Plans for the Frugal Fe$tival are buzzing – we even have a new website just for the event!
The Frugal Fe$tival website is FrugalFestival.Wordpress.com. Please visit the site for regular updates about the Fe$tival.
***If you are coming to the Fe$tival, puh-leeze RSVP.***
Why come? You can win some fabulous prizes.
Here are directions and info about getting to and from the Fe$tival.
Here’s the original welcome message.
Hi folks,
The site is particularly slooooooooow today. We ran some tests last night and the site hasn’t fully recovered. I’m taking my ace tech guy out to dinner tonight and I’m hopeful that bribing him with food and drink will bring a fix soon. Thanks for your patience.
~Julia
aka Bargain Babe
I was curious if paying for coupons was a smart move after reader Eve mentioned how TheCouponMaster.com had saved her money. The way it works is the site charges you a handling fee for clipping the coupon and mailing it to you. Paying for coupons outright is illegal.
What made me curious about the site is being able to get my hands on a lot of coupons for the the few products I buy that have coupons. I do a lot of my grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s, which does not accept coupons. (But in most cases, at least for the products I buy, their prices are still lower.) When I go through a Sunday newspaper insert, I’m lucky if I find 3 coupons to clip. So being able to order multiples of coupons I will use is hot stuff.
Most coupons at TheCouponMaster cost between $.08 and $.50. You can search for coupons by category, date added, or keyword. The category that had the most selection was Health and Beauty Aides. I found the Meat and Dairy sections to be woefully inadequate.
Here’s what I ended up buying:
3 x Right Guard, Dry Idea or Soft & Dri Products $1.00/2 = $0.24
4 x Mitchum or Mitchum for Women Product $.75/1 = $0.32
3 x Degree Men or Women Anti-Perspirant/Deodorant $.75/1 = $0.30
3 x Clearasil Product $2.00/1 = $0.45
8 x Garnier Fructis Shampoo, Conditioner or Treatment $1.00/1 = $0.80
3 x Breyers Ice Cream $1.00/2 = $0.30
6 x Aquafresh $.75/1 Premium Toothpaste = $.60
With shipping and a processing fee I paid $3.95 for $29.75 worth of coupons. If I use 4-5 of them I’ll make my money back. Of course, I did not find a wide variety of coupons – but at least I won’t have to buy deodorant and shampoo for a year! And the whole process took me about 20 minutes – not a bad hourly rate!
Itching to get away for the Fourth? Check out Southwest’s fare sale. Don’t delay, best fares will go quickly.
You may have noticed there is a new way to find coupons on BargainBabe.com. In the right column a few inches below the Search box there is another box that says Savings.com. We are partnering with Savings.com to provide you coupons that are constantly being updated. Some of them are really hot!
When I last checked there was a coupon for $25 off an order of $75 or more at Lane Bryant, a 50% off deal for any one item at Hanes, and up to 8% off at Apple for teachers and students. Not too shabby.
I hope these coupons make BargainBabe.com even more useful to you. When you use them, you are supporting BargainBabe.com because I earn a small fee from each sale.
~Julia
aka Bargain Babe
This is a post from Alex, Bargainbabe.com’s intern!
After attending a small wedding the past weekend, I thought I might share a few of the strategies that one couple used to save money on their wedding.
1. Pick a naturally beautiful location. Find a place that already has flowers blooming so you don’t have to purchase more yourself. The ceremony I attended was at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens. The trees, plants, and flowers created the perfect ambiance for the ceremony and pictures afterward.
2. Get your own Priest. I was ordained as minister in thirty seconds for free through the Universal Life Church so that I could preside over the wedding. I’d never done it before, but I put on my best speaking voice and practiced reading through what the couple had written for me to say. It felt good to give them exactly what they were looking for since they had no reservations about asking me to recite any sort of rhetoric that was important to them. To give you an idea of the range of dialogue they felt comfortable using, I’ve posted a few of the lines below:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has this to say on the subject of love: “Avoid, if at all possible.” Fortunately, Jerad and Jackie have never read the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, so let us continue.
