Coffee heat rising

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.

Dads: How to Be a Thrifty Role Model

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A visiting author’s post by Liam Garcia

These days, fathers are more notorious for being “cheap” than “thrifty.” Too often, mothers are perceived as the money-savers in the home. They coupon, shop during sales, and manage the pocketbook. They even work on DIY projects and home decorating on a budget.

Fathers have a rep (maybe fostered by the distorted images shown in prime-time TV cartoon shows) for advising their children to wear the same clothes for five years and constantly keep the thermostat at 80 degrees, regardless of the weather. But Dad’s stinginess can actually save some money in the long-run.

Listed below are some additional money saving tips for fathers. The next time one of your kids criticizes you for being cheap, just tell them you learned it from a blog.

Be a Fixer-Upper

Your wife might be an expert at DIY crafts and other projects thanks to Pinterest, but you can be your own DIY professional. Popular Mechanics, that old standby of our fathers and grandfathers, has an online presence with step-by-step how-to’s for all sorts of home improvement projects. And for larger projects, Sunset magazine has a seemingly endless series of home improvement and repair guides; these short paperback books are available in libraries, bookstores and at the big-box home improvement stores. On a lighter side, you have blogs such as The Art of Manliness, which dispense buckets of handy hints. Access “fix it” blogs and learn how to maintain your appliances, fix your air conditioner, or even change the oil in your car.

Not only will you save money for your family, you’ll pass on valuable money-saving lessons to your children.

Use Your Employer’s Incentive Programs

The easiest advice: start saving for retirement and use that 401(k)! Depending on where you work, you probably have some sort of incentive program. Some employers implement a “pay for performance” reward system, while others offer corporate memberships.

However your company chooses to reward you, take the rewards and save them. Buy stock in your company, if you desire.

Go Green, Save Green

SpaceHeaterYou can decrease your utility bills significantly by buying energy-efficient appliances. Use power strips in your home for your electronics and always turn the strips off when you aren’t using them. This is referred to as “vampire power,” because it “sucks the life” out of your bill.

Save on your water bill by installing a low-flow shower head or toilet. Plug-in space heaters work well to warm a single room, if only one person is at home or if everyone can be persuaded to hang out in one or two rooms. Similarly, if you live in a warm climate, consider installing window or wall air conditioners to cool the bedrooms, rather than running an expensive central air-conditioning unit to chill the whole house while people are sleeping.

Save on gas and carpool or ride the bus to work; if you live close enough to your job, try biking or walking there.

Hold On To Your Change

I can still remember my fascination with my father’s change jar as a little boy. We would watch it accumulate pennies and count the days until we could go cash it all in. It was fun for my siblings and me.

Today many people simply toss out pennies, because they seem so useless and because converting them into manageable cash at one of those Coinstar machines will cost you 8.9%, an exorbitant rip just to use your own money. Some banks, also, charge you to deposit coins. There are ways, however, to get around these obstacles: check out this article at Yahoo for clues to low-cost or no-cost ways to convert your change to bills, and at Bargaineering, Melissa Batai suggests a few more ideas, and readers add some more.

It may seem like the most literal translation of “penny pinching,” but it can actually benefit you when it comes to vacations and sticky situations.

Cancel the Unnecessary

If you have Netflix, you have no need for cable television. At YouTube, you can even watch full-length classic movies and TV shows for free: search for the movie’s title + “full length.” Instead of watching television shows on your TV, watch them on your laptop. Every network has its shows available (with ads) on their website. If you absolutely must have cable, subscribe to the cheapest package. You’ll probably still get an “on demand” feature even with the smallest package. When it’s time to start looking for a replacement laptop, test an ultrabook rel=”nofollow”. They have the same makeup, but are cheaper and more durable. That way, instead of one laptop, you can buy 2 or 3 ultrabooks for the family.

The Kids Are Watching

When children grow up in a household where both parents practice thrifty habits and demonstrate self-sufficiency, they learn those habits themselves. Not only will you be saving enough to help put them through college and keep yourself out of their hair when you hit old age, you’ll be teaching them healthy and wise ways to cope with their own finances as they reach adulthood.

Liam is a writer for TipsOnHowToSaveMoney.com.

