Monthly Archives: July 2010

A Frugal Daughter’s Guide to Back to School Shopping

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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The following guest post is from my daughter, Frugal Daughter. After listening to her dad’s frugal rants for the last ten years, she was bound to inherit a little frugality herself. I think she’s a pretty good writer, too (continuity plan in place…check!).

First of all, let me mention that back to school shopping is a little hard. Trying to look for sales, finding the best deals, and finding the correct sizes. Hopefully, with these tips, your back to school shopping for clothes, shoes, and supplies will be easier.

10 Ways to Save On Back to School Shopping

1. Go through your clothes in your drawers and your closet. Organize all clothes depending on what type they are. For example, you might have a sock drawer or a pajamas drawer. This way when it is time to go shopping, you can know what you need to buy so you don’t purchase things that you may not need in the next two or three months.

2. Go through your catalogs or magazines and look for any items that might be on sale or on clearance. Weekly sales fliers from the Sunday newspaper will also help you save money on your purchases.

3. Avoid the danger of designer labels. Designer clothes are basically the same as regular clothes, but their prices are outrageous. Avoid designer labels. (Frugal Dad says no designer clothes for me – well, most of the time!)

4. Start a back to school fund or savings account. Put money in it throughout the year, and you will be glad you saved all that money for supplies, clothes, and shoes when the new school year rolls around.

5. Give away clothes that are too small for you to wear. Local places such as The Salvation Army and Goodwill will take clothing donations. Try doing this instead of throwing them away. Help and bless just by giving away old clothes.

6. Take your kids with you when it’s time for back to school shopping. If parents try to shop by themselves, they are more likely to buy the wrong size or purchase something kids won’t like. This is one of the reasons kids need to go with parents to save you time and money.

7. If you are willing to fight the crowd and shop during Tax Free holidays (something my Dad avoids every year), you might save some money on large purchases. With the advantage of no tax on products, it’s a good deal.

8. If you can, try to wait a couple of days or even a week after the first day of school to do your shopping. Some stores may have better sales after school starts. You might save a lot of money on products that were more expensive just a week before.

9. When it is time to go shoe shopping, try to buy at least two pairs. If your child plays a sport, such as basketball, then get them a comfy pair of basketball shoes. By switching shoes every few days they will last longer.

10. This is my last tip, but a very important one. In fact this may be the most helpful tip of all. My mom and I figured this one out years ago. Stock up on your school supplies throughout the summer months. For example, if your child needs crayons and notebooks for a writing class, stock up on this stuff during the summer and store it in an empty crate. When they need a new notebook, or a new pack of crayons, instead of going back to store when nothing is on sale, you “shop” from your crate at home.

Can anyone add any extra tips for saving on back to school shopping?

Weekly Roundup: New Series Announcement

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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Next week I’m kicking off a week-long series here at Frugal Dad called “Beyond the Emergency Fund: Preparing Your Household for All Types of Emergencies.” I’ve had two experiences in the last week that tested our emergency preparedness here in the Frugal household. Last week, our street had a serious water leak that resulted in us losing water overnight. Naturally, none of us had showered yet, and there were dirty clothes and dishes to be washed. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but imagine if we had been without water for days or weeks?

Last Friday night, we lost our central air conditioning for nearly 72 hours. Daytime temperatures reached 100 degrees with a heat index approaching 110 degrees. Both emergencies served as a wake up call for me to become better prepared to handle household emergencies. And that preparation goes beyond 12 months of expenses in an emergency fund (though that’s a great start!). I’ll be writing more next week about ways to prepare, and over the weekend, I plan to try to get out and take some pictures of things we’ve put into practice around our house.

One more announcement – I have a very special guest post scheduled for tomorrow (Friday) morning.

The Frugal Roundup

14 Famous Man Rooms. I wonder if I will make this list one day? Do think my office will qualify me? (@The Art of Manliness)

Save Money On Razor Blades. A great way to save some money for both men and women. (@Lazy Man and Money)

6 Ways To Save Money At The Movies. Head out and catch a movie this weekend but be sure to use these tips. (@The Digerati Life)

Starting a Kitchen Garden. Here’s an interesting gardening idea. (@Five Cent Nickel)

Best of the Rest

Support Our Sponsors

The Daily Middle. The Daily Middle is a group dedicated to helping those in the middle class cope with the coming financial crisis. And when they say “cope with,” they mean not just surviving the storm, but hopefully even prospering during it.

Monitor Bank Rates. MonitorBankRates.com offers a free rate search and compare service offering the latest best rates on products ranging from certificate of deposits, savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and insurance.

Preparing for a Heat Wave

Posted on by  at  9:25 am
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Today’s post is a few hours late thanks to a household emergency. Over the weekend our home’s central air conditioner died. It happened late Friday night. By early morning Saturday it was 86 degrees inside our house. Opening windows would have done little good as Saturday’s temperatures were expected to near 100 degrees with high humidity. In fact, it was so bad there was a Heat Advisory issued for the entire weekend.