This ring, which has no beginning and no end, symbolizes that the love between you will never cease. May its presence on your hands remind you of your love for each other. Please place them on your fingers as a visible sign of the vows which you have shared today.
3. Keep your guest list small. One way to keep your guest list from snowballing is to pick a venue that is designed for small ceremonies. Holding your wedding on a boat or anywhere with pre-set seating gives you a good reason against inviting anyone you might consider extra.
4. Set up your honeymoon as a wedding present. You can make a website at TravelersJoy.com where people can go online and pay for different elements of your honeymoon instead of purchasing gifts. Guests can buy anything for you, from a night in the hotel to a bottle of wine at dinner. This saves expenses on your honeymoon and makes it easy for them to buy whatever fits their budget. Click here for a sample of what your site could look like.
The spending moratorium that I argued against but was persuaded by readers to embrace starts Wednesday. Thanks, guys! But seriously, I think this will be an interesting experiment in saying no to discretionary purchases.
To prepare myself I am:
- buying toiletries like deodorant (I ran out and used an extra of Hubby’s. It’s no fun smelling like a man.)
- filling up my tank (getting through the month on one tank in LA will be a stretch)
- treating myself to a salon treatment with the extra cash I have this month
For those of you who think my spending moratorium is hurting the economy (there were 6 of you at last count), I encourage you to spend more in July to make up for my cutbacks. And please, let me know what you buy! I’ll include it in my regular updates about the moratorium.
If you are joining me on the moratorium, please email me!
Ground rules for my spending moratorium:
Allowed purchases include rent, one tank of gas, groceries, utilities, my Internet and cell phone bill. My automatic monthly savings withdrawal remains unchanged.
Business expenses, such as flyers or postage, are allowed.
During the moratorium I’m allowed to use any gift cards I have currently have in my possession (either previously purchased or received as gifts).
I’m allowed to receive gifts as long as they are a true gift and not a way around the moratorium. In other words, I’m not going to ask my friends to pay for me during the moratorium in exchange for paying them back come August.
Here are the best posts and articles I read in the past week.
Wise Bread has a post about NOT driving your non-frugal friends crazy.
Trent at The Simple Dollars doesn’t trust grocery store flyers, with good reason.
Recession Wire reports the recession won’t end until 2011. Bugger.
Consumer Reports says that Quicken is offering $50 for users of Microsoft Money, which is going to be discontinued tomorrow.
Frugal Dad encourages everyone to have a side hustle.
The NY Times writes about frugal Paris.
Get Rich Slowly uses Fuelly.com to track gas mileage; buying premium is actually cheaper than unleaded.
SpendLessTV, a website that has clips of TV segments on saving money from a variety of channels, has a video about credit card perks you rarely use. It’s worth watching.
Caveats: not all credit cards have the perks mentioned.
Folks, we have a location for the Frugal Festival!!! It is going to be at Woodley Park in Van Nuys. The date is Sunday July 26, 2009. Time is 1 to 4 p.m. Here is a map. It is a very shady location with lots of picnic tables.
Did you miss my announcement about the Frugal Festival? Read it here.
Here are three reasons to come to the Frugal Festival.
1. You can win a one-hour financial consultation with a trusted adviser who manages more than $100 million.
2.You can meet other frugal folks and exchange coupons.
3. You can win a $40 gift card to Gelson’s.
More prizes and details to be announced next week! Do you want to get involved as a volunteer or sponsor? Email me! We are currently looking for someone who specializes in green frugality to assist us.
Reader Suzanne is quite the freezer diva, but she shares none of my problems with frozen foodstuffs taking up residence in her freezer. She described her system in a useful comment this week:
I label and rotate my stock. I have a top freezer with my refrigerator in the kitchen. This is where I keep items I will be likely to use within the next 2-3 weeks. I have a chest freezer that stores items bought in bulk and on sale at good prices. These are dated/labeled. This is where the stock for the kitchen freezer comes from. I have learned to only purchase the items we use on a regular basis so that I do not have “tenants.”
This is a great idea that I’d like to implement. But Suzanne, what do you do with leftovers? Do you immediately incorporate them into future meals or make yourself use them before you can replenish from your chest freezer? Do tell!
