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Frugality

Out, About, and the Frugality of DIY

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Only noon, and this has already been a busy day.

After returning from an early breakfast out with some dear friends, I took it into my hot little head to wash the car, before it actually does get really hot outside. Parked the annoying little tank in the shade, penned up the dogs, and dragged the hose out to the driveway.

Night before last, I’d vacuumed the dog hair out of the driver’s-side carpeting. Cassie and Ruby’s hair forms a film over the tile floors. Even when the floor looks clean, in fact a skiff of dog hair coats it. The loose hairs stick to the bottom of my shoes and shake off onto the car’s fake carpeting every time I get into the vehicle. The stuff is kind of brushy in texture: it grabs every hair and clings tight to it.

You can’t just brush it out. You have to vacuum it, and an ordinary household vac doesn’t work much better than a cleaning brush or a dog-hair removing gadget. You have to wrestle it out with a shop vac. And I can assure you: that is a job.

Also the day before yesterday, I’d gone down to the Target at Bum Central…, uhm, Christown Spectral Spectrum Mall after filling up with gas at the Costco in the same garden shopping center. Target: because I’d learned that lidded plastic kitchen trash bins of the sort I intend to use in the plan to repel garbage-scavenging identity thieves are now so out of style that supermarkets no longer carry them. Costco no longer carries them. And…yeah, Target had one…they wanted 60 bucks for it!!!!

Give. Me. A. Proverbial. BREAK!

Do I really have to order this thing from Amazon? Seriously???

I decide to travel abroad: it occurs to me that The Container Store at Town & Country Mall would be likely to have one of these antiquated designs. They have everything else, after all. And so, it was off to traipse across the city in search of an ordinary plastic trash basket, that rarest of all commodities.

On the way I passed a Bed Bath & Beyond and thought they surely would have the things, probably cheaper. But parking in that mall’s lot is a freaking nightmare, especially around the lunch hour — which, by then, it was. So proceeded on a quarter-mile to the Container Store.

Good thing: Lookit this!!! Twenty-five bucks at BB&B for a fine red trash can, a piddling 7 gallons. And no lid!

A regular 15- or 20-gallon plastic trash can — also without a lid, the sort of thing you used to see around an office: not available at BB&B unless you also buy a slide-under-the-counter apparatus, to the tune of  $32 to $68:
They’re kidding, right?

At The Container Store, I found lidded trash cans for around $13, which was inflation-adjusted OK. I guess. They only had one model, cheesily designed. Prices for most ranged from $35 to upwards of $200.

W.
T.
F.
?????

So I got the cheapest lidded thing I could find. It will do the job, but for how long?… Not very, I expect.

What the hell is going on in this country that you can’t even buy an ordinary kitchen waste basket!???

Meanwhile, the car really needed to be washed. Normally I’d park it outside in a rainstorm, let the shower wash it, then pull it back into the garage and dry it off. But we haven’t had a decent rain in many, many months. The car was filthy and the windshield so dirty I couldn’t get it clean enough to see through, even with squirt window cleaner.

There’s a car wash across the street from Town & Country, one of the few remaining car washes that do a halfway decent job. So decided to cruise through there, rather than having to (ugh!) actually work to do the long-overdo job myself.

Not so much.

The car wash is mobbed, as usual, because it’s the only actual full-service operation for miles around. But on approach, I find they’ve revamped their entry lanes, adding a lane labeled “Express Wash.” This takes you straight into the car wash, without making you stop at gas pumps, where they hope to sell you not only gas but windshield repair and tire polish and any number of other fine emoluments. There’s no one in it, so naturally I dart in.

Then I realize there’s a reason no one is in this entry lane: it’s for people who have bought a “membership”!

Heh. Evidently there’s not much demand for car wash memberships. 😀

Luckily. With no one behind me, I back out. And see that all the other lanes are jam-packed. And wonder…why am I doing this? My hose works, no? Do I not have a whole bottle of automotive window wash stuff? Do I not have a sprayer? Do I not have a giant stack of microfiber rags?

So wove around the dozens of waiting patrons and headed on my merry way.

That saved about $15, approximately the cost of the prized plastic waste bin.

