Black Friday serendipity.

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The washing machine finally died. DF can’t remember how old it is, but it’s at least 25 years old and possibly older. It didn’t owe us a thing. But the appliance still had one act of service left: It waited until the day before Black Friday to give up the ghost.

We were lucky it lasted as long as it did, yet we dreaded the cost of replacing a major appliance. Even a quick glance at the ads left us a bit breathless.

Fortunately, we are money nerds who specialize in stretching every dollar. A quartet of frugal hacks helped reduce the financial pain: 

First, DF compared prices and incentives at half a dozen retailers before choosing Lowe’s. (Hurrah for free delivery, setup and haul-away!)

Second, as always, he paid with a rewards credit card. As do I: All of my plastic is rewards plastic. It just makes sense to us.

[Surviving and Thriving has partnered with CardRatings for our coverage of credit card products. Surviving and Thriving and CardRatings may receive a commission from card issuers. Opinions, reviews, analyses and recommendations are the author’s alone, and have not been reviewed, endorsed or approved by any of these entities.]

He further sweetened the pot by raiding the “washing machine fund” jar for another $150. This is one of our easiest stealth saving* tactics: For every load of laundry we run, $2 goes into a jar. Your fund can be for anything you want; in fact, we took money from this jar a few years back to help pay for a new stove.

Finally, I cashed in enough Shopkick points to get $225 worth of Lowe’s gift cards. Since I’m always telling him that the points are for our household, not just for me, this was another chance to put my (free) money where my mouth is. As recently noted in “How I saved $233.07,” these rewards programs provided a pretty nice boost to our home and garden budget this year.

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Staycation at Abby’s house.

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Having escaped the warmth and humidity of Orlando, I am now experiencing the warmth and extreme dryness of Phoenix. While in Orlando I learned that I am no longer a theme-park person. (More on that below.) Also learned that four adults in a rather small hotel room is a recipe for anxiety; so was the need to schedule daily activities. By contrast, visiting my daughter is like a staycation, albeit at someone else’s house.

Eating whatever and whenever I choose. Reading until late at night and getting up when I feel like it, rather than rising when park activities (or other people’s getting-ups) decide.

Coming and going as I please, when I please. Sitting around and catching up for hours, with Netflix or Hulu on in the background. Doing small chores to give her a break, including helping tidy up the place and prepare snacks for a game night. (Why is it always easier and even fun to clean other people’s houses?)

A staycation, in other words.

It’s not that I won’t ever leave the house. We plan to browse the Savers thrift shop on Monday (half-price day) for a big glass bowl or Pyrex dish, as she wants to start making yogurt. We  plan to hit Bobby Q’s for ribs and sides. I hope to hang out with Sonya Ann, a regular reader from the MSN Money days. And on Friday, we’ll go to see “Die Hard: A Christmas Story,” presented by the All Puppet Players. (Yep: A plush John McClain shouting, “Yippee-cai-yay, mofos!”)

Mostly, though, it’s like any other visit to my daughter: hanging out. 

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Support the reader economy: Giveaway #6.

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I’m sitting in the Anchorage airport, watching snow fall outside, preparatory to a jaunt to the land of the palm trees. Yep, back to Orlando just a month after being there for the 2022 Financial Blogger Conference. Before I leave, though, I wanted to put up another “Support the Reader Economy” giveaway.

Why Orlando during hurricane season? Because my brother is hosting a birthday bash and I’ll get to see not just him, but also one of his daughters and her kids plus my sister. Nicole made landfall and people in some areas were told to leave. However, she’s been downgraded to tropical storm status and the Orlando forecast is for at least partly sunny skies over the next week. So southward I go, and as long as I’m in the neighborhood I will also swing through Phoenix to see my daughter on the way home.

Back to the giveaway, though. It’s the sixth in a series of giveaways aimed to give a (small) boost to reader budgets. The winner gets a $25 gift card to the retailer of his or her choice. Not a princely sum, to be sure, but if I gave away $50 at a clip I’d be able to afford only half as many giveaways. I’d rather go wide than deep.

What card would you choose?

