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Shopping

Shifting the Credit-Card Cycle: An Unexpected Outcome

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You may recall that along about the first of this month, I came up with the wacky-sounding idea of artificially forcing my American Express billing cycle, which runs from the 21st to the 20th, to coincide with my real-life monthly budget cycle, which runs from the 1st to the 31st. To accomplish this, I used savings to pay off the credit-card charges made during the last ten days of August and reset my personal charge-card budget to begin on the 1st of each month and end on the 20th, resolving to use cash to cover discretionary costs for the last ten days of the month.

This would insure that I never buy things with money that’s not already in the bank account. It would allow the same monthly amount for discretionary spending — $1100 — but simply reduce the portion of that amount allocated to put on the charge card. Instead of putting $1100 on the charge card each month, I would put $745 on the card and pay for the remaining grocery and other discretionary bills with $355 in cash. Or less, depending on how much remained in the budget when I got to the last day of the credit-card cycle.

Well, here we are at the 21st. How did the scheme work?

It actually seems to have packed a little surprise.

Wouldn’tcha know it, this month brought two big, unplanned expenses: the pool’s backwash valve handle snapped off — $192 to fix that damn thing — and I bought a new back-saving chair for the TV room, one whose design will force me to sit up straight and not fall asleep in it. The chair cost $600.

I’d figured to pay for the chair out of savings. The two hundred bucks for the pool repair, though, had to come out of the grocery budget, since savings has been raped once too often of late. Yesterday, finding the cupboard running toward bare and the piles of paper on the desk nearly touching the ceiling, I went through all the receipts and bills and entered them in the spreadsheets. Unless I’ve made a mistake (always a possibility), something weird has happened:

When all is said and done, if I can keep purchases over the next nine days down to $180, I should only have to raid about $150 out of savings to pay for everything, including the chair and the pool repair.

There’s enough money in the checking account to cover almost all those expenses, assuming I don’t go berserk in the next week & a half.

How to explain this? Normally outgo matches income each month, right to the penny. But this month, I come up with almost $640 in wriggle room. And yes, that is after projected expenses right up to the 30th.

Could changing the amount budgeted to spend on credit cards make that much difference?

That doesn’t seem to make sense. Thirty days is the same as thirty days, no matter what period the thirty days spans.

I spent about $110 less in Costco this month than over the previous 31-day cycle. Although that doesn’t account for a $640 windfall, it’s an interesting development.

On average, I spend $295 a month at Costco. That covers food, household supplies, personal items, clothing, wine, the annual purchase of chlorine tablets for the pool, and the occasional small appliance. In July/August, I spent $318 there; between August 21 and today, $207.

It occurs to me that shopping at Costco may run up monthly expenses, even though in theory buying in bulk should keep costs down over time. And that’s bizarre: not having to run to the grocery store every time you turn around to buy toilet paper, detergent, and paper towels at inflated prices should save money, not jack up costs.

WTF?

I think the problem may be that Costco is Impulse Buy Central. And it’s that way because of a specific merchandising strategy:

You know that anything you see in that place is likely to be gone the next time you visit. Even things they seem to carry as staples — those wonderful camis, for example, and the incredible Borghese mineral make-up — eventually disappear from the shelves. So if you spot something that you think you’re going to want sometime in the near future, you buy it now, even though you don’t need it now.

You buy things you don’t need immediately because you suspect that in two weeks or so, when you’ll be back, the store will no longer have it.

When you think about that, it’s a brilliant piece of marketing, eh?

Since the start of this budget rejiggering scheme (August 21), I’ve shopped in Costco three times. But between the first and today, I spent only $85 there, hoping to preserve as much cash as possible to cover the last, charge-free ten days of the month. That’s because I’ve restricted purchases to only those things I can’t find anywhere else. Otherwise, I shopped in grocery stores.

Not even Whole Foods has the vast array of impulse-buy temptations presented by Costco. Instead of buying for future needs and grabbing that pair of red Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and snatching the cool little highly portable handy-dandy shop vac, I’ve been buying only what I actually need at any given moment. Even if that costs more than buying staples and household goods in bulk, I spent fewer dollars because when I’m not exposed to things that I don’t really need right now, I don’t buy them.

It still doesn’t account for a $640 windfall — there must have been more money in the account at the end of last month than I realized. However…it’s telling.