Washing the car is really very easy. And it provides some nice exercise. By the time I got home from this a.m.’s crack-of-dawn breakfast, it was still fairly cool outside, and the yellow oleander was casting a large patch of shade across the driveway. I’ve found that those 3-M sponge blocks made for cleaning your walls work handsomely to rub off smashed bugs and road tar — and they do not seem to damage the finish. Soaking a clean microfiber rag with windshield wiper fluid (it comes in 1.5-gallon bottles) and wiping down the windows with that works much better to clean the windows than Windex and paper towels.

Whilst thrashing the bush in search of a waste basket, I happened into a Costco (which would be why I happen to know Costco doesn’t carry them). IMPULSE BUY: grab one of their wonderful roasted chickens for lunch (and future meals).

Ahem.

Make that “formerly wonderful.”

Stash everything away and sit down to what I think will be a great meal of roast chicken, fried potatoes, and salady stuff.

Not so much…

The chicken was SO OVERSALTED it would make your mouth pucker up!

Yech!

Of course, Costco’s chicken has always been salty. It is, after all, a processed food — it comes from the slaughterhouse injected with brine and then has various “flavorings” (mostly salt) added. But it was never intolerable before. This one was, in a word, inedible.

So I peeled all the rest of the meat off the carcass — meat I’d planned to use for at least two or three more meals — bagged it up to use for future dog food, and put the bones in the freezer for a future pot of chicken broth. Which I won’t have to salt…

Is it too salty to give to the dogs? No doubt. However, I’d also bought a giant slab of pork tenderloin there. This morning I cooked up a quarter of it, which I’ll grind up in the food processor with the chicken. and of course, the dogs’ meat is mixed with veggies and oatmeal or rice. “Diluting” it in that way, I hope, will make it more or less edible for canids. Just remember to put out extra water…

So that’s the last time I’ll buy roasted chicken at Costco. Too bad.

Wash your own car. Roast your own chicken. Get better service. Save a lotta money.

Convenience Cost?

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Is there such a thing as a “convenience cost,” or did I just make that term up? By it, I mean the minor cost of avoiding a minor hassle. Or, I suppose, a middling-large hassle.

Here’s a practical question attached to this fine philosophical matter:

Are you willing to spend a few cents a gallon more to avoid trudging several miles to get a better price at a different gas station in a different neighborhood? Do you do that regularly, or only when circumstances make you feel more reluctant than usual to have to drive around to get the best price?

This afternoon I have to traipse to the Mayo Clinic. At that time of day, it will be an hour’s drive each way: Two hours of doing battle on the cutthroat streets of Phoenix for the privilege of spending 15 minutes with my doctor in hopes that she can send me to the right specialist.

My car doesn’t have enough gas to get out to the far side of Scottsdale. And if you think prices at the local QT are exorbitant, you ain’t seen nuttin’ till you see how much a ritzy-titzy market like Scottsdale will bear. So I need to buy gas before heading out there.

Rationality suggests that I should drive down to the slum Costco that I normally habituate, because — given the emptiness of its customers’ pockets — that Costco sells the cheapest gas in town. While there, I could pick up the several items I need from that honored store.

This of course would require me not only to drive several miles in the opposite direction from the Mayo but also to get out of the car and walk across the parking lot, something I’m not fond of doing in that sketchy shopping center. The fewer trips I have to make there, the better: both because staying out of Costco means keeping more money in my own pocket and because it really isn’t the best of all possible shopping experiences.

Between here and the Mayo, only slightly out of my way, resides another Costco: a much more upscale Costco. They have more goods of the sort I covet, and one feels no need to pack heat while strolling from the car to the door. And… I have to get something for this weekend’s potluck. Lately I’ve found the Costco closest to me — the downscale Costco — rarely has anything very appealing. The last time I was there, they didn’t even have the standard Costco quinoa salad, to say nothing of decent bakery. Chances are good — very good, I’ll bet — that the Paradise Valley Costco will have a much better selection of bakery.

To be safe, I need to buy gas now; not drive all the way to the Mayo, halfway back, and another ten miles up to the fancy Costco and back.

There is a QT right around the corner. They extort stupefying amounts of money from their customers, because the station is on the only road that passes through the Dreamy Draw, carrying commuters from Moon Valley and points north down to their jobs in central and downtown Phoenix.

