I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘frugality’ Category

Yesterday I had three local companies come and do estimates on a new furnace for our house. I only have two of the estimates, because I told the first company they could email it to me later in the week. They are the company we have our current service contract through, and they wanted to give me a detailed summary with a few different scenarios. I should have asked for a ballpark estimate just to compare to the other two, but I didn’t realize I’d get the other two right away.

In this process, I’ve begun to work through the difference between being frugal and being cheap, for us. We did some research, and we decided we would only look at 90%+ AFUE furnaces (which is an efficiency measure) and we wanted an Energy Star rated furnace (which I think all 90% AFUE ones are, but I’m not completely positive). As a comparison, our current furnace is about a 60-65% AFUE. Heh. We could get an 80% AFUE furnace, which would still be a great improvement over our current one, but we decided that we want to make a choice that not only is better for the environment, but will save us money over the long run. We had representatives from three major manufacturers come today, all of which were highly rated by Consumer Reports.

The cheap part of me really wanted to just get the lowest price furnace and not consider anything else. But the frugal part in me has won out so far, and besides deciding on the 90% vs 80% AFUE furnace, I’ve been asking lots of questions about warranties and service contracts and guarantees as well as what options we have as far as add-ons and what the benefits of different options are. My spouse has asthma, and I have pretty severe dust allergies, so we’ve been discussing different air filter add-ons that are available as well.

Again, the cheap part of me just wants to do the furnace, and the heck with anything else. But we actually have an opportunity to do a duct cleaning very inexpensively compared to quotes I have collected on that over the past year (we have 27 vents in our house, which makes duct cleaning an expensive proposition) as well as put an air filter in that would improve the lifespan of our furnace as well as significantly improve the air quality in our house. And, by the way, our house is not huge, is is around 1800 square feet, yet it has 27 vents. The living room itself has 6. It is just an odd thing.

So depending on what we choose and what we end up installing, we are looking at spending somewhere between $3000 (for just the furnace) and $4000 (if we do an air filter and duct cleaning as well). I think I will call the one we are leaning towards right now and see if I can knock their price down a little if we do the duct cleaning and the air filter as well, and get that total down from ~$3950 to maybe $3750. Plus our gas company is running a $250 rebate right now when you install a new 90%+ AFUE furnace, plus a $20 rebate on the programmable thermostat. Which, after all is said and done, would get that estimate down to about $3700 if I can’t knock their price down any. They are the estimate in the middle right now (we expect the one we haven’t gotten yet to be the highest based on information the previous owners left about a past estimate they did) and they know it, since they asked after they gave me their estimate how they compared to the other ones we’d had done. So I think they might have some room to wiggle.

Not exactly how I wanted to spend a few thousand dollars right now but I am actually warming up to the idea. And truly starting to feel like I understand the difference between being frugal and being cheap. At least, I hope I do.

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Buying grocery items in bulk when they are at a rock-bottom prices can be an excellent way to save money on the things you would be buying anyway. Most of us have heard (or learned from first hand experience) that buying things in bulk only works when the items will last - buying perishables in bulk that you can’t freeze or otherwise store safely just wastes money. But I’ve found, in my busy household of four, another item that I can’t buy in bulk without a very specific game plan for how to deal with the items at home - snacks.  Without a plan for how to deal with the items once they enter my house, they might as well be classified as perishables because they certainly don’t last.  But for a whole different reason - the whirling dervish that is my family eats them as fast as possible.

We have a collection of items we generally snack on, and for the non-perishable ones like granola bars or pretzels, I used to buy an extra or two when the items went on sale. Then when I got home, I would put them away in the cupboards I usually stored them in. But I noticed that instead of not having to buy the item again the next week, my family just ate more of it. That’s been controlled somewhat with the onset of my spouse’s meal plan, but it still happens with my son and now daughter. They don’t have free rein over snacks but somehow if there is extra in the cupboard, extra gets eaten.

I resolved to just not buy snacks in bulk, but the sale-loving money-saving part of me just couldn’t hack it and I knew I had to find another way. The straw that broke the camel’s back was this past week’s “Mega Event” sale at Kroger. Not only were two of the most loved snacks here on the Mega Event list (pretzels and Goldfish), they were 50 cents a package. I had never before seen either item sold anywhere for less than $1. So I needed to stock up. But how to actually make this a frugal purchase?

I hid them. We generally go through one bag of pretzels a week (it is one of the snacks in my spouse’s meal plan) and when we have goldfish in the house, one package per week is sufficient. So I put a bag of each in the cupboard, and then made space in my under-stairs closet and hid the rest of the packages. Every week, I will take one package out for general consumption, and if the package runs out before the next week, the family will just have to go without until it is time for the next package. That was the problem before, if we had it on hand, I would just replenish the supply no matter how many had already been eaten. But no more. That doesn’t save money, it just costs more money. And we eat too many pretzels.

Now if I could just manage to be so disciplined with ice cream…

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Let me start this off by saying that I realize being able to make simple (and not so simple) alterations yourself is much more frugal than a tailor. And I know that there are people who think that anyone can learn to sew.

I ascribe to the idea that saying anyone can learn to sew is like me saying anyone can learn organic chemistry. It is true in a broad sense but the amount of effort, time, and quality of results that can be achieved vary greatly from person to person. I’ve attempted to learn to sew several times. When I started grad school and was very lonely and bored and had access to a sewing machine for free, I actually put a lot of time and effort into it.

