Frugal Friday

[ecosophia]

Welcome back to Frugal Friday! This is a weekly forum post to encourage people to share tips on saving money, especially but not only by doing stuff yourself. A new post will be going up every Friday, and will remain active until the next one goes up. Contributions will be moderated, of course, and I have some simple rules to offer, which may change further as we proceed.

Rule #1:  this is a place for polite, friendly conversations about how to save money in difficult times. It's not a place to post news, views, rants, or emotional outbursts about the reasons why the times are difficult and saving money is necessary. Nor is it a place to use a money saving tip to smuggle in news, views, etc.  I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #2:  this is not a place for you to sell goods or services, period. Here again, I have a delete button and I'm not afraid to use it.

Rule #3:  please give your tip a heading that explains briefly what it's about.  Homemade Chicken Soup, Garden Containers, Cheap Attic Insulation, and Vinegar Cleans Windows are good examples of headings. That way people can find the things that are relevant for them. If you don't put a heading on your tip it will be deleted.

Rule #4: don't post anything that would amount to advocating criminal activity. Any such suggestions will not be put through.

With that said, have at it!

Comments

Record Keeping lets you keep track of expenses and rewards

[teresa_from_hershey]

Record keeping is boring and tedious but if you don't keep records, how will you know that insulating your attic worked?
How will you know if a bill was missed? Or that the company claims they didn't get it when you wrote the check?

I use a ledger, one page per month, for all our bills. I have columns for notes, date due, item, amount due, amount paid, date paid, and check number.

In the notes column, I note how many gallons of water per day and number of days for water usage; KWH per day and how many days for electricity; and how many gallons of fuel oil and price for home heating oil.

I can quickly learn if a bill went missing in the mail: I've got a blank spot.
I KNOW, based on real calculations, that insulating the attic paid for itself within a few years. We have NEVER burned as much fuel oil as we did the first winter we lived here and it was a mild one. Bill insulated the next summer and we saw the benefits at once.

I keep track of prices at the grocery store, although not as systematically as I did before. 24 years at the same supermarket and -- since I pay attention -- I've got a good idea when something's on a real sale.

Record keeping pays off! You know what you spent and when you need to find a receipt for a refund, you can. It makes tax time easier too.

Do you keep records?

Re: Record Keeping lets you keep track of expenses and rewards

[slclaire]

Yes, and for the same reasons you do. There are several pieces to my system.

First, for all income and expenditures, I use a monthly Money Log like the one in Your Money or Your Life. I keep this on spiral notebook paper with three holes punched in it so the logs can be put into a binder after I've tabulated monthly income and expenses. I file original receipts in temporary locations during the calendar year and then in file folders in storage boxes in January. It's very easy to collect the info we need to give our tax preparer from these file folders.

Second, around the middle of the next month after we've received statements from our various accounts, I transfer the raw data from the Money Log to an income/expense record for each category of income and expenditures. The income/expense record is an Excel spreadsheet that I print out as a blank and fill in by hand because I don't have and don't want to use accounting software. Such software is too complex for my and my husband's situation.

For the utilities, I have log sheets for each one in which I record the dates and units used from our utility bills (water, natural gas, and electric; sewer and trash are fixed rates so they are not included). I also have space to record notes about the period in question, such as did we use the AC or furnace, did I water the garden, and the like. When the gas company used to include the heating degree days on the bill, I had a column for them. I can and have calculated heating and cooling degree days by hand for the period covered by each utility, but I no longer do this. I can also verify from data that the sealing and insulation work we had done in 2005 reduced the amount of natural gas and electricity we use as a result. Here's the post from my blog that discusses what we did and how much it reduced our energy usage: http://livinglowinthelou.blogspot.com/2016/08/how-we-went-on-energy-diet-and-what-we.html

Re: Record Keeping lets you keep track of expenses and rewards

[weilong]

I don't do it anymore, but when we first moved into this house and were doing a lot of improvements on it, I tracked Heating Degree Days (HDD) and fuel costs.

HDD is basically the difference between the outside temp (average of high/low temps for the day) and whatever temperature you like the inside of your house to be. So if you want your house at 68F, and the high/low temps for the day were 45 and 28, respectively, you take 68 - 36.5 = 31.5 and you have 31.5 HDDs for that day. You punch that into your spreadsheet, or write it in your notebook, and sometime next year you add up all the HDD numbers from October to April, or whatever your heating season is where you live. That total number can then be compared from year to year to give you an idea of how your heating requirements are changing.

