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Frugality

Month of extreme frugality (NOT!)

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Wow! If there’s any question about whether Karma is mad at me, the laughable effort at a month of extreme frugality answers it! Not only did I fail to save extra money to apply toward the Renovation Loan Payoff Fund, for the first time since I started the weekly budgeting system, I ended the month-long cycle in the red!

I was $23.57 in the black on May 16 and thought I might make it to the end of the billing cycle, but just couldn’t do it. The main reasons were the dog and the astronomical cost of gas.

The dog went off her feed, causing her to barf up the meds. So I had to go by Sprouts to pick up some ground lamb and lamb neck bones to persuade her to eat; while I was there I got some hamburger for myself (totaling $15.89). Then I had to buy a new prescription antibiotic for her, relatively cheap at $26.80 but still more than I had left in the budget, even without the cost of food. These two trips consumed just enough gas that I wasn’t sure I could make the 36-mile round trip to the office on what remained in the gas tank, plus I had to come home the long way to go by a client’s office and deliver a completed project. My van gets 18 miles to the gallon, so I bought about 2 1/3 gallons at Costco: 13 cents a gallon under the going rate, but still $3.47 a gallon. These expenses put me in the red.

This compares abysmally with the first three months of this year:

Before this disastrous month, the worst I did when I wasn’t trying to save had me $151 in the black!

What did the job on my budget was the cost of veterinary care: $379.75 to my old vet and $278.08 to the new vet, plus assorted extra meds. Plus special food. The cost of gas didn’t help-really, if gas were not exorbitant, I might have ended in the black despite the dog headaches.

Luckily, I kept $500 of the previous months’ savings in the money market checking account used to pay these costs as an emergency “cushion.” So when the American Express bill arrives, there will be enough to pay it. But it frosts my cookies.

At this point, it looks like the only hope of getting the vet bills under control is to put the dog down. The vaginal infection is better, but the nose thing just keeps getting worse. She can barely breathe through her nose. Just the cost of diagnosing what ails her starts at $300, to X-ray her skull. If she has a tumor, then she should be put to sleep right away, because it’s terminal and there’s nothing effective that can be done: $300 + $379.75 + $278.08 = $957.83 that I might as well have run through the shredder. If she doesn’t have a tumor but probably has something stuck in her nose, they have to thread a lighted tool into her nasal cavity, which in a dog is an extremely complex maze, to try to fish it out. The vet said this would be “expensive.” When a veterinarian calls something “expensive,” you can be sure the term an ordinary mortal would use is “ruinous.”

So, it may be better just to put her to sleep now. She’s had a long run: she’s almost 13 years old, two years past the normal life span of a German shepherd. I hate to contemplate it: a stuffy nose shouldn’t be a capital offense. On the other hand, heavy panting and rapid breathing are signs of doggy pain, and with the vaginal infection pretty much healed, we know the pain isn’t coming from that. The fact that her nose doesn’t appear to be congested while she’s sleeping (i.e., unconscious) suggests the noisy breathing isn’t caused by a nasal blockage but indicates discomfort or pain. She keeps me awake half the night every night, and I have to get up and get out of the house by 7:30. I’m running on fumes myself at this point-this has gone on for a couple of months-and I’m starting to get sick from the stress and fatigue. If she’s in pain, at her age chances are the cause is cancer. It may just be time to say good-bye.

Poor old lady.

3 Comments left on iWeb site

Jennifer

What a tough call on the dog.We were in this boat a few years ago and you are right about when a vet says “expensive” that means it is ridiculously expensive.our dog had a thyroid tumor, i.e. cancer, that spread to her heart.Well once that happens there is no hope.It is sad either way, but it is important that the dog not suffer.And it is hard to tell if a dog is suffering because they can’t talk.Good luck with the dog, that is hard to deal with.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008 – 06:03 PM

Allergies

I went through the same thing with 2 family dogs.It sounds like allergies.I got a lot of help by going to the online medical sites for dogs and humans too.What the vet doesn’t tell you is that dogs can tolerate most of the same medications people do, just in lower doses for their body weight.I would try a childs brand and dosage. Todays dog foods are not very good for your dog.You are better off feeding them meats and oatmeal with fruits and vegetables.or meat and potatoes.An allergy may be to meat also because of the amounts of chemicals they treat foods with today.Have a little patience and you will find the right combination to make your dog feel better.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:11 AM

vh

Alas, this dog isn’t given to allergies. When the Great Dog Food Scare arose, though, I started feeding her and the greyhound real food. They indeed do perform a great deal better on human food: dog food is substandard and provides substandard nutrition.

