Category: Frugal

As much as I love owning a car, I absolutely hate paying for maintenance and especially repairs. I bought my current vehicle brand new so I decided that for the first few years I would get the regular maintenance done at the dealership since it probably won’t need any repairs. After that I wanted to stop going to the dealership since they always seem to find problems with the car – more so on days when they are not busy. My plan (for the past year) has been to find a small repair shop in my area to work on the car.

Blower resistor malfunction

Recently the blower resistor in my car stopped working correctly – what the heck is that you ask? Well the blower is what I call the fan – it “blows” the hot air from your heater and the cold air from your air conditioner into the passenger portion of your car. In my case the fan has 4 settings and only the highest setting was still working. I found out what part was causing the problem by doing a Google search – I didn’t expect to find the exact problem but I did and it told me that I needed a new blower resistor.

Do the repair myself?

Apparently it is an easy part to replace so I thought I would try to change it myself. First step was to get the part – easy enough since the dealership had it for $28. Then I took a good look at the existing part (right behind the glove compartment) and decided that although I could probably get the old part out, it would be a big hassle and I decided to see how much the dealership would charge to replace it. Much to my surprise the dealership would charge 1 hour of labour or $135 including tax. I’m sure it wouldn’t take more than 10 minutes for them to do the job.

Small local car repair shop

My next step was to walk down the street to a small car repair shop and ask how much they would charge for the job. The guy checked out the car specs on his computer (or pretended to at least) and then quoted $50. This was still quite a bit for the work involved but it was a lot cheaper than the dealership quote of $135. I got the the small repair place to do the work and the repair worked great! For checking out the price down the street I saved $85.

Lessons learned

• Do some research on your car problem – it’s possible other people have posted similar problems/repairs/costs on the internet.
• Beware of doing your own diagnosis – had the problem been different than what I thought, I would have been out $28 and some time.
• Shop around – one mistake I’ve made MANY times is that when the dealership says something needs fixing, I’ve always let them do the work. If it’s a big job or if you are suspicious of their intentions then tell you don’t want to do the work right now and then shop around. You can use their estimate documentation to easily get other quotes.
• Beware of the lies – sometimes they will tell you that your brakes have “only” 20% left and make it seem like you can’t drive the car out of the shop. In reality if it took you 40,000 kilometres (or 25,200 miles) to wear down 80% of the brake then you have another 10,000 kilos (or 6300 miles) to go before it’s a real problem. I’m not suggesting that you wait until your brakes are completely worn out to get them fixed but rather that you probably have quite a bit of time before they actually need it.
• Don’t assume expertise – unfortunately I’ve had problems in the past with small repair places that didn’t know what they were doing and couldn’t fix the car. Sometimes you are better off taking it to the dealership (I wish I knew when this was the case).

For some reason EVERYONE seems to have had powdered milk when they were a kid and HATED it. I have no idea when or where I tried it, I just remember that it tasted like evil. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m reading “The Complete Tightwad Gazette”, and one of the articles in it talked about how great powdered milk is.

I definitely agree that milk can be a pain in the butt to keep around. It expires quickly, it’s heavy to lug home and it’s not cheap (it’s around $1.25 / liter in my neck of the woods). In Ontario, milk is often sold in 4L bags (with 3 smaller bags inside a larger outer one: this site explains it). Because there aren’t any good grocery stores near where I’m living, I’ve been buying milk at the convenience store (since it would be hard to carry milk home in addition to my other groceries).

Never one to let my childhood prejudices go unchecked, I grabbed a bag of powered milk and decided to test whether it’s drinkable or not and in what (i.e. I was pretty sure it’d be ok in coffee, but how about straight in a glass or on cereal?). I’m a dairy fanatic (cutting back on cheese when I was trying to lose weight was tough), so I really wasn’t sure what the results would be.

To quickly outline the benefits of powdered milk:

• Lasts FOREVER (compared to liquid milk) – the 1 kg bag I got is good until Nov 2009.
• Easier to get home (lighter in powdered form)
• Easier to stockpile (you don’t have to run to the store when you realize you’re out of milk, you just mix up some more)
• Cheaper (it’s about $0.90 / L) – might be possible to buy it for even less if you bought in bulk
• You can control the “creaminess” (mix it to taste like skim or 2%, just by adding more or less water)
• Great in an emergency (if you can’t buy milk for a few days because of a natural disaster, just mix your own)
• Easier to cook with
• As nutritious as regular milk (according to some sites I’ve checked on)

The instructions on the bag said to refrigerate after mixing it, but I couldn’t wait and tried a taste after mixing. It was pretty unpleasant (gritty). Undaunted I threw it in the fridge overnight. In the morning I opened the door, crossed my fingers and poured myself a glass. I took a swig and:

It tasted just like the milk I usually drink.

