saving money

Low- or no-spend February 2023: If you give a mouse some icing…

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During the final week of the low- or no-spend February, I did what I did the first week: spent money. It started out very small and got a lot bigger – but not much more expensive. I coped by:

  • Using a gift card from shopping apps/rewards programs, and
  • Reminding myself, again, that it was low– or no-spend February, not “don’t you dare” February

Here’s how it all began: While doing a little Shopkicking (see shopping apps/rewards programs link above), my eye was drawn to a clearance-colored shelf tag. Turned out the store had cake icing (which some of you know as “frosting,” but I’m from South Jersey) for 25 cents a tub. I double-checked to see if a digit had fallen off the sign but nope, it was 25 cents.

I couldn’t not buy it at that price. And as soon as it was in my hands, I remembered a reader named Wendy, one of the recipients of this blog’s Giving Cards partnership. She used her $20 gift card to buy cake mix and icing, packaged them with disposable cake pans and birthday candles she already had, and dropped them at a food bank.

If you give a mouse some 25-cent icing, she’s going to want cake mix. Then she’ll want candles to make the celebration a little brighter. And what about a birthday card? Every mouse wants one of those.

Referring, of course, to the “If You Give A Mouse A Cookie” books. (As an Amazon affiliate, I may receive a small fee for items purchased through my links.) 

 

I decided to make a pair of birthday party kits to give away on the Buy Nothing Facebook page. To do that, I’d need to buy the aforementioned cake mixes and candles. The mixes were on sale, two for $3, so not too bad. The candles were zero dollars out of pocket because I cashed in some Shopkick scrip. Finally, I added birthday cards from my card stash and put the two kits up for grabs.

But that wasn’t quite the end of the story.

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Low- or no-spend February 2023, Weeks 2 and 3. (I’m back.)

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Running a little late, obviously. I was already a bit tardy with the low- or no-spend February challenge update when a stomach bug made me almost completely work-avoidant. Many quarts of hydration and loads of hours of sleep later, I am much healthier. But catching up on belated assignments meant missing a week.

While mildly ill, I was reminded yet again that sickness means either spending way too much (medical co-pays, prescriptions, special foods) or feeling too crummy to spend much at all.

This time around it was the latter, fortunately. I was also reminded that I live in a low-maintenance prepper paradise where just about anything I needed was already in hand (and likely bought on sale or at Costco). Powerade? We got it. Canned chicken soup? Ditto. Generic ibuprofen PM, so I could sleep for 12 hours at a stretch? You bet.

That sleep was some of the coziest ever, thanks to the brand-new-to-us down comforter  whose frugal purchase was detailed in the first roundup. Reading some of the comments on that piece, I was impressed by a couple of readers’ stirring tales of thrift.

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Low- or no-spend February 2023: Week 1.

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(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.) Let me say this upfront: I spent money. Before you … Read more

Low- or no-spend February 2023: Who’s in?

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This is not a new idea, and in fact many bloggers make it a strictly no-spend February. But I like to keep things a bit looser because not everyone can just stop buying things.

Not that you have to stop buying entirely. If you get a head cold in late February, you don’t have to wait until March 1 to hit the drugstore.

And obviously you’ll still have to gas up your car/renew your transit pass as needed, or pick up fresh produce or milk when you run out (and if you decide you can’t live without these things).

The point of this 28-day exercise is to try not to spend, and to be intentional about what you do end up buying. Pretty sure you guys are already good at that.

So: Who’s in?

Instead of buying on autopilot, a low- or no-spend February asks you to think critically about everything you want to put into the shopping cart:

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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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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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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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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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Relishing summer’s bounty.

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A reader named Ringo apparently misses the garden updates, and asked whether we were still growing fruits and vegetables. Yes, and I’ve been taking pictures like mad – but still haven’t organized a major “looking at this year’s garden” post. As a stopgap, I’m going to write about relish.

Why relish? After all, we’ve frozen peas and raspberries, made rhubarb leather, and canned rhubarb compote and raspberry jam. We’ve eaten some very good tomatoes, lettuces, greens and strawberries. But the relish might be the best thing to come out of this summer, because we may have invented a new recipe.

Relish was never a huge thrill to me. It was just something to put on hot dogs and hamburgers. But last year our Chelsea Prize cucumbers, an English variety from Renee’s Garden Seeds, produced so heavily that I decided to look for a bonehead-simple relish recipe. (As a Renee’s Garden Seeds affiliate, I receive a small finder’s fee for sales made through my link.)

Found one, too. And then DF improved on it.

He improves on so many things in my life, as I’ve written before. When I described the relish recipe DF said, “You know what might be a good addition? Some jalapeño.”

We have pickled jalapeños in our fridge – a can we’d found in the dented-can bin, because that’s how we roll. So I diced up a bit of pickled pepper and added it to the mix.

The result was delicious: sweet yet pungent, mellow but with a peppery zing! that turns even the cheapest hot dogs into a decent meal.

Sometimes we nibble it by the forkful, like a salad. Which I guess it technically is, being made of cukes, onions, garlic, sugar, and mustard and celery seeds.

Our enjoyment of this humble condiment reminded me of a passage from Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine”: 

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