However, turning out 28 pounds of dog food a week is no joke. Unfortunately, I have a job and I have no partner to help me with shopping, food preparation, and cleanup, and so even if I could afford the cost of buying huge quantities of better food than I eat myself, converting my kitchen into a dog-food factory is not a practical option.

Subsequent trips to the vet show that what’s causing the manifestations of pain is pressure sores. She refuses to lay on her soft blankets–about the middle of last winter, she developed an aversion to dog beds, of which she has a half-dozen scattered around the house and back yard. Washing them did not help. Buying new ones did not help. She is so averse to a soft place to lie down that she will not even walk on them–she walks around them. Lay one down in the hall, and she treats it like a roadblock. As a result she lies on the tile flooring, which is throughout the house. The yard is desert-landscaped, and so there’s no grass to lie on out there.

Pressure sores are extremely difficult to treat, even in humans who can understand instructions not to lie on them. Eventually, they eat through to the bone. They are very painful. They get infected, and such an infection can and will kill the victim. Old folks in poorly maintained nursing homes routinely die of the effects of pressure sores.

There’s evidently nothing I can do about this. I tried tying an object to her torso so that it would force her to lie on her side. This worked for about 30 minutes, after which she just lay down on top of it.

Friday, May 30, 2008 – 07:28 AM

The miracle of penny-pinching

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OMG! In spite of $708 worth of vet bills, I’m still in the black this month!

How did this marvel happen?

Because I was frugal and stayed out of Costco, I ended up $75 in the black for the first week of this month’s billing cycle.

The following week I was $283 in the hole against that week’s $375 budget, leaving $92 to live on in the cycle’s third week. However, when I carried the first week’s $75 forward into the third week, it gave me $167 for that week. By keeping a grip on spending and returning a couple of items to Costco, I came out $33 in the black at the end of the third week. Carrying forward again meant I started the fourth week with $408.

The second giant vet bill struck in the fourth week, which is this week-it ends on the 20th. However, so far this week I’ve only had two expenditures above and beyond the second vet bill. So I have $23.57 to last for four days: until Wednesday morning.

The car still has a third of a tank of gas. One trip to the office takes a quarter of a tank. If I telecommute on Tuesday and leave my car in the garage today, Saturday, Sunday, and next Tuesday, I shouldn’t need to buy more gas.

I’ve got plenty of groceries to last for four days.

So, barring a catastrophe, not only am I not headed for bankruptcy, I actually may make it to the end of this billing cycle in the black! The checking account used to pay these charges has a $500 cushion, so even if I go a few bucks over budget, my credit card payments won’t bounce.

Whew! Thank goodness for penny-pinching habits! No snowflakes this month, but no meltdown, either.

Skeptic saves $175

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Hot dang! I just saved a hundred and seventy-five bucks, give or take. And I did it in ten minutes flat.

A couple years ago, Home Depot sold me a shoddy little vinyl screen door. I bought it because neither HD nor Lowe’s carried real wooden screen doors, and I didn’t want an ugly metal door or a security door. The vinyl things came as close as anything to a real door. They were cheap, too.

Problem was, they come with a shoddy little latch that doesn’t hold the door shut, much less lock it. The HD salesman said you couldn’t drill into the vinyl to screw a hook-&-eye latch into it. The screen door installing handyman agreed, adding that assuming you could drill into the plastic without melting it, you’d need to reattach the hook to an extra-long eyebolt and secure it with a nut; otherwise it would pull out. Ohhh well.

A year passes, and I find some actual, real, old-fashioned plain no frou-frou screen doors at a local door retailer. These cost about $125, and I figure the handyman will charge about $50 to install one of them. And they have to be painted. I delay buying, partly out of inertia and partly out of cheapness.

This week’s steady winds have been driving me nuts. The damn door, which won’t stay closed, keeps banging in the breeze, thwackada whack all night and all day.

So I tracked down the hook-&-eye I bought and didn’t use, and then broke out the electric drill.

Lo! The maleness and paleness lied!

A guide hole significantly smaller than the hook screw’s diameter zipped right into the vinyl, and the screw went in firmly and solidly. No way that thing is going to fall out of there! Now the vinyl door will do-no need to buy a new screen door.

The take-away message:

The frugalist doesn’t believe everything she’s told!

 

One frugal move = 12 to-do’s done

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So this morning I decided to wash the car in the driveway, my $13 having purchased a less-than-perfect job the last time I took the minivan to the car wash. Figured it was time, since I couldn’t see through the windshield.

