Author Archives: cosmichomicide

The Year of Living Frugally – Cable TV

21 Saturday Mar 2009

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Yes, there was a change of plans for the March Cheapskate Change when TWC gave me a kissoff on a lower priced package since I was already a prisoner… um… customer.  Time Warner Cable – they love you as a new customer, hate you as a customer and harass you forever when you leave.  I should know that, when I called them about cancelling, they had a ton of offers and reasons and low cost choices for me.  That said, we’re outta here.  Just the facts, ma’am:
 
Time Warner Package – $100/mo.
Direct TV Package – $35/mo.
Dish – (Windstream Service)
 
Direct TV includes 2 boxes and remotes wired to two locations and free DVR (no HD required until the current TV dies).  We’ve had Direct TV before so dish location isn’t an issue and the only reason we left before was Time Warner was offering a "come with us and we’ll completely screw you the minute the deal ends" package.  I call, I get a very helpful gentleman named Leon who not only walks  me through everything, but calls back later in the day to confirm the details.  The installer will be here on a specific day in a four hour window – last TWC "appointment" I got was "We’ll be there Wednesday" which got "rescheduled" at the last minute (meaning 3 PM on Wed) to "sometime on Thursday".  Did I mention that Direct TV is installing on a Saturday? 
 
For those of you wondering why Dish wasn’t an option – Windstream is the Dish provider in the area and our DSL service has gone to hell since they bought out our local phone company/DSL provider.  Not a chance we even considered giving them more money.  Your local provider of Dish may be different, so don’t toss them out of hand.
 
How we selected – the heir had a budgeting section in one of his Boy Scout badges where he was supposed to evaluate and budget for a major purchase.  We put a bit of a twist on that and had him analyze the various services.  The first thing he did was ask each of us for our favorite "can’t live without" TV shows (in my case that was Bones, Psych and The Closer), he then made a list of the corresponding channels and comparable packages.  He then charted the costs and features of the packages (which are almost identical), penalties, contract requirements and such and the end result was Direct TV beating the living crap out of TWC.
 

March Savings Total – $780/year (first year), $540/yr (second year), 2 year contract required
Cumulative Savings Total – $1650/year ($150 ahead of $500/mo goal)
Remaing Savings Towards Goal – $4350

Finding John Galt Again?

28 Saturday Feb 2009

Posted by in News and Politics

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Washington, D.C., February 23, 2009–Sales of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” have almost tripled over the first seven weeks of this year compared with sales for the same period in 2008. This continues a strong trend after bookstore sales reached an all-time annual high in 2008 of about 200,000 copies sold. –  Ayn Rand Institute for Individual Rights
 
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – Amazon Rank #202 in Books
 
As an Amazon seller, I can tell you that a book with a 202 rank will sell within 24 hrs of being posted, but their price drops rapidly to the famous Amazon "penny book".  The cheapest copy of Atlas Shrugged on Amazon is $9 (including shipping) so it is an exception and holding its value.  Interesting that people are finding a 50 year old philosophical and political treatise thinly disguised as fiction to be relevant again.  To be honest, most of the people who buy it either won’t read it or won’t finish it – it’s not an easy read, a quick read or a mindless read.  So, for those that won’t, a few quotes:
 
If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose- because it contains all the others- the fact that they were the people who created the phrase to make money. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.
 

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders—what would you tell him to do?”
" To Shrug."

Honest people are never touchy about the matter of being trusted. 

The Year of Living Frugally – Eating Out

27 Friday Feb 2009

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Nope, we aren’t going to quit eating out entirely,  but we are going to manage it.  Months and months ago we decided to go out one Thursday as a family activity before the heir went to the starter husband’s house for the weekend.  It was a great idea and has turned into a weekly habit.  No, it didn’t increase our eating out budget, it actually reduced it because no one was asking about eating out the rest of the week and we dropped all fast food about the same time.   On average, this activity costs us about $50 per week, $200 per month.  We had several options here – to cut out eating out partially or entirely, change restaurants, turn it into a family cooking night, or trying a different activity. 
 