The Costco at Paradise Valley Mall also charges more for gas, because it’s conveniently close to Tatum Blvd, which bears commuters from North Phoenix and Scottsdale. But by the end of the day — around 5 p.m. — the lines will be out to the main drag, I will be tired and unhappy, and I surely will not feel like standing in line and pumping gas. And it’s questionable whether I can get all the way out to the Mayo and then up to that Costco on a quarter-tank of gas.

I’m thinking it may be worth the cost (four to eight cents a gallon) to fill up — or maybe partially fill up — at the nearby QT, so that I don’t have to drive down south to get gas now, nor take a chance that the amount in the tank will take me halfway to Payson and back with enough left over to get down to the cheaper Costco.

That way, I would have the option of not going to the nicer Costco on the way home from the doctor’s office (should one not happen to feel like shopping for anything by then), and I could be certain that the car wouldn’t run out of gas. And I wouldn’t have to pump gas late in the afternoon, when I will hate it even more than I normally hate it. Which is a lot.

So we have two choices:

  1. Drive to the dumpy Costco now, some miles south of the ‘hood and get gas for as much as eight cents a gallon less than it costs anywhere else.
  2. Whip around the corner to the overpriced QT, eat the gouge, and acquire at least enough gas to get to east Scottsdale and back…for a whole lot more than a fair price

I’m leaning toward the QT. The savings in time and aggravation would be worth paying a couple dollars more.

And that would be “convenience cost.”

The Ineffable Charm of Inertia…

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Complacency hath its charms…

The other day while holding forth about frugal habits, I reflected that another frugal trait is to live someplace that you can love. If  you really like where you live, you’re unlikely to pull up stakes and go in search of the “dream home.”

Moving is wildly expensive. The Realtor’s commission takes a huge bite out of your home’s sale price, leaving you with a whole lot less to buy another house. If you’re like me — your house is paid for and you have no intention of ever taking on mortgage debt again — it means you can’t move laterally into a house of comparable value unless you have several tens of thousands of cash dollars to throw into the deal. If you have to take out a mortgage, then the move costs you even more outrageously: in addition to a big chunk dropped into the real estate agent’s pocket, you will pay many, many thousands into mortgage interest, a debt that may not go away for 30 years.

So it behooves you financially to stay in place for decades, if not for the rest of your life.

In that line of thought, I wondered why would I ever want to be anywhere else? What we have here is a beautiful little house, not too work-intensive and not absurdly expensive to maintain, centrally located, and (despite a few drawbacks) smack in the middle of a neighborhood on the upswing. Most of the time (except when the breeze wafts the racket from Conduit of Blight and the freeway in our direction, except when the drag racers are roaring up and down GangBangers Way, except when the helicopter cops are chasing perps, except when the City and the utility companies are digging up the streets), it’s nice and quiet. The upscale commerce that followed White Flight to the suburbs has noticed the affluent young urbanite set and is moving back to our parts. Is this not the best of all possible worlds?

Yes…but Dr. Pangloss: is this the best of all possible worlds, or is it a kind of pyrite-plated inertia?

Two houses in the ’hood, one of them the same model as mine and one the same square footage on a slightly smaller lot, are on the market for four times what I paid to buy into this tract.

Shake it up, baby?

If I sold my house today, I would net (in theory) enough to move to a quieter, less bum-ridden part of town, far away from the inane lightrail and the crime-infested apartments and the schools that serve the hapless children of the crime-infested apartments and the child molesters who jump your back wall to get at your little girls and the grocery store parking lots where you dare not carry a purse over your shoulder as you scurry from your car into the market.

There aren’t many places around here where I would rather live, not that I could afford. But there is one. Way to hell and gone on the far side of the Valley, bordering the highway to Payson, is a development called Fountain Hills.

It is very, very quiet and very, very upper-middle-class. I first noticed how quiet a couple decades ago, when Anna the German Shepherd was a pup. That dog was just flat wired to the teeth. She was like a grenade with the pin pulled out…at all times. Anything, and I do mean anything, would set that animal off. Especially if it had wheels.

For some reason that I don’t recall, I happened to have Anna with me in the car when I happened to wander into Fountain Hills. She needed to relieve her doggy self, so I stopped next to an arroyo to let her out. As she was sniffing around, along came a couple of golf carts laden with enthusiasts.

Uh oh! thought I. Here it comes… I tightened my grip on the heavy leather leash and braced for a 90-pound lunge.

