Coffee heat rising

Frugality

Declutter! Clear your life of wasteful trash

by

Why do we tend to fill our lives with dust-catchers and useless junk? Every week when the notices for the current round of estate sales arrive, my mind is filled with wonder.

What does a person do with all that stuff? Where on earth do you store it? Many houses where these estate sales take place are not huge…how do the occupants find room for the piles and piles of stuff? And why would they keep it at all? For that matter, why did they acquire it in the first place?

There’s this, for example:

Everyone needs a glass chicken, right? To go with the fake flowers. These photos aren’t the greatest, being thumbnails. But you get the (heh) picture.

Collecting is one thing I’ve never been able to understand. Why accrete a large number of useless items just because they have one trait in common—images of pigs, say? The pleasurability of this, for example, escapes me:

Scores and scores of Matchbox Cars, all in their original, unopened packaging. Someone evidently viewed this as akin to an investment, since enough people have a fixation on accruing Matchbox Cars to make them “collector’s items” and therefore, one speculates (and we do mean speculates) that someday they’ll have some outrageous value. So, we might speculate, will our house. Our stock market holdings. Our plastic hydrangeas…

They’re toys. Kids are supposed to play with them! Grabbed off the market and left to collect dust in some closet, their purpose is perverted.

Over the past couple of decades, developers have been designing houses with “plant shelves” (read “dust-collection platforms”). It also has become the vogue to install cabinetry that doesn’t go to the ceiling, possibly because high ceilings are popular and cabinets are built so cheaply these days they won’t span that much space. The result is that every newer kitchen (and many older, renovated kitchens) comes with ready-made dust-collection platforms, all of which call out to the homeowner: ohhh please: fill me with STUFF!

This kitchen scene appears in a house occupied by an interior designer, who’s in the process of unloading the high-end furnishings of her present home so she can start over in new digs:

The chintzy cabinets are in a large, expensive house:

But the developer still couldn’t see fit to provide the well-heeled (or generously financed) homeowner with cabinetry to fill the available space. So what has she done? She’s stuffed it chuckablock full with plastic plants, plastic fruit, plastic vegetables, fake duck decoys, decorative pottery, collector plates, carved wooden boxes, and basketry, all of it collecting dust and (if she cooks) kitchen grime. Makes sense, eh?

Just look at this clutter!

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

She couldn’t use any of it if she wanted to: how likely is it that in the middle of cooking dinner she’s going to traipse out to the garage, drag in a ladder, climb up to somewhere near the elevated ceilings, haul down that gravy boat, drag the ladder back to the garage, and wash the dust and grease off the thing before she does anything with it?

But so pretty, you say, and you ask, “What’s wrong with this harmless expression of one’s taste and love of…junk?” Let us count the ways!

• It’s not frugal. Au contraire. It’s wasteful. Buying and stashing junk we will never use is incredibly wasteful! Think of the trips to Paris this woman could have taken with the cash she put out for all that debris. Or…think of all the food she could have contributed to charity, if she just wanted to get rid of her money.

• It’s selfish. It keeps products out of the hands of those who might use them. Case in point: the Matchbox Car fetish. When collectors grab these things off the market, it drives up the cost of nifty toys. Little boys (and yup, little girls!) who should be able to buy them with their allowances now can’t touch them. In this case, it’s akin to stealing candy from children.

• It’s not green. Consider the resources that went in to making and transporting all that pottery, basketware, and plastic foliage, just so it could sit on top of some woman’s kitchen cabinetry and collect dust!

• It creates a stupefying amount of extra work. We (or someone) will have to dust and clean all the tschochkies we’ve littered the “plant shelves,” cabinet roofs, and countertops with.

• It’s inconsiderate to the point of rudeness. After we croak over, someone is going to have to dispose of all the debris we gathered and stuffed into every closet, cabinet, nook, and cranny of the dwelling, garage, and storage shed. Why should our heirs or landlord have to spend hours (some have the privilege of spending days) gathering all the junk and finding some place to get rid of it? Why should they have to hire a company to sell Mom’s or Dad’s junk and then pack up the stuff that some other sucker wouldn’t buy and cart it to the dump?

What to do, what to do?