That information is useful when you are doing things like insulating your house, because it allows you to discern whether your lower fuel bill is due to the insulation in your attic, or just to a mild winter. Just divide your fuel use (gallons of oil/propane, or KWH) by the HDD total for that year, and you have a good measure of your heating efficiency. At least, a measure that is comparable from year to year in that particular house.

Re: Record Keeping lets you keep track of expenses and rewards

[(Anonymous)]

Mine are a bit messier, but my system is a half-sized composition book for every purchase, every bill, every paycheck, every dime found in the parking lot... that gets recorded one per line, sometimes itemized (if I bought both windshield wiper blades and groceries at walmart, I want to separate those out), and receipts stapled to the backsides of each page. This gets big and shaggy, and fills up in maybe six months or less.

But at the end of each month, I use that daily logbook to tally up expenses in several categories for the month: insurance, rent, utilities, food, clothing, transport, housewares, books, medical, etc. Those category totals I then copy over into a ledger, where I then also record all current bank balances, cash on hand, outstanding checks, money people owe me (not so I can pester them about it, but so that if they pay me back, I have a record that we are square-- I lend money pretty much counting on never seeing it again), money I owe other people-- everything I need to get an accurate current-balances picture.

Then, I compare the previous month's balance to both this month's surplus or deficit (income minus expenses), and see if it matches up with our actual balance this month. This tells me if I have missed anything major (either forgot to record something and need to go back and find it, OR there's a bank error or fraudulent charge I need to track down and dispute).

This is really helpful, as I can easily break out the ledger and see, month-to-month what we're spending on groceries. I can quickly tally how much we spent on education expenses for the school year, that sort of thing. And yes, it's very helpful for calculating whether or not any particular change or intervention actually saves us money over the long-haul.

Re: Record Keeping lets you keep track of expenses and rewards

[(Anonymous)]

Teresa,

What does this ledger look like? It would be nice to see a picture of one. Do you make it up yourself with a spiral notebook or do you get it ready made? If you make it how do you do that?

I think keeping records like this would be very useful for me but the very basics i.e. how your ledger is set up is difficult

Thank you

Re: Record Keeping lets you keep track of expenses and rewards

[(Anonymous)]

Some people here might be interested in this article from AOM: The Butlers Book: How to Create the Instruction Manual for Your Home. There is a link to a PDF template in the article.

https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/homeownership/butler-s-book/

JPM

Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[ecosophia]

One of the easiest ways to pick up a working reading knowledge of another language is to find a book in that language you already know well in your native language. With that, a bilingual dictionary, and a copy of the same book in your native language, basic literacy is just a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes a day picking your way through the book. Jean-Joseph Jacotot, a 19th century French teacher and educational philosopher, stumbled across this while teaching in Belgium; half of his class spoke French but no Flemish, the other half spoke Flemish but no French, so he had them start reading a bilingual edition of the same book out loud -- and in a matter of weeks he had a room full of kids who were fluent in both languages.

The reason this comes to mind right now -- appropriately enough for a Frugal Friday -- is that earlier today I scored a very nice hardback copy of Der Herr der Ringe by JRR Tolkien at a used book store for US$15. I've already got a German-English dictionary, I've read The Lord of the Rings something like a hundred times -- when I was a kid, I'd get to the end and then go right back to the beginning and start over -- and I've been thinking for a while now that I ought to get my reading knowledge of German up to speed. Used book stores here in the US generally have no idea of the value of books in other languages; a hardback copy of Der Herr der Ringe right now costs €88.00, or about US$97.00. Thus it can also be a very inexpensive way to get a reading knowledge of a language.

Re: Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[open_space]

You can also use the same trick for songs, movies or other forms of spoken word. When I was a kid getting a video game console was a big moment but the problem was that the best games were only in english, there was a subtitle option however. I remember playing The Legend of Zelda over and over and doing the same trick with movies. By the time I was 10 I had a good idea of casual english.

Re: Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[(Anonymous)]

I have also read an account of working on new-language speaking fluency in a similar way:

The person who wrote the article said, when he was learning Japanese, he tracked down a children's book that told a story he already knew: I think it was Jack and the Beanstalk. He got a Japanese friend to read the book aloud into a tape recorder. He then listened to the tape and read the book along with it, over and over until he had memorized it, and could tell the story in Japanese without any hesitation. Said it helped enormously with confidence, inflection, and just getting over the hump from being able to *read* something in the target language to being able to *speak* it.

Re: Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[(Anonymous)]

I used duolingo.com, which was free the last time I checked. You can also use Rosetta Stone, but that costs money.

Re: Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[milkyway1]

One thing to watch out for with this method is the style of language, as at least some people might be prone to picking that up.

