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Frugal Cosmetics: Lemons for your beauty routine

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Here’s something fun and useful: check out Miss Thrifty’s Six Thrifty Uses for a Lemon. The main post has six great ideas, and readers have been adding more—including one link to an experiment that shows how to use lemons as batteries! The physicist in me fails at that stage. But since I’m a woman, my name is vanity…and lemon juice is one of my favorite frugal cosmetics. Here are a few ways to use fresh or bottled lemon juice to spruce up your daily beauty routine:

♥ Facial toner. Don’t spend a ton of money on fancy astringents to apply after you’ve washed with expensive facial cleanser. After washing your face, squeeze a little lemon juice (or use about 1/2 to 1 tsp bottled juice) into the palm of your hand and gently rub it over your face and neck. Be careful not to get it in your eyes.

♥ Neutralizer. If you wash your face with soap, you may find that it leaves your skin feeling dry and puckery. Most hand soaps are somewhat basic—they’re made with lye, after all. Acid neutralizes bases. Applying a small amount of lemon juice or diluted vinegar immediately after washing with soap will bring a quick stop to that parched sensation. If your complexion is naturally oily, a little lemon juice may eliminate the need to apply moisturizer after washing with soap.

♥ Hair rinse. There’s nothing like lemon juice to get the last of the shampoo out of long hair. Pour a little lemon juice over your hair (1/8 to 1/4 cup bottled juice to about a cup of water works well) after shampooing and before conditioning. Again: take care not to get it in your eyes—it stings just like soap.

♥ Hair brightener. Many women apply some lemon juice to their hair and let it sit, without rinsing, for an hour or two. Especially if you go out in the sunlight with lemon juice in your hair, it enhances blond highlights and subtly brightens naturally brown hair. You will need to rinse the juice out before you’re seen in public, since dried-in lemon juice will leave your hair sticky.

♥ Sunspot fade. Used two or three times a day over a number of weeks, lemon juice will lighten age spots. To make this really work, though, you have to stay out of the sun! Apply the juice to lighten spots. After the juice dries, cover the area with a good sunblock. And if the spots are on your face, be sure to use sunblock under your make-up and wear a hat when you’re going outdoors for any length of time.

In the frugal cosmetics department, here are some related posts:

Olive Oil: The Miracle Skin Cleanser
Olive Oil: The Ultimate Hair Conditioner
Olive Oil Soothes Sore, Cracked Heels and Callused Feet
Lemon and Vinegar Highlight Your Hair

Image: Koehler’s Medicinal Plants. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.

If I Had It to Do Over: 10 money moves I’d do differently

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Ever think about what you’d do if you could turn back the clock and be 20 again? Though I wouldn’t especially want to live my life over, there are a number of money moves—and decisions that had more influence on lifelong personal finance than I could have guessed at the time—that I’d either not do at all or that, given a peek forward 40 years, I’d do differently.

For example:

• I would have taken advanced degrees in disciplines whose graduates make decent pay.

Can’t say I regret having prepared for an academic career. It has allowed me to earn an adequate (not generous) living after spending way too much time as a lady of leisure. However, I’d never recommend to a young person who wants a life in academe that she or he pursue a doctorate in the humanities. University faculty in business, engineering, and law earn more than those in other disciplines. A Ph.D. in accounting can start at the assistant-professor level with a six-figure salary, and believe you me, that is one hell of a lot more than you earn teaching history or English.

Mind-numbing major? Puh-leeze! What could be more mind-numbing than postmodern theory? Oh yah: postmodern feminist theory! Give me a bag of beans to count, any day!

Knowing what I know today, I’d still want a career in higher education. I would take an undergraduate degree in a humanities discipline that a) interested me, b) would furnish a young mind, and c) would build skills in logical thinking. But at the same time I would take lower- and upper-division courses in statistics and basic college-level math. Then I would get myself an M.B.A. and a Ph.D. in business management, a subject not too taxing for my sketchy math skills. With those credentials—which certainly demand no more work, expense, or skill than the doctorate in English that resulted in a well respected book published through a prestigious press—I’d be earning about twice what I make now.

• I would have started working in higher education early on, even though it entailed having to teach five sections a semester of freshman comp at a community college.

