Doing it cheaper - waste not want not

I spend a good bit of time analyzing, some might say over-analyzing, everything we do.  This includes the amount of waste we produce.  As I've mentioned before, I have stockpiling rules that govern what comes into my house, what I'm willing to spend my money on.  One of the goals is to get as close to zero waste as is humanly possible.  I'm a realist, zero waste is never actually going to happen, but I can try.

The most obvious way to save money by reducing waste is trash bags.  If I'm not filling trash bags, I don't have to buy as many.  Seems simple enough.

My town provides roll away recycling bins, and I use mine.  My town will actually give you two if you request a second, and I did.  I recycle everything I can.  My husband doesn't quite get why I pull things out of the trash behind him and the kids.  He gets the logic of recycling, but he doesn't quite get why I pick things others have discarded out of the trash and put them in the recycle bin.  He honestly doesn't remember that is how I got him to recycle in the first place.

I also compost our food and yard wastes.  Again, if it's not going into a trash bag, we use and buy fewer trash bags.  An added benefit to not tossing food in the trash is that our trash doesn't smell at all.

There are secondary savings to recycling and composting past the cost of trash bags.

Every year I drop some money to freshen up the soil in my container garden, I buy fertilizer and I should buy some mulch.  I've never actually bought mulch.  Our leaf blower is also a vacuum, and it comes with a chopper.  I vacuum up the fall leaves and dump them unceremoniously on my rose bed.  Free mulch.  Having priced mulch, I save about $50 a year not buying it.  I compost what's left of the leaves, and I save about $20 in manure and fertilizer (I still end up buying some, just not as much) using compost made from yard and kitchen scraps.  I used to compost my egg shells religiously, but after being told I should lime my lawn every so often (it's the soil here), I stopped dumping them all in the compost and started saving them up to "lime" the yard.  Over the winter, the 30-ish ounce coffee container on my counter fills with egg shells, which I crush with a tall glass, and when the spring rains come I sprinkle it all over the lawn.  This saves me about $5 a year in liming the lawn.  Summer egg shells get similarly crushed and periodically sprinkled on the compost pile.  Some of them get worked straight into the tomato containers.

The savings from recycling are less directly quantifiable after trash bag cost.  According to the Aluminum Association "Today, it is cheaper, faster, and more energy efficient to recycle aluminum than ever before. For instance, only about 5 percent of the energy required to produce primary aluminum ingot is needed to produce recycled aluminum ingot. In addition, to achieve a given output of ingot, recycled aluminum requires only about 10 percent of the capital equipment compared with primary aluminum."  So recycling aluminum means that buying aluminum is cheaper for producers.  Businesses live and die by their profit margins.  If they want profit to be X%, or if they want to make $Y profit, the lower their costs, the less they have to charge for their product to be profitable, the less I have to pay for their product.  How much this saves me is an enigma, even if I could accurately quantify how much aluminum we use per annum.  It could be pennies or tens of dollars a year.  The same logic applies to other recyclables.

I mentioned that we have 2 roll away recycle bins.  They're not enough, and they won't let me have a third.  We have a single neighbor, and every now and again he lets us hijack his bin and fill it up on trash night.  We do that when all the inside bins are full, and the outside bins are overflowing already.  About a year ago we started segregating our aluminum drink cans from the rest of the recycling, crushing them, and collecting them in a bag in our shed.  We did this for 2 reasons.  1) We were visiting the neighbor every 2 weeks (which is how often they pick up the recycling), filling his bin and still having some to take back in our house.  2) There is no bottle and can deposit in my state, but there are scrap metal places.  Let's collect it and sell it as scrap.  Why not?  That's what the trash collector is doing with it.  We've been collecting aluminum cans for over a year now, we've got 2 full bags.  One of these days I'll take them down to the scrap place and see how much they actually pay me for them.  Probably won't be much, but as long as it's more than the cost of the bags and the gas, that'll be fine with me.  If it's more, that'd be great.  We discussed doing the same with steel cans, like what you buy soup in, but decided that we didn't want to get too complicated running more than 1 experiment at a time, and the cost of steel was lower than the cost of aluminum, so we'd stick with the more profitable metal.  Steel cans are harder to crush anyway.

