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Frugality

Why Is It So Much Cheaper to Be Skinny?

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Down to 128.8 this morning: hot dang. Exactly on target.

We’re now at the end of January. I hit the 130-pound diet goal on September 26. Since then it’s been too cold to swim and I’ve been too busy to walk every single day (though usually do get some sort of activity in most days). But I’ve managed to stay right around 130 pounds, give or take a pound or two.

I haven’t run a Quickbooks report to prove it, but it’s my belief that I’m spending a LOT less on groceries, despite the mountains of fresh veggies and fruits and the “less meat but BETTER meat” strategy. I’ve spent about $250 on groceries this month — a far cry from the typical $350 to $400 of a year ago.

Why? In theory, it should cost more to eat nothing but whole foods. Are we not told that poor folks consume all that junk food because it’s cheaper, on the surface, to buy processed junk and fast-food? Is it not true that corn is subsidized and healthier vegetables are not? Do we not believe that grass-fed beef, free-range chicken, wild-caught fish, and humanely raised pork are astronomically expensive?

The key, I think, is that when you’re not thinking ahead about what you’re going to eat, you’ll buy anything that comes to hand. Also, when you’re not thinking about cuisine, you tend to eat more at any given time.  When you have a diet strategy in mind, you’re a lot more careful about what you buy, and of course you eat less per sitting.

Now that I’m in the habit of eating smaller portions, the loot hauled in the door from a grocery trip lasts a lot longer. A single stir-fry, for example, provides two or three meals instead of one or two meals. Before, I would scarf the whole delicious thing down and so would have to cook, say, seven separate dinners for a week instead of five or six.

Also, with what we might call “mindful dining,” one is much less inclined to the impulse buy. Before, if I was hungry and in the vicinity of a better AJ’s or a Whole Foods, I would run in and grab a large box of sushi (maybe two!) and, naturally, a beer. Or more likely, a four-pack or six-pack of dark, foamy, delicious stout. And by golly, look at that: real Stilton! And what’s this “white” tea? And ohhhhhh I do love those spectacular barbecued baby back ribs. You can’t have those without a giant twiced-baked potato slathered in cheddar cheese…

“Ma’am? May I rent that llama over there to haul this stuff out to the car?”

And speaking of foamy-delicious beer, although I haven’t quit swilling a potable once a day, my choice of alcoholic beverage has changed enormously.

Quit drinking beer pretty much altogether, except as a special treat: too calorific.

Wine proved to be highly problematic: I dearly love wine and will drink it like soda pop. And it’s too damn easy to pour like soda pop. You finish a glass of wine halfway through your meal, so what do you do? Tip the bottle into the glass to add “just a little more” to come out even. And then just a little more. And then just a little… Uh huh. By the time you’ve finished your diet feast, you’ve consumed half a bottle of $10 red. This not only was too calorific, it was too much to drink and too expensive: at $8 to $12 a bottle plus exorbitant taxes, if you’re buying two bottles of wine a week you’re ponying up around $80 a month — and that doesn’t include the beer you’re buying to go with the sushi and the barbecued ribs!

So the wine imbibulation had to go.

Interestingly, certain breeds of hard liquor contain significantly fewer calories per dose than does a glass of wine. And because I’m not averse to watering my booze down, I can make a shot of whiskey or gin go a lot further than a beer or a glass of wine will go. A single bottle of very good bourbon from Costco will last well upwards of a month, at half the price of eight $10 bottles of middling wine.

Hard liquor has as its advantage that you have to get up and mix another drink if you want another. This activity — get ice, get the bottle out of the cupboard, retrieve the jigger from the dishwasher, get cold water from the fridge — is enough to remind you that it’s time to stop, whereas “just a few drops” more wine encourages you to keep pouring.