What I didn’t understand, in my callow youth, about that horrifying prospect is that over time community college faculty find ways to evade the most onerous courses and to wangle course release time, just as university professors do. Nor did I have any idea how much more community college faculty here earn, compared to GDU, UofA, and NAU faculty.

Without the fugues into magazine journalism, today I’d be earning a decent income, and I’d probably occupy a layoff-proof job. Or, more likely, I would have retired by now with plenty of savings to support me in the style to which I was accustomed while I was married to the corporate lawyer.

• If I were 25 again, I would insist that my husband include me in the marital finances.

It was easy to tell my women friends to get a grip on their family finances, establish credit in their own names, and know where the money was. But all the time I was dispensing that excellent advice, I wasn’t following it myself! I had no idea where all our money was going, I did not know what my husband was investing our money in or what debt he was obligating us to, and to tell the truth, I never did know exactly how much he earned. Because he deliberately entered false figures in the checkbook, I couldn’t reconcile the bank statements when I tried, and so I had no clue how much we had in our joint account. Nor did I know about the two other bank accounts he’d opened without my name on them.

• I would open my own savings and checking accounts—preferably at an institution other than the one that held our joint account—and set aside part of my paychecks, my freelance income, or (when I wasn’t working) part of the grocery money.

Being my relentlessly frugal father’s child, I was bothered when the husband refused to save for our son’s college education. But he never tried to exercise any serious control over how much I spent. In those days, I paid for everything with checks and often asked grocery-store cashiers for cash back (cash-back policies were more generous then). I could easily have creamed off $100 a month—weekly cash-backs of $25 would’ve gone unnoticed. If I’d started doing that the month my son was born, I would have stashed $21,600 for him by the time he graduated from high school.

My husband also refused to budget; his express reason was that budgeting is for poor people. Consequently I had no control over our spending and no idea whether I was spending more than we had. If I’d put aside money  for myself, I could at least have budgeted independent of his whims and felt more in control of some of our finances.

• I’d use a credit union instead of banks.

Even before banks decided to make a profitable business of fleecing their customers, credit unions were always preferable to commercial banks. Savings rates are higher, checking is free, and service is infinitely better.

• I would have learned about investing early on.

If I’d had a clue about such things as mutual funds (no joke: before I walked from the marriage, I’d never heard of them), I wouldn’t have taken my husband’s private banker’s weird advice to invest a $40,000 inheritance in (hang onto your hats, folks!) one-week CDs! Yes. Forty grand sat in one-week CDs for over a year, until after I ran away, spent three awful months sleeping on the ground in the outback of Alaska and Canada, and finally made my way back to the city.

Yup. I could’ve invested the $21,600 of grocery money in instruments that earned compounding interest, too. Hmmm. Check out this handy-dandy little calculator. Assuming we went ahead and paid for my son’s education out of his father’s capacious salary and so I just kept on investing a hundred bucks a month for him at, say, 8 percent, today he would stand to inherit another $177,395.38.   Ah, coulda shoulda woulda!

Moving on…

• I would have learned and started to use Quicken the minute it came out.

Quicken is the answer to the innumerate English major’s dreams. Not having to add and subtract (something I can’t do reliably even with a calculator) made it possible to reconcile bank statements easily, without dampening sheets of paper with sweat or with tears. Consequently the program allowed me to take firm control of my financial life, in a way that wouldn’t have been possible when every encounter with money involved a daunting episode of math torture.

• I would have learned how to use Excel.

I still don’t know it well enough to free myself from Intuit, which, despite the glories of its Quicken program, rips off customers by issuing ever-more-bloated annual updates that won’t read data in formats more than three or four years old. Excel does everything I need Quicken to do, it doesn’t go out of date, and it functions across platforms.

• I probably would have spent less on my current home’s landscaping.

I’m pleased with the yard and glad to have it, but something acceptable could have been accomplished at lower cost. Specifically, I wouldn’t install such a large front patio (or possibly any front courtyard!), and I would have planted younger, less expensive trees.

• I would have opened a Roth IRA as soon as they became available and maxed out contributions every year.

Though we can add a substantial amount to our 403(b) above and beyond our mandatory retirement contributions, the university matches only 7 percent of our paychecks. IMHO, that makes these highly restrictive investment instruments less desirable than the after-tax Roth IRA, which accrues interest and dividends tax-free and can be passed to your heirs without encumbrance.

