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Be a frugal role model.

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A while back my cousin found out he’d accidentally encouraged someone. While he was on his daily walk, a car pulled up and its driver called out to him. Seems she and her daughter had seen him taking long strolls in the hot Utah weather.

“You inspired me to get out and walk. I’ve lost 10 pounds since February, just walking,” she concluded.

My cousin posted this encounter on social media, concluding with, “Sometimes we are unaware of the impact we have on others.”

A longtime reader, whom I’ll call V, recently reminded me that my long-ago MSN Money Smart Spending posts inspired her to pay off a ton of consumer debt. Soon after the debt was gone, V’s husband was killed in a traffic accident. Because she was otherwise debt-free, she was able to handle the mortgage on her own.

“You gave me the tools and support when no one else was there,” she says.

I pointed out that she was the one who did all the work. But I did cherish the gig of frugal role model for MSN Money. Even though I now work on my own, I still love sharing ways to get the most bang for your buck.

Judging from the comments you leave, a lot of my readers are not only frugal, but also love sharing frugal hacks. I encourage you to keep doing that. Money-saving knowledge is needed more every day in this country.

During the pandemic lots of folks cut way back on spending. Living on less was essential if you’d been laid off or had your small business hammered by lockdown. It reminded me of the recession, when people were floundering and desperate for info on how to pay their bills.

Enter personal finance blogs, which told readers how to fix cheaper meals, use coupons and take other steps to keep costs low. People couldn’t get enough of this advice until things eased up a bit – at which point some couldn’t wait to get back to business as usual. They jettisoned frugality, deciding it was no longer necessary because the good times were back. 

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5 ways to ruin the 2021 holidays.

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The pandemic has messed with my sense of time, and maybe with yours. Certainly I was startled today when I did the math and realized that Thanksgiving is just 77 days from now.

Three days after that is the first night of Hannukah. And if you’re a Christmas person, that happens in 107 days.

Some of us prepare throughout the year. If we see gift bags and/or holiday wrapping paper on deep clearance (or waving at us from the mixed-paper bin at the recycling center), we stock up.

Yard sales, thrift stores and Buy Nothing Facebook groups yield us holiday décor, serving pieces and gifts. We stash points from rewards programs/apps, planning to cash them in for gift-buying.

Not everyone is as vigilant (or hypervigilant). To those who prefer a more laid-back approach, I hereby offer some helpful tips on completely screwing up the 2021 holidays.      

1. Wait until the last minute.

So what if supply-chain issues are predicted to get worse in the coming months? Maybe they won’t!

And so what if retailers like Walmart and Amazon are struggling to get space on shipping vessels, or if the continuing microchip shortage has affected manufacturing? Surely they’ll have that all ironed out before Christmas.

You’re a busy person, after all, so it’s fine if you wait until Dec. 23 to start your shopping.

2. Relax about the mailing.

The U.S. Postal Service plans both a temporary rate hike and a first-class mail delivery slowdown starting in early October. If you don’t wrap and mail early, you’ll pay more and the stuff might not get there on time. 

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6 money lessons from “Black Widow.”

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A few weeks back I checked out “Black Widow” with my great-nephew, a superhero nerd. Appropriately enough for a Marvel Comics Universe film, I wore my mask, at least until we sat down. Social distancing is in effect in terms of how many tickets the theater will sell, so I felt safe enough removing my mask to enjoy some kettle corn* and a soft drink.

We’d been waiting a long time for this pandemic-postponed female action movie to open, and I went in planning to love the film so much that I wanted to bear its children.

This was not to be. Although I liked a lot of things about it, it ultimately didn’t hang together as a super-epic. One thing I did love was Florence Pugh’s portrayal of Yelena Belova, a sardonic young badass and sister to Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanov.

While I think Johansson’s a fine actress, and that the two of them played marvelously well against each other, Pugh walked off with the whole film tucked into one of her many pockets.** She lit up the screen and owned every scene in which she appeared.

So in-like, not in-love. Still a good day out – and I paid only $6 because it was cheap(ish) day. Even more luckily, I can call it a business expense if I write about it. So here we go.