I’m thinking that a great deal of money could be saved, month-to-month, simply by staying out of Costco. The store does carry some things I can’t find easily anywhere else, certainly not for the price:

• tomatoes with flavor (those Campari-brand tomatoes actually taste like tomatoes, and they cost a lot less at Costco than cocktail tomatoes at other stores; their flavor is better, too)
• Glorias (jeans that fit grown women)
• chicken and pork for the dog
• dog veggies (frozen vegetable mix with no corn, onions, or artificial flavorings)
• chlorine tablets (vast savings!)
• toilet paper in lifetime supplies
• paper towels in lifetime supplies
• walnuts, pecans, and pine nuts
• cheap wine
• hard liquor in lifetime supplies

Really…that’s not very much stuff.

Maybe buying everything else in smaller quantities at other stores would push monthly costs down, even if the amount paid for certain things (meat and fresh produce, for example) would be higher.

Geez. If I could recover even $200 or $300 a month out of the budget — to say nothing of $640! — my life would be so much better! I could actually DO some things, rather than just getting by from day to day. Imagine being able to afford to go to shows, buy some decent clothes (new, not second-hand!), and go out to a restaurant without feeling guilty. Maybe afford the gas to drive up to Prescott or over to Bisbee now and again.

Imagine that.

Frugal Coup of the Day!

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Well! I pulled of a frugal coup this morning, without even hardly trying.

The wardrobe has been running short on plain, easy-to-care-for, unobtrusive knit tops that I can wear on the junkets around the park (now three miles long, in 90-degree heat at 5:30 in the morning), loaf around the house in, and not look too unpresentable in at the grocery store. The ones I’ve had have just worn out. After the last closet-cleaning frenzy only three such priceless garments were left.

The early mornings are now pushing humid and hot enough that I’m soaked by the time I get back to the house. Running the laundry every three days is not how I want to amuse myself.

A year or more ago, I found plain, unadorned, well-made Calvin Klein T-shirts at Costco. Went back to acquire some more. Naturally Costco isn’t carrying them anymore.

So on the way home from this morning’s Scottsdale meeting, I stopped at the mildly upscale Biltmore Fashion Square and popped into Chico’s, which I recall as usually having such shirts on sale during the summer.

Nope.

They had a few V-neck shirts. I hate V-neck T-shirts. I want crew necks.

Over to Black & White.

Nope.

Ann Taylor.

Not a chance.

Brooks Brothers.

Like, I’m sure. 🙄

Finally dragged into Macy’s. I really don’t like shopping in Macy’s. It’s such a jumble of stuff that if whatever you want is in there somewhere, you have about a snowball’s chance of finding it. But what the heck. The alternative to was to buy something from Amazon, sight unseen.

Trudged through the second-floor women’s clothing department. Found two, count’em, two that pretty much filled the bill: $25 and a 25% discount. Traipsed through the swimsuit department looking for a cover-up that might work. Actually found one: $78.

😯

Moving on, I picked up a third knit T-shirt, cutely screen-printed, on the way to the checkout — $30, the same 25% discount. None of them thrilled me, but they would do. Not exactly what I wanted, but close enough. One, I saw at check-out, had some sort of frou-frou smocking in the back.

{sigh}

Shuffling off the escalator and through the main floor toward the exit, I had a thought:

Maybe I should look in the boy’s department? Or…what about in the men’s department? Men wear T-shirts!

Hence a detour into Men’s Wear.

Actually, I found two really cool T-shirts, one of them a Tommy Hilfiger in deep-ocean blue with this wild octopus on it. Continued shoofing around…and lo! What should appear, tucked away in a back corner, but a big display of ABSOLUTELY PERFECT 100% cotton T-shirts in every color of the rainbow!

And! To gild those lilies, the things were marked $7.98 — regular price!

The men’s “small” fits like it was made for me. The “medium” is a little large — not unsightly, but extremely comfortable.

I grabbed one in bright teal blue, one in little-old-lady violet (yes! can you believe…in the men’s?), and one in tan. If there’s any cash left at the end of the month, I may go back and get the bright pink and the deep purple and maybe a green.

So I take these three finds to the Men’s Wear checkout guy and explain that I searched all through the women’s department looking for something like these and now I want to buy them from his stock and I want to return the overpriced stuff I bought upstairs.

w00t! After the returns were tallied and the guy’s T-shirts were purchased, the AMEX card still had a net credit of $32!