My not building Roth savings from the get-go is a function of late-blooming investment knowledge. Which takes us back to item 6: learn about investing early on.

What would you do differently if you could start from financial scratch again?

On this subject, check out Frugal Scholar’s conversation about the most successful things she and Mr. FS did with their finances.

Facing unemployment: The emotional effects, the business consequences

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By way of handing off her classes to me, the community college instructor for whom I agreed to play substitute while she’s out of town came over to my house with a pile of lesson plans. Let’s call her La Maîtresse (the teacher), for her extraordinary enthusiasm and her creative approach to the often routine first-semester freshman composition course.

After a long conversation with her, I came away feeling a lot better about the pending loss of my own job. Like me, she also is a state employee: she works in a key agency downtown. Like me, she also is being canned after a long tenure—almost thirty years! And like me, she also was presented with a protracted “winding down” period. Don’t know how much advance notice they gave her (my staff and I had nine months), but her hours have been cut to 50 percent FTE and she soon will be working 0 percent FTE. She’s teaching for the same reason I am: to cobble together a survival income.

Centrally located state employees don’t think much of the Great Desert University’s leadership, of its employees’ financial and procedural competence, or of its president’s motivations. She is not the first to express a certain dubiousness about these issues.

Speaking with someone who’s an old-timer in one of the central nodes of a government agency is always revealing, and our conversation was no exception. For one thing, when I related the story of the identical misinformation La Maya and I got from HR officers on two different campuses about collecting accrued sick leave pay (RASL), she remarked that this sort of thing meant the higher-ups were instructing the CSRs to dispense misleading palaver. As you may recall, we were each led to believe, on separate occasions, that a layoff would mean we could not collect the important RASL benefit unless we retired before the university terminated our contracts. This, as it developed, was untrue.

An eligible state employee (one who has 500 or more hours of accrued vacation pay) has two weeks after termination—any termination, whether layoff, resignation, or even firing—to claim the RASL benefit. You do this by submitting a form stating that you’re “retiring,” even if the real reason for leaving state service is not voluntary retirement. Miss the deadline, and you forfeit the benefit: the money reverts to the state agency. La Maîtresse pointed out that where GDU is concerned, our money would go back to the university. This is not an inconsiderable figure: over $25,000 for La Maya; about $20,000 for me. Because the two-week window is rigid and allows no appeal, if you were misled long enough and convincingly enough, you could easily miss your chance to collect your back sick-leave pay. If enough terminated GDU employees believe they’re ineligible for RASL, the university retrieves quite a large sum from monies set aside to pay this benefit.

That’s a level of paranoia that rises even beyond mine, which orbits just above the stratosphere. But is it paranoia? One wonders: it comes from someone who is very much in the know.

She also said she finds less and less to do on her job, a source of great dissatisfaction. It’s reassuring to hear that someone else is having the same experience and reacting to it in a similar way. At this point my team and I have almost nothing to do. I hate this: it makes me feel lâche—like some kind of slacker. Ever since Her Deanship told our client editors, at the start of July, that our office would close in December, they’ve almost stopped sending us work. On the one hand, that’s just fine with me…I have an allergy to work, anyway. But on the other, I don’t like collecting a salary in exchange for precious little.

I dislike it so much that it’s a significant source of stress. In the tooth-grinding department, I rank it right up there with worry about how to get by without a salary.

It was reassuring to learn that I’m not the only one who a) is anxious to start something new; b) questions the goodwill of GDU’s upper management; c) isn’t doing much on the job. Apparently it’s normal for people who are being laid off to experience resentment, anger, loss of self-worth, outright fear, and finally loss of interest in the work.

Because of these predictable emotions, I would argue that keeping staff members through a long “winding-down” period is counterproductive for the institution. In my case, for example—and evidently in La Maîtresse’s case, too—the longer the parting has strung out, the more disconnected from my job I feel, and the more alienated from my soon-to-be-former employer. Three months ago, if GDU had closed my office and then, on the spot, offered a lower-paid but benefits-eligible job elsewhere in the bureaucracy or offered to farm our work to us on an outsource basis, I might have accepted. Now, I wouldn’t touch it. In fact, even though the university pays PhD’s significantly more for teaching adjunct courses than the community college district does, I’m no longer interested in picking up courses from any of the university’s four campuses. Despite the district’s lower pay, from my perspective the community college pasture looks a lot greener just now.