It was actually creamier than I was used to (I drink skim milk). I’ve since tried it on cereal, and in coffee and tea, and so far it tastes great everywhere.

Years ago I switched from 2% to skim, and it was tough at first. When you’re used to something, and you have something subtly different, it’s easy to reject it. However, I quickly adapted to both skim milk and powdered milk.

I wonder if the powdered milk we all had as kids was just served too soon (they didn’t let it sit in the refrigerator)? Maybe kids just have more acute taste buds than adults…

I’d definitely recommend grabbing a bag of powdered milk and seeing if you can switch over. If it’s tough to stomach, try “cutting” (mix them half-and-half) real milk with powdered milk until you get used to it.

Another option for “stockpiling” milk is to buy bags of it and freeze them. Families in the more rural areas where I grew up would sometimes do this (so they wouldn’t have to make trips into town just for milk). Shake the bags after you’ve thawed them to mix the fat back in with the liquid.

As much as I love to save money, something I’m embarrassed to admit is that I never bother with coupons. I’ll grudgingly submit rebates (I hate them though, just sell me the thing cheaper please), but coupons have always seemed like more trouble then they’re worth.

Every so often you read about a coupon queen and it always makes me suspicious I’m missing out on some big savings. An article I read a while back said to combine coupons that give you money off EACH item, with “buy one, get one free” sales in order to get paid to buy things (i.e. they give you the items AND money).

Recently I got “The Complete Tightwad Gazette” out of the library after a reader recommended it. One suggestion turned me off a bit. “Make potholders out of old blue jeans”. My reaction was “come on! how big of an expense are POTHOLDERS for the typical family!”. Most of the suggestions are reasonable though, and even things like this she’ll often acknowledge don’t really make sense from just a dollar and cents perspective (she makes her kid’s Halloween costumes, even though she agrees that they can be purchased pretty darn cheaply – its about crafting as well as saving money).

She addresses coupons at one point, and her feeling is similar to my own: that they’re a lot of work for debatable savings. She makes the point that many people look at their SAVINGS from coupons, rather than their TOTAL SPENDING. If you save $20 buying name brand products with coupons, but you could have saved $30 buying store brands, are you any further ahead?

Have any of our readers saved big by getting serious about coupons? Can you find situations where you get paid to take things home (or can get them for next to nothing) very often? Has anyone done this in Canada?

I started running regularly a few months ago and really enjoy the exercise. However, since our second child was born, I’ve had a really difficult time getting out jogging. It’s hard to run during the day since I am usually looking after my son (the older one) and at night I often help out with the little one so that mom can get some sleep. I decided to buy a jogging double stroller which will allow me to go running and look after one or both of the kids at the same time. Jogging strollers tend to be expensive and I didn’t want to pay too much for it. I figured that $300 would be a good upper limit.

As I concluded in my baby expense series, “used” is the way to go – so I looked on Kijiji and Craig’s List for a used double jogging stroller. On Kijiji I didn’t see any for sale except for one really nice one that had an asking price of $675 – no thanks. I put up a “wanted to buy” ad and then moved on to Craig’s List. There I found three good possibilities which were all posted that weekend. They were listed at $120,$150 and $175. I sent out the emails and the $150 offer responded right away. I asked if he would take $100 and his response was that he would take the highest offer received by the next day. I assumed that either he had received more emails about the stroller or he was playing me to get more money! Either way, I would have been fine paying the asking price of $150 so I emailed back an offer of $130 and he accepted right away. When I picked up the stroller the next evening he told me there were quite a few emails offering to buy it and mine was the first one. The stroller looked good so I took it. It was a Baby Trend Expedition double jogging stroller.

The next morning I loaded up my son and the three tires from the stroller up in the wagon and we went down to the local gas station to pump up the tires. After assembling it, we took it for a test “run” and it worked great. Later that afternoon I went for a jog with my son and I have to say that I was pretty happy with the stroller. It is definitely an adjustment since running with your hands on the stroller bar is a lot different than running hands free. There is a safety strap on the bar which you put around your wrist (in case the stroller goes faster than you do) and there is a hand brake as well. The stroller literally will not turn unless you lift the front wheel a bit. One drawback is a lack of storage underneath – we had hoped to be able to use this stroller as our “shopping” stroller as well but I think we will end up buying a cheap double stroller for that purpose.

I’m a big fan of exercise in order to stay in shape. One of the things that I try to do is to get some exercise doing normal chores around the house so that I can increase my fitness without having spend extra time or money going to a gym. A great way to get some solid exercise during the summer months is to mow the lawn with a manual lawn mower.