Some people look for life lessons in movies. I look for financial ones, whether it’s in Metropolitan Opera HD Broadcast Series productions such as “Parsifal” and “Gotterdammerung,” or slam-bang action films like “Wrath of Man” and “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.”

Did I find them in “Black Widow”?

Do you really have to ask?

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Lowe’s, PaperMart gift card giveaways from Savings.com.

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Savings.com has two quick-turnaround giveaways going on right now. Why not throw your virtual hat into the ring?

The big-ticket drawing is two $250 e-gift cards at Lowe’s. The #GetOutsideWithLowes giveaway could be fun to spend at the end-of-season clearance sales, or as a head start on  outdoor displays for Halloween and/or Christmas. Since Lowe’s sells a lot of furniture and housewares, you could also use the gift card on a housewarming gift, or to feather your own nest.

The second drawing is smaller, but intriguing: Savings.com is giving away 10 $20 e-gift cards to PaperMart, a store that specializes in packaging. Winning the #SaveAtPaperMart giveaway would give you the chance to buy everything from ribbons and bows to shipping boxes. This could be the year when you put some super frou-frou wrappings under the tree.

How to enter these drawings? So glad you asked.

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Attack of the greenhouse tomatoes.

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Most of the year we don’t eat tomatoes, because we know what they should taste like. Oh, we’ll buy a few Roma tomatoes to cut up into salads, but they just plain don’t taste like much.

I once described the flavor and texture as “ketchup-tinged oatmeal,” and I stand by that description today.

At this time of the year, though, we can have all the tomatoes we want. In fact, we have trouble keeping up.

Even eating them up to three times a day does nothing more than keep us from losing love apples to rot. The horror.

Which is why I’m thinking of it as an attack, a la “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.” (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small affiliate commission on items purchased through my links.)

My niece and great-niece came over for a lunch of Black Prince and Cherokee Purple tomatoes on DF’s fresh rustic bread with mayonnaise, some of our Red Sails lettuce and crisp bacon, plus fresh cucumber slices on the side. (More on those in a minute.)

This has been a year for some weirdly shaped tomatoes. That one in the illustration was uglier than sin, and twice as satisfying. Some of them look normal, but we’ve had quite a few gnarled behemoths that are hard to slice, but completely worth the effort. The flavor just knocks us out.

It’s hard to describe the taste of these heirloom varieties: sweet as sugar but with an underlying tomato tang. There’s a reason they charge $10 a pound for them at the farmers market here in Anchorage.

And there’s a reason we refuse to buy them. In part it’s because we don’t want to pay $10 a pound for meat, let alone tomatoes. It’s also because we can grow these beauties ourselves, and for a few short weeks we can gorge ourselves. More than a few short weeks, actually, because when the weather gets too chilly we’ll bring in all the greenies and let them ripen. Usually we finish them all by the beginning of December, at which point we start to dream tomato dreams once more. 

 

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Missing out on the world.

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(Happy Throwback Thursday! This piece originally ran on Sept. 9, 2018. Given how much time we’ve all spent on screens in the past year-plus, and given that the Delta variant might send us all back into lockdown, I thought the points in this post bore repeating.)

Nature Valley Canada recently asked three generations of families about how kids have fun. Grandparents and parents were asked what they liked to do when they were young. The third generation was asked, “What do you, a kid, like to do for fun?”

The grandparents and parents cited fishing, fort-building, gardening, berry-picking and other pastimes, smiling fondly as they recalled these simple pleasures. Their expressions changed as they listened to the answers from today’s crop of children.

Texting and e-mail. Video games. Binge-watching TV shows. A couple of girls, who looked no older than 10, noted they spend three to four hours a day texting and sending e-mails.

“I would die if I didn’t have my tablet,” one of them said.

A boy said that his video games are so engrossing that the real world disappears. He forgets his parents, his sibling, even his dog.