Well, first, let’s all refrain from collecting stuff that serves no practical purpose. If it doesn’t do something (collecting dust does not qualify as “something”), don’t get it.

Second, let’s invest our money in something better than speculative “collector’s items,” and leave the toys for the kiddies to play with. We could stash our money in a high-yield online savings account until such time as it’s accrued enough to buy into a low-load mutual fund. As investments go, savings accounts and securities are lot more likely to show some profit, a lot sooner, than will a collector’s item whose main function is to gather dust.

Third, resist! Resist buying houses that are designed with dust-collection shelves and corner-cutting cabinetry that shorts you on storage space. If you already live in one of those houses, get yourself some drywall, tape, and plaster and fill in the stupid shelves. If you know the brand and make of your cabinets, find the cabinetry maker and try to buy some matching cabinets that will fill in the space between the existing boxes and the ceiling. Don’t buy houses that give you useless space, but if you’re stuck with one, eliminate the useless space.

Fourth, at the very least, if we must have houses adorned with dust shelves, let’s refrain from filling them with dust-collectors. You could, for example, install up-lighting in them (puck lights are easy to install and very cheap at your nearby box home improvement store). Or…there’s no law against leaving them empty.

And finally, when something we don’t want anymore still has some use left on it, let’s pass it to someone else, whether by selling it or donating it, instead of saving it for a posterity that doesn’t want it.

Frugality is minimalist. Clutter is wasteful.

Space heater works to save on power bills

by

This winter I decided to heat the room I’m occupying with a space heater, rather than use the central HVAC system (a heat pump) to warm the entire house. At night, I’m turning the heat off altogether.

The electric bill just arrived: $90.99. Last January it was $128.14. That’s a $37.15 savings. More, in reality: the power company raised its bills by 6 percent this year.

It’s up from last month’s bill of $63.52, probably because this January was cooler than December and I did turn the central heating on a few times to take the chill off the morning. This winter has been warmer than usual—only a couple of nights in the low 30s, though the neighbors’ roofs are white with frost every at every sunrise. January was rainy and gray. In December, the sun shone most every day, warming the house through the south-facing windows by 10:00 a.m. Still, if you believe the graph included in the power company’s bill, I used a little more than half the kWh I expended last January…and last winter was pretty cold.

So, now we have two months’ worth of data suggesting that the use of space heaters, sweaters, and warm blankets works to beat ever-expanding power bills.

Was I cold? A few times. But never unbearably so. When I felt cold I put on some more clothes. You are, after all, supposed to be cold in the winter.

Pennies saved…

by

Sometimes it’s well worth a trip to return small items to a store—or to question a bill—that may seem too minor to be bothered with. A penny saved, after all, is a penny earned…and pennies add up.

For a week or two, I’ve needed to return a jug of Costco’s “environmentally friendly” laundry detergent and trade it in on the “Free & Clear Ultra” version. Stupidly, I imagined that environmentally friendly meant “unadulterated by industrial perfumes.” Wrong! When I opened it I found it stinks of some allegedly “clean-smelling” chemical. I want my sheets to smell of the open air and my clothing to smell washed…not full of an odor that some industrial chemist imagines the Little Woman will imagine smells “clean.” Cheap perfume smells of cover-up, not of cleanliness.

In the interim since I’d bought that stuff, I’d also purchased a bag of scrumptious-looking frozen asparagus spears, proudly branded “organic.” Not until I was about to slice the bag open did I notice the label saying “Product of China.”

No, thank you. Couldn’t pay me to put a product of China in my mouth, not on purpose anyway. This is the country whose food producers poison dogs, cats, and babies in pursuit of profit.

And a couple of days ago I’d picked up a bag of sweet onions, all but one of which, when the bag was opened, proved to be spoiled.

Trekked the rejects back to Costco this noon and came away with a $26.79 credit. Bought a new container of laundry detergent for $15.15, netting $11.64.

Then it was off to Radio Shack, where some time back I’d noticed a double-charge on a receipt. Luckily, the old guy who manages the store—who sold me the goods for which I was accidentally double-billed—happened to be in. He promptly refunded the phantom charge: $16.23.

So: my net refund came to $27.87. For a dollar’s worth of gas and an hour of my time.