Now you might be thinking that your yard is too big. Well, how about doing part of the lawn with the manual mower and then hop on your 8-cylinder rider for the remainder? Now I can accept that some people are not healthy enough to do manual work but everyone else should be capable of doing part or all of their lawn with a manual mower.

Reasons why you should be using a manual lawn mower

1. Exercise – this particular workout doesn’t cost you any money, no time to get to the gym and is time that you would doing a chore anyways.
2. Save money – manual mowers are cheaper than any other kind of mowers and the maintenance is much less.
3. Good for the environment – you aren’t using any electricity or polluting with a gasoline engine.
4. Quiet – electric and gas mowers are very loud, which is annoying to the person mowing as well as everyone else in a half mile radius.

If you are going to mow your lawn manually, then it’s important that you do it regularly, otherwise if it gets too long then it’s too difficult.

You can buy a pretty good manual mower for about $100 so even if you already own an electric or gas mower then you can sell it and buy a manual mower. Your health will thank you.

If you have kids that are old enough then get them to do this exercise which will help them if they ever look for lawn mowing job.  Here are some more jobs for kids.

Much like my recent post on finding extra income if you’re poor and unskilled, this post is about methods for reducing your expenses, which SHOULD be possible for most people. If you’re not doing any of the things listed, and *still* have trouble getting by on your salary (which is at least equivalent to full-time, minimum wage work), please send me an e-mail at [email protected] and I’ll try to help you work something out…One of the best parts of cutting expenses instead of increasing income, is you pay for almost all expenses with after tax dollars. A dollar saved is worth more than a dollar earned (since the government will do its best to take as much as possible of that earned dollar away from you).

I’m not saying everyone should do each of these things (I don’t). These are just ideas for ways that most people could spend less money (if that’s your bag, baby).

1. Stop using recreational drugs. This includes legal and illegal. Tobacco, alcohol, pot, etc. Stop doing all of them. Even if you’re smoking Rothman’s (sniff). Ben Stein has some interesting thoughts on this.
2. Stop eating out. I was able to save hundreds of dollars when I started preparing food at home instead of eating out all the time. If you miss the social element of dining with friends, start having each other over to your houses and cook for each other. Similarly to eating at home, you can save money by making your own meals instead of buying pre-prepared meals.
3. Cancel your cable. You don’t need TV. Really! You can even become like this guy.
4. Cancel your internet. It pains me to add this one, as I’d go and collect empty bottles for $20 / month before I’d cancel my internet. HOWEVER, you CAN surf at your local library and most people could get by with 30 or 45 minutes there each day.
5. Move into a smaller living space. If you’re in a house, move into an apartment. If you’re in an apartment, move into a smaller apartment (or get a roommate). At the most extreme, rent a room in someone else’s house or a rooming house. At the ultra, ultra extreme consider living in a vehicle (maybe talk to family / friends before you get this desperate though).
6. Get rid of your car(s). If you need your car to get to work or school, move somewhere closer that you can walk / transit from. If you have more than one car, consider selling the extras and getting by with just one. I’ve never owned a car. Maybe you can’t get rid of it if you’re living in it though ;-).
7. Quit your job. A common idea in many blog posts is whether you’re further ahead or not having a second parent work. Crunch the numbers and see if you might be further ahead staying at home instead of working.
8. Cancel any / all memberships. Get rid of gym memberships, Netflix, etc. Re-occurring expenses are killer.

Debt reduction blogs will have FAR more ideas than presented here, but these are some areas I’d look at trimming if I was spending more money than I was earning each month (or if I wanted to stop working with less savings). The basic theme is these are all wants, rather than needs. Learn the difference, get rid of the wants that aren’t worth the money you’re paying for them, and LATER in life, when you have more cash, re-introduce them to your lifestyle.

What are the first areas you’d look at cutting out of your lifestyle if you wanted to trim your monthly expenses?

This Sunday is Mother’s Day and if you are anything like me then you are probably wondering what to get her and how to get it without spending too much money. I’ve come up with a few suggestions – keep in mind this list is intended more for Mom as in your mom, not the mother of your kids – although most of the items can be applied in either case.

