Frugal Grocery Shopping: Peppers Net $360.00 per hour!

STOP THE PRESSES! I had a couple of topics in mind for today's post, but when I got this email from Frugal Son, I just had to post it. Frugal Son has never read Your Money or Your Life or The Tightwad Gazette. Yet he somehow figured out the concept of the true hourly wage offered by frugal choices, perhaps by osmosis. In my return email, I further pointed out that the hourly wage he "earns" is even higher than what he states, since, as Andrew Tobias mentioned long ago, you don't pay taxes on money you save.

Here is his email:

One day when Daniel and I were food shopping at Wal-Mart, we came across a frugal conundrum. Was it cheaper to buy bell peppers (a red, yellow, and green) separately or as part of a three-pack? Daniel said it wasn’t worth his time to figure out whether it was a better deal to buy a 3-pack of multicolored bell peppers for $3.50 or to buy them individually for $0.82, $1.87, and $1.87 (which adds up to $4.56).

Being no math-whiz myself, I took 10 seconds to do the math in my head and figured out that the difference was nearly $1.10. I then asked him whether it “was worth his time” to do 10 seconds worth of simple math to earn $1. That is equivalent to earning $360 per hour, a wage that no one would turn down! After all, money you don’t spend on groceries is money that one can spend on something much more fun like a plane ticket.

I think that the reason so few people bargain shop is because they have an image of someone obsessively clipping coupons out of the newspaper to save a few cents while in reality bargain shopping can be as simple as stopping for a few seconds to compare the prices of similar items. Of course, not all bargains are as immediately apparent and the prices aren’t always as disparate as was the case in my bell pepper dilemma but the principle remains true.

Sometimes, of course, the bargains show themselves without any work at all. Moments after grabbing the bell peppers I grabbed a one pound bag of carrots for $0.99. Only a few steps later, another bag of carrots caught my eye and after a quick glance I saw that it was a one pound bag of organic carrots for $0.88. Ten seconds and 11 cents? At just $39.60 per hour it is quite a come down from my bell pepper “wage” but I’ll take it.

So Dear Readers, do you figure out your savings per hour? If so, what was your best hourly wage?

Thrift Stores: Frugal Friend, Frugal Faux

My Saturday morning relaxation often involves a leisurely stroll though my local thrift stores. In my little town, three are within a one-mile radius of my house, which also includes grocery and drug stores. So first I went to CVS to do a prescription transfer, which netted me a $25.00 gift card for my $6.00 prescription (This is a good thing to know about, incidentally).

Feeling flush, I then went to Goodwill, where I saw a Raleigh men’s twelve speed bicycle for $18.00. It was for a tall man, just like Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar. Reader, I bought it.

Then, an employee rolled out a new rack. Everyone ran over to see. At the end of the rack was the object of my interest: a dress. Unfortunately, a woman interested in some nice drapes stepped in front of me, and I stopped dead. The dress was picked up by Elizabeth, owner of a local vintage store. I wandered over to look at the dress. She said “I don’t know what this is.” The label said “Chloe.” Since I believe the truth will set you free, I only hesitated for a second, and told her it was a real designer dress, perhaps worth several hundred dollars originally. She said, “You can have it.” Reader, I bought it.

It is a lovely dress. The label says T2, which may stand for Taille 2, or size 2. That means it would fit no one in my family. But of course I had to buy it. It was “only” $4.00.




Mr. DFS is ecstatic about the bicycle. He wants to use it when his brother comes to visit, so they can ride on the Tammany Trace, one of the rails-to-trails bike paths.

All this makes me wonder: is thrift shopping a frugal friend or a frugal foe?
Is buying that Chloe dress true frugality or faux?
Would you have bought the dress?
And, finally, what do I do with the dress?

Share your thrift stories, true and faux.

Paying Yourself Forward: Spend or Save?

There was an interesting essay in the New York Times the other day. It had a bit of tongue-in-cheek to it, as well as some serious suggestions. There was a fair amount of outrage in the Comments section. Finance is a sensitive subject these days.

