As we face uncertain economic times, one thing to keep hammering on is being careful what we spend and how we spend it…
Over at Lucy’s Frugal Living, I ran into the meme-of-the-week:
I think people are just afraid to buy things right now, with all of the uncertainties…
Well, good! People (we all) buy too much stuff. Stuff is the bane of our society’s existence. We buy too much, hoard too much and throw away too much. Almost all of the “too much” is of the wrong stuff. Junk food and flashy toys that break and faddish clothes, etc., instead of staples and healthful food and really durable goods that we need and clothes that will last us for years.
And we–as a society, not all as individuals–have been buying this crap for years on credit! Maybe a few credit junkies buying crap with other peoples’ money will be scared straight by a crash. Maybe. One can hope.
Maybe congresscritters will grow some brains and rent some intestinal fortitude and allow big car makers who’ve made stupid financial decisions for years reap the whirlwind they’ve sown. Maybe. One can hope.
And maybe a few grups will actually GROW UP and act like adults for a change, putting away their irresponsible, childish pursuits of childish pleasures long enough to actually BE adults, begin eschewing spendthriftism for frugality and actually contribute to society. Maybe (but I doubt it).
*feh* Enough of this. Two or three tightwad, money-saving tips for the “scared straight” among credit abusers and junk hoarders:
1. Reduce your dependence on the trashman: recycle internally. Find genuine uses for as much of your trash as you can!
–coffee grounds, eggshells, potatoe peelings, darned near anything organic can
be added to a compost heap. And you can start small, in a corner of your
yard, making nutrient rich soil… to use instead of expensive potting soil or
just to enhance the soil in your flower beds.
–sandwich bags and other plastic “throwaways”: clean the things, dry them
and re-use em, for heaven’s sake! Even those “open-with-the-jaws-of-life”
ceral bags can be cleaned and put to MULTIPLE uses. (I like opening them up
flat for use rolling out dough on; storing cut onions in; etc.)
–shredded bills, etc. (don’t we all have a ton of this stuff?): pet bedding!
–food and drink bottles, jars, etc.: surely EVERYONE reuses these things
instead of using expensive (and less useful) plastic crap that introduces
negative health issues. *heh*
–cardboard boxes: besides using for storage, etc., consider other uses: floor
mat when working underneath car (can be as easy scooting around on a
cardboard mat as using a creeper, and the cardboard will absorb fluids… and
can then be tossed); craft mats or projects; MAKE A CAT
SCRATCHER from your own scrap cardboard, instead of paying $10 or more
for a disposable cardboard cat scratcher. The uses are virtually endless.
–“broken” applicances or electronics: before you toss a broken appliance or
piece of electronics, check it out. I have a NICE panasonic remote
handset-speakerphone-fax machine that I pulled from a neighbor’s trash pile
(yep, I check those sorts of things). ALL it needed was some electronics
cleaner spray inside the handset and to have the rollers on the fax part
cleaned with water and cotton swabs. The next week, I saqw the “baby
brother” to the thing marked down to $186 at a discount warehouse. My
cost? About $0.50. And no, my neighbor didn’t want it back. He’d already
spent $$ to replace it.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Old socks, no longer darnable (you DID repair the holes earlier, right? ;-)): dust/shop rags. Old books: trade in at used book store for more reads. Old glasses: donate, don’t toss. Etc.
2. Make more of what you need from scratch. Bake a loaf or three of bread weekly, instead of just buying bread at the store.
MAKE that chair or desk or bed frame–and do it with discarded or scrap lumber if you can. Don’t have tools or a workplace? *feh* Garage sales and thrift shops are where I got my earliest hand tools, and you can make servicable and often quite nice furniture using hand tools and scrounged materials. Workplace? With a supportive spouse (and halfway decent work habits on YOUR part) that ought to be no problem: a dining room or even living room or den or spare bedroom, if no garage is available, with a cardboard “drop cloth” on the floor (and perhaps drop cloths–old sheets ready for recycling will do–on other areas) will serve for small projects. Just clean up after yourself well.
Artwork for a redeco project? LEARN TO PAINT. It’ll make a great hobby, and you can use the woodworking skills you’re already working on to make canvas frames, frames for finished paintings, etc. Use acrylics. While I prefer(red) oils, acrylics can be less expensive and still give quite good results. Heck, I even have a couple of paintings still around somewhere that I used stretched and gesso-ed scraps from junked blue jeans as canvases. Yeh, they’re small paintings, but sometimes a small painting is all you need. And canvas isn’t the only medium you can paint on. Try murals directly on walls, or scraps of wood or plaster castings. I even did a collection of painted eggshells one time. Beats watching reruns of House, and you might well end up saving a ton NOT spent at “starving artists” sales.
Whenever you’re about to buy something, ask yourself “Can I make that less expensively? Would I make that?” If so, and you need “that” then MAKE it yourself!
