Category Archives: Frugality

Frugal Activities

Do It Yourself (DIY) To Save Money

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When I was in school, I remember a particular teacher that taught that it’s better to great at one job, than to be mediocre at many jobs.  I humble disagreed.

I think it’s better to know how to do as much as possible!  Some of the things that we pay professionals, is quite entertaining.

I just want to say that it really pays to be able to do things yourself.  Anymore, labor costs are the biggest expense of fixing things.

List of some of the things I’ve fixed myself are:

  • Rotated my tires
  • Fixed my electrical garage door rail (just needed oiled really), It was getting stuck.
  • Changed car brakes in both our cars
  • Fixed countless toys
  • Washing Machine (twice)
  • Laundry Dryer
  • Lawn Mower (multiple times)
  • Shower head
  • Alarm radio
  • VCR (a long time ago)
  • Cassette Player (4 years ago)

Being able to fix things myself has helped me with my saving goals.  Now, I almost always try to figure out how to fix my things first, before calling in the professionals.

Do you have a list of DIY things you’d done?

The Value of Infomercials, Caveat Emptor

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We are constantly bombarded with Infomercials, especially in the early morning and wee hours of the night, when we’re at our weakest moments.

Exercise Infomercial

Exercise Infomercial

While the some of the infomercial products may work, most are not worth the money.  You’ll buy them, using them a few times, realize they aren’t magic, then (especially with exercise equipment)  just put them in the basement.

Infomercials should not be part of the frugal lifestyle.  As a mid-level frugal person (freegans being at the apex level of frugality), I’ll watch the infomercial and try to figure out a way to simulate what they are doing for free.  Especially with the exercise packages.

Speaking of “Exercising” Infomercials, it’s not the video that will make you lose wait, it’s “the you“ (and me too), actually doing the exercise routine in the package.  In my opinion, most exercise videos are definitely not worth the money.

If you want to look good, you really need to alter your diet and stick to an exercise routine that:

  • You create yourself.
  • Is on TV and you can follow (Gilad, All Star Workouts, Bodies in motion, whatever…), be sure to combine this with a little bit of weight training too.
  • You can borrow from the library via an exercise video, most libraries will carry such videos (DVDs and tapes).  You’ll be surprised if you look for it.
  • Involves Walk/Bike/Jog, and work out with weights.  Remember the diet part too. 😉
  • anything that involves both cardiovascular and anaerobic exercises, even part-time work (a two for one deal here!!!)

Of course, you need to do the exercise routine for more than a month…

As for the “Making Money” Infomercials, Google the review of the product.  Nine times out of ten, the review will be negative.  and the 1 time out of 10 that it isn’t negative, it’s usually a site that is trying to sell us the product.

So how do you know what is worth the expense and what isn’t?

  • First, not much is worth it, think of a way you can achieve the same desired results for free!
  • If the presenter says “It’s great” or gives thumbs up too many time, really start to question the product.
  • Google the infomercial product name follow by the word “review”, this is tricky though because some reviews are people trying to mislead you into buying the product from them.
  • Read blogger posts from highly ethical bloggers.  ex.) MoneyReasons.com, freemoneyfinance.com, frugaldad.com, thesimpledollar.com, etc…  After reading a few days worth from a blogger and skimming it’s archive of previous articles, you’ll have a fairly good idea if the blog is ethical or not and thus to be trusted…  Note, the reasons I mention this here is because I’ve been seeing a few blogs that are really “wolves in sheep’s clothing”.  Meaning that the blogger is really a new startup company pretending that it’s a blogger!  !!Caveat emptor!!

If you’d like my opinion of an infomercial, email me at MoneyReasons(dot)com[at]gmail(dot)com.

To use the address in the previous sentence,  replace (dot) with . and replace [at] with @ (this is an anti-spamming technique).

If you think my assessment is flawed, please submit a comment or email me.   If you have stories you like to share, please do.

Spot Budgeting To Save Money For A Goal Fund

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First, let me say, that I’ve always admired people that create budgets and could follow them to the T.  I’ve actually tried to create a budget when I was in college, but it’s never worked out for me. There was always something that would pop up that I didn’t save the receipt for.

Surprisingly, while doing my Breakfast/Lunch experiment, I “out of the blue” realized that my experiment is really a form of budgeting.  I decided to call this type of budgeting “Spot Budgeting“.

