Freebies!
What personality type are you: do you use freebies the moment you get them, or do you save them for a rainy day? I tend to be more of the latter type. As part of my being more frugal while my funds are low, I have been avoiding purchasing small things unless I dearly need to. Yesterday I ran out of cream, so couldn’t and didn’t make coffee at home. When I got to work, I felt the lack like a big empty hole inside. Something was missing! Oh yes, my caffeine addiction! My pseudo-breakfast!
I was all set to just go and buy a coffee at the place down the street, which I have been oh, so good about avoiding in the last 2 weeks. But then I remembered I had a free coffee waiting to be used! I have been saving up their coffee stamp card until I really needed it, and today was the day. I got a luscious white chocolate mocha. Yum. Totally delectable and totally free. Am I ever so glad I waited to use it.
That was yesterday, and today I’m drinking office coffee (not as good, but also free). I think I may have some more free coffee cards stashed at home. I probably also have a free CD coming my way from Easy Street Records that I haven’t cashed in. There are definitely some albums I am interested in getting. Hmmm, what else can I cash in this week, which seems all about making do with what you’ve already got.
Frugality slipping with the cold
It’s cold, it’s Sunday, and I’ve got a hankering for pot roast tonight. I’m still doing really well eating food in the fridge/freezer/cupboards, but there definitely needs to be some surplus to make everything stretch ’til Nov. 6. I think I’ll go splurge for today and then make do on the rest of the week until Friday, when Thursday’s paycheck clears. I have had such a craving for 4-hour, slow-cooked pot roast, in the last several weeks and I haven’t yet managed to indulge. So I’m off to go buy the roast, some veggies, an inexpensive bottle of red, and then dinner and 2 days of leftovers will follow!
Oh, and I finally went out and bought new shoes, and all the warm clothes I need to make it through the winter. The thrift stores haven’t been providing, and I rarely find good quality, wearable clothes I can wear to work. So I overindulged and overspent on my budget, but limited myself to 2 pair of cheap, sale pants (about $28 and $34), two second layers (one $35 after mailer discount, and $22). I now have enough clothes to not wear the same things in the same week!
Plus, I also bought dansko shoes, $130. Those are never on sale. But then I get my money’s worth. My current pair has the sole completely cracked through (you can look inside and see how it’s built!), and there’s a big fat hole where my big toe is on the other one (it’s sad, but I made do with it all last winter, but I’m now ready to upgrade). If the new pair lasts anything like the others, they’ll last me 3 years of wearing them every day in the winter (once sandal season is over). I usually wear my clothes into the ground, so as long as they are comfortable, relatively flattering (ie, they don’t look bad), then it’s a good investment. I just read on another blog that a trick to buying clothes is to try them on without looking. If they *feel* good, then go ahead and open your eyes and see if you like the way they look. I tried it and it worked pretty well! There was none of that temptation to get something even if it is ill-fitting (though cute).
I also couldn’t stand the thought of going into the thriftstore yesterday when it was Halloween. I think it is their busiest shopping day! I couldn’t handle the crush.
So my efforts to not spend ANY money were a bit unrealistic. I have stuck to things I needed to and was going to get anyway, so I don’t feel that bad. I was hoping to push the spending to next month’s budget, but most of it is on a my Macy’s credit card (which I always always pay in full), so it won’t hit until the November budget. I am going to be careful to not spend much at the store on food. Here’s what I’m planning on getting. Let’s see what I end up buying when I get back:
3 lb chuck roast
4 red potatoes
2 onions
1 bottle red wine ($5-7 range)
baguette
lime juice
I do have to say that it’s not that hard being frugal if you have a semi-well stocked pantry. I made chocolate chip cookies last night (my alternte was apricot thumprint cookies, but i’ll probably make that this week with our canned apricot jam from this summer) with split pea soup (the only thing we had to buy was carrots which I’ll also use for the roast tonight). Breakfast this morning was cardamon french toast (we’re now out of eggs and running low on sandwich bread), and scrambled eggs with goat cheese and scallions. Doesn’t sound that frugal, does it?! I just have to say, if you’re gonna be cutting back, there’s nothing like splurging on a dessert when you normally don’t to make you feel like something special!
Update: I did good! I bought almost everything on my list and nothing else! Total bill: $27. Mmm, only 2 hours to go ’til dinner is ready. I’ll toast (with the red wine I just got) to that!
Making do
Are you frugal? I think I fall into the middle-of-the-road frugal category. I’m far from a normal conventional person. I don’t watch tv, I don’t have cable (haven’t for years and years). My last 2 cars were used and not expensive, and I bought them both outright at the beginning. If I didn’t have a bf, I’d have a room mate (that’s normal to me, to share housing expenses with a total stranger). I don’t plan on extravagent holiday trips, nor fly around the country regularly for this friend’s wedding or that reunion. I’m a bit of a couch potato actually, which isn’t always a bad thing.