Surprisingly little research has been done on this subject. The 1994 report linked above was inconclusive, and it conflicted with at least one other contemporary study. Here’s a more recent study that’s pretty interesting, if you can get past being characterized as a “victim.” We’re not victims, any more than a fish is a victim of air because it absorbs oxygen through its gills. We’re unemployed workers who, for one reason or another, are not ready to quit working. The same site published a more lightweight report on the long-term negative effects to employers when lay-offs are used to address short-term challenges. The very issues we’re seeing in my case and La Maîtresse’s—plummeting morale, distrust of the employer, and alienation from the job—are mentioned here among factors that undermine the institution over a very long term.

In our talk, it became clear that both of us are more interested in moving forward with new projects and building a new life than we are in dragging out the last few weeks and months in a job that’s a losing proposition. When I’m at the office, I have to force myself to sit still in front of the keyboard: I simply no longer care about doing any work for that outfit. Yes, I’m grateful for the extra months of pay…but the point I’m making here is that expecting disaffected employees to hang around after you’ve caused their lives to implode is as counterproductive for the institution as it is harmful to the workers.

It will be a long time before GDU recovers from the investment losses it sustained in the collapse of the Bush economy and from the often malicious funding cuts inflicted by a hostile, retrograde, and desperate legislature. But it will be even longer before the university recovers from its leadership’s own ill-advised administrative strategies.

Update: Cool vintage carving set

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A little Web-cruising reveals that the carving set that I was lucky enough to find at last weekend’s estate sale must have been made before 1950.

After I cleaned the knife’s blade, a maker’s mark became visible:

Universal
L F & C

“L F & C” stands for Landers, Frary, & Clark, once a prominent manufacturer of household appliances and hardware. Founded in 1862, Landers, Frary, & Clark discontinued its cutlery division in 1950, giving us a terminus ad quem. So that would make the set at least 59 years old.

The handles are probably celluloid. Apparently the company made some products with Bakelite embellishments, but I can’t find any specific statement that L F & C used it for knife handles. On the other hand, this set, whose ferrule (the little ring at the top of the handle) is identical to the ones on mine, is said to have celluloid handles. On the third hand, the writer of this sales pitch incorrectly says the blade and fork tangs are made of stainless steel. They are not: as you can see at a glance, they’re wonderful carbon steel.

This knife enthusiast decribes celluloid as likely to decompose as it ages and remarks that one way to recognize celluloid is that the blade tends to rust. While there are a couple of rust spots on the estate-sale steel, they look like places where drops of water were accidentally left on it; the other pieces show no signs of rust. The blade is pitted in a couple of places along the top edge, so it could have shown some rust and been scoured clean. None of the handles show any sign of decomposition. Yet.

This guy is claiming a similar handle is “bone,” but like our seller who can’t tell the difference between carbon and stainless steel, his claim is dubious. A close look at the photo at this site shows straight, even stripes, very faint ivory-on-ivory, similar to those on the estate-sale treasure:

old knife
Click for a closer view

Another knife enthusiast mentions in passing that Landers, Frary, & Clark used bone on kitchen forks. IMHO, these lines are way too straight to be natural. When seen on end, at the tip of the set’s handles, the lines show an even herringbone grain. Anything’s possible, I suppose…but I’ll bet nothing that precise is natural.

We’re told that the way to distinguish celluloid from the more desirable Bakelite is by warming it under hot water and sniffing it. Bakelite supposedly smells like formaldehyde or an old-fashioned Bandaid, whereas celluose smells like vinegar or camphor. This test results in “none of the above.” It might have a slight Bandaid odor, but it’s so slight as to be most likely imaginary. Lucite, which was fashioned in colors including the ivory-like tint on our set, has no odor but is said to be lightweight; these handles are not. This outfit shows a close-up of a knife and steel set with celluloid handles, which also seems to show those straight lines.

