A Cheaper Swap

When my husband started his new job, we had to pick up a few things to accommodate his more physical workload.

We got him an arm brace so he could haul heavy house doors properly without bruising himself. We also got him a few pairs of good work gloves...

And we thankfully scored a free pair of steel toes shoes (required for his job) from his dad since he has multiple pairs just sitting in a closet... and since he conveniently has the same shoe size as SCB (he also wore his dads shoes at our wedding too)... we were able to save around $50 or $60 by shooting his dad an email... (talk about the power of asking!)

So while most of those things are one time buys... there are a few things we will need to start buying regularly. Gatoraid is one of them.

Last week we picked up a few bottles for SCB to take with him... but even at Walmart (the cheapest place we can find them--including Costco) they are still a buck a pop (plus CRV). One day last week SCB forgot his Gatoraid back at the shop and went the whole day on water alone and he just felt really flushed out since he drinks so much of it when they do a lot of hauling that its kind of a necessity... not a perk. (After all, your body does need electrolights). But since we normally don't shop at Walmart every week, I'd most likely end up doing a once a month stock up... cringing as we spend $20-$25 a go on just Gatoraid. 

But it's something he needs for work so we went hunting. They are around $2 or so at Fresh and Easy so if we were lucky and had a good coupon week (where we had more then one we could use), we could get them for $.85 cents a piece.... but we can't really rely on that since most weeks now we only get one set (either in our email or in our weekly ad). While we were there though, we saw that they had powdered Gatoraid... and a light went off. Since they don't stock any flavors my husband will drink, we headed back to Walmart again... and I embraced my new friend... Powdered Gatoraid. 

We spent $8.48 at Walmart for a whole container... and since my husband gets a bottle of water every day from work (and brings his home so we can recycle them) we used those to make our own Gatoraid... The savings says it all...

Yup. We essentially can get the same amount of gatoraid (my husband did a taste test to make sure it mixed right) for $0.36 a bottle... instead of paying for $1.05...  That's almost 3 whole bottles for what it would cost us to get one in the store.. It looks like we have a winner folks!