Yay! When added back into this month’s budget, it puts me firmly in the black, despite the beekeeper’s bill, which only came to $75, not the $125 he proposed to charge.
A$k and ye shall re¢eive.

Get better hamburger, cheaper

by

Dropped by the Safeway on the way home from the Apple Store. Checked the butcher’s sale counter, and yup! They had 7-bone chuck roasts for $2.79 a pound. Since that’s significantly cheaper than Safeway’s hamburger, I always get a roast and have the butcher grind it up for me. Also I ask to have any bones that come with, which I can use to make wonderful beef broth.

Their regular hamburger, cobbled together (according to the sign) from carcasses hailing from Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, ranged in price today from $3.37 to $5.29 a pound! For hamburger. For not very good hamburger.

The amazing thing is, when you have the butcher grind a roast for you, the result is infinitely tastier than what you get when you buy packaged or butcher-case hamburger. It NEVER drips water into the fire. It never leaves you with a frying pan half full of water and…stuff. It came from one cow, not from some unknown number of cattle, and you know what the meat looked like before it was turned into hamburger.

In this case, frugality not only works, it works better.

Believe I’ll cook up some broth with the chuck bones and a few others (I also picked up, very cheap, some lamb neck, and I have a few other bones in the freezer). Then with the burger I’ll make some of that albondigas soup I posted a while back. Yum!

How the garden grows!

by

Well, darn it! My camera won’t export my most recent veggie photos into iPhoto. But trust me: the garden is lookin’ good. Click on these thumbnails (twice!) for some older photos of the tiny babies…

Everything is much bigger now. I’ve thinned the chard and beets. The tiny pea plants are now pea toddlers, as it were, and are beginning to put out tendrils. I haven’t gotten around to thinning the carrots, mostly because they’re so thick it’s sorta daunting to figure out how to thin them without damaging the survivors—must do that today.

Having watched Jim’s summer-long gardening project at Blueprint for Financial Prosperity, I drew a few conclusions…well, more like theories…relevant to my own craving for garden-fresh veggies.

First, I think it’s probably best to plant in the ground rather than to continue the container-gardening strategy. I’ve always liked to grow things in pots. However, plants seem to prefer being in real dirt in the real ground. In Arizona, too, you have to use a lot more water to keep a plant alive in a pot: once the weather hits about 95 degrees, you have to water every morning or your plants will fry by midafternoon. Less water is needed when plants are in the actual earth. And pots, potting soil, and the extra fertilizer needed to replace nutrients washed out by frequent watering are expensive.

Second, also related to the local weather: fall and winter seem to be the best growing seasons here. Anything leafy bolts to seed when the ambient temperature reaches about 80 degrees, which is most of the time. Between October and March, though, lettuce, chard, and spinach seem to last forever. They can take a light frost with no damage, and you can pick off enough leaves for a salad or a side dish, letting the plant continue to produce more for you through the winter and early spring. Some tomatoes will bear fruit before the frost (they hate getting cold-nipped, though, and generally die in December).

Third: grow from seed. Buying plants at the nursery quickly turns into a pricey proposition. If you get started early enough, you can get a nice healthy crop in just as the weather turns perfect. Seeds are very cheap and produce a zillion plants.

And fourth: don’t think you’re going to save much on this project. Think of it instead as a way to get especially delicious, vine-ripened produce that you know to be as chemical-free as possible. And think of it as a stress-relieving hobby that brings you some pleasure, gets you outdoors, and on the side presents you with something good to eat.

This winter’s Grand Experiment is bush peas. Casting about for a place to plant them (my yard is xeriscaped and doesn’t have many unoccupied planting beds), I realized the basin around the queen palm gets watered a couple times a week by the overflow from the Meyer lemon tree. So I excavated some holes in the gravel, digging down to the dirt, and filled the holes with commercial garden soil plus some compost from my own compost bin. Stuck a pea or two in each prepared hole. If they want to climb at all, they can go up the palm tree’s trunk. These are doing quite well today.