With this I don‘t mean the vocabulary, as missing words are easy to fill in later, but the actual style, mannerisms, etc. E.g. in German, Thomas Mann is rather long-winded, whereas Brecht is very to the point. That doesn‘t matter much while one is understanding a language, but for speaking/writing, it might influence one‘s own style later in the language. I.e. if somebody has serious ambitions, it might be smart to work that way with books from different authors (one at a time, of course).

(Although a Tolkien-style German would be a really good fit for a bearded druid… :-P )

Milkyway

PS: Apologies if this posts twice. I got an error message the first time and re-submitted.

Re: Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[teresa_from_hershey]

We've watched a LOT of foreign movies for the Agatha Christie project, using subtitles.
Thanks to sheer volume and its relative closeness to English, I can now pick out some French words!

We've also learned that some of our overseas buyers of our annotated Agatha Christies (not available in the U.K. or E.U.) buy them to help learn better English, especially the meaning of idioms like "long in the tooth."

Re: Reading Knowledge of Another Language

[(Anonymous)]

On that subject, it just so happens that I have begun a series of articles on Substack that shares and reviews various foreign language textbooks I found on Internet Archive, and also talks a bit about each language.

https://jlmc12.substack.com/p/language-learning-through-time-part

J.L.Mc12

Garden Tricks I Use To Save Money

[dreysz]

Oh, this is a delightful thread! Here's some tips and habits I've picked up to garden on the cheap, because gardening and saving money go together like basil and tomatoes ;D

1) plastic takeout containers make excellent seed-starting trays and seedling greenhouses.
In a similar vein, any plastic cup or food-storage container can be recycled as a short-term pot when my extra cuttings actually survive and root. If you start doing this, make sure to poke drainage holes in the bottom. In most cases the material doesn't usually last longer than one or two summers before disintegrating, but I feel much better throwing plastic away after I squeeze as much use out of it as I possibly can.

2) Spent ash from my incense cauldron goes in the compost tumbler, which introduces minerals and micro nutrients to my yard. A word of caution- Less ash is better for your plants' health. I also heard somewhere that spent incense ash can be worked into soap recipes, but I haven't tried this yet.

3) If you don't currently garden and want to, or have ill luck growing things and need some practice, teach yourself to make cuttings and how/when to save plant seeds. I consider this an essential skill. Seeds and houseplants at the nursery are expensive, but when I ask to take a few cuttings or a spent seed head or two I almost always get a yes. This is absolutely free to do and affords plenty of trial & error. If they don't make it, you know what doesn't work and didn't spend a dime. If they make it, you have free plants and a nice self-esteem boost. I have a very productive patch of sweet basil I resurrected from kitchen waste at my job.

4) I work in a restaurant, so this may be harder for some, but I get discarded 5gal food-grade buckets and obscene amounts of kitchen scraps that my boss lets me take home and re-use. Food scraps amend my soil, and I use the buckets for everything from mixing soil, carrying forest leaves and rotting wood to my composter, catching and holding rain water, and I even use them to work out.

5) The efficacy and importance of modern medicine cannot be understated. That said, I've learned a lot and saved myself much discomfort and money that would have gone to the drug store by utilizing local plant medicines for myself, using the spagyric techniques I learned from the DOGD textbook as a starting point.

6) This one isn't a garden tip, but writing #4 made me think to include it anyway.
Gym memberships! You either love em or hate em. I love exercising but my gym wasn't worth the monthly fee after a while, so I opted to teach myself ways of honing my body by recycling things, getting creative, and spending more time outside. It might sound silly, but I work out with old bricks, cinder blocks, buckets of sand, and I've even picked up running and climbing trees again like I did when I was a kid. Coming up with new ways to train my body is challenging and very fun, and if I may boast a little bit, I certainly look better too!

I hope someone else gets inspired by these habits and finds some use from them in their life. Peace be with ye!
-Sean

Re: Garden Tricks I Use To Save Money

[slclaire]

I like keeping plants in containers to bring into the house in the winter. I have plenty of different sizes of clay pots as a result of yard and estate sale expeditions years ago, but I used to have few trays to set them in. Most of the trays found for sale are plastic and some of them don't stand up well to prolonged use, especially when sitting in the sun. Clay trays can get moist on the bottom, which does no good to wooden floors or furniture that the tray is sitting on.

Last week we discussed the glass trays from discarded microwaves as one source of container plant trays. Another source is the "disposable" aluminum pie plates that people who bring homemade pies to your events bake them in. As long as you don't cut through them, these pie plates are leakproof and thus safe to set on wooden furniture, floors, and windowsills (as long as you don't overwater the plant so that the pie plate can't hold all the water).

