frugality

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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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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Meet a reader: FrugalStrong from Texas.

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Like the first person featured in the “Meet a reader” series, FrugalStrong has also been the subject of a post on this site. I had the chance to meet her and her family when they traveled to Alaska. The result was an article called “Why aren’t more people frugal?” The title for that piece came from a question her husband posed during our frugal meet-up at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant (a location chosen for its big indoor playground).

When the 2017 Financial Blogger Conference took place in Dallas, she invited DF and me to stay for a couple of days, pre-conference. Their home is on a lake, and DF got a kick out of being able to swim in late October. Unfortunately, I came down with some kind of bug while I was there, which was mortifying, but she and her husband couldn’t have been nicer about it. 

Our recent phone chat was the two of us taking turns preaching to the choir. FrugalStrong and I have the same mindset: Save where you can so you can spend where you want.

Here, lightly edited for brevity and clarity, is that conversation.

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Life hack: Baking soda as oven cleaner.

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While baking pie* recently I smelled something burning. My initial thought was that bits of crust had fallen onto the cookie sheet under the pie tins. Nope. The smell was from the floor of the oven, where a now-carbonized remnant of a previous meal** continued to smolder. Time for some oven cleaner.

DF offered to take care of it. I agreed, and suggested a very simple way to do this. No need for a commercial cleanser or the oven-cleaning cycle as long as we had baking soda on hand.

He was unfamiliar with this particular life hack, so I explained it to him:

  • Cover the burned-on stuff completely with baking soda.
  • Sprinkle water atop the soda until it’s fairly damp (but not soupy).
  • Let it sit for a bunch of hours (for me, that’s usually overnight).
  • Wipe it up.
  • Rinse thoroughly.

Easy on, easy off*** – could it really be that simple? 

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Meet a reader: Cheryl from Florida.

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Recently I announced my intention to borrow a strategy from The Frugal Girl, who posts a regular feature called “Meet a Reader.” This seemed like a natural fit for my site, since (a) I like talking with readers and (b) you guys are always talking to one another in the comments.

(Love it when that happens, by the way. And long may it continue!)

So I asked who might be interested in participating* in this feature, and was delighted that a dozen people either volunteered, or suggested a reader they hoped I’d interview. In addition, I made my own list (there was some overlap).

Random number generator decided that Cheryl would be first. Some of you may remember her from a previous piece I wrote, “Cheryl paid off her mortgage.” I was fortunate to meet her in person when visiting my dad, and figured a phone conversation would be as stimulating as the one the three of us had in person at a Dunkin Donuts in Tarpon Springs, Florida.

It was.

Here, edited a bit for brevity and clarity, is how it all shook down.

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Anatomy of a frugal meal.

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It was close to suppertime, and no supper was in sight. We had three or four ounces of leftover pork tenderloin, bought deeply discounted and frozen until needed. I thought to slice it thinly, cook some rice and steam some peas from last year’s garden.

That would have been okay, but dull. Instead, I started pulling things out of the freezer:

A bag of chopped celery, also from last year’s garden

A bag of chopped red and yellow peppers, bought from the produce manager’s “ugly but still good” shelf

A bag of chopped onions – DF recently noticed an onion was starting to rot, so he cut and froze the still-good parts

A bit of turkey fat, from a bird we cooked a couple months ago; we save the fat from all pan juices, for cooking vegetables and making white sauce

Next, I put on a pot of rice (bought by the 50-pound bag at Costco) and melted the turkey fat, announcing that I planned to caramelize the vegetables and then add the diced tenderloin and some kind of sauce. DF diced the meat, then thinly sliced some carrots while I considered potential sauce ingredients.

What immediately jumped to mind was a bottle of General Tso’s sauce that I’d gotten free from our neighborhood’s Buy Nothing Facebook group. I poured maybe four tablespoons into a glass measuring cup, along with some rice vinegar (from an ancient bottle lurking in the lazy Susan) and a shake of powdered garlic (another Costco buy).