 

Gimme that old-time household junk…

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flyswatterHave you tried to buy a fly swatter lately? I mean, a real, old-fashioned screen-type fly swatter, not a piece of plastic that falls apart the first time you whack it against a counter, not an electronic gadget ironically tricked out to look like a tennis racket. You can order one at Amazon, o’course (that place is as good as The Country Store for carrying seldom-seen products of yore) — but only, we’re told, because it’s been made possible by the “Add-on program.” The Country Store, BTW, does not feature fly swatters in its online catalog.

Neither, in their brick-&-mortar incarnations, do Target, Walgreen’s, Safeway, Fry’s, or Albertson’s…least not so’s I can tell.

Nor do they sell a real, honest-to-God whisk broom, or a true dust-pan broom of the sort that actually picks up debris and is large enough to matter. Or a true, really tough scrub brush. Yeah, they have some stupid little brooms and brushes: flimsy imitations made with fake fibers that don’t have anything like enough substance to do the job.

flyswatter2Comes the Crate and Barrel catalog in the mail, and lo! They have exactly these items — real brushes and a strange little fly swatter that probably will do the job better than plastic and may work as well as a real one. They’re only available online, although you can call an 800 number and order through an actual human being. Through May 19, they’re offering a free shipping promotion.

Apparently this new department is meant to compete with Restoration Hardware, which, last time I was in one of those stores, no longer offers many of the dozens of extremely cool “hardware” items RH used to sell. All my fault, no doubt, for rarely ever buying the stuff: Restoration Hardware prices were out of my league, even back when I had a decent job. RH still offers some of those things online, but…well. A dustpan brush similar to Crate & Barrel’s $14.95 number goes for an amazing $38…and that’s with the 20% discount presently in place. The actual price is $45!!

Presumably it’s meant as a decorator item, something you hang on the wall in the kitchen to evoke homey days of old. You sure wouldn’t want to damage a $45 dust brush by actually using it.

Annoying, to have to pay ultra-premium prices for what used to be (and still ought to be) the most ordinary household products, available at every corner dime store. Well, I’m glad to see at least of few of them coming back, although it would be better still to find them widely and at more accessible retailers. Crate & Barrel is not only underpricing Restoration Hardware, its $9.95 price (!) for the fly swatter beats the $12 plus shipping at something called Nessentials.

When did the banal become the effete?

duspan

 

MacJunketing

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Yesterday KJG invited me to join her in a quest to buy a new computer. Or, more to the point, a Mac.

She’s had an iPhone for a while, likes it, and in the course of using it has grown accustomed to some of the Macinoid ways of doing things. Her laptop PC having arrived at its last legs (or whatever PCs have), she had pretty much decided she wanted to at least seriously consider a Mac.

So we presented ourselves at the Arrowhead Mall Apple store at 10:00 a.m., the moment it opened to the general public.

That was when we met the most amazing man. His name is Stan, and he and his yellow lab are employed full-time as sales reps for Apple computers. What a remarkable guy! He’s stone blind. Using Apple’s voice function plus an amazing tactile memory and about the quickest mind any of us have ever had the privilege to meet, he had no problem demonstrating how the various choices of products work, how they compare, and what the various choices (for example, of memory) mean in the context of the two businesses KJG and Mr. KJG operate.

The hound had recently had surgery and so spent most of his time resting. No matter. Stan had no problem navigating the store and all its products on his own, all the while operating as an engaging salesman.

He sold me a cool little Bluetooth keyboard tricked out as a cover for the iPad. It works like one of those expensive and useless little fold-up covers you can buy, in that it will put the iPad to sleep when you “close” it. But it gives you a small keyboard with actual keys that actually work, unlike the endlessly annoying virtual keyboard that pops up whenever you need to type something into an e-mail or a web page. This infuses enough usability into the iPad to make the gadget a practical device, something that I haven’t found to be true since I bought the thing.

And I learned that Pages, which only costs a few bucks and which now will manipulate Word documents, can be downloaded into an iPad as a fully functional app. So can Numbers, a spreadsheet with power comparable to Excel’s.

Hot dang!

I’ve wanted a spreadsheet app that would allow me to enter, say, a budgeted amount for Costco, so that I could carry the iPad into a store with me and keep a running tab of what I’ve spent. This would simplify life considerably. But the spreadsheet apps I’ve found so far leave a lot to be desired…like, say, usability.