Anyway, the article talked about how we can be “patriotic”: do we spend or do we save? For years, Americans were chided for spending and not saving; now we are being chided for saving and not spending. The problem with saving has to do with the “paradox of thrift,” whereby spending can help the economy as our money spirals away from us, while saving is basically like putting a stopper in your drain.

The author went on to suggest a kind of spending that would be good for the economy and for us. He said we should spend for our future selves. Hence, instead of patronizing a rent-to-own furniture store (shoddy stuff at usury-level interest) we should save up for a better and less expensive sofa. He said that a Costco membership would help a family with babies save on diapers. Getting a programmable thermostat and investing in other energy-saving items would save your future self money on utility bills. And so on.

Well, aside from the fact that I am a strong advocate of cloth diapers for the bottoms of our precious little ones, I think all the ideas are good ones. Read the essay for other pay yourself forward ideas.

Then I thought it would be instructive to look back and see what I have now that involved paying myself forward. What was a nice gift from my past self to my present one? My big All-Clad sauté pan, my Calphalon cookwear, a few cookbooks, my good quality sheets, the expensive alpaca blanket that my son “borrowed,” the big cupboard in my kitchen, and, of course, my too-expensive cottage with its slate roof. All these items were bought expensively but right the first time and will provide many years of good service.

Wow! That’s a short list. Of course, I could mention my cloth diapers, but I gave them away long ago. Not one item of clothing or jewelry makes my list.

Then there are the intangibles that bring us the greatest happiness, according to reports. For this I would include our many vacations to visit family and to travel abroad. Funding our children’s trips to Japan and elsewhere. Sending our kids to a wonderful pre-school. Sending our kids to a wonderful summer camp. These pay forward memories, but are not the kinds of things the author was talking about.

Of course, all these lists are very personal. I was struck by how long it took me to compile my short list. And I am going to start thinking about how to pay forward my future self.

And so, dear readers, how did your past self pay forward your present self? And how will you pay your future self forward?

Men! Get thee to a Thrift Store; OR, the Agony and the Ecstasy

Everyone who knows me—perhaps including the readers of my little corner of the blogosphere—knows that I love thrift stores. Although many cities have thrifts filled with bedraggled clothing, cracked plastic furniture, and yellowing romance novels circa 1976—all at ridiculously high prices, I have been lucky to live mostly in places that have excellent and reasonably priced thrifts.

Of course, every silver lining has a cloud. Because of my outstanding abilities at thrift shopping, I find too much. Everyone who knows me also knows I have a clutter problem. These fabulous bargains are too hard to resist, which is why I have a Geoffrey Beene jacket, a Karl Lagerfeld blazer, John Fluevog shoes (new, but a bit too small), just to name a few. I know I will never wear these. So I have to impose rules on myself.

Here are my rules:
Sweaters: cashmere only, no holes, or nice ones from Banana Republic or the like only if from the last two years (Banana, Gap, and Old Navy clothes are dated under the tags!).

Blazers: very expensive brands only; MUST FIT ME!

Shoes: FLATS only, must be new or close to it, must FIT. I have smallish feet and so find a lot of great shoes, including my best find of all time, new Chanel loafers.

As for the rest, pants (too lazy to try on, plus I wear only jeans now), don’t wear skirts or dresses, shirts/tanks cost the same as sweaters, so are too expensive in my thrift universe.

What about men’s stuff? I’m only allowed to buy cashmere sweaters, Hermes ties (not that anyone wears them in my house), and that’s about it.

Really, I should stay away from thrift stores. But today I needed milk and salt, and it just so happens that a thrift store is RIGHT NEXT to the grocery. So I ventured in, for a quick spin. Honestly, I get out fast and look in the most desultory fashion. I hope NOT to find things, truly.

Women’s Department: Lots of nice things, but only two cashmere sweaters jumped into my hands. One was a new with tags George brand, from Walmart. That disqualified it. I did buy a Prive brand ivory cashmere cardigan. Prive can be found at Dillards, and a similar sweater is available on sale for about $35.00, marked down from $115.00. The Ecstasy!

