Archive for the ‘Frugal Living’ Category

Wolf and I have a lot of funny conversations… It never ceases to amaze me how the Lord brought us together, across the country, in the midst of a culture that is so different from us!

It all started when he had worn down the heels on his favorite pair of cowboy boots, and also worn out the sole of his Redwing work boots.

I was shocked how hard it was to find a shoe-repair shop. Wasn’t there always one on every corner, one in every mall?

Wolf and I began to speculate on the decline of shoe repair as a symptom of the rise of consumerism and the disposable mentality. Can’t you just hear it now:

After all, if I’ve worn these flats for, say, a year, and they get to the point of needing new heels… They are hopelessly out of style, and I should just throw them away and buy myself a new pair! I deserve it, right?

We laughed when we asked our Facebook friends where to find a Shoe Repair shop, and someone said almost exactly that!

Needless to say, I did find one, and both pairs of boots were restored to their former glory. Both have years of use left in them, and would only have been replaced with identical (and costly!) new ones…

I got to thinking, later, that there are a lot of things around the house that we use longer than many people might. We don’t throw something away simply because it starts to look worn.

Some things can simply continue to be used until they wear out totally. Other things can be repurposed or converted, and then used until they wear out totally.

Here are a few diapers that we are still using, for instance, as they disintigrate…

Shortly after taking this photo, that top layer fell off entirely. As thin an scraggly as it was, I couldn’t think of a use for it, and it did get thrown out. But the diaper is still in use!

A friend made this diaper for me, and I had no idea it had a red layer underneath…

This diaper was a lovely, soft bamboo velour. Amazingly, once all the “fuzz” wears off it is a thin grid, and you can see the underlayers right through it!

This diaper was actually retired shortly after this photo was taken. After a certain number of layers wear away, and the elastic loses it’s spring, it just doesn’t do its job anymore.

The first step! The end of the elastic wore through the casing, and came loose.

This is a “diaper service quality” prefold. Heavy-duty. The top layer is disintigrating…

…and a close-up…

Yeah, that flat-in-patches fabric is terry cloth – the loops just plain wore off!

And I’ve already mentioned where worn-out socks go in our house!

It just doesn’t make sense to discard and replace things that have plenty of life left in them.

Whether we do it because of laziness, carelessness, pride and vanity, or some other reason… It’s neither “green,” nor good stewardship.

Here’s my simple-living, green, thrifty tip of the day:

Don’t want to darn socks? Me, either.

I’m not sure my family would wear them, anyway, as used to smooth, fluffy textures as everyone is.

But I don’t just toss them in the trash, ether. Waste of money, waste of fabric, etc., etc., right?

So I pull out my trusty sewing scissors and give them a couple of snips.

I clip once across the sock, going up from the “point” of the heel.

For my anklets, I then just discard the remaining elastic band portion. For athletic socks, this divides them into two.

I’ve also been cutting off the toe-tips. This helps them lay flat, removes the toe seam, and allows them more free water flow in the wash. This is strictly optional.

These little cloths have a wide range of uses:

• Baby diaper wipes
• Family cloth wipes
• Dish cloths (not a drying towel, but instead of a sponge for washing)
• Handkerchief
• Cleaning cloth – windows, etc.
• Dedicated shoe-shine cloth
• Eyeglass or computer screen cleaner (used appropriately)
• I’m sure you can come up with your own unique uses, in your particular situation

You can just toss them in the wash… With your diapers, or your regular white load, depending. A few little cloths don’t add greatly to your washing burden.

If I had access to my sewing machines, I’d serge up the edges, as certain socks are starting to unravel at the cut edges. (Why some and not others remains a mystery).

I was inspired to write today by the edition of Everyday Cheapskate I just received: A Simple Trick to Stop Mindless Spending.

Mary Hunt makes a couple of really great points is this article, which I would like to elaborate on and add to.

Many people don’t realize where the money goes. It’s not just a problem of budgeting, it’s a problem of not thinking about it in the proper perspective.

We’re not even talking about making the tough value judgements yet – we just want to be aware of what things are really costing us.