In the booze + food department, one thing that soon became apparent is that once you hit your target weight, you can keep it down more effectively by eating larger meals earlier in the day and smaller meals or even just healthy snacks at dinner time. I like a drink with dinner. So, I wait to have a large, glorious mid-day meal until I’ve finished whatever running around needs to be done and know I don’t have to drive any more that day. Because this is likely to be around 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, it means I have to eat a good breakfast that will last until after the noon hour.

This eating pattern, by sheer coincidence, turns out to be an effective weight-loss and blood-glucose management strategy! That’s nice. It also means, though, that if I’ve had a bourbon and water or a gin rickey at 2:00 p.m., I am not going to go back out to the grocery store in the afternoon. By two or three, I’m done with running around spending money.

So, in a lot of subtle ways that have nothing to do with personal finance, the diet plan also works to promote frugality.

Image: Nejmlez. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

woot! Incredible Estate Sale Coup

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So last week La Maya and I descended on an estate sale in an upscale central Phoenix neighborhood. The organizer had photographed and marketed effectively — and they had something good to market — so we got on the road by six in the morning. Numbers were handed out at 7:00 a.m., and we were numbers 32 and 33. Having secured our place in line, we went off to grab breakfast and returned at 8:00 for the opening.

Absolutely amazing! The client apparently was an affluent woman, living alone, who had a great deal of money and a great deal of idle time. Evidently she assuaged her boredom (depression?) with recreational shopping. The house was filled with goods of all kinds, from expensive kitchenware to expensive pocketbooks, that still had their price tags. Wads and wads of costume jewelry, piles of scarves, clothing, tchotschkes, artwork, on and on and on.

I snabbed one item that I won’t describe because it will make a nice Christmas present for M’hijito. Picked up some beads and fake pearls that will be good in the fake jewelry-making enterprise. And then on the way out, as we were standing in line to pay for our loot at the mobbed check-out, what should we find but a box of leather gloves.

Well, I’ve been needing a pair of gloves for my walking project — early mornings at this time of year can be kind of nippy. The other day I looked at Macy’s and almost fainted at the prices, which ran from $60 to $80. Finally ended up buying a pair of nylon things for four bucks at Costco, which do the job but aren’t very attractive.

La Maya grabbed a pair first, in a really beautiful gray leather. Then she noticed they were made in Italy and lined with 100% silk. I found a black pair and an ivory pair that fit, and, not inspecting them any closer, plonked down the $10 per pair to claim them.

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They were clipped together with spring-loaded office paper clips. When I got them home and freed them from the metal clips, I discovered that the black pair was still tacked together with its original little piece of thread — they had never been worn! The ivory pair had been used, but not much. And both pairs were labeled “Made in Italy. 100% Silk Lining”!

Also picked up a hand-made, fine leather wallet that similarly has no sign of ever having been used. My wallet is shot — had to replace the zipper pull with a safety pin — and I’ve been looking for something to take its place. Five bucks!

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Wow! How cool is that?

 

 

Discounted Appliances: Nifty Little Side Gig!

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The appliance repairman was just here, going on about the choices between spending $350 to repair my nine-year-old Bosch dishwasher and buying a new one. In the course of chatting, he revealed that he’s built an incredibly cool side gig, one that seems so obvious and yet not one that I, at least, had ever thought of.

As part of his job, he goes around to various retailers who sell appliances. Many, especially Sears, regularly discount kitchen and laundry appliances — sometimes deeply. Very deeply — about three weeks ago he found a dishwasher, brand-new, marked down 85 percent!

When he finds a serviceable, new appliance (note, these are not used machines), he buys it. Then he turns around and sells it for a profit on Craig’s List. He said he made $500 on the last one he peddled that way.

How about that? If you have a truck or service van that you can use to haul the things around, voilà! A handy-dandy resale business!

I Bought 80 Onions!

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Onion_on_White Prices for onions have come down to a mere 88 cents a pound — that would be 5.5 cents an ounce. You can get them cheaper if you buy them in bags, but that invariably means you end up with at least one that’s spoiled, pushing the price per onion right back up to what it would have cost if you’d selected them carefully, one by one.