It quickly became apparent we would not be able to occupy the house during the heat of the day, and may not be able to occupy it at all – who can sleep in a muggy 90-degree house!

For all I’ve considered regarding preparedness, I suddenly realized I was ill-prepared to handle a loss of cooling. We have propane and other heat sources to specifically serve as a backup for loss of heat in the winter, but nothing to prepare for loss of cooling in the summer.

We considered the idea of staying in a hotel for a couple days, but worried about our dog being home alone in the heat. After contacting a number of air conditioning repair company’s emergency lines, I learned they only had skeleton crews on staff, and they had many calls ahead of us. It would likely be Monday before anyone could get to our problem unit. If they did manage to get to us, it would cost an arm and a leg (don’t these things always seem to happen on the weekend!).

I’ve performed a few AC repairs over the years. There was the time I had to unclog the air conditioner drain line, and I did manage to install a programmable themostat, but this was beyond my level of expertise as all the standard troubleshooting failed to resolve the problem.

For the cost of a couple nights at a hotel, I bought a window air conditioning unit to place in our master bedroom window – a place where we could all congregate in the heat of the day. They are easy enough to install and take down that I can store it and only install if we have problems with our central air conditioning unit. And since I only needed to cool a single room, there was no need to spend many hundreds of dollars on a much larger window unit.

Of course, this plan only works in the event it is just your central air conditioning unit that died, not that you’ve lost power to your home. Actually, this is a more likely scenario considering the strain a dangerous heat wave can put on power grids. The next step in ultimate preparation would be to have a generator available powerful enough to run your AC, or to install a whole-house standby generator that would automatically kick on in the event you lose power.

Backup power sources are expensive (permanent, whole-house backup generators can run a few thousand dollars, while portable units are a little cheaper, but often don’t produce enough wattage to operate everything in your home). Even higher on the price range you can find solar power generators, which might be worth a look considering other types of generators require some type of fuel to operate (gasoline for smaller units and propane for large, standby models). Depending on the emergency, getting additional fuel could be a challenge.

The Home Depot website offers an interactive tool to give you an idea what size generator you might need depending on the number of appliances and electronics you’d like to run in a power outage.

If you live a cooler climate, or at least a less humid climate, you can probably get by for a couple days without air conditioning by visiting a library or catching a matinee in the middle of the day and using a window fan to draw in cooler air in the evenings and early morning. Others might get by with misting fans, or by setting up a homemade air conditioner (running a fan over an open cooler filled with ice).

However, if you live in a hot, humid climate zone, occupying a house with no air conditioning can be downright dangerous. This is particularly true for the very young and the very old, as kids and the elderly are more susceptible to heat exhaustion.

This experience over the weekend is really part of a larger theme – how to prepare for “alternative” emergencies. By alternative, I mean outside of your everyday financial emergency like a costly hospital stay or expensive car repairs.

How can we better prepare for other types of emergencies? How can we diversify our emergency “fund” by investing in other forms of emergency preparedness? It’s something I plan to write more about in the next day or two, but for now I’m off to get back in front of that air conditioner!

Weekly Roundup: Support Our Sponsors Edition

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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I’ll be including a new feature in the weekly roundups called “Support Our Sponsors.” Just a short blurb about our current banner advertisers, whose financial support helps pay my expenses here at Frugal Dad and keep things running.

Every now and then I get an email from a reader asking how they can support Frugal Dad. I don’t currently sell any material (working on creating a couple products – more on that soon), and I don’t lock down content to paying subscribers, so the best way you can help is by supporting those who support me.

The Frugal Roundup

Cooking Around the Campfire: 9 Easy and Delicious Foil Packet Recipes. We don’t get a chance to build many campfires, but we’ll definitely give these a try on the grill. (@The Art of Manliness)

Effects of the Recession on America’s Personal Finances: How Long Will They Last? History tells me that most positive effects of the recession (Americans’ increased savings rate, lower credit card balances, etc.) will be long forgotten in a matter of a few short years. (@My Dollar Plan)

How to Recover From a Lost Wallet. I really hope that you don’t lose you wallet, but following these tips can help ensure that you recover from it fast. (@Bargaineering)

My Teenage Son, His Cell Phone, and the Bill For $1,055.20. My kids remind me daily that nearly all their friends have a cell phone, but they don’t. This article reinforces my desire to keep it that way for a little while longer. (@Len Penzo)

Best of the Rest

Support Our Sponsors

The Daily Middle. The Daily Middle is a group dedicated to helping those in the middle class cope with the coming financial crisis. And when they say “cope with,” they mean not just surviving the storm, but hopefully even prospering during it.

Monitor Bank Rates. MonitorBankRates.com offers a free rate search and compare service offering the latest best rates on products ranging from certificate of deposits, savings accounts, checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages and insurance.

Saving America’s Middle Class – The Return of Frugality

Posted on by  at  5:00 am
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The following guest post is from M.W Larsson, co-founder of TheDailyMiddle.com, an excellent source for middle class survival news and information.