Re: Garden Tricks I Use To Save Money

[(Anonymous)]

I've had a lot of luck using other people's discards for gardening. Towards the end of spring, you will often find plant pots, especially 4 inch pots, in other people's recycling bins. Also sometimes big plastic pots that would be fairly pricy at the garden center. Milk jugs are great for winter sowing.

Also, keep an eye on the grass verges and boulevards for free items. I have picked up for the garden:
-a decorative glass plant waterer, broken but still pretty
-plant pots
-all the cardboard I could ever want for paving garden paths and stopping weeds
-a wire rack to hold lots of gardening gear
-liquid organic fertilizer
-regular organic fertilizer

I've also aquired apples and grapes to eat that way, and lots of non-garden related stuff. Plates, mugs, plastic food containers, materials for building wargaming terrain, a shoe rack, ring binders for sheet music...

Re: Garden Tricks I Use To Save Money

[(Anonymous)]

DOGD textbook?

House Gutter Maintenace 101 :

[(Anonymous)]

Clean Your house gutters twice a year. In the spring, and late fall. Never in between.

For example: The remnants of Debby were coming our way in a few days to rural New York State, predicted to dump a refreshing 2-5 inches of the wet stuff fast and furious.

I made repairs to and reinforced the driveway apron, loosened up the gravel to allow the H2O to flow into our swales properly, built mulch berms, and prepped the basement and gardens for the worse.

Then I thought. "Hey, why not double check the gutters?" Long story short, finished the gutter cleaning on that side of the home, was about to set foot on the ladders' first step when I fell 7 feet off the roof and landed in an upright seated position. Thought to myself. "Well, the lower lumbar just felt like when you crush an aluminum can with your hand, but I've still got feeling in the legs, so let's finish the job, the really big job out back."

Climbed up 25-foot ladder S L O W LEE and managed to tidy up an arms spread of said gutter, before I heard an angry buzz and was stung on the face by something at least 3 fingers across- measured when I grabbed and tossed it with an alarmed monkey-like yell. Went down the ladder very fast indeed. Decided to call it quits on the gutters until Late fall, as usual, when the wasps and hornets are gone.

So, clean Your house gutters twice a year. In the spring, and late fall. Never in between.

Yes, I am perfectly alright. Sorta.

Black Tuna and Hand-

Re: House Gutter Maintenace 101 :

[(Anonymous)]

Ouch! Nasty. Glad you're not too badly hurt.

U-Pick farms and making preserves

[claire_58]

I just went to the U-Pick to get pickling cucumbers. It took me about 20 minutes to pick 11 pounds of cucumbers for less than $30 CAD. A rough calculation that includes the salt, dill, and other spices (the garlic and grape/horseradish leaf is homegrown) brings it to just over $3 CAD/litre for about 12 litres of dill pickles.

Earlier this month our annual expedition to the blueberry farm was a fun outing for my grandchildren, my daughter, and I. We picked about 8 litres of berries but the actual yield of preserves was quite low. The children ate a massive amount of blueberries over the next few days. I did manage to put a small fraction of the total pick in the freezer.

[(Anonymous)]

Can anyone point me to good instructions on how to add a tip jar to a site? Preferably without Pay Pal—I got enough problems without being expensively censored. Thank you!

[temporaryreality]

I added "buy me a coffee" to my site (and some generous soul actually contributed a few months ago!). I recall setup being relatively straightforward. I have to get the cash out via bank transfer, so that might work for you.

rediculously cheap to keep pets

[(Anonymous)]

Terrestrial invertebrates often make very low maintenance, cheap pets. They're also typically silent, and don't take up much space. Perfect for small apartments and shared living spaces unless your roommate or landlord is phobic of creepy crawlies and bans them.

I keep isopods (woodlice/sowbugs/rolly polies that can't fully roll). I grabbed some from my garden where they were eating my strawberries and generally being nuisances. That was, I think, three years ago. I put them in a large jar I already had, covered in with netting and an elastic band, threw in a few pieces of bark, some dead oak leaves, some moss, and some coconut choia, sprayed them with water for moisture, and fed them on expired fish food all of which I already had. I still have them, and the colony is thriving. I keep putting extra ones in with my gecko to clean up after her and be snacks. I recently moved them to a critter keeper (plastic mini terrarium) I already had so they'd have more space and I'd have a better view of them. I have never spent a cent on them directly.

They're surpringly entertaining little critters and I find them very cute. Given they're literally common crop pests and non-native at that, I really don't feel that guilty about kidnapping them from my veggie garden. And they do make surprisingly good pets. 10/10 would recommend.