So, I’m guessing the set’s handles are celluloid. Think I’ll take them out of the glass-fronted buffet where they’re now displayed, since corrosive outgassing would wreck the wooden shelves in there. And they’d probably better be used and enjoyed before they start to fall apart.

Free entertainment

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The other evening La Bethulia and La Maya invited me to join them for dinner and then to do the rounds of First Friday, a sprawling monthly open house for galleries and studios in the downtown arts district. Interestingly, they invited a particularly charming friend along—let’s call him Bob ;-)—and we headed off for an Asian bistro on the west side of the Valley.

Since, contrary to the weather prediction, it wasn’t raining, we drove back into town for the large, unruly art walk. So many people were packed into downtown, we couldn’t find a place to park, so we went up to a midtown historic area called the Melrose district, which also houses a few galleries and antique stores. This area, running down for years, is beginning to gentrify as Phoenix’s answer to Seattle’s Capitol Hill. We managed to park close to a gallery right in the heart of Melrose, where we found some amazing found-art sculptures, including a nifty abstract agave, and one really very nice painting that both Bob and I were taken by.

From there we drifted across the street to an aging strip mall where a large drum circle had gathered. By the time we got there, after 9:00 p.m., they were going strong. Athletic young (and some not-so-young) belly dancers were joined by onlookers who frolicked in the street. At least one was teaching belly-dance moves to a few girl children, very entertaining.

It was a fun time, and—except for the modest cost of dinner—it didn’t lighten our wallets. First Fridays are free, though of course one is tempted to buy art, jewelry, and kitsch at the galleries.

One thing that’s clear: in retirement (or unemployment) a crucial trick is to find inexpensive or free entertainment. There’s a lot of it out there. Most of us think we have to pony up cash to be entertained. But that’s not always so.

Saturday morning we came across a club of bicyclists riding in groups through the pleasant desert and upscale neighborhoods of far north Scottsdale: an altogether free activity once you have the bike.

And the community colleges here are alive with inexpensive or outright free events, from the athletic to the theatric. Check out these possibilities:

• Complementary admission days or evenings at city museums
• High-school and community college athletic events
• Meetup.com
• Art walks through gallery or studio districts
• Bicycling and hiking groups
• Church- or synagogue-related activities
• City Parks & Recreation programs

We don’t have to be job-free to develop an interest in frugal entertainment. What do you do for low-cost (preferably free!) fun?

Update: Soda ash frolic

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The great swimming pool soda ash crisis has resolved itself. Along about 5:30 the evening before Bob the Wonderful Leslie’s Pool Guy was slated to show up, I realized that bumping the filter’s backwash valve every 30 minutes or hour had drained off a fair amount of diatomaceous earth, so I added another four pounds.

This stabilized the pressure at 15 psi, and by the tag end of dusk the last of the clouds in the water dissipated, having been kicked up when I broomed another couple of soda ash dunes that were resting on the bottom of the pool. Come dawn, the pressure was holding steady, so I planned to wait  until about 8:00 a.m. and then call off Bob the WLPG, who was supposed to surface between eight and noon.

But he showed up at 7:30.

His face wreathed with the “no one could invent the stuff I hear on this job” look, he heard the story through and then said, “You dumped twenty pounds of soda ash in the water?”

“Yes.”

“He told you to dump twenty pounds of soda ash in the water?”

“Yes.”

Eyeballs water. Inspects filter. Peers into water again.

“Well, what’s happened is the soda ash has finally dissolved. When you add much more than about two pounds, it coats the grids. But because it doesn’t last as long as DE, eventually it breaks down. That’s what’s happened.”

He said it should run just fine, and indeed it has. The water is now sterling clear once again (except for a bit of storm debris). The pH has risen back to the normal level. And the water no longer tastes strangely sour.

Couple hours later, the phone rings. It’s Biker Phil. He’s calling to apologize! (Can you believe that? I was astonished.) He said he wanted to hurry the process along and shouldn’t have advised me to apply the entire twenty pounds at once.

Personally, I’m skeptical that this is Phil’s doing. He struck me as a pretty smart guy who’s anxious to do his job right. Clearly Leslie’s needs to train its sales staff more carefully.

WhatEVer. Thank goodness the pool is now running right again, without having cost any more than the $50 for the soda ash. It sure is welcome in the muggy, hot last six weeks or so of summer!