I had to turn those curtains into rags, even my spouse had to admit they were completely unusable.

That is why a tailor has become my frugal alternative - and truly, a tailor can be a frugal thing. The idea of a tailor has always sounded extravagant to me, but if they can make a piece of clothing that is unusable in its current state usable, they are worth the investment. The alteration, in most if not all cases, will cost less than replacing the item.

The first time I used a tailor besides my wedding dress was when my spouse unintentionally destroyed the elbows of two of his dress shirts on a sharp desk corner at work. His dress code is “business casual” and at his job, that means basically a suit and tie, except they don’t have to wear a jacket. Not so casual in my opinion, but you do what you need to do. And his clothing is expensive. So I honestly felt like crying when he destroyed the second shirt, and made him figure out what he was doing to destroy them. He did, but we still had the two shirts that were perfectly good except the gaping elbow tear.

So I took them to a tailor and had them turned into short sleeved dress shirts. He is allowed to wear short sleeved dress shirts in the summer, so it worked for us and he is still wearing those shirts today. And it was two less short sleeved dress shirts we had to buy. Now I try to find him dress shirts at Goodwill, but that is somewhat hit or miss - all the short sleeved ones I have seen in his size so far look like they are for a luau.

We’ve recently run into another reason to go to a tailor for my husband’s business wardrobe - he’s been on a specific meal plan for the past 2+ months to lower his cholesterol and lose weight, and he’s lost 23 lbs. He’s now, according to the personal trainer they work with, at about 11% body fat (his goal is 9%) so he is starting to add calories back to his diet and move to maintaining mode versus weight loss mode, so he’s not going to change much more in size. And his pants are literally falling down. He had to get a new belt to hold them up.

We did use a gift card to JC Penney’s he received for Christmas to buy some new underwear and pants, but we aren’t donating his old pants yet. We’re taking them to be tailored. His pants, being dress slacks, are ~$60-$80 new (although I do shop the sales hard) and turning the 36″ waists into 32″ will be a lot less than that, I bet. Some of them may not be able to be tailored, but I bet some will be. And we won’t have to replace any more of his pants for a long time.

Find a good tailor, and use them instead of replacing clothing if you can. You’ll be surprised how much money you can save. (Or learn to sew - that’s even better. I have the scarred and calloused hands to prove that it wasn’t the best idea for me. Although I can now replace a button. )

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I mentioned in passing in an earlier post that my brother has a bunch of HD-DVDs because he backed the wrong horse in the high definition DVD wars. Apparently Blu-Ray won, and from here forward the high definition DVDs are going to be Blu-Ray and not HD-DVD. If I was him, I’d be really upset right now.

He’s not really that upset, because he’s a 29 year old “professional” with too few expenses and too much free time (he still lives with my parents… mama’s boy lol) so he’ll just buy more Blu-Ray DVDs and call the HD-DVD system a loss. We are in very different places in life, him and I. I’d seriously want to send the smackdown somewhere right now.

I realized, thinking about it, that avoiding things like this is a significant side benefit of being broke. I am not generally an early adopter of new technology anyway, but my spouse is a techie kind of guy and likes his toys. If we had a lot of discretionary income, he might have bought some kind of high def player. Well, I guess we’d need a high def TV first. But because of our financial situation, he has never even suggested it. In fact, he willingly gave up his Playstation 3 fund to help pay for our car repair and has not complained about it since. He knows that we have different and more significant priorities than new technology right now.

Sometimes, it is good to be broke. Almost. There’s still that broke part…

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This past weekend was my spouse’s holiday party. His company has their holiday party in January so they can do a year in review type of presentation at the same time - so it is a little odd timing-wise but still very fun. It is a very upscale affair - black-tie optional dress, very fancy food, and really excellent door prizes.

The party itself is free, of course, for it is sponsored by his company. But the preparing for and being able to go to the party, sadly, is not. We had committed to going this year, and even with our limited funds to be able to pull it off, we managed, and had fun at the same time.

We had friends babysit for our kids who offered to do it for free. In fact, we tried to pay them but they refused. They did it as a favor, as I would do for them if they ever needed anyone to watch one or more of their kids.

I got my dress at Goodwill. I didn’t know if this would work out or not - for of course, you are limited by what Goodwill has in stock. I needed a new dress though, for the last two times we have gone to this party, I have been pregnant, and so the dress I wore both those times does not exactly fit me. I went to Goodwill on a mission though, and I found almost the perfect dress for only $4.50. It was a size too big, and someday, I want to take it to be tailored to fit me completely correctly, but it was close enough and a few safety pins kept things in check. In fact, people told me how great I looked and one of my spouse’s coworkers asked it I’d lost weight. That, I like to hear. My spouse already has a suit, so we didn’t have to get anything for him.

As I said, the party itself was free, so that wasn’t an issue. We of course had to pay for gas to get there and back, but that wasn’t too much, all considered. The party was held at my spouse’s workplace so it wasn’t too far away.

It was fun and the kids even had fun at our friends’ house and I had a whole lot of chocolate fondue. Who could ask for anything more? Take advantage of free things in your life. Fun doesn’t have to come with a huge price tag.

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