PS. This picture is not of Suzanne’s freezer, but I imagine hers is just as well organized!
Here’s a cool website for readers. BookSaleManager.com lists local and community book sales by state. The site is fairly new but they are adding several hundred sales a day, a rep for the site told me. Libraries and non-profits can list their sales for free.
Search for sales by state for sales near you. When I searched for sales across California the site returned 283 sales, including a promising one tomorrow in Los Feliz. (Titles are $.25 to $1).There were 39 upcoming sales in New York and 41 in Florida. See all sales by state.
Some sales also list how many books will be for sale.
If you set up an account, you can get emails about upcoming sales that fall a zip code radius that you set, i.e., 10 miles within the zip code 91302. You can also create a calender of upcoming sales and get email notifications about the sales you are interested in. Neat!
Related:
No, I don’t have a brain tumor. But my friend Marla Jo, a fabulous writer at the Orange County Register, does. Or did. She had surgery recently to remove it but I didn’t find out about the whole ordeal until just now.
Marla Jo wrote about dealing with news of her tumor in a way that made me laugh. I bet you will too.
One of life’s annoyances is that freezers are always three-quarters full when really, they are empty. Don’t know what I mean?
Last night I was looking for freezer space for my groceries, and saw pizza sauce, mashed potatoes, cubes of chicken broth…I think. I can’t really tell!
Rather than admit defeat I close the door to think. I need to make room, but I can’t toss these indecipherable packages and containers because I have been paying to freeze them all this time. They must be valuable – and edible – if I put them in there!
Which brings us to the first law of freezers. The longer an item remains in the freezer the less likely you are to throw it away OR EAT IT.
I call this the grandfather rule. In practice, ancient items have grandfathered rights to remain in the freezer.
The problem is these inedible edibles are taking up valuable real estate. How am I supposed to be a freezer diva when all I can stash in my icebox is one measly pizza pocket? It’s embarrassing, I tell you.
Worst of all, my frozen foodstuffs mock me.
Have you ever tried to put a carton of ice cream on top of a grandfathered tenant? Immediately slides off and jams the door before you can slam it shut. It’s as if all the old tenants pass around a bottle of olive oil and lather up so nobody can cozy up to them.
This is the second law of freezers. Old = oily.
If you are lucky, you will close the freezer completely on the seventh try. (Yes, I leave the freezer bursting precariously and yes, I make sure not to be the next person who opens it.)
Yesterday, after a late-night run to Albertons, which is having a massive sale through Tuesday, I came face to face with my grumpy old tenants. Oh, I’ll outsmart you this time, I thought when I returned with three whole chickens, two cartons of ice cream and one pint of sorbet. (Not to mention 11 boxes of cereal, all on super sale.)
The sorbet popped into the door on top of a bag of chili peppers (I’m testing how long they freeze. Three years and counting!) I jammed one ice cream container into a bag of frozen peas, and I rearranged two packages of hot togs to make room for a chicken. I shoved the second ice cream carton into a bag of hamburger buns and stuffed another chicken on top. That leaves one more chicken. Into the fridge with you!
The door stayed shut, but 
I know my tenants will get the better of me soon. So this morning I decided to confront them once and for all.
I opened my freezer and evicted every last edible and inedible package, above. Get moving, granny!
Here are the shady characters I have been renting to this entire time. Items in italics are bound for the trash.
4 D, 2 C and 2 AA batteries
1 small bag of breadcrumbs
1 tupperware of breadcrumbs
8 frozen strawberries
Full loaf of bread
1 bag of chili peppers
2 frozen cheese and chili tamales
Small bottle of Jeager with one shot left
2 containers of Hubby’s chili dated 1/9/08 and 9/22/07
Tube of limeade syrup
7 containers of chicken broth
1 freezer-burned chicken carcass (for making broth – as if I needed more!)
