Donna Freedman

I’m in Phoenix – come say hi!

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Recently I mentioned that I’d be in Phoenix to help out my daughter, who was due for cataract surgery. It took place yesterday; if you want to know how it went, check out her post, “Cyclopian, but still here.”

Her follow-up appointment took place earlier today and things are not quite normal (see her post for why) but the doc says it’s okay. So I feel confident saying that this Sunday, March 17, will be fine for a meet-up.

I went back and forth on the best day to schedule this. Ultimately my reasoning is that working people tend to use Saturday for errands, household chores or even just a little self-care. Working people who go to church on Sunday are generally done by lunchtime.

Thus I’ve planned to be at the usual spot – a Wendy’s restaurant near my daughter’s Phoenix home – from 1 to 4 p.m. on Sunday. We can talk about money, frugal hacks, writing or anything you like, really.

 

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Life hack: 9 uses for a rice sock.

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Recently DF committed to giving his older granddaughter a ride to school every morning. She’s in a charter school, i.e., no buses.

The booster seat required by state law is chilly, and she let him know. The next morning he warmed up our biggest rice sock (we have several) and put it on the booster, to create a kind of poor man’s heated car seat. Thus her narrow little butt stayed toasty-warm all the way to school.

Now that’s service. DF also brings along a banana and an old Altoids tin filled with bacon. This kind of thing could give Uber and Lyft a run for their money.

For the uninitiated, a rice sock is a classic life hack. Simple, too: a cloth bag (sometimes an actual sock) filled with uncooked rice. Heat it in the microwave and you have a steady, lasting source of heat.

You can also heat it atop a wood stove: During a prolonged power outage some years back, DF put a rice sock in a clay pot atop the fireplace insert. Until the heat came back on, the rice sock was as good as a hot-water bottle. Better, maybe: If it had leaked it wouldn’t have soaked the bed.

As the headline of this post indicates, that’s not the only use for a rice sock.

 

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How many credit cards should you have?

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This is not a fun topic to tackle, since so many people hate credit and the credit scoring system. But in a recent post on The Simple Dollar, “You need at least two credit cards: Here’s why,” I take on the issue of how many credit cards you should have, and also our love/hate relationship with plastic.

You need at least two forms of payment in case of fraud, robbery or card loss. And no, debit card use is not a good substitute; it puts your personal cash at risk and does not help you build a credit score.

Who cares, you ask? Isn’t cash king? Ideally, maybe: We would all buy only what we could afford and pay cash on the barrelhead instead of running up debts.

But to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, life is never pure and rarely simple. Less-than-ideal things happen all the time.

The post explains what might happen when you lose a card or it gets hacked and you have no other form of payment, and also what could happen to those who use debit only.

It also points out the benefits of rewards credit cards, one of my enduring frugal hacks. Every time I cash in points for a birthday gift (which I recently did), a home improvement project or some kind of entertainment, it reminds me how much I like being rewarded for buying something I was going to buy anyway.

 

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Breakfast in a straw.

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I’m fighting some kind of virus: mild sore throat slight headache, fatigue. That’s never fun but in this case it’s particularly dismaying: I have to get on a plane* on Sunday night.

Bad timing.

No fever and no super-serious symptoms, so I will not try for an appointment with the physician’s assistant who is my primary care provider. Most likely he would say, “Looks like a virus, so stay home and drink a lot of liquids” – advice I can give myself for free.

My usual m.o. is to feed a cold, starve a fever – and drown a sore throat. Thus I’ve been pouring in all the tea and water I can stand without developing water intoxication.

My appetite, usually spot-on-and-then-some, has dwindled. It’s not as though I can’t afford to miss a meal, but rather that if I don’t eat something I feel light-headed. Besides, my other theory is that you have to feed the machine if you want to fight off/recover from an illness.

Hence: smoothies. For the past few days I’ve been hitting the blender hard: frozen raspberries (grown in our yard), a banana, some homemade yogurt, a raw egg and a scoop of ground flaxseed (paid for with Amazon gift cards I earned from the Swagbucks rewards program).

Today, though, I took it to a new level.   

 

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Still more s–t my boyfriend says.

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This is the third in a series of posts spotlighting the at-times clever and at-times groaningly awful wordplay in which my partner regularly indulges. When he comes up with another zinger my response (other than laughter and/or eyerolls) is generally, “That’s going on the list.”

Not that I always remember to write them down. And not that all of them are suitable for sharing; some are too obscure and convoluted, and others are just kinda naughty.

Too, some of them aren’t pun-ny – they’re just odd.

About the headline: It spins off the best-selling book (and short-lived TV series), “S#*t My Dad Says.” The author was a guy whose father was given to pithy pronouncements, some of which were definitely NSFW.

The other two posts are linked at the end of this piece. Probably I should beg the readers’ pardon for sharing some of this stuff. But as Dogbert says, “Puns! Never apologize, never explain.”

Here, then is the third list. It almost certainly won’t be the last list.

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No-spend February: What have we learned?

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Really, really enjoyed the no-spend February. The month showed me that sometimes even super-frugal types are susceptible to advertising. It reminded me to keep an eye on impulse purchases. And on the bright side, it spotlighted how ingrained my careful spending habits tend to be.

I also loved the sense of community, of seeing readers encourage one another and suggest tactics to help stay on target. This has long been a sharing group; the no-spend month merely confirmed that.