So, instead of going through a 20 count box of trash bags, sometimes 2, a month (we have a large family), we go through a 45 count box of trash bags a year.  That's a savings of $25 a year.

All tolled, I've listed $100 in annual savings just by thinking hard about how much trash we're producing and taking action to fix it.  Can you pull $100 or more a year out of your trash?  Try it, let me know how well you do.

Doing it cheaper - lighting and ceiling fans

About 5 years ago, my husband and I started discussing LED lighting.  At the time, LED light bulbs were very, very, expensive.  They're also more energy efficient than CFLs, and they don't contain Mercury (I'm not even going to go there).  We've watched, we've waited, the price has come down quite a bit.  So this spring we decided it was time to replace a couple of insanely ugly light fixtures with ceiling fans.  Ceiling fans are awesome when it comes to keeping the heating and cooling bills down.  We looked at a good number of fans, but we leaned hard toward those with LED light kits.

Does this new ceiling fan with LED lights produce as much light as the monstrous 20+ light bulb chandelier it replaced?  No, but I wasn't expecting it to (honestly was praying it wouldn't, that thing was bright, it was easier to stare at the Sun than that chandelier fully lit).  It does produce ample light for the space though.  And it's a ceiling fan, so it keeps me cooler than the chandelier.  And, even with the lights on and the fan on full, it still draws no more power than the monstrosity.  If I'm using it just as a light, it draws less than a 1/10th what the chandelier was drawing for power.  Lighting is an admitted small percentage of our overall electric usage, but if I'm saving $25 a year on my power bill because of a couple of LED lighting, I'm good with that.  The energy draw of the fan is less than the energy draw for those last few degrees of heating and cooling I'm not needing to achieve, which should trivially save me $100 a year (and quite probably a good bit more).

It's been a particularly temperate (read cold and rainy) summer here thus far.  While I've been running the A/C in the baby's room (set to 78 degrees), and in the office to prevent computer overheating (set to full blast as soon as my husband boots his computer because that thing can jack the ambient room temp by 5 degrees in about 15 minutes), I haven't yet run the A/C in my bedroom.  Even on the dozen or so nights where the temperature was above 85 degrees hours after sundown, I haven't really needed the A/C to be comfortable.  There was 1 night, just one, where I seriously thought about it.  I decided against it because the problem was more the greater than 60% humidity than it was the heat, and I was betting on it to rain overnight.  It didn't.  It was a rough night.  I had to wash the sheets the next day, and before I could get them out to line dry them, it was pouring.

Doing it cheaper - at work

I commit a good bit of thought to everyday actions.  I ask myself "is there a way to do this cheaper?"

Frequently, the answer is yes.

Back when I worked in the cubicle jungle, I broke myself of the habit of ordering lunch everyday in favor of bringing my own from home.  I took it a step further by storing some shelf stable foodstuffs for those off days when I'd forget my lunch.  This easily saved me $5 a day.  Then I worked on my coffee habit.  I wasn't about to give up my daily cup, but could I do it cheaper?  Yes, yes I could.  A couple of the other ladies were in when I told them I wanted to get a coffee pot so we could brew our own.  I'd been spending $1.50 a day on my midmorning cup, but for $1.50 a week I could go in on some high quality coffee.  Next, my afternoon soda fix was costing me 75 cents a can.  I popped across the street from my office, to the drugstore, on my lunch break and grabbed a full price 12 pack for $5.  I kept the 12 pack at my desk, and dropped 1 can in the office fridge in the morning.  I saved 33 cents a can.  I started watching the sales at the stores, and got in the habit of grabbing 12 packs when they went on sale 2 for $5.  Now I was saving 54 cents a can.  I was saving almost $40 a week, and I wasn't depriving myself at all.