7 half-full containers of pizza sauce
1 serving of mashed potatoes
4 veggie burgers (unopened)
1 baggie of gray, freezer-burned chicken meat
1 small, 1 large bag chopped peppers
7 hot dog buns
8 hamburger buns
4 mini pita rounds
2 empty plastic bags
3 slices of bread
2 1/4 chunks of unsliced bread
4 slices of bread
1 unopened package of vegetables
2 cracked containers of beef gravy
1 bag edamame
1/2 bag pork wontons
2 whole chickens
1 lb ground turkey
2 packages of hot dogs
4 chicken thighs (in two bags)
5 completely unidentifiable packages
3 cold sports packs for icing joints
1 blue eye mask
1 bag peas
2 bags chopped green and red peppers
6 potato rolls
1/2 bag petite onions
1 rolling cloth (for dough)
1/2 bottle Jose Cuervo Tequilla
2 mini empanadas
1 bag french toast
1 container sorbet, two boxes of ice cream
6 otter pops
4 cubes of potatoes
1/2 package green beans
2 tiny balls of dough
1/2 lb sliced turkey breast
I wiped down the freezer, re-arranged the items by category (from the bottom up, bread/veggies; meat; anything in tupperware; misc.), and snapped a picture for you all to see evidence of the third freezer law. Sometimes you have to throw stuff out. Notice the top shelf is half-empty. Success!
A reader named Kali left an intriguing comment about how she motivates herself to clip coupons, which, you may remember, is not one of my favorite activities. I talked to her recently about a growing trend called coupon trains.
What is a coupon train? It’s simple circle of coupon clippers who send their excess coupons to each other, around and around.
How much time to you spend each week on the coupon train? About an hour. But that’s not an more then I would normally spend clipping coupons for myself.
How does it work? You have somewhere between 5 and 10 coupon clippers. I know there are ones that go across the country. Smaller generally works better. The larger the train, the more coupons that get through, but it takes longer for the train to come visit each station. Everybody sends an envelope every week. The idea is you send a new one each week, and you get one envelope each week. Generally you send the coupons to the next person on the list unless you know someone is on vacation, or if someone had a baby, you can send them specialty coupons.
I’ve been in two coupon trains. One failed completely. It was a large one. It was all over the East Coast, up the entire seaboard and it took forever. People forgot. In my opinion from what I’ve seen 5-10 people works the best. It also helps if there’s wide range of people in it. If everyone is a mom with a 2 year old, everybody wants the same coupons.
Doesn’t the cost of postage outweigh the savings? It’s 44 cents to mail an envelope. Letter size envelope can only take 3 ounces. For every envelope I probably spend $1.25 on postage. I may buy a bigger envelope at the post office, which is $.50. But if I’m pulling $20 worth of coupons each week and I’m spending $2, I’m still saving. People who don’t use a lot of coupons would not be happy with this.
How much have you saved from the train? My biggest one is shaving razors. I got a buy one get one free coupon. They usually run about $7 apiece. And sometimes they stuff extra razors in the bag. I’ve gotten $4 off Claritin, BOGO free pizza. I’ve probably saved well over $100 a month.
How many coupons do you receive in your train? Probably at least one letter size envelope that has at least 100 coupons, on a slow week.
How many do you use? It really depends on the week. I pull $10-$20 worth of coupons from the envelope.
Do you use all coupons you take? Almost always. I’m very picky about my coupons.
How many coupons do you have to add to the train each week? I usually add about 100 per week. Sometimes it’s less, sometimes more.
How did you find a train to join? Through TheGroceryGame.com, but a lot of other places do it too. People form them on Craigslist, soccer moms at schools organize them. TheGroceryGame has a specific forum for it and encourages it. It does not cost money to join. Most of them are (paid) members of the site but I do believe the actual message board on TheGroceryGame is free.
Do you know the people in your train? No, not personally.
Do you have safety concerns? I did at first, but my train is very careful to only send out the addresses to the people who need them. In my train, everyone potentially only has one other person in your train who knows your address. Plus the person who receives your envelope.
Anything else you want to add? They’re not any more work – if you normally clip coupons. It’s not a huge commitment.
I’m surprised I’ve never heard of this. It’s fashionable to clip couons.
Does anybody want to start a coupon train? Leave a comment.
