Frugal Friday Feb. 20

It’s that time again! Here is this week’s highlights from the Frugalosphere.

Lots of questions, sublime and mundane, were asked and mostly answered this week. Lazy Man and Money asked if wine tasting was a frugal hobby. Why, yes, it is. Wine drinking, on the other hand, could set you back a few dollars. Free Money Finance asked Should Christians Have Life Insurance? Again the answer is yes, provided you do not buy more than you need, which apparently raises thorny theological issues. (Possible follow-up posts: Should Muslims Drive Volvos? Should Jews Own a Tivo?)

Frugal Friday the 13th of February

It was a quiet week on the frugal front. It seems like every blog had the same Valentine’s Day hints. The most common tip for saving money was to ignore the holiday entirely, but failing that, you could celebrate it late, when the candy goes on sale.

There was some mention of Lincoln on the occasion of his 200th birthday. There was no mention of Charles Darwin, a reasonably important figure in some places, who was also born on February 12, 1809. That Darwin doesn’t rate in Frugal Nation isn’t that surprising. According to The Economist, only 14% of Americans believe that humans evolved over millions of years. The scientifically minded can take heart in the fact that the trend is actually up. In 1982 only 9% believed in human evolution.

Of course, to the frugal, Lincoln is closely associated with that enduring symbol of saving really small amounts of money, the penny. Free Money Finance had an informative post of facts about the penny, including that 63% of Americans think we should keep using them. That’s actually not that high, if you think about it, and shows that at least 37% of Americans are insufficiently frugal. Imagine how much worse it would be if it was widely understood that it costs 1.2 cents to make a penny. (It takes a special kind of government to mint coins at a loss.)

According to Coinstar, which supplied the penny facts to Free Money Finance, the average American household has $90 in coins lying around. Based on the handy converter on their home page, that’s about half a gallon of change. What to do with this hoard of metal disks is of course a concern for the frugal. Dawn at Queercents suggests that you put it in a tin container rather than a glass one. Seeing the money will make you want to spend it. She also suggests other clever ways of hiding money from yourself, including inflating the values of the checks you write in your check register so that your balance is actually higher than you think it is. This has inspired me to convince myself that I belong to a high-end gym and to record imaginary large monthly checks for the membership fee. I think this will work as long as I don’t notice that I am not losing weight.

Speaking of losing weight, Frugal Living Tips suggests saving on food bills by foraging for things to eat in the woods. Not only will you save money, you will lose weight because of the exercise you will get and because you will find so little to eat, especially in February.

And finally, Tip Hero has a post about saving what must surely be many small copper disks with Lincoln on them by making your own half and half for your coffee. The recipe given is one quart light cream to one quart milk. No word on what to do if you need less than half a gallon of the stuff, but you can use that glass bottle you used to store loose change in.

Frugal Friday 2/6

It’s Friday again, so here’s the weekly roundup of frugal hints from around the blogosphere. Just to make it clear, these are selected with the intent of finding ideas you haven’t seen before. Lots of sites tell you not to go grocery shopping hungry. It is the useful blog that gives tips on making a meal of free samples in the store.

We start with a cautionary tale. As all citizens of Frugal Nation know, Denny’s gave away free Grand Slam breakfasts this past Tuesday. And as some may have noticed, they failed to specify one to a customer. A reporter with the Chicago Tribune attempted the obvious act of frugality, consuming 5 Grand Slams before 9AM. The results were not as joyful as you might have expected.

I don’t know if that feast of free cholesterol inspired self-reflection, but there were quite a few posts this week wondering if this frugality thing might not be bad for society. For example, Almost Frugal, which as you may know is written by an American living in the French Alps, had a post entitled The Ethics of Frugality which mused that buying the cheapest item available might be sending American jobs to China.

As this is the first week of February, lists of money saving hints for Valentine’s Day were everywhere. They mostly just repeat the same old stuff about handmade cards and single roses instead of a dozen. But Sound Money Matters had a list that cut to the quick by starting with the suggestion that you just skip the holiday entirely. Failing that, push it back a week when restaurants are much less crowded and gifts have been seriously marked down. And SavingAdvice.com has an original list of Valentine’s Day Tips for Gals. Obviously, what most guys want from their gals costs no money at all, but the post does come up with a few alternatives, including allowing your man to teach you how to change the oil on your car.

If you are a frugal user of candles, presumably because you want to save money on both lighting and heating, you will appreciate Little People Wealth’s tip: store your candles in the freezer. They will burn more slowly.

Speaking of heating, Zen Personal Finance had a series of three posts with a total of 13 ways to save money on your heating bills. The first twelve are pretty obvious, but the last one in the last post suggests saving money on heating by not eating out, because your stove will create heat when you cook. Further, the blog points out that “If your thermostat is near the kitchen, you will save money.” How true. Sadly, my thermostat is not near my kitchen. But I have remedied this by putting an electric space heater right under it.