It was great fun to read about everyone else’s frugal hackery, including but not limited to:

Slowing down (staycations, letting bad weather keep us indoors, craft activities, taking the time to watch TV or read free Kindle books)

Substituting (adding chopped apples to the oatmeal because the raisins are all gone; substituting not-quite-right yogurt for the sour milk in a recipe; trading a discount movie for a friend’s DVR queue)

Stretching (adding some water to full-fat milk; turning doggy bags into additional meals)

Setting things to rights (repairing a vacuum cleaner with help from a YouTube video

Sunk-cost strategies (fixing meals based the cupboard and freezer; using on-hand items to make snacks rather than buy them; bringing coffee from home vs. hitting Starbucks)

A lot of good money habits begin with the letter S.

And now that the month is over, we can all spend again! But will we?

 

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America Saves Week: Grow your dough.

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As a country, we’re not saving. Our personal savings rate is at its lowest level since the 2008 recession.

How’s your savings going?

Plenty of reasons explain why people aren’t saving: un- or underemployment, tax issues (local, state or federal), stagnant wages if you do have a job, illness (your own or a family member’s), the rising cost of living or even good old-fashioned bad luck (of all the cars in the parking lot, yours was the one that got sideswiped by a guy who just kept going).

Fact is, we have to do better. That’s why America Saves Week was created. Even if you don’t take the America Saves pledge (which apparently gives you the chance to win cash) or follow any of the suggestions in the ASW tool kit, the program might help you focus on this essential fact: It’s up to us to save ourselves – and one way to do that is to SAVE.

 

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No-spend February, Week 3: Taming the reflex.

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It has been a quiet week in Lake Spend-be-gone*. In honor of no-spend February, this has been a week without  questionable stock-ups of Tater Tots, trips to the movies or other unnecessary expenditures.

One big-ticket item, though: a plane ticket to Phoenix* for next month, which set me back close to $600, including trip insurance. Of course, I expected to pay a lot: Right now is the high season for people wanting to get out of Anchorage.

But this trip is an essential expense: My daughter is having cataract surgery, so I’ll be driving Miss Abby. Also painting her bathroom, doing a few household chores, making some casseroles and scooping the litter box. And, yeah, taking daily walks on gloriously ice-free sidewalks.

I watched “The Walking Dead” at my niece’s home for free, rather than go to a local bar and have to spring for a soft drink and a tip. The writers group to which I belong had its monthly meeting, and I brought a spice cake made from ingredients we already had. (More on that later.)

While I’d planned to get some vanilla ice cream on the way to the meeting, to go with the cake, I forgot all about it. Turns out it wasn’t necessary (very moist cake!), and besides, the forgetting jibed with something from last week’s comments section.

A reader named mdoe37 said she’d picked up a planner to help organize her household. Soon afterward she had what she calls a “hello!” moment: Don’t I already have a couple of binders at home, and couldn’t I go online for some organizational sheets to print out?

Somehow her first impulse on seeing a planner was to buy it: Look, a thing that will help organize all those other things! Upon reflection, though, she decided to return it and save a little over $5.

“It’s all about taming the reflex,” she notes.

If people take away nothing else from the no-spend month, I hope they get this part.

 

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Honey-mustard pretzels: An easy, frugal snack.

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Lately we’ve been playing around with recipes for honey mustard pretzels, thanks to having scored one-pound bags of Snyder’s of Hanover pretzels for 50 cents apiece at the bakery outlet.

We’ve experimented with proportions and also the type of pretzel: minis, nuggets and “snaps” (the square ones that look like tic-tac-toe grids — see illustration at left). Yesterday DF came up with what I think is the simplest and most flavorful honey mustard pretzels recipe in the whole wide world.

In the interest of scientific discovery, perhaps you should try it yourselves.

Here’s how:

Melt two tablespoons of butter. (We use a Pyrex cup in the microwave.)

Add three tablespoons of honey and three tablespoons of prepared mustard.

Stir in one teaspoon powdered mustard, a shake of garlic powder and a splash of Worcestershire sauce.

Pour one pound of pretzels into a large bowl and drizzle the sauce over them, stirring constantly until evenly distributed. (A rubber or silicon spatula works well.)

Coat two or three cookie sheets with cooking spray and spread the pretzels as evenly as possible. Bake at 250 degrees for at least one hour, stirring every 15 minutes. If they still feel super-sticky, bake them a little longer. (We have left them in for 75 minutes.)

Break up the pretzels with a pancake turner or your brave, brave hands. (Pro tip: It’s more fun to lick your fingers than a hot metal utensil.)

 

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No-spend February, Week 2: Lots and lots of Tater Tots.

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This week reminded me, once again, that retailers are ultra-skilled at coaxing us to spend on stuff we hadn’t expected to buy.

Yep, I backslid.

But since it was all in the food/healthcare category, I’m going to give myself a pass rather than regret the dollars that flowed from my wallet – or the chopped, formed and extruded potato scraps that landed in our freezer. (More on that later.)

After all, one of the points of the no-spend month is that each person gets to determine what “essential” and “non-essential” spending means. What’s vital to you might be a pffftttt…are you KIDDING me? to someone else.

For example, some people consider coffee an urgent need (DF calls it “God’s blood” – and he’s religious) while others can take it or leave it. The first group will therefore deem a replacement bag of grounds, or daily cups from their favorite java joints, as essential.

The second group will shrug and say, “Not in the budget right now” and either stick to water or bring coffee from home. Which brings me to the mad frugal skillz of a reader named Kate.

 

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