I don’t buy large onions, because I usually can’t use a whole one and end up sticking half of it into the fridge, where it eventually dissolves into onion mush. Weighed the small onion I picked up at the Safeway a couple days ago: 12 ounces. That little brown onion cost me 66 cents. A large one would have cost pretty close to a buck. And that, IMHO, is ridiculous.

So I bought 80 of them.

Well. Not exactly of them. 🙂 At Lowe’s the other day, after I’d made my way into the store around the blacktop-roaming pedestrian, I ambled past the nursery’s bulb display and spotted, lo! The last bag of white onion sets. Cost: $1.93 for 80 little onion bulbs.

{Grab!}

So yesterday while I was having another gardening frenzy, I planted them all in the newly enlarged and compost-enriched watering rings around an orange tree and a backyard rose. The package instructions said you could plant them just an inch apart, so in theory you could plant quite a few of them in a good-sized pot.

We’ll see if they grow. If not, little ventured: $1.93 isn’t going to break me up in business. But if they do turn into onions, I’ll have enough to give to all my friends — at two cents apiece!

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Image: Yellow onion. © User:Colin / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0.

Going over to LED Lighting

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IncandescentLightbulbMy neighbor Will, an engineering type who loves numbers, decided to switch out all the lights in his house to LEDs. In his enthusiasm, he created this incredible spreadsheet analyzing the Great Changeout and comparing wattage and other aspects. The thing is fairly elaborate, so I’m going to upload it as an Excel file:

Will’s House Lighting

The file has two spreadsheets, so check out the tabs at the bottom when you open it.

Will says he figures his utility-bill savings are about $25 to $30 a month. I asked him how he came to that conclusion — by comparing power bills, or by calculating energy use based on the lights’ wattage — and whatever got into him to engage this potentially pricey project. Here’s what he says:

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Savings are based on watts consumed compared from beginning 2008 until now. The average is $30 a month, with the change of bulbs and Levelor black-out blinds on the sunny side of the house.

Actually I started incandescent, then went to CFL (Compact Florescent Lights), and am still moving to L.E.D. bulbs as I find ones cheap enough and that fit my purpose both in color and fixture.

LED_bulbs
CFL’s now come in blue/green and warm white. They take longer to charge up, when cold, and to come up to full brightness, which is annoying in  the winter time.

Flickering: Incandescent bulbs flash on and off at a rate of 60 times a second. CFLs flicker like the charged gas they have inside. But L.E.D. bulbs are constant narrow-band light…no flicker….no UV, no attracting bugs,

The cost per bulb is listed on the sources tab of my sheet, as well as where to get them.  I try to keep to around $19 to $25 a bulb.

I have been changing them out a chunk at a time. I plan to do the rest of the PAR 30 lamps this year.

In the candela type bulb, I have only been able to find a good CFL equivalent. So far none of the L.E.D. versions have  met my specifications.

The original 60-watt incandescent were cooking my fan lights. So they got changed to CFLs right away, to prevent a fire hazard.

I did the spread sheet because about ten people were asking for the information and I found myself rewriting it over and over. I figured I’d do this spreadsheet to save me the time.  Since I was already doing the research for myself I figured I’d share and save others the hassle of figuring out all the engineering crap you have to wade through in order to understand these.

It seems many L.E.D. bulb manufacturers want you to pay for all their engineering, so the bulb is like a hundred bucks. And they wonder why no one wants to buy it.

It sort of like those stereo speaker ads from the 70s and 80s.  “Big sale! Pair of 200 Watt speakers for $49.99!” But the problem was it was a big lie.  They were actually thinking 100 watts per speaker, that being maximum peak power rating, so after you calculated the RMS value, they were actually 50-watts speaker. With today’s L.E.D. bulbs you CAN NEVER GO BY THE INCANDESCENT EQUIVALENT ON THE PACKAGE…they are either lying or don’t know their product. 🙂

If I replace the rest of the bulbs to L.E.D, I will have gone from over 3000 watts usage to below 700 watts, and that’s just in bulbs. I may use LightKiwi BR30 bulbs for outside motion safety lights. I’m currently using 75-watt incandescents, but these LightKiwi bulbs are only 11 Watts each.  $24 from manufacturer’s web page or when on sale at Newegg .