Here’s how “Spot Budgeting” works for me:

  • First, every monday, I clip 5 sheets of paper I recycled together and use them as a log for things I do at work.
  • At the top, I add Breakfast and Lunch cost to these 5 sheets, 1 entry for breakfast and 1 for lunch on each sheet.
  • On Friday, I add up the total cost for breakfast and lunch, then I do the following calculation:
    • Is 60 – (weekly breakfasts + weekly lunches), greater than 40?
      • If 60 – (weekly breakfasts + weekly lunches) is greater that 40, then I pay myself the full $40 dollars for an allowance.
      • If 60 – (weekly breakfasts + weekly lunches) is less that 40, then I pay myself the amount that’s less than $40 dollars.
      • The following week I’ll make it up by not eating out for lunch as much.  Then I’ll pay myself the amount over $40 dollars that I didn’t spend.
  • Since I’m adjusting and tracking this weekly, I don’t do any monthly or yearly budgeting comparisons (this makes it simple).
  • Since it a weekly comparison, and it typically only involves 20 entries (only 2 a day) to log per week, it’s very simple and quick to do.
  • If I want to calculate my yearly savings, it’s just (40*52, which is $2080)
  • That’s it…  My budget is just for Breakfast/Lunch and during the typical workweek only.

Now my next stage is to take the money I save by budgeting and put it into a dividend yielding stock (etf, bond, mutual fund or whatever).  Then use the dividend paid by that investment to increase the amount of money I have for lunch.  See my attached spreadsheet table below:

So after 3 years of saving, I can afford to buy another cheap lunch per week, while I’m at lunch… so instead of 2 days out for lunch per week, I’ll added another lunch out with the guys after every 3 years of savings.

My view on the “Spot Budget” is that you are no longer paying for the lunch out of your earned money, but instead using the money from your investment dividends.  So after the 1st year of investing the money, this will effectively be my “Lunch Fund”.

To speed up the savings, I also add “Additional Savings” to my “Lunch Fund”.  The “Additional Savings” could come from bonuses, part of my tax refunds, etc.

Additional Main Adult Total Yearly Amount & Interest Monthly Weekly
Savings Savings Allowance Contributions Interest Interest Rate Earnings Earnings
2009 1000 2080 3080 3,080.00 $154 3,234.00 5.0% $12.83 $2.96
2010 2080 2080 5,160.00 $258 5,418.00 5.0% $21.50 $4.96
2011 2080 2080 7,240.00 $362 7,602.00 5.0% $30.17 $6.96
2012 2080 2080 9,320.00 $466 9,786.00 5.0% $38.83 $8.96
2013 2080 2080 11,400.00 $570 11,970.00 5.0% $47.50 $10.96
2014 2080 2080 13,480.00 $674 14,154.00 5.0% $56.17 $12.96
2015 2080 2080 15,560.00 $778 16,338.00 5.0% $64.83 $14.96
2016 2080 2080 17,640.00 $882 18,522.00 5.0% $73.50 $16.96
2017 2080 2080 19,720.00 $986 20,706.00 5.0% $82.17 $18.96
2018 2080 2080 21,800.00 $1,090 22,890.00 5.0% $90.83 $20.96
2019 2080 2080 23,880.00 $1,194 25,074.00 5.0% $99.50 $22.96
2020 2080 2080 25,960.00 $1,298 27,258.00 5.0% $108.17 $24.96
2021 2080 2080 28,040.00 $1,402 29,442.00 5.0% $116.83 $26.96
* The idea here is to pack food, which saves money and to pay my allowance out of that money

This is my first “Goal Fund”, eventually I plan on have other “Goal Funds” that will pay dividend for other goals, perhaps vacations, taxes, etc.

Well, this is my evolution of my lunch experiment into a Lunch “Goal Fund”.  I’m kind of excited to see this come to fruition!!

Goal Fund for lunch

Goal Fund for lunch

– D

Saving Money Using Google

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Google is great for searching for your favorite topic of interest, but did you know you could use it to save money too?

Last Feburary, my dryer started making a horrible metal grinding sound (I tried turning up the TV to drown out the sound, but it got louder). I didn’t want to buy a new dryer (these are hard time afterall…), so I decided to try to figure out how to repair it myself via google.  So for the search criteria, I entered “whirlpool dryer squeak” and I was able to find some good site on what the problem and how to fix it.  I like to put just the key words in the search windows.

I tried to type things like “whirlpool dryer is making a squeak sound“, but that wouldn’t give me as good of results as “whirlpool dryer squeak“.

I didn’t even know how to get the dryer apart to figure out the problem… until I googled it. It turned out to be the felt gasket, that the drum twists around over. It cost me $20.00 in total to fix the dryer.  I ordered the part (off of ebay), and install it. Normally, to get a repairman out, it would probably cost me at least $150 to $200 and they would do exactly the same thing that I did myself.

I’ve been able to do this with my car brakes and with other car repairs too.

During one of the coldest days of last winter (-10F), my heat pump decided to stop working.

Using google, I was able to quickly figure what the problems was, but I didn’t have time to order the part. From a few websites, I was able to determine what to do, and I was also able to determine that the part would cost me only $26. Unfortunately, I didn’t want my pipes to freeze, so I called a repairman so they could get it fixed that day.

The repairman did exactly what the websites stated to do, but instead of costing me $26 by doing it myself, the repairman’s fee cost me $234.

The moral of the story, the internet (using google to find a fix-it guide) is a great resource for saving money by diy (doing it yourself).

Google rules!

-MR