniversary. And now I don’t have to deal with the guilt of spending money we DON’T have.

What About You: How do you celebrate special occasions, while keeping your budget in check?

You can check out other Frugal Friday posts over at Life As Mom!