Now if I can just get the hamsters to power the a/c in the summer I’ve got it made. 😉

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You can see what other mischief Will has been up to by going to his central website and exploring from there.

Images:

Incandescent bulb: Gluehlampe. KMJ, alpha masking by Edokter. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
LEDs: Commercially available LED lamps (“light bulbs”) with Edison (screw-type) base. Geoffrey.landis at en.wikipedia. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

 

The Frugal Virtues of Buying Expensive Stuff

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This morning a moment of chaos led to an impromptu kitchen cabinet clean-out. It’s not a large cabinet, but it’s one that holds stuff I use all the time, so it gets messy, what with all the shoving in and out of utensils and bowls. As I was setting stuff on the floor preparatory to cleaning the shelves and figuring out a better way to store things, I reflected that if I’ve been in this house for ten years—a proposition I still find hard to believe—then some of those things are really quite old.

There is, for example, a nesting set of stainless-steel strainers, which I use mostly as colanders. I don’t even remember when I bought those—I had them in the old house, and I may have brought them with me when I flew the marital nest. If that’s the case, then they’re a good twenty years old; in any event, they’ve been around for at least fifteen years. And they look and function just like new.

They weren’t cheap. I’m pretty sure I bought them at Williams Sonoma, or maybe from Sur La Table, a favorite source of gourmet cooking gear back when I could afford to buy anything my little heart desired. Williams Sonoma is charging $37 for the current version just now. But like the set of stainless pots and pans with the copper-core bottoms, they’ve lasted and lasted and lasted, through daily use and occasional misuse.

These are things that I couldn’t afford to replace today. Now, if a good piece breaks or wears out, I have to replace it with something cheaper, which about 97 percent of the time equates to something that won’t last. Case in point, the late, great cheapo percolator I bought to replace the very nice teakettle that gave up the ghost after many, many years of service. You may remember this:

Came from Amazon. See that cute little glass bubble thing at the top? That’s where coffee perks up, if you’re using it to brew coffee. It has some half-baked threads that let you sort of screw it into the lid. They’re already shot: the lid won’t stay together anymore. As you’ll recall, I bought this thing last July. Now I need to buy another one.

If I’d paid two or three times as much for a teakettle from Sur La Table or Williams Sonoma, I’d have a pretty kettle on my stove (something that happens to please me, for it makes the kitchen look like someone lives here) that would survive another ten years of daily use.

But, being forcibly “retired,” I didn’t feel I could pay twice as  much for a teakettle that may very well last longer than I will. That’s because I couldn’t. This summer, with everything in sight breaking and expensive upgrades to doors and windows installed after the notorious Garage Invasion (which came within a gnat’s eyelash of becoming a home invasion) and almost no money other than Social Security coming in, I didn’t have the cash.

I’m glad that when I had a job, I bought as much quality as I could afford—considerably more than I can afford now. The Crate & Barrel buffet, the Thomas Moser rocker, the Restoration Hardware overstuffed armchair, the leather chairs and sofa, the Stickley side table (on sale!!!), the good set of stainless cookware, the Heath dinnerware: those will last for the rest of my life, never fall apart, and probably even retain their looks up to the end. Mine, that is. Though they were expensive, they actually were frugal: I’ll never have to buy any of these objects again.

When retirement starts to appear as a speck on the distant horizon, that’s the time to stock up on expensive, well made, and sturdy housewares, tools, and furniture. While you still have an income, buy for the future. It will save you having to replace cheaper stuff several times during your (heh!) “golden years.” The gold in them thar hills, folks: it’s pyrite.