For instance, Mary shares:

According to Starbucks, the average customer spends $4.05 per visit for coffee and makes 18 visits per month. I’m fairly certain that most of these customers think of that as a series of $4.05 expenditures because it’s less painful than seeing it as an $874 annual expense, spent $4.05 at a time.

Figuring the annual cost of that “trivial” expense is a great way to look at what it’s really costing you.

It’s not hard to figure it out:

• Take your monthly cost
• Add a zero to the end (multiply by ten)
• “Add a little more” (per Mary Hunt), or, for us literal folks, it’s two monthlies more.

Another illustration of this from Mary’s article:

Heather gets her nails done every two weeks at a cost of $20 per visit. That’s about $40 a month. Times 10, that’s $400 plus a little ($85) is $485. Again, let’s check the numbers: $20 x 26 = $520. Not far off, and shocking when Heather has been trivializing this as just a little something she does for herself. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against nail appointments. I just want you and Heather to know the true cost of what you believe to be insignificant expenditures.

Here’s another trick I use a lot to put things in perspective:

How many hours do you (or the wage earner in your home) have to work to pay for that?

Going out to dinner is a great example of putting this one to use.

Taking your family out to dinner at even a moderately priced restaurant is likely to run you close to $50 with tax and tip.

Even if you earn $20/hour, that’s two and a half hours’ gross pay, probably three and half hours of labor to take that home with taxes taken out.

For someone earning $10/hour, that’s probably six hours or more.

You could easily work all day just to pay for dinner!

And Mary’s final tip for today:

Be specific about your income, rather than thinking of it in inflated, general terms.

Take Tom and Susan. They live in the false security of a $50,000 income, as in “We make $50,000 a year so we should be able to buy what we want without feeling guilty.” The truth is Tom makes $48,275 a year, which is close, but not exactly $50,000. Allowing for taxes and other payroll deductions, their net take-home pay is something closer to $35,000. Of that amount, their actual discretionary income (what’s left after allowing for essentials of food, shelter, insurance, transportation, etc.) is more like $5,000 … They have just $450 cash to spend each month. That makes blowing a hundred bucks here or $4.05 there more significant.

This is huge!

Isn’t that just what you always hear people talking about – “Joe makes $40K”?

Even if Joe’s salary is $40K (and it may be $38,500), taxes and other withholdings take out about a third off the top.

And of course before you think about how much you have to spend, you have to subtract out the essentials – which in many cases eat up nearly the whole paycheck these days!

Working on reducing the cost of those essentials is a project for another day… For today, it’s enough to be dealing with them as hard numbers.

So, if we

• Think concretely about how much our income is, and
• Analyze the cost of a purchase as an annual expense, and/or
• Calculate the hours worked to pay for it

…we will have an accurate picture of the true cost of that “trivial” expense, so we can make a wise, informed decision.

(This post was not sponsored or endorsed by Mary Hunt. But if you’d like to get Mary’s tips yourself, sign up for her FREE Everyday Cheapskate emails!)

In addition to my sundry ramblings about our journey to home-baked bread (below), I wanted to specifically talk about the cost.

I’ve heard people wondering if, these days, you can really make bread at home any cheaper than you can buy it in the store.

I think the answer is, “Yes, and No.”

The bottom-line calculations for this would involve a lot of time, measurement, and calculation. When I looked at all the issues, I decided it wasn’t worth it to even “go there.”

A cursory online search found people’s calculations of the cost of a loaf of homemade bread, including energy, between $0.50 and $1.50 (which included beer). In an absolute sense, I suspect that my bread would come out about on par with the cheapest loaf of bread I can buy at the store (about $0.89 around here for a loaf of Publix grocery store brand white bread). If you have a bakery outlet near you, or similar opportunity, you can probably get it cheaper.

But I have absolute power over my bread.

My bread has no High Fructose Corn Syrup and no preservatives. I use baking powder that has no aluminum, and unbleached four. I use real butter, not artificial and chemical stuff. I add nonfat dry milk for extra protein, and I can switch it up by adding some whole wheat four, oatmeal, herbs, or whatever strikers my fancy.

It makes the whole house smell wonderful, tastes wonderful, and makes my family feel nurtured and happy.