3. Handyman chores you might have paid someone else to do so you can take your boat out on the lake/go to a movie and dinner out/whatever: do those jobs yourself. Consider it exercise. Sell the boat (which you probably are still paying for), rent a movie or do a useful activity together (after doing the chores), make a special dinner and eat in as a reward for doing the chores. You’ll practice (or maybe gain new) “grownup” skills–replacing that light switch, mowing the lawn, painting the wall/trim, changing your oil/spark plugs–and save some money all at the same time. The first time I did a disc brake job on my own car, it was a tad daunting, but when you do an important job right (and brakes are very important!), you gain much, much more than just the money saved.
4. Build up your library of do-it-yourself resources. A decent manual on each of your vehicles. A good home repair reference you can understand (a book on electrical codes might not be up your alley, but a how-to on DIY wiring might be appropriate). A GOOD cookbook or three (better ones, IMO, are all OOP, oldies that explain HOW to do things and WHY: haunt used book stores). Woodworking, general mechanics, crafts books, gardening references. I value my collection of 70s and 80s Mother Earth News as a great DIY resource, for example, but my old Popular Science and Popular Mechanics mags are often inspiring. *heh*
I wish I’d spent more time picking my paternal grandfather’s brain. I learned as much from him as I thought I could at the time, but he was the consumate tightwad. Always generous to family and those in need, but a lot of the reason he had resources to spare is that he used everything, right down to the pig’s squeal, and when he’d used it up, he made something of the leavin’s. *heh* I’m sure I could have learned more had I paid better attention…
David, I bet your grandfather lived through the depression. He probably gained a lot of his skills during that time period. My dad was very thrifty and I learned a lot from him. When cooking a chicken, he would use every part of it and he never threw away any of the chicken. He would cook a chicken and save the back, neck and wings for other meals. He would boil those parts, pick off whatever meat was there and use that for chicken and dumplins…….
Lucy,
Actually, Granddaddy had those skills in abundance from having grown up on a homesteaded ranch in Texas as one of 9 brothers and 2 sisters. He could shoe a horse he’d “saddlebroke,” plow a straight furrow (behind a horse-drawn plow), work on his own car, small appliances, home electrical, build homes from scratch using hand tools (and did–part time, after his job at the post office, after he sold his own farm–a year before the Depression), quote the Bible, Shakespeare, Tennyson–by the chapter–grow his own food, catch his own fish–almost anywhere there was water–and hunt, kill and butcher his own meat. And more, much, much more.
And Grandmother ran her home like The Prototype Tightwad. *heh* I thought of her one Christmas season when I was in school, living off campus, and lived one week off a box of Bisquick (something she never used, but… ) and chicken necks I’d saved back over the course of the semester. (I’d just paid my last installment of tuition and had budgetted to juuuust squeak through that semester.) Chicken and dumplings? Oh, yes. Had that one down pat, anyway, cos Mother always did the same as your dad, and made sure each of us in the family knew how to use all the chicken but the “cackle”. 🙂
It’s a fair bet that many of the people that most need this advice aren’t going to “get it.” The notion of repairing things rather than disposing of them is foreign to much of today’s youth, not having seen it in action in their families. Decades of prosperity punctuated with conspicuous consumption and out-of-site-out-of-mind “recycling” (dump it in the recycle bin and let someone else worry about it) don’t lend a frugal mindset to people that never learned frugality in the first place.
These series are good David. How and Why to be frugal are the things that I think need to be shared. Especially the How. With things going the way they are, the Why will probably force itself upon the public consciousness. The other things people need are perhaps a bit of encouragement for people to get off their backsides, and to patiently work through their problems. I know that those last two are among my biggest problems.
Perri,
“With things going the way they are, the Why will probably force itself upon the public consciousness.” Well, probably, but then so very many are of the Entitlement crowd that I expect many–perhaps even a majority–of folks who’re impacted by a Need to Economize… won’t, but will simply throw a tantrum and expect Big Brother to Fix Things for them… *sigh*
Smart ideas: in a contracting economy and with an upcoming political leadership that’s vowed to make energy more expensive, my son has begun a move to transfer (within the company he currently works for) to a job that’s half the driving distance his current job is, with a $3,000/year pay raise. The catch? The job pays more because it requires an unattractive work schedule (night work) and a few other negatives. But, cutting his gas expenses (and other attendant car maintenance) while improving his take home pay (for more savings) simply made sense to him.
How many folks will make such deferred gratification choices?
One of my goals for the coming year is to cut my trash-to-the-curb by half by
a. purchasing fewer things with throwaway content
b. finding more genuinely beneficial uses for what might otherwise be trash w/o serious mods
c. find ways to combine “trash” or use it as raw material in new ways, making useful items for myself or for barter (no selling, unless via yard sale or some such)
d. with food, buying more in bulk (and storing in smaller packaging/freezing, etc.) so as to have less in packaging, etc., to deal with
e. continuing with my repair/mend/retask model for appliances, tools, etc.
Great blog that you have here! I am looking to add you to my blog roll if you are willing to add me in return. Let me know!
Christopher,
I don’t “trade links”. I’ll read your blog for a bit, though, and if it’s something I feel I can recommend, I’ll probably add you in somewhere.