What don’t I do that stops me from being mega-frugal? Well, for one, I don’t coupon clip! Partly it’s because the food I buy doesn’t often *have* coupons! I shop at the co-op and Whole Foods (oddly enough, they are waay cheaper than a lot of other places around town, which is why I have never referred to them as whole paycheck). I don’t buy conventional, full-of-chemical cheap drug store products, so I can’t play the drug-store coupon game. I don’t sew, so I can’t make my own clothes (plus come on, they never look like real clothes anyway, right?). I am the most un-handy person you could imagine, so I could never fix something if it broke. I do like to buy very high quality the first time around, so that’s rarely a problem. I don’t grow my own food – I live in a commercial building (technically it’s illegal to live there, but half the people in my building do) and my backyard is a train track. My front yard is a semi-busy industrial street. However, due to it being a commercial space, I pay a hell of a lot less in utilities. My electric is approximately $20/month. Gas heat during this past month was $86 (we only heat one small room, the rest is a waste of time). With 14′ ceilings and no insulation, and an old wood factory building, what’s the point? We turn the heat off while we’re gone and when we go to sleep. Sometimes I don’t take my coat off when I come home – it’s too cold. In fact, I have a permanent scar on my tummy from sleeping with a hot water bottle from last winter. I’d have internet if I could, but neither cable nor DSL are available in my building. I tried clearwire for their required year contract and it flat out didn’t work – my space had bad connectivity and it was worthless.
I don’t go to the movies. I stopped buying books of any kind once I started this blog and my debt freedom journey. I only use the library. I do have Netflix – it’s my only entertainment vice, and at $18-19/month, it’s a small one. I work about 50+ hours a week at my job, and do nothing on the weekend, so I rarely spend money.
My dansko shoes have a big hole in them, but I haven’t bought a new pair. They work just fine. My last pair I wore for so many years that the sole was litterally in separate pieces. I even impressed the shop keeper at the store with how bad they were. I just don’t want to spend another $90-100 on a new pair when they’ll look just like what I have now. I wear 1 pair of shoes in summer – my chaco sandals. I wear 1 pair of shoes in the winter – my dansko clogs (trust me, they are the ubiquitous Seattle foot wear just like the Subaru is the state car, which was my previous car, and would still be my current one if someone hadn’t hit me and totalled it last year).
Most of the people I know or work with are kinda like me. To me it seems normal. Maybe I don’t go out to the bars drinking several nights a week like they do, but I still consider myself within the norm. And every time I see a story on the news about a family making multiple mega-salaries, owning multiple houses, new cars, you name, I just don’t get it.
My debt comes from living off of borrowed money for a year and a half after finishing school, then working part time for another 8 months. Stupid, and I should have bucked up and gotten a job when I graduated in 2005, but that’s water under the bridge. At least I’ve acknowledged the problem, stopped buying, stopped using the credit card, started a budget, started a blog, and started saving. I’ve started the journey and I’m in it for the long haul.
Happy New Year and here’s to making it, this month and this year!
A few ways my spending has changed
The number one debt reduction credo is to spend less than you earn. Prior to last October, I never really gave my spending a thought. I’d occasionally look at my checking balance, but if I was concerned, I would actively avoid it, thus resulting in the dreaded overdraft fees that I had been afraid of all along. If I wanted something, I’d get it, not thinking much about how I was going to afford it.
If I was hungry, I’d go for the most expedient option. I rarely had leftovers in the fridge, or enough food to cobble a good meal together (at least not quickly), so that meant eating out. I never thought ahead enough to plan to shop for groceries to have items on hand.
If I needed clothes, I’d go to Macy’s, the GAP, wherever, and buy something new. Are you seeing a pattern here? It’s called living above your means, and living in denial, and being a good little consumer/debtor.
When I finally took the plunge to really look closely at my spending habits and really see where I stood, and how to get out of the debt hole, I realized things had to change. I instinctively knew that Icouldn’t afford large purchases of any kind, and I’d play poor, but then still spend elsewhere with a destructive habit.
I feel a lot more experienced now. I have no desire to shop at the mall. I have only bought clothes at the thrift store since October (and done quite well). I shop for groceries *a lot*, and (other than my December track record, which is still not bad, in comparison), I don’t eat out all that often. I’m trying to bring my lunch to work much more often. I shop for bargains on the items I consume, and buy in quantity when there’s a good deal.