Bringing your own lunch to work is often the first suggestion people get when they start looking for ways to save money on food.  Even if you're not packing leftovers (generally the cheapest lunch option), a homemade sandwich or salad will be several dollars cheaper than buying one.

I'm not just interested in saving money on food.  I want to save money on everything.  This is the first in a series.  Stay tuned.

Stockpiling, my rules, my story

Before I took up couponing last year, several people I know expressed amazement at how little I spend to feed my family.  I've always been frugal.  When I first started grocery shopping for myself I shopped the sales and stocked up on the best deals.

My rules for stockpiling are:

1) Buy only the best deals
2) Buy as much as you can afford without otherwise sacrificing your diet
3) Buy as much as you can consume before it goes bad
4) Buy as much as you have room to store

With almost no effort, and before I started couponing or playing the drugstore game, using those 4 simple rules, I was able to feed my family 3 meals a day, including snacks, plus supply personal care items and paper products for $2 per person per day.  And when I say all meals and snack, I mean all meals and snacks.  I homeschool my son.  My husband or I make his lunches.  We rarely eat out, but when we do it is because we are significantly under our $2 per person daily budget.  I don't budget for dining out unless we're planning a trip.

Now that I coupon, I'll be honest with you, I don't spend any less money every month.  What I have done is create a stockpile of items I did not used to keep many of, items we don't use everyday but will use sooner or later that are a fantastic deal***, and I've increased our stockpile of paper products.  I've also bought a lot of food my family won't eat for pennies on the dollar and donated it.

If I get no more for my family by couponing, but it continues to feed my charity addiction without costing me extra money, I will do it forever.

A couple of points about stockpiling...

A stockpile is like a house, you should build it piece by piece.  A stockpile isn't something you go out and buy today.  You could do that, I suppose, but you're not battening down the hatches or preparing for the apocalypse (or maybe you are).  You are building a supply of food and other consumables for yourself and your family that you purchased for a great price so that you can keep your overall costs down.  If that stockpile helps keep your family fed during an emergency, all the better.

Stockpiling is not the same as hording.  Hording is unhealthy and horders should seek help from a mental health professional.  If stockpiling is interfering with your life, your home or your relationships, you might be crossing over from stockpiling to hording.  Get help.

My stockpile helps me sleep at night.  That may sound a little silly, and you may question if I really am a closet horder, but I assure you I am not.

My husband has hinted that I might be a horder, more than once.  My husband also grew up with money and his Mom bought what she wanted to buy at the store regardless of price.  He didn't understand why I would come home with 50 lbs of pasta at a time.  His mother bought a week's groceries at a time, and there's no way we could eat that much pasta in a week.  From his experience, me coming home with much more than a week's worth of groceries just didn't make sense.

Then the transmission in our car died.  It was a 2 year old car and in no reasonable reality did we foresee a major repair this soon.  We needed money.  We didn't have an emergency fund to draw from.  I refused to charge the repair and pay interest.  The transmission shop offered us a payment plan that did not have interest, so long as they got to hold on to a set of keys, if we could make regular monthly payments.  We had to find wiggle room in the budget, and one of the few places to find it was groceries.

For four months I had less than $50 a month to feed my family.  Two teenagers, my husband and my very pregnant self (during the 4th month, I gave birth) had to live largely off of what was in my kitchen.  My husband was worried.  I was not.

My grandmother always said "Hope for the best, plan for the worst."  Emergencies like this are a good part of what stockpiling is all about.

While I will admit it was stressful, and towards the end I was really loathing those cans of green beans, I managed to prove to my husband why keeping a stockpile is a good idea.  We ate.  We ate well, and I spent almost nothing on food.

I don't want to say I enjoyed the experience, I never wanted to have to live off my stockpile and I don't wish that on anyone.  One of the good things I walked away with was a better feel for just how large my stockpile is and where I seem to be lacking in stocking up.  My stockpile was at a nice size in my mind.

When I talk about stockpiles, I don't talk in terms of pounds of food, I talk in terms of time.  How long before our meals start lacking nutritionally?  How long before we run out?  What might be a 2 month stockpile in my house might last 6 months in yours.  It varies based on your family.