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Soup of the evening.

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DF was an alchemist this morning. Pulling containers and bags of stuff from the fridge and freezer, he filled the crockpot with:

Two kinds of broth (chicken-vegetable and seasoned pinto bean)

The drippings from a chicken he’d cooked on the Weber

Leftover pork loin (bought deeply discounted, of course)

Chopped-up garlic scapes (from the 2022 garden)

Diced onions

A handful of red and yellow pepper chunks (from the produce section’s “ugly but still good” shelf and cut up to freeze)

Homegrown celery (frozen), carrots and potatoes

The slow cooker began to emit a marvelously savory aroma as the day wore on. A little after 5 p.m., DF sliced up some of his easy rustic bread and announced that dinner was served. Outside it was 13 degrees and snowy, but indoors it was all warmth, comfort, and food that was prepared and shared with love.

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How I saved $233.97.

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This was money spent – or, rather, not spent – on the year’s garden, greenhouse and yard. Things like potting soil (we start our own seeds), garden soil (for our potted tomato and cucumber plants), replacement screws and nails, and yellowjacket and slug bait (wasps love nesting in our yard, and those slithering land mollusks like eating what we grow). How I saved that $233.97 was pretty simple: rewards programs.

As I’ve mentioned before, rewards programs, apps and credit cards are a nice boost to the budget. A real frugalist just hates to pay retail, or to pay anything at all if she can help it. So I cashed in gift cards to pay for the goods we needed to grow some of our own food.

Not that we limit these savings to the garden. Recently I cashed in a $25 Safeway card and a $25 Kroger card to use toward stealth stock-ups. I’ve also used reward programs to pay for trips to the movies, lunch out with my daughter and, of course, gift-giving. (Looking forward to cashing in more points in the near future, for Christmas gifts.)

I’ll be visiting my brother and sister in Orlando* next month, and stopping by Phoenix on the way home to see Abby again. It’s a pretty safe bet that rewards programs will help me pay for some of my trip expenses.

Here’s the beauty part: They’ll also produce more rewards in the bargain, as I use the cards, apps and programs to pay for things while I’m on the road. #GreatCycleOfFrugality

Will I get rich using these programs? Probably not. After all, my focus is on not buying stuff. But some rewards programs don’t require you to buy anything (more on that in a minute), they give you gifts for buying the things you do need, and fairly regularly let you get things for free.

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Beat inflation: The financial fire drill.

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I figured the words “beat inflation” might get your attention. Let me say upfront, however, that inflation isn’t 100 percent beatable. No matter how self-sufficient we are, we still have to pay taxes and buy certain things (any food we can’t grow, sewing materials, shoes).

Even if we ride bikes instead of drive cars, we need replacement parts. If we do our own home improvements, we need to pay for materials somehow. And we can’t meet all our needs through rewards programs and Buy Nothing Facebook groups (although I’m having fun trying).

In the novel “The Godfather,” mobsters would hole up in anonymous apartments in times of gang strife. They called it “going to the mattresses.” Right now we’re in times of financial strife, and we should all think about going to the frugal mattresses: How to make the smartest, safest decisions to beat inflation?

Here’s how to start: by doing what I call the financial fire drill, a kind of extreme budget makeover. The idea isn’t that you won’t pay your bills, but rather that you’ll look for ways to cut the number and size of those bills.

The financial fire drill is pretty simple. You build a baseline budget, i.e., the absolute minimum you need to survive). That means basic shelter, utilities, medical care, food, clothing and debt service (installment loans, child support). The idea isn’t to starve in an unheated garret. It’s to figure out how little you could spend without jeopardizing health, safety and solvency.

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This isn’t your grandparents’ recession.

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Image by Ingrid Felix Victoria from Pixabay

(Happy Throwback Thursday! Given recent inflation rates, and some pundits’ responses to the very real struggles that some people face, I thought this post needed re-saying. It first ran on April 25, 2011; a version of the piece, written by me, originally appeared on MSN Money’s Smart Spending blog.)

When the going gets tough, it’s tempting to invoke our grandparents and their tribulations during the Great Depression.

