How do you handle those purchases when your family is on a budget?

• I have learned to expect that I will buy a certain amount of popcorn and a certain amount of cookies from the scouts. My daughter, after all, was a Gold Award Girl Scout and I’m a big fan of scouting even though I’m no longer involved as a volunteer or mom.
• I have learned to expect that two or three times a year I will buy from a pizza dough fundraiser. We like those products, so it’s a treat.
• I will, once in awhile, buy a fundraiser candy bar.
• I will, once in awhile, spend $1 on a charity’s 50-50 ticket or gift basket raffle ticket.
• I will most certainly shop at a charity rummage sale. I go to as many of those as I can. I’ve also donated stuff to charity rummage sales and charity thrift shops.
• I have, on occasion, eaten at a charity breakfast or dinner.
• I have purchased books on many occasions from a Friends of the Library book sale.

I pretty much leave the rest of the fundraiser product sales and events alone.

But here’s also what I do:

• I have my Kroger shopper card account set up so that two of the schools where my nieces and nephews attend in Ohio, and St. Mary Catholic School in Monroe, benefit from Kroger points or Campbells points with each swipe of my card.
• I have my Meijer shopper card account set up so that the Holy Cross Sisters benefit from rewards points with each swipe of my card.
• I signed up this week for the Gordon Food Service Marketplace Fun Funds program and designated those points to St. Mary Catholic Church in Monroe.
• I save the General Mills Box Tops from my purchases, and divide that pile up throughout the year among three of my sisters for their children’s schools.
• When my daughter was in Monroe High School choir program, I worked in the kitchen at the Christmas madrigal dinners.
• I take my newspapers and office papers from home to St. Mary Catholic School in Monroe for their paper drive. I don’t think they’re getting much money for the recycling efforts these days, but at least the school kids get credit for my donation.

Some other things you can do:

• Sign up for a rewards card at Subway, where the points go to a participating school.
• Buy retail gift cards from a Scrip fundraiser. The way this program, and similar ones, work  is that you buy the gift card at face value from the school or church, which then gets a percentage of the sales.
• Purchase and set aside some grocery and personal care products specifically for the donation drives that youth groups and schools often hold during November and December.
• Set aside your Michigan pop cans or pop can returns to benefit a donation drive. Several groups do this on an ongoing or once-a-year basis.

What will you do this year to help raise money for the schools, charities and non-profits?

As my examples show, a fundraiser doesn’t have to result in a lot of money out of your pocket. Sometimes it just involves a little bit of time and effort.

As part of the updated guidelines and procedures for the Girl Scout Gold / Silver / Bronze Awards, Girl Scouts has updated and reposted a scholarship opportunity list for girls who have earned the Gold Award.

Although my daughter didn’t wear uniforms to school, she was in Girl Scouts. For the six years my daughter was in the Mackinac Island Honor Guard, she needed to have a full dress uniform. Her membership in the honor guard began a year after the colors and fashions for the older girls’ uniforms changed completely. Because of the timing on the uniform changes, almost all of my daughter’s scout clothing had to be purchased new. There simply were not enough hand-me-downs available in the correct sizes and styles.

We did, however, pass on her outgrown uniform items during the years to her troop, the honor guard and other scouts. We didn’t see a reason for other families to get stuck with the up-front cost if a piece was a hand-me-down possibility.

When she graduated from scouts, we made sure to set aside one entire full dress uniform arrangement as a keepsake!

If you do have uniforms at your school (and some of the schools in the Monroe, Mich., have that policy), you should ask about a hand-me-down closet or rack where families might be able to trade pieces in and out. I’ve seen such a rack at a local Catholic grade school.

Even if you still need to buy two pairs of pants and five shirts this year, it can really ease up your budget if you can acquire pieces such as a skirt, a jumper, a sweatshirt and other approved attire through the hand-me-down network.

If you can’t get hand-me-downs for uniforms, look at consignment shops that are located near your child’s school or in a neighborhood where the school dress code is similar to the one at your school. One of my sisters’ friends found her son’s school attire at a consignment shop.