In particular, I wanted to try to get the old, stale coffee stains out of the carpet, where over the months and years I’ve spilled my favorite potable while driving around town. Toyota’s carpet and upholstery are practically invulnerable. Hence, a rough-sounding strategy: spray plenty of window cleaner on the rug, scrub the stuff around with an old sponge, and then suck it out with the shop vac.

Amazingly, the scheme worked with no ill effect. It not only got out the coffee stains, it also pulled up a number of other spots scattered around the vehicle. Other than the Great Automotive Coffee Extraction Project, the rest of the job was pretty easy: I sprayed the van with a little Windex Outdoor, which doesn’t do much for windows but works great on paving, walls, and your car. This product comes in a container that attaches to the hose and has a spray attachment that turns the water flow off (saves water!) and also switches to “rinse,” making it simple to lather and rinse off the vehicle.

The Coffee Extraction Project got the eight-year-old carpeting almost as clean as new, and a little Murphy’s Oil Soap cleaned and polished up the vinyl interior trim. So, for the price of a quarter-bottle of Windex Outdoor I saved myself $13 on the wash-and-rinse and, if you believe Johnny’s Carousel Car Wash prices, another $80 on the detail job.

Better yet, because I chose to wash the car in the driveway, in the process I did a whole series of small chores I wouldn’t even have thought about had I schlepped to Johnny’s:

  • Filled a spray bottle with a handy solution of diluted Murphy’s Oil Soap
  • Cleaned the fingerprints off the garage cabinets
  • Refilled the window-cleaner spray bottle
  • Cleaned the garage door threshold
  • Cleaned the utility sink
  • Cleaned the clothes washer
  • Took out the garbage
  • Cleaned the garbage basket
  • Washed the grackle guano off the pavement under the ash tree
  • Picked wildflowers and put them in the kitchen
  • Cleaned the fireplace ashes out of the shop vac & washed the filter
    Memo: Don’t use the shop vac to clean out the fireplace!

Voilà! In the time it would have taken to drive across town to Johnny’s and wait around for a half-baked car wash, twelve household projects got done (counting the car wash). The cost was almost nothing, and no gasoline was consumed.
w00t!
Frugality pays, in more ways than one.

Saving $$ at the pool pump

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Since I can’t save at the gas pump ($51 yesterday for a Costco fill-up that recently cost $38!), maybe I can retrieve a few bucks from the swimming pool pump.

The Feds say you can save as much as 60% on your pool’s electric bill simply by cutting back the number of hours you run the pump. Well, I’ll believe that when I see the statement (and don’t see sheets of algae growing on the walls)…but I’m willing to give it a try. It sez here:

Pool pumps often run much longer than necessary. Circulating your pool’s water keeps the chemicals mixed and removes debris. However, as long the water circulates while chemicals are added, they should remain mixed. It’s not necessary to recirculate the water everyday to remove debris, and most debris can be removed using a skimmer or vacuum. Furthermore, longer circulation doesn’t necessarily reduce the growth of algae. Instead, using chemicals in the water and scrubbing the walls are the best methods.

Reduce your filtration time to 6 hours per day. If the water doesn’t appear clean, increase the time in half-hour increments until it does. In the Florida study, most people who reduced pumping to less than 3 hours per day were still happy with the water’s quality. On average, this saved them 60% of their electricity bill for pumping.

Hmm. I’ve always gone by the advice that six hours a day is the least you can run a pool pump without getting green water, and you need to run it longer in 100-degree heat, when the pool water turns bathtub-warm. It’s hard to believe that you could get away with three hours in Florida—though maybe so, in the winter.

I do cut back the hours to six in the wintertime, to no ill effect. Right now it’s set to run about seven hours. Let’s try shifting it back down to six for a week; then try five. It may mean you’d have to keep the chlorine level too high to swim safely, which is no trade-off. But if the system will stay stable with normal chemical levels and fewer pumping hours, bully!

Comments from iWeb site:

2 Comments

Mrs. Micah

Good luck with that. My dad co-owned a house with a pool before he got married and he told us it was just too expensive to consider.

Saturday, April 26, 2008 – 12:26 PM

vh

Thanks to my rabid neighbor, costs of running the pool have been well within reason. Because he destroyed the entire system, my homeowner’s insurance paid to replaster the pool and install a new filter and pool cleaner, saving me about $10,000. It will be many years before any of that work has to be redone.

Meanwhile, I do the routine maintenance myself–it’s really easy. Costs of pool chemicals are modest, especially if you buy in bulk, and a comparison of power bills between this house and my last house, which was the same size but didn’t have a pool, suggests the cost of running the pump is about $15 a month. I’ve never paid more than $150 for a pool technician’s visit; most of the time a service call is $80.

None of this (so far) has been unaffordable. And I enjoy the pool so much, the costs to date have been worth it.