Things I learned about my stockpile from having to mostly live off it...

If we continued to eat all we wanted, without rationing at all, we could eat a balanced diet for about 3 months without bringing anything else in to our home.  If we rationed, we could eat a fairly balanced diet for closer to 6 months.  I don't stock nearly as large a supply of protein as I do starches.  My vegetable stockpile is lacking, though not as much as protein.  I need to do a better job of keeping at least 6 months worth of toilet paper in the house at all times.

We're now at 4 months back to normal, financially.  There's no repair payment to be made, and my grocery budget has resumed it's regular size.  I've been restocking slowly, as I find good deals.  We're not back up to our previous level.  We're around 60% of our previous level.  We've made a few trips to our local teen homeless shelter and dropped off soup, bodywash and toothpaste inspite of still being in restocking mode.  It's easy to do when we have plenty for ourselves and I can get more for pennies.

***I mentioned in my last post giving my husband previously purchased free eye drops.  The week before that it was Sucrets.  Freebies we're likely to need in the next few months come home with me all the time.  When I get too many of a particular type of freebie, it gets donated.

It's more than just being cheap

Cheap and frugal aren't the same thing.  Really, they aren't.  Someone who is cheap walks through the produce section and settles on the clearance package of tomatoes, bruised, soon to be past edible, likely to start molding.  A frugal person walks through the produce section, is floored by the price of heirloom organic tomatoes and resolves to grow their own.

The cheap shopper has done himself no service in choosing poor quality product.  Nutritionally, culinarily, their choice was lacking.

The frugal shopper, now resolved to be a frugal gardener, while not guaranteed success, has a fair shot of spending less on tomatoes all year than their cheap counterpart.  They will get rewarded in spades (gardening pun intended) for doing it better for less.

That's what it's all about.  Getting more, getting better, getting high quality at a low cost.

Hello, I'm Sam

.....and I'm a frugalista.  I have been a saver and a serious bargain shopper since I was a kid.  I've had ups and downs, financially.  My inner frugal ninja has helped me weather every storm (even when some of those storms were of my own making courtesy of bad choices when I was young).  I shop the sales and stockpile, and I have ever since I first had to start buying my own groceries.

I used to clip coupons long ago, before there was really much of an internet.  It was tedious, all the clipping, sorting, filing, searching the sale ads.  Knowing I had a coupon that would match up with the sale I saw, only to dig it out of my file to find it had expired really wasn't fun.  That happened a lot because flipping through all those coupons to weed out the expired ones was not how I wanted to spend a fine weekend afternoon.  After a couple of years I decided it was too much work and that my time was better spent doing other things.  I always shopped the sales, stocked up on the lowest prices, so the financial hit wasn't all that hard.

That worked reasonably well for many years, until last summer.  We had an unexpected car repair ($3k transmission rebuild for a two year old car) that necessitated reworking the budget to find the money.  Most of the wiggle room was in our grocery budget.  Since we had a good stockpile, I didn't worry too badly about continuing to eat.

I spent 4 months with less than $50 a month to buy groceries for my family.  Near the end of that time, I gave birth to child #4.  With the prospect of paying for diapers, no budget with which to buy them, and no better ideas on how to stretch our paper thin budget just a little thinner, I turned to couponing again.

I've been couponing again for just over 6 months, and I'm hooked.  The internet makes it all so much easier.

In the part of the country I live in, all the stores have rules and restrictions on the use of coupons.  You can't really find that one awesome deal, swoop in and clear the shelves.  They've tailored their coupon policies to prevent that, and that's OK.  I'm not above developing a shopping addiction and becoming a slave to a good deal, but with the coupon policies in place near me it would be almost impossible to escalate to that level of obsession.  I suppose it could be done, but not without a fair amount of effort.  My time, like my money, is valuable to me.  It doesn't make sense to me to spend my time trying to figure out how to spend more money when we get along just fine with the current restrictions.