The Girl Scout Shop site has a clearance section where you can pick up items such as older T-shirt designs for very cheap. (How many girls do you see buying “this year’s shirt” every year?) Sometimes the clearance section has formal uniform pieces.

And I just did a quick search on eBay for school and scout uniforms where I found plaid school girls jumpers, Boy Scout uniform shorts and khaki pants.

Tonight at the University of Michigan, nine young women from Southeast Michigan will receive their Girl Scout Gold Award.

This award is equivalent to the Boy Scout Eagle with a lengthy list of requirements and a community service / leadership project that the Scout takes on with approval of her council.

Two years ago, it was my daughter’s turn to stand on the U of M stage and accept her Gold Award pin.

This year, the nine awardees include three girls from Monroe County. My daughter and I know these girls. So as soon as Girl Scouts Heart of Michigan sent the above press release to my desk at The Monroe Evening News for publication in the newspaper, I put tonight’s event on my day planner.

My gift to the girls will be handcrafted congratulations cards that depict each of them in paper doll uniforms.

I didn’t spend any money to do this because several years ago, I bought every paper doll stencil I could find at the craft stores. And as I played around with my stencils for various scrapbook layouts, I created my own patterns to make the vest, sash and skirt for proper Girl Scout attire.

My uniform patterns were made by necessity: by the time it was possible to buy commercially made Girl Scout scrapbooking stuff, my daughter was well past Junior rank. Go ahead and try to find the Cadette / Senior / Ambassador girls’ uniforms in pre-made scrapping pieces: The ones I’ve seen are for heritage uniforms, not the ones that are currently used. Besides, my daughter served in a Girl Scout honor guard, so there also were times when she had white gloves and a beret as part of her “full dress” uniform.

But in the long run, it was a very frugal trick for me to buy up a bunch of stencils. I can assemble a paper person in any fashion I want, any time I want, for a scrapbook page or greeting card — and I am using scrap and bulk purchase paper to handcraft those designs.

I have made First Communion paper dolls, Monroe High School choir paper dolls, tailgate party paper dolls, and … lots and lots of Girl Scout paper dolls over the years.

A snippet:

National numbers are not yet in, but regional Girl Scout councils nationwide are seeing the impact of the down economy, as well as bad winter weather, in declines as large as 19% in pre-order sales, which took place January through early February.

Pre-order sales— mostly door-to-door and workplace — make up around 70% of cookie sales, council leaders say. Councils are hopeful they will make up for the drop-off with sales at shopping center booths through early spring, says Michelle Tompkins, spokeswoman for the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Yes, local readers, the delivery trucks have arrived and your cookies are on their way to the individual troops and scouts. The cookie booths for cash-and-carry sales will be starting soon, if they haven’t started already.

Now, the comment boards on USA Today story are full of debates as to whether Girl Scouts should be selling cookies at all – and whether the purchase is worth it. I won’t jump into that debate.

I will tell you that I agree with the story premise that the economy has a lot to do with the situation this year.

Why? I have experience with selling Girl Scout cookies.

My daughter’s number 1 activity starting in sixth grade and continuing through high school graduation was Girl Scouts.

She earned the Girl Scout Gold Award (equivalent to Boy Scout Eagle) in addition to several other major pins and honors. She served in the Mackinac Island honor guard. She went on weekend travels with her troop. She worked as a Camp Linden summer camp counselor one summer, and upon going to college joined the Campus Girl Scouts.

All told, there were six years in which she had cookies to sell.

My husband and I never were enthusiastic about product fundraisers for student activities. Host a dinner, and I’ll sign up to serve. Ask for parents to be a stage crew for a production, and I’m there. Make it a “mandatory” service project for your student members to write a check for such-and-such charity, and my husband and I will make the donation in lieu of pestering the relatives.

But Girl Scout cookies were the exception we made.

Girl Scout cookies sell themselves, or so we thought.

Despite our reasonable efforts to sell cookies, we only sold 60 to 80 boxes of cookies a year on my daughter’s order forms. To help the troop meet its goal for sales, and therefore earn money for its activities, daughter would then help staff the cookie booths later in the season.