One child said that whenever he gets upset, he starts playing video games until he feels “normal.” Another boy said he can play for five hours in a row. Another mentioned having watched 23 episodes of a TV series in less than four days

A saddened parent responded in this way: “I actually feel a little sad, because I feel like he’s missing out on what’s out there in the beautiful world.”

Ditto. 

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Monday miscellany: Social media shopping edition.

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Last week I did something unprecedented: social media shopping. Specifically, I succumbed to a Facebook ad. While I can’t say too much about this, on the off-chance one of the two recipients is reading, I can say I think the gifts I purchased will be a hit this Christmas.

This was new to me, but definitely not to everyone. According to a CreditCards.com survey, nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of millennials say social media affects their buying decisions. By contrast, only 45 percent of my own age group copped to this kind of impact.

Ana Staples, an analyst with Bankrate.com, says it’s pretty easy to be influenced. In fact, she recently had to put herself on a “book-buying ban” after watching too many TikTok videos about reading. Staples realized she had months’ worth of reading material already stashed.

“Not my proudest moment,” she says.

To help the rest of us avoid impulse buying – and, maybe, Internet scams – Staples offers the following tips. 

 

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7 ways to get free groceries.

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Back in July 2019, a member of my neighborhood Buy Nothing Facebook group posted about an estate sale that wanted to dump all the kitchen stuff. Free groceries! Woo hoo!

The catch: You had to take all of it, or you couldn’t have any of it.

That didn’t bother DF a bit. He cheerfully brought home several of those large plastic totes full of nonperishables: soups, relishes, pickles, marshmallow fluff, Minute Rice, dried beans, canned milk, Stove-Top stuffing mix, jams and jellies, other stuff I’m probably forgetting and – our favorite – a 33.8-ounce bottle of vanilla.

The vanilla was our favorite part of the score. Have you priced that stuff lately? On Amazon it seems to range from $1.03 to $4.99 per ounce. [As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee if someone shops through my links.]

 

 

Getting this vanilla means two years’ worth of free flavorings for Lightning Cake, cookies, brownies, and tapioca, rice and coconut bread puddings. It’s unlikely that most people will score a find like the estate sale. But I have gotten free food in other ways, too – and maybe some of these tactics could help you build a deeper pantry.

 

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Giveaway: $30 Netflix gift card.

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In this unusually hot summer weather, it can be hard to muster the enthusiasm to do, well, anything.

Hikes? Sure, if you want to drown in your own sweat. Visit to the community pool? Loud and crowded. Gardening? Early morning hours only, please, lest you dry up along with those bean vines that are fading despite regular irrigation.

Proximity to air conditioning is ideal. If you don’t have AC, then spritz yourself with ice water and sit down close to the fan with “Anna Karenina,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “The Grapes of Wrath” or any other Great Work you’d been meaning to read since forever.

And if you don’t have a reading list, or if you’ve read yourself blurry-eyed and can no longer face the printed page? Go ahead. Give in. Turn on the television. Let art, or something quite like it, just wash over you while you drink iced tea by the gallon and subsist on cold melon slices and bowls of sherbet.

And let me help you pay for some of it. This week’s giveaway is a $30 Netflix gift card. Who’s interested? 

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Free weekly credit reports offer extended.

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During the pandemic, the big three credit reporting bureaus offered free weekly credit reports through April 21, 2021. Normally each of the bureaus – Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – would give you one free credit report each year. The pandemic changed that.

And continues to change it: The bureaus have committed to making a free weekly credit report through April 21, 2022.

While the extension is a response to the continuing financial issues caused by the pandemic, you don’t have to be in dire money straits to check your report. It’s a good idea to make sure there’s nothing on there that shouldn’t be.

Recently I checked my Experian credit report and found an error. According to the report, I’d had a certain card since 1976. Except that no, I didn’t have a credit card at that time. I didn’t get my first card until about five years later.

I challenged the information and Experian was all over it. I got an immediate note saying, “We’re looking into this, sit tight.” Soon after, I was notified that the incorrect info had been removed* and they were sorry it happened.

Mistakes happen – and sometimes they can be very bad for your credit. 

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