1. Visit her or phone her if the distance is too great. All Moms love to hear from their kids so make it happen.
2. Make a Mother’s Day card complete with photos and some description of your recent activities.
3. If you are really feeling retro then write an actual snail mail letter (with photos).
4. Candies – yes, these cost money but don’t buy a huge box of specialty chocolate. Go small, go cheap and she will like it just as much.
5. Flowers – this is another one where you can spend a lot of money but don’t have to. If there are flowers in bloom in your garden (or your neighbours) then pick them and use for the gift.
6. Treat her to dinner – either invite her over for a frugal meal at your house or prepare some food and bring it to her house. Either way she will be thrilled.
7. Do some chores – mow the lawn, weed the garden, wash the car, do some home repairs for her – all these actions will be greatly appreciated and will be worth a lot to her.
8. Listen to her – let’s face it a lot of us don’t really listen to our parents so for a change of pace ask your mom to tell you some things about her past. This could end up being one of the more painful gifts you ever give, but hey, it’s not your day right? 🙂

There you have it – any other suggestions for frugal and cheap ways for a Mother’s Day gift?

My mother recently went on vacation to Spain with one of our distant relatives from England. During the course of the trip, it turned out our relative is deep in credit card debt. She split up with her husband (of over 20 years) and has been struggling to get by on jobs that pay a pretty low wage. She told my mom that she “couldn’t live a decent lifestyle without going into debt”. No one in my immediate family could make heads or tails out of that comment.

To me living beyond your means is a party that is inevitably going to end badly. Eventually you’ll have to radically change your lifestyle once you lose access to the credit you’re abusing. Beyond that you’ll have the pain of filing for bankruptcy, probably at a stage in life when you’ll be less able to deal with it (since you’ll be older – working a second job will be even LESS appealing than it is now). Or, you’ll try to reverse your lifestyle before bankruptcy and have even less money to live on as you’re servicing your debts.

Perhaps, for extra fun, you’ll borrow money from friends and/or family and blow that before the party ends as well.

It’s a cliche, but some people truly don’t understand the difference between a need and a want. Vacations are wants. No one needs to travel for pleasure. I enjoy travel greatly, but if I can’t afford it, I don’t go. It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would think it’s a good idea to go on vacation or buy a fancy TV and add the cost onto a debt they’re already struggling with.

1 billion people live on $1 / day or less. At this level of spending you’re probably not meeting the long-term survival needs of your body (although I think a lot of people don’t realize that a dollar goes a lot further in a rural village in a developing country than it does at the Eaton’s center). These people can say that they don’t earn enough to live a decent lifestyle, but can ANYONE earning a western salary really make the same claim?

A while back I read through a blog of a guy who lived off $1 of food per day. Unappetizing? Sure. Unhealthy? Yeah, probably. That being said, how much more do we REALLY need to spend before it’s considered a decent lifestyle? $60 in snacks at The Carrot Commons seems like a want rather than a need to me. (for those not familiar with the Carrot Commons, it’s a hippie spawning ground masquerading as a grocery store here in Toronto along the Danforth – their hummus is great!).

Debt Kid and Violent Acres both have stories about times in their life when they were living pretty rough. This is probably the threshold of what I’d consider a “decent lifestyle” for Westerners, but in both of their situations they admit that they made poor choices and got themselves into a bad place, and they chose to temporarily live the way they did to get out of it. My brother spent 6 months travelling across Canada and the US in a pick-up truck with a mattress in the back (covered by a cap – those shells that cover the bed of the truck). He was homeless living out of his truck for half a year and he loved it! Hobo Stripper lives out of a van (and takes off her clothes as a job). I suspect she does have a problem or two, but I don’t think money is one of them – she chooses her lifestyle and seems pretty happy with it.

My brother probably would have been happier if he’d had a stripper with him in his truck, but I’d argue that would have been a want, not a need ;-).

Part of what got Debt Kid and V through their experiences is they chose them. I’m not terribly sympathetic with someone who sticks their head in the sand and ignored their financial reality until this type of lifestyle is forced on them. If a train is coming down the track towards you, I’m not impressed if you turn and look the other way until you get hit. In situations like these, the medicine will probably be less bitter the sooner you take it.

People sometimes are amazed at how little I spend ($1200-1400 / month these days), but from a global or historical perspective I’m living a lavish lifestyle. I have time to spend with friends, a computer and Internet connection that lets me blog and read all day, I never go hungry (and I have the option of healthy food), I have clean water, a hot shower and a roof over my head, free government medical care, there’s a public library in easy walking distance I can read current newspapers and books at, there’s a subway stop 2 minutes from my door that gets me to any corner of our not-so-fair city for a couple of bucks and a wide assortment of tasty affordable foods when I have some extra cash and want to “splurge”.

Not too shabby from my perspective. I could stop eating out, get rid of my home computer, live with a few roommates or in a rooming house and still be living what I’d consider a very decent life.

In a western urban setting, what’s the minimum amount of money or amenities that you’d consider a decent lifestyle?