What we noticed as a Girl Scout family is that the years when people were worried about their jobs were the years when they bought cookies on cash-and-carry, but not on pre-orders.

During cookie season one year, my husband was working a temporary staffing job at a local factory. Although I posted a cookie form at my desk for my co-workers to list orders, my husband didn’t take one to his workplace. Why would he try to sell there? Almost everyone he knew there was a temporary / contract worker – subject to layoff on no notice.

Sure enough, by the time delivery day came that year, my husband had no co-workers to deliver to.

Do we still buy Girl Scout cookies? Yes, but like the article says, we haven’t ordered as many during the past two years. It’s money that we don’t have available in this economy.

The usual order among the three of us, when we were a Girl Scout family, would be about 15 boxes of cookies.

This year, my daughter picked up four boxes at a cookie booth – one for her, one for me, two for the husband. She’ll bring the cookies home when she visits next weekend.

It was an interesting report of how today’s youth, who are increasingly interested in eco-friendly and ecology issues, are influencing their parents to become more aware and more involved in “green” lifestyles.

There’s also been a TV commercial along those lines where daughter and dad are shopping for light bulbs, and the daughter points out CFL light bulbs.

Now, I am aware that some parents have spun the frugal lifestyle they need to take for financial reasons as “going green.” That’s a tip to remember if your children are rebelling against turning off the lights, purchasing clothes at a Mom2Mom sale or thrift shop, taking the bicycle to school, or growing a vegetable or herb garden.

But has anybody else caught what my husband and I did when we watched that news report last night?

Green is actually “old school” for many of today’s parents, or should be.

My husband and I remember learning many of those concepts when we were children in the 1970s.

One of my memories as a youth was serving on a day-long, city-wide volunteer cleanup day where we picked up litter around my Ohio hometown and in return got served a free picnic breakfast and lunch. Now, the food was not much to brag about for the effort we put in, which is one of the reasons I remember that event! But the school children really did make a difference that day.

Do you remember when Michigan started its bottle deposit law and why? My husband is old enough to have remembered the news coverage when that got started.

The CBS report also makes reference to Girl Scout badges and patches that encourage “green” projects. Yes, Girl Scouts has always tried to stay current with its activities and projects, but eco-friendly skills are not new to the program. When my daughter was in scouts, I learned the ecology badge for the older girls had been around since the 1970s. And Girl Scouts of any era can remember this line in the Girl Scout Law: “Use resources wisely.”

And most of us who are now parents have most likely heard stories passed down as to how our family got by during the depression years of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s. While the details of daily life are different, their stories of thrift, re-using and repairing items do have echoes in what frugal and eco-families are doing today.

So, yeah, “Green” is as old school as you can get.

I knew ahead of time that we had to be very picky about the multiple photo occasions that come up during senior year. But there were some photo opportunities that took me by surprise. Here’s the list for those you who need a review:

• Formal yearbook photo. If you get only one photo taken this year, it’s this one. (The class of 2009 will have yearbook photo shoot deadlines very soon, if not already.)
• Informal senior photo. This is a very popular trend – athletes wearing their letter jackets, the “glamour shot,” the musician with her instrument. These poses showed up occasionally among my high school friends in the 1980s, and today’s students often expect it. Some yearbooks allow seniors to submit both their formal and informal poses for publication.
• The family portrait. Some studios suggest this as part of the senior portrait shoot. Maybe you don’t have a recent formal picture of the entire family. Why not take one before the senior moves out to college or away from home? Hmm.
• Team or club photo. I was in show choir, concert choir and marching band during my senior year – and have all the studio photos to prove it!
• Homecoming, Winter Homecoming / Winterfest and Prom. You have never seen that boy in suit, much less a tuxedo. Need I say more?
• Class group photo. There’s the pose where everybody is smiling very nicely; and the pose where everybody is goofing off. The chances are very good both will be available for purchase. (Where’s Waldo?)
• Girl Scout Gold Award / Boy Scout Eagle Award formal poses. The awards ceremony doesn’t always coincide with senior year, but it did for us. And the Girl Scout Gold Award picture was the best studio shot my daughter posed for all year.
• Newspaper photos. Senior year is when your student is most likely to be photographed by the newspaper for occasions such as all-region sports awards, special events and feature stories. It does cost about $10 to purchase a 5 by 7 reprint from The Monroe Evening News. But the picture service makes very good quality prints. (I have purchased such a photo and was very pleased.)
• Graduation day. Given the fact my personal camera was acting up at graduation, I was glad to have the option to purchase a professional picture from the ceremony.