…And I’m positive that my bread costs far less than the price tag of the kind of bread I prefer to buy in the store – approaching $4 per loaf!

I started out using the basic boule recipe from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking.

It tasted nice, and would be fine as bread with soup… but there’s just no way you’re going to be using that for sandwiches.

Luckily, I was pointed towards the terrific blog Everyday Food Storage (actually part of a set of three!), and her recipe for EZ Bread (which I double).

We’ve been eating nothing but homemade bread for over a month now. Each batch we’ve tweaked the recipe just a little, as we learn more about what works, and what we like.

• I use 1 cup of rolled oats in place of 1 cup of four. I’m working on getting some wheat germ in there, too. The kind of “bitter” taste of whole wheat four is just not something the family can seem to get over, so I’m trying to find other ways to get some more nutrition in there.
• Nick and I are learning about watching the dough in the mixer “kneading,” and knowing when you need to add a bit moe flour or water. Recipe or no recipe, there are enough other factors (temperature, humidity, etc.) that this part is more art than science.
• To get the bread nicely done inside and out, we had to lower the cooking temperature and increase the time.
• On a suggestion from an online forum, I butter the top of the loaves when they come out.  Yummy!

We did decide it would be worth it to invest in some better bread pans.  The kind most people have at home (and what I had) are actually smaller than a “real” bread loaf – great for banana bread, but not so much for regular bread-making.

I chose a pair of 1 1/2 lb. Chicago Metallic Commercial Bread Pans, and have been simply delighted with the big, beautiful, evenly-cooked loaves they’ve turned out.

We’ve made our bread into monkey bread, dinner rolls, and pizza crust. My next project is to work on hamburger buns (there’s a great recipe for that on the original Homestead Blessings DVDs I reviewed on Life on the Road!).

It’s surprisingly easy, takes very little hands-on time (especially if your KitchenAid is doing the kneading), and is one of the most gratifying homemaking tasks in my day.

The Everyday Food Storage blog had another great tip for saving even more time: When you bake a batch, make up several more batches of dry ingredients in zip-top bags. Then making the next few batches is super-quick!

You can also make multiple batches on a big “baking day,” and freeze them – slice first for ease of straight-from-the-freezer use.

If you’re not making bread for your family, you’re missing out on a blessing!

It’s just plain too expensive to keep buying the kids new books and DVDs to keep up with their avenous (if wholesome) appetites.

Sure, we have a Blockbuster Online rental program for movies… But it’s so nice to own the “Little House” series that we’re watching together as a family, gradually. And those favorites that people want to see again and again.

And there’s the library, of course. But what do you do when your kid has read everything there that he finds interesting and you find appropriate? Or when you want a certain book that’s out of print and they don’t have? I know some people use interlibrary loan to great effect… I’ve not had that much success with it – or maybe just not librarians who cared enough to really help out.

And then if it’s something you want to keep for a reference?

I looked at a lot of swapping type sites out there, and I found the whole process exhausting.

What are the odds, after all, that the person who wants the book I’m trying to get rid of actually has a book that I’m interested in?

But then I found the site of my dreams – actually two versions of it.

• I set up my account, and list all the books (or DVDs, respectively) that I want to swap – and they even give you a couple of free credits just for doing that!
• Someone else in the system “requests” a book from me.
• I pay the postage to send it to them (Media Mail, not too bad). I get one “credit” in the system.
• I can use my credit to order any book listed in the system (and the sender pays to ship it to me).
• They even have a “Wish List”, so you can automatically request an unavailable book you want if someone posts it!

It’s free to join, so what have you got to lose?  Except, you know, those books collecting dust over there…

Click these handy (giant) buttons to go to PaperBakcSwap and/or SwapADVD.

It just plain makes sense.

I recycle homeschool books this way, as well as Nick’s reading “stack”…

We’ve gotten rid of the DVDs we had accumulated over the earlier years of our lives that we don’t feel are good family entertainment. And, for instance, I just received the six-disc set of Little House on the Prairie Season 3.