The new keyboard gadget, Numbers, and Pages will hugely improve the iPad’s functionality. Too bad the thing doesn’t come already loaded with these things — it’s only taken, what? two years to figure this out.

KJG wanted some time to think about all she’d learned before deciding on a purchase, so from there we wandered to a shoe store — decided that the new Mephistos are surprisingly uncomfortable — and through several wonderful stores for teenyboppers and twenty-somethings (imagine! once we could wear stuff like that), and into a Coldwater Creek (this is what we have to wear now????), and over to the food court, and finally back to the Apple store.

Finally she decided on a 13-inch MacBook with a mid-range of memory. The staff there walked her through setting it up, and when last heard from, she was e-mailing messages from the little guy. 🙂

So that was fun. And productive, too.

Amazon.com Rises to the Occasion!

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Gosh! This is pretty amazing.

Remember that I found the coveted ClosetMaid over-the-sink dish drainer at Amazon, for the bracing price of thirty bucks? Readers were abhorred and protested that the contraption was to be had elsewhere on the Web for significantly less. But then reader Karen found it, at Amazon, for $15!

Well. Truth to tell, I’d already ordered the thing at the inflated price before I wrote that post. My cookies frosted, I wrote to Amazon and groused. A living CSR actually responded by e-mail, amazingly enough. This person emitted some policy, superbly obfuscating and superbly obvious. I wrote back and remarked that I understood all that (“all that” basically came down to caveat emptor), but I still felt I’d been ripped off to the tune of about fifteen bucks.

To my astonishment, this afternoon along comes an e-mail from Amazon reporting that they’ve credited my account for $15!!!

The thing showed up in the mail today, along with the stylish Le Creuset tea kettle I ordered at about the same time.

How cool is that?

Green LC teakettle

Grocery-store Gasoline Discounts: Deal or No Deal?

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At  Planting Our Pennies, Mrs. PoP reflects on grocery-store offers of gasoline discounts that grocery stores sometimes offer regular customers. Ultimately she concludes that these programs are hardly worth the effort.

Here in lovely uptown Phoenix, Safeway stores offer a gasoline discount after you’ve racked up some crazy number of dollars on purchased registered with the annoying red card. So every once in a while, they’ll offer my deceased dog (in whose name the card is made out) cents off on gas.

Problem: the nearest Safeway with gas pumps is way to hell and gone up on the north side! Safeway has reserved its shiniest new stores, the ones that sport gas stations, for the White Flight set. So Safeway gas stations exist only in areas close to the upper-middle-class tracts where the white folks have moved. And those areas are way, way off my beaten track. By the time I got all the way up there and back, I would have spent more on wasted gasoline than I would have saved on the gas buy.

And besides…better strategies exist.  IMHO the Costco AMEX card is about the best of those.  You get 3% back on gasoline (which is usually pretty cheap at Costco to begin with), 2% back at U.S. restaurants, 2% back on travel purchases, and 1% back on everything else. Once a year you get a lump-sum  cash back “reward” — a kickback on purchases made during the year.

There’s a Costco on every corner in this city, so it seems. Costco underprices stations in the immediate vicinity of its stores. Gasoline prices vary wildly by the part of town you’re in: in upscale Scottsdale you can pay ten to thirty cents a gallon more than other parts of town. In the westside slums, you’ll pay ten cents a gallon less than you’ll pay in the more or less middle-class tracts in the central areas or the far west.

One Costco, which is on my way to many destinations, straddles an aging middle-class district and a downscale high-density area that feathers into the gang-infested tracts bordering the I-17. That thing ALWAYS has the lowest prices around. I try to time gas purchases to days when I know I have to drive down in that direction. The gas is cheaper in the first place, and then I get a 3% kickback on it.

So ultimately, by purchasing gas at Costco regularly — even if I happen to be at one of the higher-priced outlets — I end up saving a lot more than I would if I traipsed up to North Phoenix for the privilege of collecting “bargain” gas from Safeway.

In the gasoline department, BTW: man, quitting the hateful teaching gig sure is saving on the gas! In the last month I taught, the four-day-a-week commute racked up an astonishing $230 in gasoline bills. In the first full month of freedom: just $80.

Just think of all the things I can diddle away that $150 savings on! 😀