8 posts tagged “frugal”
It was a frugal fiesta this weekend! Friday night I saw the fantastic Zoe Lewis again -- volunteered at the show, so I got in free. (Yay!) Saturday night, went and saw three local bands at the Replay for $3, plus the cost of a couple of beers (that's where they getcha). Sunday afternoon, went to Goodwill, dug through their three full racks of Halloween costumes, and found one for $4, along with a pair of jeans and nice shirt ($18 total).
Of course, I also went out to lunch twice, so that kind of blew the difference, but it's always great to have some fun without dropping a lot of cash. Especially with the Halloween costumes; it's just painful to lay out $40 for something that you'll wear once a year (and maybe only a couple of times).
It may be the last personal finance advice you need:
http://consumerist.com/consumer/clips/snl-skit-dont-buy-stuff-you-cant-afford-252491.php
It's nearly the end of round two of dumpster diving season -- aka Hippie Christmas -- in the college town where I live.
Round one is the end of the academic school year, in May, when all the dorms close for the summer and all the students leave everything that won't fit in their cars for the trip home.
Round two is the end of July, when everyone prepares for the housing version of musical chairs that happens here every Aug 1, as ten thousand apartment and house leases come up at the same time.
I didn't do too much curbside shopping this year, but did find some nice odds and ends, including a 10' extension cord in perfect condition, a load of votive candles and candle holders, some ceramic cereal/soup/salad bowls, Pampered Chef tart pans, and some other stuff.
My favorite item this year, though, was a director's chair I got last week, the kind with the canvas seat and back, in perfect condition except it didn't have a back. I already had two of the canvas backs in my trunk, because I found them two weeks ago and thought they might come in handy.
I was just following a curbside shopping tip I'd heard awhile back: if you find half of something useful, go ahead and pick it up, because chances are good you'll find the other part someplace else sooner or later (and usually sooner, rather than later).
And now the fully assembled director's chair is gracing my (still somewhat chaotic) living room.
Yay! the bus system at the university where I work will be fare-free for all students, faculty, and staff starting in August! Long-time readers of the blog will remember how I rejoiced last year when I got a free bus pass as a staff member; at the time, I wondered whether they'd make it permanent.
The even better news is that if all goes well (cross fingers, knock wood, do the hokey-pokey and turn yourself about), I'll be renting a place close enough to campus that I won't even need to take the bus! But it will be handy to hop on the bus to go downtown after work or over lunch, etc.
Read an article about "freegans" today, and was intrigued. I have heard that one downtown pizza place here in my town, at the end of the night (10 pm or so), takes their unsold pizza out to the alley in back and gives it to whomever shows up, rather than trashing it. And I think several of the local grocery stores work with America's Second Harvest to distribute to the hungry the food that they can't sell but is still edible and safe (think: day-old bread, produce with spots, dented canned goods, etc.).
These folks are slightly further out than I am on the frugality continuum, but only slightly. It's mostly a question of how much time and effort I'm willing to expend to recover items from the waste stream, AND how much risk I want to run to do it (dumpster diving, for example, is technically illegal in the town where I live, though I don't know that anyone has been prosecuted for it in recent memory).
I used to work for a grocery store, and there were strict rules about employees not being able to take damaged food home -- they had to throw it away. I think that policy was to avoid a rash of "oops, I dropped this case of tuna and accidentally dented every can" incidents. They put food items to be thrown out in a trash receptacle inside the loading dock, locked up, so they wouldn't have to deal with dumpster divers. Alas. In large cities like New York, I'm betting there's more food available to dumpster divers because businesses don't have the space to store trash, lock up dumpsters behind little security fences, etc.
Forget a warm gun. Today my happiness is a shiny bus pass, which arrived in my office mailbox FINALLY yesterday, allowing me to ride FREE on all KU buses. Yay!
So this morning I strolled out in the sunshine and had myself a nice little walk down to the bus stop (it's maybe 3/4 of a mile from my house, so when the weather's good, it's no trouble at all), caught the 8:55, and was on campus in about ten minutes. No parking hassles. No long walk up the hill from the free street parking. Ah. And a teensy bit less CO2 in the air.
I fired the cable company this week! Hooray! Signed up for wireless service Lawrence Freenet instead. The service is noticeably slower than broadband cable, alas, but still way faster than dial-up. Seems comparable to DSL. We were being charged $55 a month for a combination of limited basic cable TV (the minimum, which we never use since we don't have a TV) and the "silver" broadband internet service.
Freenet costs 19.98 a month for the service, plus $11 a month to lease the base station (which plugs effortlessly via Ethernet cable into our wireless router). No contracts, no installation fees. Total: $31.78 a month (with taxes), 10% of which is tax deductible because Lawrence Freenet is a nonprofit. Yeah!
As my honey and I wait endlessly for our house to sell (more on that in a later post, but our real estate agent says the market in this town is worse than she has ever seen in eleven years in the business), it's nice to be able to whittle down the monthly bills a bit, and $23 less a month is nice. A little here, little there...
I was getting low on my vanilla extract supply, and use a lot of it, so this morning I made some more.
This is another perfect example of a common ingredient that's dead easy to make (and half the cost if you make it yourself), but unless you know that, you think it must require some arcane knowledge or equipment. I mean, extract? How do you extract it? But it's easy; the only catch is that you have to wait two weeks to use it.
Here's the real deal:
1. Find a vanilla bean. This will be the hardest part. They sell them in grocery stores with excessive packaging, but start at your local health food store. Mine, the Merc, sells organic beans at $1.75 apiece in their bulk spices.
2. Get some cheap vodka. I get a half-pint of McCormick's for this purpose.
3. Get a small bottle. I use the cute 4 ounce brown glass bottle from the last organic vanilla I bought.
4. With a knife, split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise. It's a little bit like splitting a very very long raisin with a tough skin. The good vanilla flavoring is that brown stuff on the inside.
5. Fold the split bean in half (I usually do this so that the insides of the bean are turned out for maximum contact with the vodka) and shove it in the bottle.
6. Pour in the vodka -- 4 ounces or so.
7. Wait at least 2 weeks before you use it, so the vodka can absorb maximum vanilla flavor. Because you aren't adding any artificial colors, etc. (and aren't cooking the beans as many commercial manufacturers do), your vanilla will be lighter-colored than store bought. The flavor will be just as strong or stronger, though, and far better than artificial flavoring! Leave the bean in the bottle, and just use like any other vanilla.
I've read that you can reuse the bean by just adding more vodka to the bottle. I've done this a bit (added maybe 2 ounces of new vodka) without noticing any difference in the strength of the vanilla. On this most recent round, I just left the old bean in the bottle and added a new one.