Men’s Department: This about killed me. I saw several Zegna shirts (newly drycleaned), a Robert Talbott shirt (ditto), and other pricy brands. All in Dr. Mr. FS’s very size. Then I checked out the ties, which are all 99 cents: a Ferragamo, a Zegna, several high-level Polo numbers, several Robert Talbotts, other Italian silk ties from makers I didn’t recognize. I had to tear myself away. These were new looking ties, sufficiently au courant. But Mr. DFS has enough and will be very sharp with me if I buy these. The Agony!

Total purchases: sweater plus 5 books, including Austerlitz , which I’ve been meaning to read. Total spent $4.00 minus my 15% senior discount.

All I have to say is:
Men, get thee to a thrift store! Not too many men go to thrift shops, so the field will be yours!

And, to remind myself that I need not buy everything nice that I see, here is a picture of a Hermes tie that I found a while ago.

Dear Readers, do tell. Are thrift stores agony or ecstasy? And, of course, share your best finds.

Creativity and Frugality: Personal and Poetic Ties

The third post featuring the creations of the late mother-in-law of Frugal Scholar. Below is a coat made of ties. Clothing made of ties is nothing new: I remember reading an interview with Jane Gallop, an academic provocatrice (is that a word?), where she spoke of wearing a skirt of ties reputed to have been gathered from her sexual conquests. She refused, if I remember correctly, to confirm or deny those rumors.

These ties belonged to the late Henri Coulette, the closest friend of my father-in-law, who recently celebrated his 90th birthday. Henri died at age 61 in 1988. He was divorced and had no children. As I recall, a battle over his estate ensued; fighting it out were his ex-wife and a nephew, whom he had never met. Presumably, a Bleak House scenario followed. My father-in-law loved Henri and gathered these ties that no one wanted. Henri was known as a spiffy dresser. My mother-in-law made this coat from some of them.

Mr. DFS and I knew Henri was a poet. We looked him up on-line and learned that he suffered the tragic and accidental destruction of his second book. Here is a bit of what we learned:

Henri Coulette has the odd distinction of enjoying a cult, or underground reputation as an exemplar of what is often considered the most conservative mainstream of American poetry, the form-conscious, ironic academic poets of the 1950s, strongly influenced by the New Critics. Coulette's career foundered after the bizarre and accidental destruction of nearly every copy of his second book, but because of support from important admirers, and the resurgence of formalism in the 1980s and 1990s, he has come to be regarded as a poet's poet.

For more, see www.opus40.org/tadrichards/HCouletteGW.html




Back.

Entrepreneurs, Bubbles, “I Know what I’m Doing,” Frugal Dad

“The time is out of joint”: so says Hamlet, lamenting, "O cursèd spite,/That ever I was born to set it right!" (1.5). Luckily, unlike Hamlet, I don’t have the responsibility to set anything right, outside of my own very limited sphere of influence.

But, in honor of our out-of-joint time, I present a disjointed series of thoughts economic, entrepreneurial, and other, ending, as Hamlet begins, with the ghost of a father.

Shabby Chic: while noodling around the blogosphere, I came across a notice of a fabulous sale at Shabby Chic, the super expensive furniture and accessories store. Why the sale? Because the business is in chapter 11. Founder Rachel Ashwell’s blog entry on the financial troubles of her company is heartrending, truly poignant: she refers to herself as a “flea market girl” with a dream caught up in a complex business in difficult times. I read some of her books (library copies!) back in the day: I was impressed by the coherence of her vision. Then I read some comments on the blog Apartment Therapy. There were a few acerbic ones, noting that for a flea market aesthetic, her stuff was awfully expensive (true dat!). Also noted was the fact that her business, born in affluent Santa Monica 20 years ago, perhaps rode the housing market, expanded out of control, and then burst, like the rest of the bubble.

My Dinner with Andre: Andre is someone I knew slightly. Our chat dates to the late 1990s, as will be obvious. Andre’s husband was the scion of a New Orleans family known for a chain of furniture stores, then recently defunct. I’m not sure if he had a job or lived on the proceeds of the business. Andre said, “I know I should get a job, but I make more money playing the stock market than in any job.” I, envious, since the mutual funds in my retirement accounts never achieved spectacular returns, said, “Ooh, could you tell me what you do?”