I still had more than half a package of peas after this, though. So I found an old plastic plant pot and filled that with the rest of the bag of garden soil I’d bought to improve the flowerbed near the pool (which now hosts chard, beets, carrots, herbs, and a tomato plant). Not ideal, but better than nothing. The ones I put in that are kind of crowded—probably also need to be thinned—but just now are doing very well. I love fresh peas! And they never show up in grocery stores any more. On the rare occasions that I’ve found them, the price is well beyond my budget. So I do hope these grow and produce. 🙂

No-shop days boost frugality

by

Despite an extravagance (bought some dishes at Pier One), it looks like I’m going to end this month’s budget cycle in the black, for the first time since the memory of Person runneth not to the contrary. All I have to do is make it to Sunday without spending any more money.

This accomplishment came about simply by staying out of stores. Every day you can stay away from a store (or a gas station) is a dollar saved. With the week-to-week budget, I’ve found that if I can avoid laying out cash in, say, week 2, there’s enough in week 3 to cover the deferred spending. Or if I overspend in week 2, I can catch up by pinching pennies in week 3.

A day or two, or even three, is not an unreasonable length of time to hold off buying most necessities. I’m completely out of onions, for example, but so far the deprivation hasn’t killed me. I’ve evaded emptying the gas tank by telecommuting a day this week; I’d planned to telecommute again today, but in fact there’s enough gas in the tank to get me to campus and back, and so I’ll probably go out there this morning. If the gauge were closer to empty, though, I could make the round trip on two gallons. Six dollars would not push me into the red this week; though in past weeks it would have.

Before the run-up in gas prices, I had to make a conscious effort to stay out of the stores where I routinely buy supplies: I’d work “no-shop days” into my schedule. But thanks to the exuberant increase in the price of gasoline, no-shop days have become habitual. Not only that, but because I now shop exclusively in stores along my commute, I no longer shop at Home Depot.

And that, my friends, generates a surprising savings.

Last weekend I needed a few things I didn’t think I could find at the Ace Hardware, plus some potting soil, which is overpriced at Ace and at the nursery. So I made a special trip up to the Depot, several miles from my house.

One bag of potting soil, three timer gadgets for the garden hoses, three $1.37 bags of plastic plugs to cut off the irrigation lines, two cheesy plastic cord reels (last time I was in there, they hadn’t had the kind of reels I needed for months—grab it while you can get it), a bag of palm tree fertilizer, and a six-pack of tiny bedding plants came to $107.

I couldn’t believe it!

The largest single expense was the hose timers: about $20 apiece. Coincidentally, the style I wanted (a thing that resembles a kitchen timer) was the cheapest available. So that accounts for $60 + 8.3% tax: $65. With any luck, that cost eventually that will pay for itself in water savings—if the plastic junk doesn’t fall apart before the timers have recovered that much from the water bill. But forty-two bucksfor a bag of dirt, a bag of nitrogen, a few pieces of plastic, and some seedlings?

Apparently I’m not the only one who’s concluded that Home Depot cuts too much out of the budget. At 1:00 on Sunday afternoon, the parking lot was half empty. Without using my disabled sticker, I got a space right in front of the door. I’ve neverbeen able to park in front of the store; not ever. On weekends especially, the place was jammed.

No more.

The weird thing is, I’m not missing Home Depot. Its bazaar-like layout leads you to spend more than you have to on things you don’t really need. The flimsy cord reels, for example: I needed them last Christmas. Somehow I’ve struggled through nine months without them. Clearly I could have lived the rest of my life unburdened by cord reels. And had I been in Ace Hardware, I would have gone directly to the shelves that stocked what I needed and, not wandering through the electric department in search of irrigation plumbing, I probably wouldn’t have been reminded that I “needed” cord reels. Nor would I have purchased the plants, since Ace doesn’t carry them: that impulse buy would have been deferred until I could make a special trip to the nursery, at which time I’d have a list of the specific plants I needed and so would not have picked up just anything that struck my fancy.

After the $107 hit at Home Depot, I made a run on Costco for food and gas ($111), stopping by Fabric Depot along the way to pick up some yardage to make the coveted placemats ($32). This left $125 in the week’s budget—the final week in the August-September budget cycle. I did spend nine bucks on a miserable little lunch on the campus one day this week, only because I was so hungry I couldn’t go without some food, and another twenty on a few groceries. After subtracting last week’s $77 overrun, I’m still $17.51 in the black. And for the whole month: $151.99!

w00t!