There was a time – and it wasn’t all that long ago – when a Middle Class lifestyle wasn’t just obtainable; it was downright easy to be a member. Really, all you needed was an “average” job, and you were in – a home, a nice car, occasional dinner out, color TV, an annual vacation, and a pension for when you got older.

Obviously, those days are gone, so I don’t want to wax poetically about nostalgia and why can’t we bring them back, etc. But I do want to point out the two reasons those days have left us, and I’d like to expand on one of those reasons:

  • The most obvious reason for the end of the “one average job’s paycheck can raise a family” is that the economy changed. Expenses outpaced wages, and many of those jobs (manufacturing, etc) are gone. And they won’t come back. Forget relying on the government and waiting for “good times” to come back – they aren’t.
  • The second reason, however, is one that doesn’t get as much play, because it’s personal, and it “hurts” a little. And that reason is simply this: WE’VE changed, and we want more, because there is more. Many families cannot “make it” on their salary not because food and shelter cost too much – it’s because of all the other stuff.

I’d like to expand on this last point somewhat, and discuss how a return to frugality can help.

To start, what really changed in terms of what we buy and what’s available? Well, the answer is, everything changed. There’s so much more available to us now, and more importantly, many “more” things that are an almost expected part of everyday life (cellphones for the entire family, anyone? There’s something a 1970’s era family never had to pay for.)

We want the food and shelter and automobiles that people used to have, but we also want a flatscreen TV in every room, cellphones for all, birthday parties for kids that run into the hundreds and even thousands, satellite radio, DVD’s (every child I know has a personal DVD collection of Disney and Pixar films), and more. Plus, we want more space – the average house is far bigger than one just thirty years ago. The “great room” is now part of our vocabulary.

We’ve added and added to our lives, at a pace that far exceeds salaries. This is why “the credit card bill” is a monthly staple. We want more life than we can afford. And it’s why many people find themselves in trouble.

I mentioned earlier that this “hurts”, and it’s why this reason doesn’t get much press. Nobody wants their kid to be the only one without a cellphone. Or without Toy Story 1, 2, and soon even 3 on DVD. Or without cable TV (on a flatscreen). I’ve personally known parents who stressed about paying the heating bill turn around and buy their son a new Xbox that same week! This sort of thing happens more than you think. And it’s insane.

Here are a few stats:

  • One in nine families can’t make the minimum payment on their credit cards.
  • One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure.
  • One in eight Americans is on food stamps.
  • More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy every month.

*(source: Elizabeth Warren’s, “America Without a Middle Class.”)

OK, how do we fix this?

I co-founded and run a website called The Daily Middle (www.thedailymiddle.com), where we explore the global economy and how it specifically relates to the middle class (typically individuals or couples making between $40,000 and $120,000 per year) here in the U.S.

The Daily Middle relies on those experts who saw this “Greater Depression” scenario starting to play itself out years ago – experts like Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers, Dr. Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Ron Paul, David Walker and Nouriel Roubini.

In my research, I run across articles, videos, stats and quotes all day long. And my advice in this case can be summed up with following two quotes I find particularly meaningful:

“One does not accumulate, but eliminate.  It is not daily increase but daily decrease.  The height of cultivation always runs towards simplicity.” – Bruce Lee

“It was hardly an exaggeration to say that the American standard of living was bought on the installment plan.” - Historian Daniel Boorstin

You see where I am going here, right? For many families, fixing their economic situation can be as simple as saying “no”. Right now, the average American family’s net worth (adjusted for real inflation) is at 1970 levels. Take a look at a family in 1970 and see what their expenses were – it may sound drastic, but that’s kind of where you need to be if you want the same economic lifestyle. Ok, pay the internet bill, but does everyone in the family really need a cellphone? Or cable TV? Do gifts have to be charged? These are all places to start – and yes, living frugally means sacrifice and a change of mindset.

Now, for those of you who are waiting for some Government magic, let me dispel that right now:

  • The official National Debt has just surpassed $13 Trillion (not including the massive debts of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae which are backed up by the Federal Government, estimated at $6.3 Trillion.)
  • Our Unfunded Liabilities (Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare) are approximately $60 Trillion
  • Our National Debt is now growing 3 ½ times faster than decades ago
  • We are the world’s largest debtor nation with a National Debt that is 14 times larger and 89% of GDP (not including Fannie/Freddie debts and unfunded liabilities.)

We are in deep, deep trouble, and if you think “things are going to turn around,” you are mistaken.

To me, there’s really only one solution, and that’s to live below your means and return to frugality. If it requires giving up a few things that others are paying on credit for, so be it. If it requires cutting coupons, buying off-brand merchandise, well, that’s what it takes. If it requires a combination of both, fine. But being frugal and living below your means does not just help you today – it will allow you to weather almost any economic storm.

But being frugal isn’t always easy. It takes a good, objective look at “everything” you are spending money on, and it requires hard choices to be made. It’s not just cutting out a latte every day. It might mean your child doesn’t text his or her friends, because the “pay as you go” cell phone is for emergencies only. And that’s OK.

We hope you will join us at The Daily Middle for our “daily dose of reality” to keep your feet firmly planted on the road back to frugality.