I’m about to commit cultural heresy: A lot of their advice wouldn’t help us.

My paternal grandparents, who were 17 and 18 when they married in 1935 and had a baby the next year, knew an awful lot about living on an awful little. They’d make most of us modern frugalists look like Rockefellers.

But allow me to point out an irritating fact: The world was different then. When you look at our grandparents’ lives in context, you’ll see that it was easier to manage on relatively little. Not more comfortable, or more fun – just easier.

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Easy(ish) food preservation.

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Recently a neighbor offered me a Lowe’s-sized bucket of apples and a gallon of pie cherries. The former became eight pints of applesauce and the latter a 10-inch pie. At some point that day I got a Facebook message from an old friend; while e-chatting, I learned she, too, was elbow-deep in food preservation that day: tomatoes, corn and green beans.

The coincidence made me grin, especially since her early life goal was to become a big-city journalist and live the single-gal life. (She did become a journalist, but spent most of her career in a small town.)

I asked her if she’d ever pictured herself using a pressure canner, or was that something our moms did. Her response: “We are lucky we grew up the way we did, so we can survive. I rarely shop but when I do it’s only for what I can’t grow myself.”

Those are thoughts I’ve voiced myself. Growing up fairly broke got me through single parenthood and a protracted midlife divorce. Now I’m no longer jobless or broke, but the soaring cost of food (and other stuff) is making me really nervous.

Not everyone is able to (or wants to) freeze, can or dehydrate. But hear me out.

For starters, think about broadening your definition of “preserving” food. In my opinion, bulk buying, stocking up during sales, and combining sales with rewards programs are all ways to “preserve” food. As in, you’re making sure you have the groceries you need at the best prices you can find.

You’re preserving your budget along with the food. The money you don’t spend on grub is money that can go toward other essentials. It’s unlikely that many of us will starve in this country, but a whole lot of people will be mightily inconvenienced, in a couple of ways: 

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Support the reader economy: Giveaway #5.

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Still here (albeit on semi-sabbatical), and still supporting the reader economy. For those just joining us, I have been doing a semi-regular giveaway of products made in Alaska, the state where I live. It’s important to me to support the local economy.

But with inflation kicking everyone’s backside, I have decided to focus also on the reader economy, with a semi-regular giveaway of $25 gift cards. That’s not exactly a huge sum, but I’m not exactly a huge blog.

Besides, while $25 giveaway won’t permanently prop the budget, it can certainly be a much-needed tweak. For example, maybe you’re operating on the tightest of margins and your kid’s birthday is coming up. These days $25 won’t buy you much, but it will buy you something. Maybe several somethings, if you’re a bargain hound and your child is young enough not to be picky.

(Pro tip: Before you buy anything, join a Buy Nothing Facebook group. Not only might you find like-new or even brand-new items to gift, you could also put out an “ask” for birthday party supplies. I see that kind of thing being given all the time in my own Buy Nothing group.)

The winner of the Support the Reader Economy giveaway gets to choose the retailer, so perhaps that winner will choose Shell or Chevron, for gas to get to work before payday. Or, if you live in the right area, a Wawa card. (Man, I miss Wawa.)

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Nope, I haven’t retired.

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It’s been way too long since I’ve published anything here, but that doesn’t mean I’ve retired from blogging. Blame a mix of deadlines and personal stuff, plus the need to enjoy the last days of summer; even though it’s been raining almost nonstop, I still love these days of near-nonstop light.

I’m also getting ready to go to the Financial Blogger Conference, which is in Orlando* this year. Hearing all the horror stories about flight delays or outright cancellations, I’m hoping for the best. But I am also planning to observe the mantra of the stranded seal hunter: Go with the floe.

Taken together, this has meant an undeclared sabbatical. I don’t want anyone to think I’ve given up on this site, because I haven’t retired either from it or from writing for a living. It’s just that other things get in the way of my wanting to post here regularly.

That whole work-life balance thing: If I could figure it out, I’d become a millionaire teaching other people how to do it. But I haven’t. And as far as I can tell, few people have.

That’s because we want to do it all – at least in theory.

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