 

Annals of the Floored and Flabbergasted

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So La Maya e-mails to report the latest astonishment: When La Bethulia sold the rental house she owned down near M’hijito’s house, she called the insurance company that issued policies on that house and on two other houses they own, one of them free and clear, and asked them to cancel the insurance on their former possession. Time passes.

La Maya gets a letter from the credit union, which owns the mortgage on their house here in town: they have no proof of hazard coverage from the insurer.

Bet you can see where this is going, eh?

She calls AAA Insurance and discovers that instead of canceling the policy on the rental, they canceled the policy on their residence! The house hasn’t been insured since last October!

Moving on… I decide to drop by Lowe’s while I’m cruising around. As I arrive at the right turn into the parking lot, I see an old guy walking along the sidewalk. He’s going to get to the mega-driveway into the vast parking lot before I do.

So of course I slow down and stop so he can walk cross the driveway, holding up traffic behind me.

He ambles across the blacktop. Gets about three-quarters of the way to the other side and…stops.

Looks like he’s going to turn around and go back.

No.

He circles around a couple of times like a dog getting ready to lie down.

Then he decides to walk into the parking lot, headed toward the Lowe’s entrance…right straight up the middle of the drive. Now he wanders around, blocking the entry, so there’s no way to get into the lot without running him down.

A serious temptation…

Speaking of La Bethulia’s rental house, I see by Trulia that the people who bought it last October did a modicum of fix-up — installed some Saltillo tiles and upgraded the stand-alone studio so it could in theory be used for a rental — and then sold it for exactly what they paid for it!

Why?

An acquaintance who earns his living as a financial adviser recently opined that you don’t pay taxes on Social Security. Well, no. Not if that’s all you’re living on. But if you have the kind of investment income his customers do and you take that advice to heart, you could be in for a surprise.

Whaddaya think? Do we live in a Monty Python show? Or is it a Kurt Vonnegut novel?

Culinary Blast from the Past: Hippy-Dippy Rice Pilaf

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So I’m thinking about dinner and thinking how I’d like some rice with it and thinking how I sure as hell don’t want to drive to the Safeway to restock the now disappeared jasmine rice…when I recall the storage jar full of brown rice — real brown rice — that’s been sitting in the fridge since before the memory of Human runneth not to the contrary.

Hm. Real brown rice takes 40 minutes or so to cook. But WTF…so much the more time to absorb the contents of the bottle of wine I just bought.

Back in the day, brown rice was THE thing among us back-to-the-earthers. Not that we could raise it in our organic backyard gardens…but as a generation, we were prone to manias. One of our manias was the macrobiotic diet, in which one ate brown rice until one’s health failed. Well, actually, that wasn’t the goal, but it was the de facto outcome, if you could stand eating the stuff that long.

Given the vast popularity of brown rice, everyone and every restaurant had a recipe. I mean, if you ever had anyone over for dinner, you had better know how to cook brown rice.

I took my mother’s recipe for what she called “fried rice” (and my friends all called “pilaf”) and substituted brown rice for the Uncle Ben’s Instant (don’t ask), added nuts (macrobiotic!!!), and flavored it with sherry or white wine if I had any on hand. If guests weren’t vegetarians I’d use beef bouillon, beef stock, or home-made chicken stock for the cooking liquid. The result is extremely tasty.

Here’s how this shakes out:

You can use…

• 1 cup old-fashioned, non-quick-cooking brown rice
• some wild rice, if you have it (maybe 1/8 to 1/4 cup) (hippies love wild rice) (don’t know why, but it’s good)
• 2 to 2.5 cups cooking liquid, which may be all or any combination of the following:
…..water, beef bouillon, chicken or beef or lamb or veal stock, white wine, sherry
• 1 or 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1/2 to 1 whole onion, chopped pretty finely
• herbs of various types, to taste, preferably fresh (from the garden last night, I picked marjoram and rosemary)
• other vegetables such as carrots and celery and bell peppers, to taste, as desired or available, chopped
• nuts of one sort or another, such as pecans, walnuts, almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, or pine nuts
• olive oil
• salt & pepper to taste

Skim the bottom of a good frying pan (one with a lid) with good quality olive oil. Preheat briefly over medium to medium-high heat.