But no! She was calm. She was quiet. She refrained from flying into a berserk fit. She just stood there quietly and watched those fascinating, usually enraging objects roll past.

Sane (relatively, sort of) dog

Before long, it became clear she was calm in general. A car drove by and she didn’t try to bring it down by the oil pan. Somebody walked by with a dog and she didn’t try to rid the earth of the beast. Eventually I realized this was because Fountain Hills itself is quiet.

Where I was living at the time, a couple blocks away from the present abode, was a few lots southwest of the War Zone at GangBanger’s Way and Conduit of Blight Blvd — sometimes it was so noisy there that SDXB and I actually had to shout to hear each other when we were sitting outside in the backyard. The ambient noise, evidently, was driving that dog batshit.

It’s a lot quieter here in my present castle — as long as the wind blows in the right direction. Sometimes the noise is annoying, but most of the time it’s tolerable. Fountain Hills is just about the only place — other than Sun City, which enjoys the silence of the mausoleum — where you a) can find that kind of peace and quiet and b) can afford to buy a house.

Despite the presence of some startlingly priced real estate, it does sport a few houses that I could afford. Here’s a sweet enough little place, whose price is eminently right. That shack costs less than I would net on my house, it’s smaller than mine and so would cost less to air-condition, and even though it has some flowers and a fantastic view, the exterior would cost a fraction of what mine costs to maintain. There’s no pool, no trees, and the ground is all gravel.

Fountain Hills has a few disadvantages:

• Most of the housing is cheaply built, as you can tell from the cheesy dry-wall shelving in the shack above; anything built after 1990 is pyrofoam and plaster.

• There’s no gas service out there, so you’re stuck with a glass-top electric stove,  IMHO inadequate and unsafe.

• It’s way to hell and gone away from everything. Though it’s relatively close to the Mayo Clinic, the only other serious services and shopping are in Scottsdale, which is a drive.

• It’s so far away, I would be isolated from my son, from the choir and the church, and from my present set of friends.

• I hate that tacky fountain they’re so proud of.

• Even though the scenery is spectacular and the air appears to be clean, it boasts the highest ozone levels in the Valley.

If it ain’t broke…

So IMHO, inertia does have its frugal charms. Everything, whether it’s housing or your dogs or the city you live in or your spouse, presents trade-offs.

One of the charms is that it’s a lot cheaper to stay put than it is to move. Maintaining and upgrading this place would cost no more, over the long run, than forking over a commission on several hundred thousand bucks, paying a moving company to haul my stuff to the far side of Scottsdale, paying furniture stores to replace the stuff the movers break or lose, and fixing or upgrading some aging shack. Probably the routine cost of gasoline alone would make it totally not worth moving way to Hell and gone out there.

How much of your time will you spend for a few bucks?

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How do I love thee…?

So on the way home from getting gasoline (because tomorrow I have to drive halfway to Timbuktu), I stop by the neighborhood Walmart grocery store and pick up five pounds of sugar and several packages of frozen veggies. At the bakery in that strip mall, I grab a couple of palmiers, a fattening treat of which I’m unduly fond.

When I get home, I realize the Walmart cashier has put those few little grocery items into not one but two plastic bags, which at Walmart they just leave on the bag dispenser for the hoi polloi to disconnect and carry off themselves. I’ve left a five-pound bag of sugar at the Walmart.

Which brings us to the Question of the Day: Would you jump back in your car, drive back to the Walmart, park, stand in line with your receipt in hand, haggle with the clerk, and try to get them to give you the abandoned sugar?

The sugar cost less than $2.00.

I have not one, not two, but three projects in hand today, paying between $4 and $10 a page. All the clients are in a ball-busting hurry to get done.

Ultimately, I decided to write off the cost of the sugar. It would, I think, cost more to drive back up there and beg for the sugar than to pay two bucks for air. There’s no guarantee that Walmart would agree to let me have a bag of sugar — for all they know, I’m running a scam. Something to do with drugs, no doubt.

But assuming they did, I’m earning something between $30 and $60 an hour just now, depending on which project I’m laboring over. Twenty minutes or half an hour of my time devoted to retrieving five pounds of sugar would mean that bag of sugar would cost between $10 and $20: most expensive sugar on the planet!

No.