Now … how do you keep these picture packages from exploding your wallet?

Ask the relatives and friends before you place the orders what pose or image they want to remember the year by. To keep your costs down, you could also ask the relatives to purchase their own prints or decide to pay for the expense as part of a birthday or Christmas gift.

Then order only the exact number of pictures you need from each occasion.

The only photos for which you need any extras are about 10 to 15 wallet-sized formal yearbook poses. These are the photos you will be submitting to scholarship committees in the spring and summer should your student win any scholarships and awards. (If you don’t want to include that packet in your original yearbook photo order, keep the phone number or web site for the studio handy so you can place such an order in a few months.)

Everything that she did in school, or out of school, went into that resume with dates of participation and notes about accomplishments or efforts. This list was so detailed I think we even wrote down the name of every Girl Scout badge she earned.

I told her it didn’t matter how long that big resume got. It would never be the final copy of whatever got sent to a scholarship committee, awards committee, college admissions office or potential employer. This was our reference information.

At the end of 10th grade, we updated it with everything she had done that year.

At the end of 11th grade, we updated it again.

The flurry of college application and scholarship paperwork started during her senior year at Monroe High School. Each committee or application asked for biographical information in a slightly different way, or with a slightly different emphasis. There was even one packet where she was needed to explain what she had done in high school that would help lead to her chosen career.

But we didn’t panic.

We had somewhere to start looking up all those details. We could say that she was in student government as a freshman (even though she decided not to continue in later years.) We knew what grade level she was when she earned specific ranks and awards in Girl Scouts. We knew how many years she had participated in the Monroe CROP Walk and March of Dimes fundraiser walk as a member of Monroe High’s National Honor Society. Etc.

What I knew, and what a college scholarship expert explained in a press release sent this week to The Monroe Evening News, is that this information is scholarship application material.

Dale Clifton of Dayton, Ind., who goes by The Scholarship Doctor, has written “The Best Little Scholarship Book in the World” and “The Champions Goal Setter.” On his web site, he has some  scholarship application advice posted for everyone to see. A snippet:

When the scholarship applications start to come due, the mind goes blank. There is a time deadline and there are lots of things to do. The pressure mounts. But, when you’ve kept an organized, detailed and accurate record, there will be no sweat, no stress, no nothin’. Considering the high cost of four years at college, it really “pays” to write things down.

Hmm … that’s exactly what I did with my daughter.

Dale also explains what scholarship committees are looking for these days: community service, leadership, vocational interests, extracurricular activities and good grades.

It is a fact that some scholarships are written only for the top-ranked students. Depending on where the cutoff point was for any given scholarship program, my daughter might qualify with a 3.9 high school GPA; but in other cases, she might not.

But my daughter had far more credentials than just a 3.9 GPA to put down on her college and scholarship applications. And we had the record-keeping to prove it.

She did get some scholarship awards as a senior in high school in addition to what her college offered.

She also was awarded two more scholarships this year as a college sophomore.

Now, if you want more expertise from Dale, well, he makes a living as a consultant and he has resources available for purchase on his web site.