The best frugal post of the week comes from Gather Little by Little, which provides a list of 25 uses for dryer sheets, none of which involves a clothes dryer. This, of course, is particularly important for the truly frugal, who save money by hanging laundry on a line to dry. Inevitably, this results in a growing stock of unused dryer sheets, which can really clutter up a storage closet. These 25 uses will have you putting a dent in that backlog in no time. For example, did you know that to reduce odor you can “Scrub incoming dogs or cats (especially wet ones) with a dryer sheet before they come back into your home.” All wet cats love being rubbed down with scented foam sheets.

Frugal Friday 1/30

Ah, Friday again. Instead of coming up with my own content, today I pass along the very best of the many frugality tips from the past week or so in the blogosphere.

Free Money Finance has a follow-up on their controversial post from last week, Can You Pay for a Costco Membership by Eating Free Samples? This one has tips on maximizing the free samples you get on each visit. Oddly, the author says that he “debated whether or not to publish this post or not.” Apparently, he worries that “it’s a bit over-the-line” because, according to him, “there should be a limit to what we’re willing to do to save money.” I guess it takes all kinds.

And as if the frugal world needed more controversy, Living Almost Large asks if it is more frugal to take home half your restaurant meal to eat the next day, or to split that meal between two people at the restaurant. I’m not sure that this sort of debate can ever have a resolution, but it is important to provide a forum for a free and open discussion of these issues.

There is an insightful post on How I Save Money. It is #8 in a series on ways to save money on your wedding. I haven’t read the others, but this one suggests not feeding your guests so much food. The author makes clear that although she has no plans to get married, she does read bridal magazines, looking for ways to save money on a wedding. And that is not weird at all.

The group blog Queercents (The subtitle really is “We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping without coupons.” I could never make that up.) has a post on making homemade deodorant. The results are mixed, and at $6 a stick not really a money saver, but it is more than worthwhile because of the stereotypes it shatters. I thought gay people were much more particular about personal grooming.

Real Life gives a whole list of ways to save money on groceries. The one that you haven’t seen before is to save money on beef by getting together with a few other families and buying a whole cow from a farmer. Another list of tips comes from Debt Reduction Formula. He suggests saving on toiletries by shaving only once a week and ceasing to clean your ears altogether.

But this week’s winner for the best new way to save money is from Money and Values, which provides a link where you can download a printer font that is designed to use up to 20% less ink. I am such an idiot for not thinking of this myself. But why stop there? The truly frugal could save money by using shorter words. Also, why not avoid letters with big “ink footprints” such as w, e, and k, and favor eco-friendly ones like i, c, and l?

And in these times of economic and ecological stress, I think we should all do our bit by saving ink that otherwise would have gone to non-essential printing. In the UK, Birmingham City Council has voted to drop apostrophes from traffic signs. Even that small step, supported by a grassroots anti-apostrophe movement, was bitterly opposed by pro-ink pressure groups such as The Apostrophe Protection Society. Of course, in a nation where they spell color as “colour” change will come slowly. Here at home, with the new beginning of hope and change in Washington, isn’t it time that our nation’s leaders stepped up and endorsed spelling simplification and the widespread adoption of texting abbreviations in standard written English?

b/c if u cn rd ths, u cn sav $.

Frugal Friday

Fridays sometimes put me in a certain mood. I thought I might highlight a few frugality tips from this week in the blogosphere:

Free Money Finance asks can you pay for a Costco membership by eating free samples? That is, if roaming the store and snarfing up food samples can substitute for a meal, would that savings be enough to cover the annual membership fee? I’ve read this post several times now, and I really think it’s a serious question.

The Frugal Mom Blog has a list of even more amazing ways to save money on food. My favorite is saving the wrappers from your sticks of butter to grease baking pans. If you baked enough, I estimate that you could save the equivalent of an entire stick of butter in a year. Now that’s real money.

The Frugal Duchess had two posts listing ways to watch the inauguration for free, assuming you do not own a TV. The answer is that you could have watched it on any one of several obvious websites, e.g. CNN.com or CSPAN.org. (You may not have a TV, but you’ve obviously got high-speed web access, right?) Also, it turns out that it was on every TV in every public area in the nation. Come to think of it, a post listing ways to manage to spend money watching the inauguration would have been more interesting.

Rounding out the week’s insights, The New York Times’ Frugal Traveller reports that Cape Cod is cheap to visit in January. How true. In a similar vein, I will add that admission to Fenway Park is much cheaper on days that the Red Sox are not playing.