Most recently (and the genesis for this post), I saw a breadmaker on sale at Amazon (listed at Boston Gal’s site). Yeah, major find I thought to myself. I’ve been seeing people at work bring warm bread to work for breakfast. I used to have one and can’t remember why I got rid of mine. I eat a lot of bread. I’ve been thinking subconsciously that I wanted a breadmaker. Then this thread made me start salivating over the process. But wait! I’m supposed to be living frugally, right? On sale for $90 – 100 is still a lot of money. I can do better. Tons of people want to get rid of theirs. So I looked on craigslist and there are a ton available. For $15-40. I’m going to shop and try and get one this weekend, for at least half or more of the “sale” price elsewhere.
This is what it means to be living within your means – shop frugally, buy used whenever possible, and only when you really need something. In the long run, I’ll save money with the breadmaker. I’ll use it a ton, at least several times a week. I’m going to be making my own lunches at least 4 out of 5 days starting next week (I’ll be writing about that in a future post). Flour and yeast is cheaper than $3.50 loaves of bread. Plus it will be warm and luscious.
Here’s to being frugal in the new year. Make it a habit!
Dinner: no grocery spending!
Came across a fun challenge on beingfrugal.net:
This coincides nicely with my dinner from yesterday! We’re going away for a week for the Thanksgiving holiday and I was thinking how we didn’t really have anything ready for food to make (no fresh meat in the fridge), and I got home late from work, and didn’t want to have to go drive to the store and start dinner 1 1/2 hours later. So I put together what I call “Everything but the Kitchen Sink Soup” – all the veggies in the fridge, plus a handful of split peas, a lot more of lentils, leftover pasta bits (angel hair broken up makes nice vermicelli), some opened canned tomatoes (they go in everything). Voila, soup that’s good for 5-6 meals.
The challenge from beingfrugal is a great concept: go through your cupboards and get rid of all the wierd packages of food items you don’t use regularly. The trick is to not go buy *more* specialty items to complete the meal. For example, we have a bunch of asian noodles. I didn’t buy them, but unless we go buy coconut milk and curries and other items, I can’t think what to do with them!
So don’t give in and get take-out or go eat out when there’s “nothing in the fridge.” Be imaginative and whip up something you already have!
Saving Money Costs More
One of the biggest ways I’m trying to trim the budget is by cooking more at home and eating out less. I have to say it’s been working, at least in the 1 month that I’ve starting budgeting. I think I’ve eaten out once a week, and usually for lunch on the weekend, which is usually pretty cheap. It generally costs $10-15 each time. I initially had budgeted $100 for restaurants and $400 for groceries per month and I think I’ve been more than meeting that (at least for the restaurant part).
So to cook more at home you have to buy more foodstuffs. This means lots of bulk foods, and cooking from recipes. I’m finding there are certain kitchen goods I’ve been doing without that I’m starting to really need! Measuring cups, a good 9″ square bake pan, and a good seasoned cast-iron skillet. Glassware to store extras in, freeze, and/or take to work. I did without previously but now that we’re cooking and baking at least every other night, it’s become a necessity. J even started canning, and he had to buy a bunch of mason jars and racks for boiling. I had to buy a bunch of mason jars for bulk goods. I bought the jars at the thrift store, but still have to go buy the new lids.
These are short-term purchases, so I’ll need to be spending some money in the home goods budget category – I think I’ll portion one of these per month until I’ve gotten them all.
Cutting Expenses
How do you cut costs on a budget?
1. Don’t buy new, buy used whenever possible. This takes much longer, and the selection may be much more limited. I have been running low on everyday clothes. Rather than buy brand new t-shirts at $13-24, and needing a few more pairs of jeans ($40-60/pair), I’ve been visiting thrift stores every weekend. This lets me shop, and keeps it cheap.
Two weeks ago I spent ~$50 on 7 pairs of socks (my main goal for the day’s expedition), 1 pair of jeans, 1 tshirt, 1 polar-fleece zip up hoodie, my entire halloween costume ($12), sand ome props for a photo project. Today I spent $14.01 for 2 tshirts, a bunch of kitchen supplies including ball jars for storing bulk good, a book, and another photo project prop.
I think I’ve got enough stuff to last me, but I’ll still haunt some other stores from week to week; I have a penchant for destroying shirts by getting oil stains (that never ever come out) all over them!
I’m also starting to pay really close attention to what items cost at different stores and only get them when I’m needing a bunch of stuff from that particular store or when I’m nearby – I no longer drive somewhere just to get because I want it at that time (I think this term is called batching your trips, to save gas). My preferred pet food is $7 cheaper at Petco than at the natural pet store. Cans of food are cheaper at the natural place (and I don’t think Petco offers case discounts like the other store does). But now I know and now I know not to buy something just ’cause I’m there. I think that’s one of the biggest pitfalls for spending money when you don’t need to: not having comparison shopped and not knowing your options!