I haven’t done the math myself, but according to PaperBackSwap, based on a used book price of $4.50, I’ve saved over $2,200 using their service. Not too shabby, eh? And imagine the cost of new books…

Full Disclosure Notice: There is a referral bonus awarded at PBS, and probably at SwapaDVD, too. Last time I checked it was 1 credit for each referral who posted their initial 10 books. So I will benefit if you click through my link and check it out – although I would have to tell you about it anyway, since it’s too good to keep a secret!

Of course, that also means that you can get some extra credits by referring your friends to sign up…

I recently ran across an ad that got me thinking: Survival Seeds.

Although I haven’t started yet because our housing situation is so uncertain, I have my heart set on starting a garden.

I want to grow a substantial portion of what our family eats – for reasons ranging from cost, to nutrition, to sustainability and independence, to teaching the children important life skills.

The Survival Seeds ad copy touches on a lot of “hot button” issues, but it also makes a lot of factual claims that I don’t know enough to know about.

I’ve often wondered why, for most plants, you hear people talking about either buying seeds to sprout or buying seedling plants from a nursery – over and over again every year.

Why can’t you just keep some of your crop for next year’s seeds?

Apparently, at least part of the reason is that so many of today’s food plants are hybrids, or “engineered” – and in many cases specifically designed to not be able to reproduce! They can make the fruit (or vegetable), obviously, but the seeds are sterile.

This can only be overcome by purchasing heirloom seeds or plants. Another good thing about these is that they are the original plants that God designed.

I’ve read elsewhere that you can have problems with cross-polination with the “modern” plants degrading your heirloom varieties, even to the point of sterilizing them. How do you keep your stock “pure”?

Survival Seeds also warns that these seeds are getting harder to come by, although it’s hard to tell if that’s just a scarcity tactic on their part.

So what is the value of these seeds – is it a good deal?

My cursory Internet searching turned up heirloom seed packets for an average of $2 – $3. Unfortunately, I’m not enough of a gardener to understand how many of those you’d need to plant your acre, so that doesn’t help me much.

I found a similar “plant a reproducing acre” kit from Sweet Corn Nursery, for about the same price.

There’s also a “Victory Garden” from Heirloom Seeds, which offers an optional “sealed in plastic” packaging – although this only claims to be good for three years’ storage, the cost is under $100. If you want to have it for “just in case” for the next couple of decades that won’t cut it, but for me to plant right now it could be the way to go.

And what about that long-term storage solution? Will it work?

I’d be very interested in hearing from any farmers or gardeners out there with your thoughts!

I don’t think of myself as a fanatic in the “environmentalist” category.

I absolutely care, don’t get me wrong… But I think people can get a little nutty with that stuff.

Like the impression I got from the woman in front of me in line at the health food store last week: Crepe-y mumu type dress, Birkenstock sandals, re-usable (purchased) shopping bags, buying granola, organic overpriced everything, drives a Smart car – when not riding her bike, vegetarian, doesn’t shave, wirries a lot about Global Warming…

I just don’t see myself in her.

And then I got to thinking about it some more.

Of course we turn off lights when we leave the room, hang laundry to dry, use Tupperware over plastic baggies, and turn off power strip to kill “vampire” draws… But everyone does that stuff, right?

People who are “environmentally conscious” use paper towels that are made from recycled paper, and they make sure to put them in the recycle bin whenever possible.

But we use cloth for everything, and don’t buy paper towels at all. (I do keep one roll in the house for a few exceptions – like bacon).

Sure, I have to wash them, but tossing a few “un-paper towels” in with my regular wash doesn’t seem like it’s an awful lot of “footprint” compared to the manufacture, packaging, shipping and disposal of a roll of paper towels (plus cardboard core, plastc wrap outer, etc.).

Skating on the daring edge of TMI, I’ll just allude to the fact that we also use cloth for personal hygene matters, eliminating the need for disposable feminine products, and greatly reducing our consumption of toilet paper.

Those cloths all go in with the diaper laundry… Oh yeah, cloth diapers…

It is so tied in with my feelings about being a good steward for my family’s resources, that I often don’t think as much about the environmental impact.

Hey, green’s my favorite color. I’m glad our cloth makes us Greener than I thought!