She said, “I just know what I’m doing.”

Bubble, anyone?

The House Down the Street: A nice but shabby house down the street sold a few years ago to serial flippers. They fixed it up and decorated it in shabby chic style, as it happens. My son worked on the house for a while, in the company of two high school friends who had been hired by the flippers. One of the boys explained that the couple bought houses and sold them for huge profits, which they used to live on and to buy the next house.

He said, “They really know what they’re doing.”

The house was put up for sale at a huge price, now reduced by a third. Need I say it remains unsold?



EBay: My experience with EBay is strictly anecdotal. About seven years ago, I had a pair of Birkenstocks that hurt my feet. A student said, “I’ll sell them for you on Ebay!” At that time, listing was difficult, you had to have a digital camera, you had to find a hosting site for your pictures, and you had to take checks. So, selling was very challenging. The shoes sold for $70.00! I spite of the difficulties, I sold a few other items, and was always amazed that my several year old clothes generally sold for what I had paid for them. Cool. I really felt that I knew what I was doing.

Now the selling is easy: EBay hosts pictures, everyone owns a digital camera, EBay owns Paypal, etc, etc. A few years later, I found at a thrift store the same Birkenstocks I had previously sold—same style, size, everything. With visions of $70.00 dancing in my head, I put them up for auction. I got $7.00. The buyer left me a positive rating and said, “Thanks for the great deal.”

Interestingly, my anecdote is quite in line with the business fortunes of EBay and its sellers as recounted in the financial news. Sellers are angered by the huge fees EBay levies and by the low prices that most items command. From my perspective, I’d say the problem is that listing is easy now, hence an oversupply of goods. For buyers, why bother paying a lot, since hundreds of identical items will be listed later. Did the sellers know what they were doing? A bubble, once more.

My frugal Dad: It’s fitting that I began with Hamlet, which is concerned with that “common theme" of "nature,” the death of one’s father(1.2). My frugal Dad died suddenly in November. Perhaps one reason that I have always been skeptical of people who say they “know what they’re doing,” is because he was always skeptical. He was a very intelligent man, one of whose greatest points of pride is that he attended the famous magnet school in New York, Peter Stuyvesant. But he was always very modest about his own intelligence, always pointing admiringly to the intelligence of others. This is, as most of us know, an unusual attribute.

My father was an entrepreneur for a while. First he owned a business with a partner. Later, after working for a company in Philadelphia for a year, he started his own business (market research) in around 1965. He had an office in New York. The employees consisted of my father and a secretary, plus, after a bit, my mother. Occasionally he had temporary workers. He paid very well, and I and many of my high school friends reaped the benefits of a $4.50 hourly wage.

After about 12 years, my father decided to close his business. He had had some very bad years. A few of the people who had passed work on to him had opened competing businesses. There was a recession. I asked why they were closing, and my mother said, “We don’t want to lose our savings.” What savings?

Little did I know that they had had a few very good years. The reason I didn’t know that was because our visible standard of living did not change. They saved.

I’ve been thinking about this because of all the stories about people in their 20s and 30s who have gone from making high salaries to hard times. Many of these sad stories feature mortgage brokers and people otherwise in the real estate or banking business. (“I worked hard! I knew what I was doing!”) This does not even include the upscale tales of the now-unemployed MBAs who worked in investment banking, and, supposedly knew what they were doing. (Which is why there is a shriek of pain at Obama’s proposed pay caps for executives: “But we’re worth it. We know what we’re doing!”)

My father, I now see, had the gift of modesty; he never thought he knew what he was doing. He saved during the good times. Thanks for the fine example.

Frugal College Cooking: Beef Stew Part Two

Part Two of the beef stew adventures of Frugal Son.


