Here’s a stat I find hard to believe: according to a recent survey of ShopSmart readers (that’s a Consumer Reports magazine), only 7% of women dislike cleaning their house.

What?

I don’t know about you, but I always feel like I’ve got the guilt of not having time to clean my house hanging over my head. I’m usually pretty good about tidying up here and there. But a top-to-bottom clean house? Hasn’t happened in years. Well, at least not since we fired our cleaning lady when we went frugal.

Having a cleaning lady was one luxury I couldn’t continue to justify, especially when we were selling our old house. Ever day it was my job to straighten the place up so it was “show ready,” meaning that the floors were always swept, the bathrooms always spotless, and the rugs always vacuumed.

If it weren’t so unreasonably time consuming, I’d love to still be able to live like that. But with my looming book deadline and all of the other time constraints in my life, I’m lucky if the dishwasher gets loaded and unloaded in a day.

That’s why I was almost giddy when I read about the “Nobody Beats the Maids Instant Win Sweepstakes.” The grand prize? A year’s (or $2,500) worth of cleaning services from The Maids.

From March 16 through June 14, 2009, all you have to do to enter is visit The Maids website and plug in your information. While the year’s worth of a cleaning lady is a pretty sweet prize, the other prizes aren’t too shabby either–you could win a vacation for four at Beaches Resorts in Turks & Caicos or Jamaica, or fresh flowers for a year from 1-800-FLOWERS.COM.

I don’t know about you but I’m toggling over to Maids.com to enter. I would love to hand over my feather duster, broom, and vacuum cleaner to someone else for the next 12 months.

So I’m completely in the home stretch of writing Suddenly Frugal, the book. My contract asks for a 60,000 word book, and as of about 30 minutes ago, I’d written just over 53,000 words.

I have three chapters left to write on the following topics:

• Gardening, yard, and landscaping
• Renovations and interior decorating
• Vacations and getaways

I’m putting out feelers left and right across the Internet for more information on these areas so I can include it in my book. If you have suggestions to share–or know of websites I should check out to research these topics–will you let me know? Thanks.

Early on down the road to frugal living, I figured out that a great way to save money when I shopped was to check out store brands of nearly any product I wanted to buy. While I have professed my brand loyalty to certain products–and continue to feel that way about particular items–I would be crazy (and poor) if I didn’t make store brands or generics a part of my frugal equation. Just today I refilled the soap dispenser in my bathroom with store-brand liquid soap, served store-brand cranberry-apple juice with dinner, and cleaned some pots after dinner using a store-brand scrubber sponge.

If you haven’t yet converted your shopping thought process to include store brands, here are 5 reasons why you should:

1. An American family of four spends nearly $10,000 a year on food, housekeeping supplies and personal-care products and services. If you choose to buy store brands on a third of those items, you’d be saving a ton.
2. When in doubt, give store brands a try when you’re in the market for personal-care items, paper products, and household cleaners. I know, for example, that my blue window cleaner shines my glass just as well regardless of the name on the label.
3. You can expect to save, on average $.75 an item when you choose a store brand over the brand name. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you buy about four of those kinds of items a week, all of a sudden, you’re talking an annual savings of $156 a year on a single item. Do that for just a dozen purchases and your savings grow to nearly $1,900 a year. In fact, according to CVS, its customers save $250 million annually by purchasing CVS/pharmacy brand products instead of national brand products.
4. Today’s store brands might as well be the brand name product. Also called private labels, they are just as good or better than national brands–often containing the exact same active ingredients as the national brands. (There’s a reason I buy generic ibuprofen in bulk at BJs versus the brand-name stuff. I know I’m getting the medicine I want and need, and it costs a heck of a lot less.)
5. Store-brand products are just as safe as the brand name items. That’s because the FDA holds all store brands to the same guidelines as brand-name products.

Many of these statistics are courtesy of CVS, which, I just found out, has so many stores in the United States that the majority of the US population lives within 2 miles of a CVS/pharmacy. That is true–my local CVS is less than a mile away, and when I need to run an errand there–or my daughters want to get new makeup, which they have to use their own money to buy–we usually walk rather than drive. So in going on foot, we’re doing something good for our pocketbooks and our general health, too.

What about you guys? Are you fans of store brands, too?