Sometimes It’s Best to Just Throw in the Towel. Pun Intended.
Last night I made a final attempt to attach a towel rack to the bathroom wall. The self-driving anchor I was using per the instructions I had heavily researched kind of, for lack of a better word, folded into the wall, causing a half inch hole to crumble out of the wall.
Mr. MoneyDummy said gently that he really appreciates my attempts to improve our home, but he’s starting to get a little bit nervous about how many more of my improvements our home can actually survive.
I went in and looked at the bathroom wall this morning, and I must concede that he may have a point.
Video Log: Internet Scams
If you can’t view the video in the screen below, you can watch it directly on Youtube.
Book Review: 5 Meals for $5
I received a free copy of Jaci Rae’s 5 Meals for $5, and though it took me far too long to get to the review, I think it’s especially useful now that the economy has taken this turn and food prices are skyrocketing. In this book, Jaci Rae covers several topics including how to buy food, how to shop frugally, and how to budget. The book’s main thrust, however, is its recipes, which include ingredient price breakdowns and analyses of how much each dish would cost.
Let’s dig in:
Chapter 1: In this chapter, Rae covers how much each of her items cost to buy. She discloses how and where she bought the items, whether it was on sale and whether she used coupons, which is great. The downside is that the pricing in this chapter determines the pricing for the recipes, and many of the prices she got are no longer reasonable to hope for or never were reasonable to hope for for certain regions of the country. Overall, however, it’s nice to look at this section and know what she’s basing her prices on.
Chapters 2-3: Learning to be frugal and living within your means. It’s good that she covers this chapter just in case any beginning frugalites are reading the book. If you’ve spent any time at all reading frugal living advice, however, these chapters won’t tell you anything you don’t already know. Best to skip ahead to the good stuff.
Chapter 4: Chapter four qualifies as “good stuff,” because she includes several brief and useful tips on how to get more value out of your groceries. These tips include things like how to select quality produce and what items are worth the increased cost (olive oil over vegetable oil) in the long run. She also includes a few interesting cooking and household tips like how to tenderize meat or use vinegar and baking soda to de-clog your drain. This section is definitely worth the five minutes it takes to skim it.
Chapter 5: This chapter is just a two-page explanation of how she calculated her pricing for the recipes. It’s worth skimming to get an idea of where her prices come from, but other than that, just dig in to . . .
Chapter 6: The recipes! The recipe section is divided into too many sections to list, but it includes things like “Asian Cuisine for under 5.00″ and “Asian Cuisine for Under 8.00″, continuing the pattern through breakfasts, meat dishes, poultry dishes, beef, etc. What’s nice is that each recipe contains not only a breakdown of the recipe’s cost, but a breakdown of each individual ingredient’s cost. (Holy cow, girl! That’s a lot of great work!) This is nice because it allows you to glance at the ingredients and spot whether your actual cost of the ingredients will significantly affect how much it costs you to make the meal. For instance, if you glance down the recipe cost and see that there’s a significant difference between how much she paid for chicken (.99 a pound) and how much you have to pay for chicken, you’ll know that her final recipe cost will differ from your actual cost. This makes it easy to glance through the recipes and apply them to your own grocery-budget situation.
It’s a good book; I enjoyed glancing through it, and will probably continue to reference it as I shop and cook. If you’re a beginning frugalite who’s trying to get a handle on trimming down the grocery budget, this would be useful for you.
Why America Won’t Fail
Because of people like this.
This family’s not in my area, but I hope that whoever’s area they’re in will find some work for them to do.
In Which Goodwill is A Ripoff and Craigslisters are Crazy
As it turns out, my three-year old son intends to continue growing, and his current clothes intend to continue staying the same size they’ve always been. As it also turns out, used clothes for preschool-aged boys are hard to come by.
First, I tried posting a want ad on Craigslist. I posted twice, about two weeks apart, and got only one response. It was from a woman who gave me not her address, but rather the intersection on which she lives. Naively thinking that no one would give an intersection location unless there were only one house at that intersection, I went there. To my surprise, the intersection had the usual four houses, one on each corner. And yes, I did in fact knock on all four of the houses’ doors and ask each person who answered if they planned to sell me 4T boys’ clothing. None of them did.
It was not amusing.
The woman finally e-mailed me back an address–funny concept, those convenient identifying numbers that are so much more definitive than random landmarks or vague intersections–but it got deleted. Plus, she wasn’t sure when she could really say she’d be home, and I felt that I had wandered aimlessly around her neighborhood enough for one lifetime, so it kind of washed out.
Craigslist was a bust.
Then I checked E-bay, and was surprised at how popular lots of used 4T boys’ clothing are. I looked at several completed auctions and realized that by the time you’ve outbid all the other users and paid for shipping, you’ve paid about 2.50-3.00 an item. I’d be willing to pay that for individual items, but I’m reluctant to pay that per-item price for a huge lot of clothing which may contain several items I don’t like.
Next I hit the thrift store. I thought that perhaps my earlier experience had been skewed, and that maybe I’d find the prices to be more reasonable this time. No such luck. At Goodwill, boys 4T clothing was marked at four dollars an item. Four dollars! (They were also, by the way, charging a dollar for sun-warped children’s paperbacks, and ninety-nine cents for a battered foam sword with pieces of foam falling off it. This was particularly funny because the sword was a buck at the dollar store when it was brand new.)
Now, if I’m going to pay four dollars for boys’ clothing, I have much better options than used stuff of questionable cuteness.
What I’ve learned is that boys’ clothing is a lot harder and more expensive to buy secondhand than baby and toddler clothing is. I’ll keep my eyes peeled to see how yard sale season looks, but I suspect that I’ll have to start being more aggressive about stocking up on good sales at retail stores. And I’ll just stay out of Goodwill.
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