The slowly cooking onions, peppers, celery and carrot were making the kitchen smell divine. Maybe this olfactory distraction was what caused me to overdo the vinegar somewhat. It didn’t quite drown out the General Tso’s, but it didn’t do the sauce any favors, either. A few splashes from a jug of Langer’s pineapple-orange-guava juice (bought on sale, with a coupon) brought the vinegar into line and added a sweet hint of citrus.

Just typing this is making my mouth water. How about yours? 

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13 ways to save money on bread.

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We save money on bread by making our own, with flour and yeast bought in bulk at Costco. Each time, DF writes the date and the price paid on the bag. (He saves those 50-pound sacks to use as yard waste receptacles.)

That’s how we know that between March 2021 and March 2022, the price went up 51.5 percent. In one year! And that’s why I suggested an article for Money Talks News called “13 ways to beat the rising cost of bread.”

This baker’s dozen of ideas includes our rustic bread fetish, of course. It also features tips for those who don’t bake. One or more of these tips could help you save money on bread, too, so check it out.

Some readers have specifically asked me to run links to pieces I’ve written* lately, which is why I’m doing this roundup. Note: Some of my recent work is either fairly boring (useful, but eye-glazing) or else it’s unsigned. Thus these roundups focus on stuff that won’t put people to sleep, or out the folks for whom I ghost-write.

Another piece for Money Talks News is a topic that regular readers might find familiar. “11 ways to turn table scraps into delicious meals” starts with a sobering stat from the U.S. Department of Agriculture: Almost one-third of the U.S. food supply winds up going to waste. Maybe more, since this was an older study.

So what do frugal people do? Repurpose it! Boiling bags, gleaning, liquid assets, turning “bad” dairy into good ingredients and other tactics help us get the most out of every ingredient. 

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A chance to meet a reader.

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During the no- or low-spend February challenge, a reader named A. Marie mentioned she had been interviewed for the “Meet a reader” feature at a site called The Frugal Girl.

(That interview can be found here, if you’d like to go learn more about the awesome A. Marie. Go ahead. I’ll wait.)

Now: Who else is interested in being interviewed?

Yep, I’m appropriating The Frugal Girl’s idea. In part that’s because it sounds like great fun. After all, one of my favorite things about being a writer is getting to talk with people, and I’d love to chat with some of you in real life. (Well, over the phone.)

In fact, I have chatted with some of you in real life, during my travels, and it’s always stimulating.

The other reason I think “Meet A Reader” will fit here is that you folks tend to start conversations in the comments. Seems you’re already meeting readers, in a sense, and bringing us into the conversation. So why not make it official? 

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No- or low-spend February: How did it work for you?

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Week 4 of the no- or low-spend February has come and gone – long gone, sorry about that – and what I suspected was true: Most of the readers of this site are already frugal. But just about all of us need a reminder now and then to spend intentionally. Even diehard frugalists can backslide.

During the no- or low-spend February, I was:

Not tempted to buy clothes, because I dislike shopping.

Not needing to buy books; instead, I went to the library (or to our own bookshelves) for reading material. I also chipped away at a backlog built up courtesy of the Amazon First Reads program, in which Amazon Prime members get a free e-book (sometimes two) each month. (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items bought through my links.)

Able to hit the movies without paying cash, thanks to discounted gift cards I bought last December. I stretched those cards further by going on pay-one-price Tuesday and using my Cinemark Movie Club membership to get 25% off refreshments; it also brings the ticket cost down to $5.

Staying home due to lousy weather. We had snow, then a chinook brought in warm temps and rain, then cold temps that froze all the melt into peaks and valleys, then lots more snow, and just blech blech blech. Although I have wonderful Icebug shoes and the car has studded tires, I just did not feel like setting out across the frozen wastes. If I’m home, I have no opportunity to spend.

Focusing on  no- or low-spend February. Although I technically could have spent money, I had a specific reason not to do so. Taking a sharper look at how (and why) we’re spending is good for us, and good for our financial goals.

Here are a few takeaways, based on your actions over the past month.

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