But my job at The Monroe Evening News includes typing up scholarship announcements for local students. That means I see some of the supporting information for the award notices beyond the details of who won what. Based on what I’m seeing, there are some key points parents need to remember when seeking out scholarship funds:

• Most scholarships that Monroe County, Mich., students get are funded by local civic clubs, local scholarship foundations or the individual colleges the students attend. You will find those applications at your high school counselor’s office, the financial aid office at your chosen college, and sometimes listed in the Community Page and Classroom Page of the print and e-editions of The Monroe Evening News. As time allows, you should expand your search to the parents’ employers and parents’ professional or civic memberships. Spend time searching the national scholarship databases only after you have maxed out all of your local information resources. You can spend hours looking through scholarship databases even after you fill out all the filtering information. NONE of the scholarships my daughter won came from leads in a national database.
• Pay attention to all deadlines. The busiest scholarship application season in the Monroe County area is January and February of senior year in high school. It is quite possible that your high school seniors will need to fill out multiple applications that are due within weeks of each other. You may want to give the kids a break on family responsibilities while they writing essay after essay in hopes of getting cash for college!
• If there is a notable accomplishment that your student will want to list on college and scholarship applications, make sure that accomplishment is achieved no later than fall of senior year. In my daughter’s case, the noteworthy accomplishment was her Girl Scout Gold Award. Her Gold Award project was completed (except for final documents to the council office) by November of senior year and therefore could be listed on all appropriate college and scholarship applications. Now for an achievement that didn’t lead to money: my daughter won a state medal from Family, Career and Community Leaders of America during spring of her senior year, but it was past any deadlines for turning that award into scholarship application material.

The scholarships that my daughter won, plus the effort I put into with making sure the need-based financial aid paperwork was filed on time, is helping her get a private college education on a budget.

Yes, I did have to sign for some college loan money in my name. But I had a good credit score to do that through the Parent PLUS program rather than seeking out private commercial loans, which are increasingly difficult to find in today’s credit market.

And the scholarship money my daughter is earning is keeping both her loan totals, and mine, as small as possible.

If you have a Michigan student in high school or college and need more information on paying for college, I have a college financing sidebar.

If you are a leader, volunteer or mom of a daughter involved in Girl Scouts, here’s a list that Ms. Tucker compiled of the badges, pins and patches that relate to money skills:

Brownie Try-Its

• Cookies Count.
• Penny Power

Junior Girl Scout badges

• Business-Wise
• Consumer Power
• Money Sense

Cadette and Senior ranks

• Dollars and Sense badge
• Studio 2B: Cashin’ In
• Studio 2B: Mind Your Own business
• Studio 2B: Saving and Investing

All levels of Girl Scouts

• Girls and Giving: Philanthropy in Girl Scouting.

If you live in the Huron Valley Council and need tips or resources to help a Girl Scout work on the award requirements, the council library in Ann Arbor can assist you.

I knew that a Girl Scout only needs to wear a membership pin to be “official,” that local girls usually wear their Scout vests over T-shirts and jeans to troop meetings, and that my daughter would be a Junior Girl Scout for only a year before moving up in rank.

But my husband and I assumed a full dress uniform would be appropriate on occasion. So we bought her the green Junior vest and the green uniform skirt. We paired that vest and skirt up with a white blouse she already owned.

Our hunch was correct. There were three formal Girl Scout occasions my daughter attended that year. At those events, you wouldn’t have known my daughter had a uniform on a budget. She looked as good as the troop leader’s daughter (who had all the official uniform pieces).

When my daughter went into seventh grade, we bought her one entire uniform in the khaki and blue colors that were newly released that year for the older girls. Then she joined the Mackinac Island Honor Scout program, and we had to buy more uniform pieces. But even without her honor guard assignments, my daughter still attended at least two events each year where a formal Girl Scout uniform was appropriate. (Bridging ceremonies, Gold and Silver Award ceremonies, Girl Scout Sunday programs …)

So what did we do with old uniform pieces as she grew out of them? We handed them down to other scouts. Even if we had to spend the money, at least someone else didn’t have to.

If you aren’t able, or don’t want, to get a complete uniform, a plain white blouse or polo shirt and khaki pants will be appropriate for most dressy occasions. (I bet you can find those pretty cheap at places that sell school uniforms).

In the meantime, if your daughter is still growing, consider getting a sash instead of a vest for the first year or two that she wears a particular uniform. Yes, most local girls do wear the vests. But she won’t have received enough patches and pins during the first year or so to fill a vest anyway, and the sash is far more adjustable to size changes.