Tomorrow’s trip back from Timbuktu will take me past a Trader Joe, a Sprout’s, and a Safeway. Each of them will charge considerably more than Walmart, of course. But even at, say, $3.50 for a bag of sugar, that’s still a bargain compared to the value of my time when I’m actually working.

How do you feel about that kind of trade-off? Spend a half-hour to run back to a Walmart and try to retrieve a forgotten two-dollar item? Or stay in front of the computer to earn five to ten times that much?

Image: DepositPhotos, © ajafoto

The Cheapskate Jamboree: How much is a man’s life worth?

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PalmTree1Yesterday a neighbor called and asked if I could give her Gerardo’s phone number, he having recently deployed his underlings to trim the hated palm trees that flank (and contaminate) the swimming pool.

In the course of conversation, she asked how much I’d paid.

“Two hundred and forty bucks,” I said. “For four trees.”

“That’s too much!” she squawked. “I only paid $30 a tree the last time.”

Let’s think about that…

A Mexican fan palm is a nasty plant. Those fronds that wave so decoratively in the breeze are lined with vicious thorns. They’re very heavy, and they do not readily biodegrade, presenting a serious headache for waste disposal companies in cities where a lot of yards have palms.

Over the course of a year, a season’s green fronds die off as new fronds grow in, creating a “skirt” of dead palm fronds around the trunk. This stuff harbors cockroaches, snakes, black widows, and termites. Also, to the eye of the gringo, it’s unaesthetic. In the springtime, the commonplace Mexican fan palm, which grows to about 100 feet, sprouts long, prolific seed wands (“inflorescences”) that drop PalmTreeSeedstiny, hard flowers into the pool and then eventually drop hard seeds into the water. The flowers clog the filter, forcing you to backwash once or twice a week — a job that should need to be done no more than once every two or three months — and soon requiring you to hire a guy to come take the filter apart and clean it professionally. The seeds also get into the filter, and in addition they BREAK your $350 pool cleaner.

So, we of the White Middle Class hire a class of fearless Mexicans who show up armed with lumberjack equipment. In 100-degree heat, these men will climb a hundred feet into the air, saw off the dead fronds (and, unfortunately, many of the live ones), and cut off the damn seed things.

Then they climb down and fish all that crap out of your pool. This latter chore alone can best be described as one bitch of a job.

All of that might be shrugged off as the life of a Mexican immigrant, hm?

No.

Trimming a palm tree is about as dangerous a job as you can take on. Every year or two, a man gets killed when he undertakes to cut back a palm.

In addition to the obvious risk of falling a hundred feet or so, you have the problem that palm fronds are extremely heavy. If one falls on you and you can’t get free of it, the thing will suffocate you in short order.

This is a common fate of those who die in the palm-trimming trade.

If you’re all the way at the top of a 100-foot trunk and you’re tied to the thing with a lumberjack’s belt, you can’t get out from under a frond that drops down onto your head and face. And nobody can get up there to help you before you smother.

If you’re on the ground and one of the things falls on you, it can knock you out and suffocate you as you lay there, if it doesn’t kill you quickly by breaking your neck. The trimmer himself can’t get down the tree in time to save your life. Assuming he notices at all.

Often you’ll see these guys working with just one spotter on the ground.

Gerardo supervises the job himself, and he also shows up with at least two other guys to wrangle the fronds as the trimmer drops them. But even then: only the trimmer has climbing equipment. If anything happens to him while he’s at the top, none of the men on the ground can get up there fast enough to help him. Without gear, only the strongest and most agile of men could get up there at all.

Forty bucks is too much to pay a man who freaking risks his life so you can have a damn palm tree in your yard? Next to your freaking pool?????

Personally, I think Gerardo is giving away his guys’ services. The trimmer is not going to get anything like $40 per tree, because Gerardo has to pay the other two guys, and he undoubtedly skims off something for his own time — or at least, he surely should. I can’t believe he charges anything less than about $200 a tree.

And even at that: is a man’s life worth $200?

PalmTree2

Abby Did It!

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Hey! Have you been over to I Pick Up Pennies to see Abby’s announcement of her brand-new book? Frugality for Depressives is up and running. Go on over to her site to order it in PDF or ePub, or straight to Amazon for the Kindle version.

Congratulations, Abby!

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