Sunday, April 27, 2008 – 08:08 AM

Candles

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One element in the Month of (not-so)Extreme Frugality involves the experiment of navigating the house after dark by candlelight.

This requires me to dig up some candles and to figure out how to use them to best effect.

I have a number of pillar candles. Some are scented. Personally, I dislike the odor of scented candles. However: the late Walt the Greyhound had, as most greyhounds do, a bit of a flatulence problem. The methane could get pretty thick in the house, especially when the air-conditioning was going and I couldn’t open doors and windows. One way I coped with that was by burning off the gas with flares-that is, candles. Perfumed candles stank less than Walt, and so I would pick up pillars on sale at places like Cost Plus and Pier One for use in the living room and bedroom.

The problem is, pillars don’t put out much light. In terms of candle-power, they’re not much better than a plug-in night light. They’ll do to keep you from stubbing your toe on the coffee table, but you can’t read by them.

Tapers, however, do work quite well for the purpose. In the candle drawer, I have eight tapers, plus the two stubs in the outdoor candle-holders that have resided on the back porch all winter. These aren’t gunna last a month. How to buy candles without spending more than the CFLs would run up on the electric bill?

There’s an Ikea down the freeway from the university, halfway to Tucson. They have candles, very cheap. I’ll drive over there some time in the next couple of weeks and buy a box or two. A round trip to Tempe costs $7; add another dollar or so for driving almost to Chandler. In yard sales, candles can be had for pennies, but that also requires you to spend gas driving around town. I could make them with beeswax, an easy project that produces candles free of ingredients from the chemistry lab.

Burning Gas to Burn Wax?

In green terms, I’m now beginning to have doubts about this candle scheme. While it may or may not be frugal for an individual—depending on how high the Salt River Project racks up our electric rates and how cheaply you can get your hands on candles—burning wax and string release carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. If everybody is burning candles every night, will this not consume more energy and release more greenhouse gasses than generating electricity at a central plant, where smokestack washers or hydroelectric power control the per-capita release of gasses?

What’s the carbon footprint of a candle? It takes heat to melt wax and power to run assembly lines and make dyes and perfumes, plus the raw materials have to be hauled to factories and the finished products delivered to market-probably from overseas. Even so-called “beeswax” sold in craft stores probably is not: how do you think they get those colors in beeswax sheets? It doesn’t come out of the hive colored pale blue. The stuff must simply be factory-made wax melted, colored, and poured into molds to produce hexagonally patterned sheets.

Now let us consider the dollar costs for the individual. Beeswax to make your own candles is pretty expensive, even when ordered on the Web. One outfit sells wick at 10 cents a yard or $50 for a spool, and sheet beeswax at $1.75 a sheet, or $35 for 20 sheets. One sheet makes two candles, so DIY beeswax candles would cost you about a buck apiece ($1.75/2 + 5 cents = 97 cents, not counting gas to drive to the craft store or shipping for an online order).

I estimate my use of electricity to run lights at not more than $20 a month. The power bill was $80 last month, when all that drew power was the pool pump, the refrigerator, the lights, the toaster, an occasional use of the oven, once-a-week use of the bread mixer and the washer and dryer. The pool pump costs about $20 to $40 a month to run. The refrigerator allegedly runs around $13 a month. I can’t find figures for the clothes washer that don’t figure in the cost of heating water; I use cold water and I rarely wash more than two loads a week. The cost must be around five or ten bucks a month, max. Assuming the pump costs $40 a month (on the high side, I believe) and the electric cost of the laundry is $10, the cost of lights and small appliances would be $17 a month. Let’s say the oven, toaster, and breadmaker cost about $10 a month; that would leave $7 for the lights.

If a typical beeswax candle cost a dollar, you’d burn through seven bucks with seven candles, far from enough to last a month. Twelve economy tapers cost $11.50, plus $6.50 shipping, or a $1.53 apiece. Here, too, if you use tapers for lighting and not just for atmosphere, you’ll burn though those fairly fast. Even if the pool cost $30 a month and the lights are running $17, the cost of candles to light your house for 31 evenings could easily add up to around $30, significantly more than the cost of electricity.

So, unless you go to bed at dusk, chances are you’d spend significantly more on candles than you would on CFLs, which are said to cost $12 for 10,000 hours, including the cost of the bulb. That’s around a penny an hour. While it’s true that CFLs contain mercury and require fuel to make and transport, just what kind of chemicals are in a candle?

It looks to me like an individual would do a lot better to simply turn off the lights in all rooms that are unoccupied and use a single CFL bulb to navigate each room that is occupied.