With beef in hand, I went to Daniel's apartment and began to defrost the meat in a bath of lukewarm water. The recipe I used is actually a combination of two recipes I found on (a great website, by the way); neither recipe was exactly what I wanted so I took the desirable elements from each to create a recipe perfectly suited to my taste and, more importantly, the ingredients I had on hand. Once the meat was defrosted, I put it all in a bowl and added about three tablespoons of flour, salt, pepper, and a pinch of rosemary. I added a mix of olive oil and canola oil to a large pot and then browned the meat in the pot for a few minutes while stirring occasionally. I had some free time while the meat browned to chop the leftover vegetables—carrots, onion, scallions, and bell pepper—and two cloves of garlic. The flour began to brown in the oil, forming a flavor-intensifying roux of sorts and some of the flour and fats from the meat began to burn and stick to the bottom of the pot. While burning and sticking usually spell disaster and a ruined meal, in this case it is actually desirable because the burnt sticky bits, the fond, can be deglazed and incorporated into the stew to enhance and enrich the broth.

Once the meat was evenly browned on all sides I removed it from the pot and put it back into the bowl. Into the same pot that I cooked the meat in, I added a little more oil and then all of the vegetables. I stirred them occasionally but otherwise just let them cook and soften as they absorbed the intense flavors lingering in the crusty bits of flour and fat at the bottom of the pot. Once the onions had become translucent and the bell peppers were soft but not mushy, I added a single tablespoon of tomato paste (although I now know from my Frugal Mom that ketchup would have done the job) and stirred that into the vegetable mixture.


After letting the tomato paste cook for a bit, I added three cups of beef broth plus ¾ cups of water to the pot. I would have loved to have had a beef stock made from scratch, but both time and money were in short supply so I settled for beef bouillon cubes. Once the broth was in the pot, I added the beef, put on a top, and let the mixture simmer.

Apparently the classic method is to braise the stew by putting the whole pot into the oven for at least two and a half hours, but I misread the directions so I just let it simmer on the stovetop. While the stew gently bubbled and gurgled on the stove, I peeled, quartered, and washed a little over two pounds of potatoes. I put these into a pot with water and a bit of salt, covered it with a lid and set it on the stove to cook. With both items I finally had some time to sit back and relax, although the incredible scent coming from the stew pot was hard to ignore. I sampled the stew after about an hour and the meat was incredibly flavorful. Maybe the beef was actually no more flavorful than normal corn-fed, hormone injected, industrial beef and it was simply my mind wanting this local, free-range beef to taste better but to me, but it tasted so much more intense than any other beef I have had. I am normally relatively unenthusiastic about meat in anything other than a supporting role, but this beef really made me excited.

As soon as the potatoes were finished, I drained them and began to plate everything (on warmed plates of course). The only thing "wrong" with my stew was that the beef did not really soften up; perhaps this is a result of me not braising it in the oven, not cooking it long enough, the particular cut of meat, or maybe this is just the price one pays for a more natural beef. The texture, however, did not bother me and I don't think it bothered any of the other eaters. It definitely did not bother anyone enough to keep them from getting seconds and then thirds, until all that was left in the pot was a few tablespoons of rich broth. The vegetables added a fresh, clean taste to the broth and they also added a nice splash of color to the muddy brown stew. The stew broth, which had thickened considerably after an hour of simmering and because of the flour roux, was great when slathered on top of the boiled potatoes.

When I cook this again I will definitely let the meat simmer longer and maybe I'll even try braising it in the oven. Another change I might make when I cook this again is to use a bit less meat. Two pounds for four people was a lot of meat and I don't think the flavor of the stew would suffer at all if I used a half-pound less meat. A cheap and easy way to extend this meal to feed at least six people is to add more potatoes. My Frugal Mom says that this stew tastes even better the next day but I can't attest to that since it disappeared so fast! I can easily say it was the best beef stew I've ever had, and it tasted even better knowing that all I had to buy for it was the meat and local meat at that!

The Breakdown: Serves 4 college aged boys or 5 (maybe 6) normal mortals

2 pounds of stew meat @ $2.20 / pound: $4.40
1 leftover bell pepper: $1
4 leftover carrots: $0.50
2 cloves of garlic: $0.25
1 leftover onion: $1
2 ½ pounds of potatoes: $2.50
1 tbsp ketchup or tomato paste: $0.25
3 tbsp flour: $0.25
Olive and / or Canola oil: $0.50
3 cups beef broth from bouillon cubes: $0.75

Total: $11.40 or $2.85 / person assuming 4 people