I originally threw in some actual rolly pollies/pillbugs also from the veggie garden into the jar as well, but they died out fairly quickly. Not sure if they were outcompeted, or didn't like the conditions. Also a few little stripy ones I wasn't sure what genus they were, and that didn't do well either, plus tropical dwarf whites I had from a different project. Those are still hanging in there, though I don't see them very often. So I think if I were to try it again I'd do one species per terrarium.

Re: rediculously cheap to keep pets

[(Anonymous)]

Roly Polies are pests??

I love seeing them in the garden, because it means I have sufficient organic matter, and it's holding moisture! They do not seem to cause any harm to healthy plants. I treat them as an indicator for soil/biocommunity health.

Cheap Perennial Plants

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Everyone,
Last year, I was visiting a friend in the autumn and as I left, I took some of the Cotoneaster berries from a huge shrub by her gate. I planted them in a 4-inch pot and left then in the greenhouse over winter. I watered them from time to time.

I make my own potting soil from finished compost and sand so in the spring, a lot of weeds came up. I weeded the little pot and found a group of Cotoneasters growing and I watered and fertilized them along with the other plants in the greenhouse. I just potted them up this morning into half-gallon pots. I have 3 Cotoneaster plants that should be big enough to plant out next autumn.

The Cotoneaster foliage is a larval food for a number of moths. The flowers attract clouds of pollinators and birds eat the berries so it is a very worthwhile shrub to have in your yard.

I am sure anyone interested will have no trouble finding Cotoneaster berries to plant later this autumn. I doubt they need to be kept in a greenhouse. I am sure they would do fine in a pot on the step or in the yard.
Maxine

Re: Cheap Perennial Plants

[baconrolypoly]

Hmm, depending on what Cotoneaster you've got, beware. I don't about elsewhere, but in the UK some species of Cotoneaster are now classed are now classed as 'invasive non-native' and have been removed from sale.

Despite how attractive it is to pollinating insects and birds, C. horizontalis - one of the re-classified plants from that genus - can be an absolute menace. The berries drop readily in autumn or are dispersed by birds, they find their way into the smallest crevice, then put down strong woody roots that are very difficult to get out and away they go. They've popped up in every single garden I've ever worked in and removing them has become so regular an occurrence that these days I just do it on automatic or the gardens would be overwhelmed with them. In my humble opinion, Cotoneaster is only one step down from the horrors of rhizomatous bamboo.

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/trees-and-shrubs/cotoneaster

You tube recipes are not cheap.

[(Anonymous)]

This I have concluded after watching yet another video touting a supposedly inexpensive vegetarian preparation--tastes better than meat! This particular frugal meal calls for red lentils--good luck finding those outside of specialty markets--and a whole onion and a potato and carrots and 3 whole garlic cloves and whole bunches of both parsley and cilantro not to mention an array of spices; you get the idea. And a food processor is required, which I don't own one of, plus the finished croquettes need a dipping sauce.

I think a frugal recipe should have no more than 5 major ingredients at most, should be infinitely accommodating of whatever dibs and dabs you have on hand and not necessarily require special sauces. Those are nice if you can manage them, I love the French practice of deglazing in which you make a sauce out of pan drippings, but the dish should be edible without.

Furthermore, frugal cooks have to strategically manage whatever foods are on hand. Especially during that last week before payday, it is a good idea to use the last potatoes and eggs, etc. for dishes your family really likes. Right now I have potatoes from the garden, so I might just reach for a tater for some interesting new preparation, but in winter, maybe not. Especially considering that potatoes are grown with an astonishing array of chemicals and if at all possible should be avoided unless organic. Mary Bennett

Re: You tube recipes are not cheap.

[(Anonymous)]

We cook red lentils fairly often-- they are inexpensive at our local indian/middle-eastern grocery. If you haven't got one of those nearby then yes, they are a specialty item.

Credit Lock

[temporaryreality]

It's likely we've all had data compromised in recent years - it might be a good idea (in light of recent news on the few-months-back data breach that then had all the data become publicly available) to lock your credit on at least the biggest three credit companies: Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. It's free to do and prevents anyone from using your credit to do things you don't want them to do. It could save a lot of money (incl. everything in your bank account).

Maxine Rogers looking for lay from Comox BC

[(Anonymous)]

Hi Everyone,
I am looking for the lady who lives in Courtenay or Comox who bought a sewing machine for me. I was going to invite you for a visit and cannot find your contact info and I have forgotten your name due to old age and fatigue. Sorry! Could you email me and we can arrange a visit.
Hugs from Max

Re: Maxine Rogers looking for lay from Comox BC

[claire_58]

Hi Max,
I'll be in touch.
EC