Add chopped onion, celery, carrots, and/or mild peppers. Stir until the onion is softened. Add the garlic, nuts, herbs, and rice. Continue to cook until the nuts and rice are toasted, BUT do not let the garlic scorch(!).

Add the cooking liquid. As soon as the liquid comes to a fast simmer (which may be instantaneously if you’ve overheated the pan), turn the heat to medium low. Cover and allow to simmer slowly for about 40 minutes. But come back and check after 20 minutes or so. If the rice has gone dry, add a small amount of water, wine, bouillon or beef stock, or…whatever. Just don’t overdo it.

Continue cooking for a total of around 35 to 40 minutes. The rice(s) should be tender but not soggy, more or less al dente. Wait until the grain(s) are cooked to season with salt and pepper, since the amounts required will depend on what you used as a cooking liquid.

While this stuff is cooking, prepare the rest of the meal. Stir-fry, grilled fish or whatever, baked squash, salads, etcetera.

To serve, garnish with some finely chopped little green onions or, if your guests will put up with it, grated Parmesan or crumbled feta cheese.

It really is  surprisingly delicious. Well worth the time it takes to prepare.

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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.

 

When Rich People Get STUFF…

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This defies belief.

There are some goodies in there that I’d like to have, like that red fake Tiffany lamp (who knows…maybe it’s real!) and the leather love seat and the desk chair that looks Herman Milleresque. And it would be fun to go to this event, simply because it’s always fun to ogle other people’s excess. But my goodness. After slide number 153, the brain begins to boggle. Even with an army of maids to dust all this junk, imagine living with it!

If that prospect is too oppressive, imagine having the money to allow you to buy all that junk.

What would you do with seven fur jackets, even if you lived someplace where it was cold enough to wear a fur jacket?

Ah well. Fortunately we hoi polloi have other riches, which I’ve neglected shamelessly these past few weeks.

The one that delighted me most was Donna Freedman’s lovely (and loving) Valentine’s Day piece. Now we know why she decamped to Alaska!

Frugal Scholar is contemplating jumping off the same cliff I did a few years ago…or, some of her readers might say, doing what I have done, in the House of the Rising Son.

Naked Girl in a Dress reflects — or is led to reflect, by words from the mouth of a babe — that not everything in life has to be perfect.

Heeee! Revanche emits a very funny series of rants about television ads, to which she’s been exposed more than normal of late.

LOL! Nicoleandmaggie’s report of one of those incidents with students that leave a person in her 30s feeling like a dinosaur evinces a long and often hilarious serious of responses from readers.

And Mutant Supermodel spins off a whole new post from that one, entertaining and embellished with an amazing video.

At Blue-Collar Workman, TB considers the ins and outs of bidding for small contracting jobs.

Money Beagle reports an interesting experience with Sprint…one that entails a paradoxically unwelcome $556 credit balance.

NZ Muse experiences an incident that brings up a favorite PF blogger conundrum about picking up the restaurant tab.

At Planting Our Pennies, Mrs. PoP considers perspectives on pain.

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan suggests several ways to cope with insufficient retirement savings, a predicament many Americans will find themselves enjoying. In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau published a study suggesting that just 56% of singles are prepared for retirement. If that figure holds true for couples, about half of us need to start thinking now about how we’ll put food on the table during the 20 to 30 years we can expect to outlive our jobs.

And speaking of retirement, Crystal posts a report on their retirement preparations over at Budgeting in the Fun Stuff. Here’s a pair who aren’t going to be dining on cat food in their dotage!

Five-Cent Nickel contemplates the sequestration drama crisis. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Washington…and interesting to see what happens to the country as a result.

By the way, on more down-to-earth subjects, have you seen this adorable site? Just yesterday, I saw a dog that  looks just like Hufflepup and almost stopped my car to ask his humans if they were the proprietors. Note that in “Socializing and the Pier” he’s smootching a critter that looks suspiciously like a corgi.

Uh oh…time to stop this. System went down and erased this entire post. Fortunately while its whirling mandala was grinding away, I raced over to the MacBook, called up Funny’s dashboard, and managed to copy and paste all the content above into a Word file, rescuing almost two and a half hours of work. That was close!