By consolidating all our eating out into one regular weekly “fixed” amount, we already reduced our dining budget substantially, so we decided we could keep this in a modified state for the moment, knowing that we could quickly save more money down the road.  We didn’t want to change restaurants either as we really like and appreciate the staff.  As an aside, they collect the marginally used crayons that kids leave behind and we take and donate them to schools, teachers, day cares, churches, etc.  We decided to cut one Thursday a month out for the moment on the week that the heir was not going to visit his dad and to make that Thursday a family cook and board game night.
 
February Savings Total – $600/year
Cumulative Savings Total – $870/year
Remaing Savings Towards Goal – $5130
 

The Year of Living Frugally – PaperBackSwap

26 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in Books, Cheapskate

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I’ve been an avid reader for as long as I can remember.  I’ve read between 50-100 books a year since college – my only New Year’s Resolution is to read a book a week and I have never failed.  At $7.99/book, that’s an expensive habit – more than $400 per year, not including time and gas and such driving to bookstores (though I love bookstores).  Yikes!  And used book stores have virtually disappeared.  Yes, the library is free and obviously the cheapest option, but I’m one of those folks that reads “spur of the moment”, drags books around everywhere and goes on genre binges.  Several years ago, however, I joined paperbackswap.com and cut my annual reading costs in half (remember, this is about cutting costs, not necessarily using the dead cheapest option – yet).
 
Basically, it works like this – you sign up and post any books that you don’t plan to read again (you are going to be sending them to other people in exchange for having people send books to you).  The books go in a queue (meaning if you posted the 10th copy of “The Possum’s Guide to Crossing the Road” you are number 10 in line) and as folks want your book, you move up in the queue – a FIFO system (First In, First Out).  When your book reaches the top, you mail it to the requestor and you get a “credit”.  You can then use your credit to order a book you want from another member.  If that’s not good enough, you get bonus credits after a you ship a few books out and for referring friends.  What you get is a clean, readable copy of a book you want, delivered to your house by the USPS.  The shipping cost for a paperback is around $2.50 per book or you can simply buy credits from paperbackswap itself or from other members.
 
Annual savings (not including gas and time) – $270 per year.  Check it out at www.paperbackswap.com – and consider using me as a referral (cosmichomicide) if you like what you see. 🙂
 
January Savings Total – $270/year
Cumulative Savings Total – $270/year
Remaing Savings Towards Goal – $5730

The Year of Living Frugally – Cell Phones

26 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in Cheapskate

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Well, this blog has been dormant long enough that it’s safe to believe only the dedicated will still have it stuffed on some RSS feed, so I can use it as a private sandbox for our fiscal responsibility experiment.  The goal is this – to reduce our annual spending by $6000/year.  Just because we’re getting fat and complacent and it just doesn’t seem to be such a good idea in the current economy.  So… here’s the deal…
 
Each month we will pick a major "fixed" expense, research it and, if one exists, go for a cheaper option.  The net spending reduction or savings (in the case of interest) should be $500/yr or about $40/month on average.  We are expecting some months to be lower (January’s backtrack to PaperBackSwap, for instance) and some to be higher.
 
This month (March) it’s the cell phones.  Currently we have three lines with AT&T Wirelesss – the same company I switched to escape 5 years ago.  We’re spending about $75 per month for three lines, family plan 500 minutes, rollover, no texting or data.  We first researched comparable plans with the various carriers and essentially discovered that, for our usage habits, they are all about the same cost.  We currently have more than 1800 rollover minutes and they are falling off the back end every month, unused.  The current contract has expired as well, so no penalty for making the change.
 
We decided we started with the wrong premise as we hadn’t actually looked to see if cellphones were a need or a want and figure out our requirements.  So, we started with a summary of the current situation with the requirement being to a.) reduce our cost and b.) match our phone needs (land and cellular) to our usage requirements.
  1. Reduce costs – current annual cost approximately $900.
  2. Have a phone available at home.
  3. Have a phone available for car emergencies.
  4. Have a phone available for the heir during extracurricular activities.
  5. Texting not required.
  6. Data not required.
  7. Current usage – less than 300 minutes per month.
  8. Internatlional calling not required.
  9. Nationwide long distance – preferred, but optional
  10. Statewide long distance – required.

So, what resources did we use, what did we decide on, what changes did we make and how much money did we save?  (Yes, this was one of the big ones)  The next article will cover the pre-paid vs. pay as you go vs. standard contract decision.  Then we’ll compare plans, phones, coverage, etc…