frugality

The following is a guest post from Katherine at BeCentsAble.

Photo by snowflake5

Yard sale, rummage sale, moving sale, tag sale and garage sale are some of the many names for the type of informal sale where a homeowner offers used household items for a low price.  I’ve been to numerous garage sales over the years, and I’ve scored bargains on all kinds of items ranging from clothes to our solid-wood kitchen table to sports equipment.  We’ve saved hundreds of dollars by buying used. 

However, shopping at garage sales can be hit or miss. How do you get the best deals?  Over the years I’ve learned a few tricks.

Know how to find the sales.

*Check the newspaper classifieds.  Most papers include a garage sale section that you can access online if you aren’t a subscriber.

*CraigsList has a tab under the For Sale/Wanted section dedicated to garage sales.

*Word of mouth.  I hear about many of the best sales because my friends know I’m interested.

Know when to shop.

*Starting early in the morning on the first day of the sale is the best way to get the bargains, many of which will be snatched up within the first half hour.  Seasoned garage sale shoppers often park outside and wait for the garage doors to open so they can begin shopping as soon as the sale begins.

*Oftentimes the second best time to shop is late on the last day of the sale.  This is especially true of sales that have run over the course of two or three days.  Although many items will be sold, those that are left are often available for a huge discount.  After 11am or noon some owners will reduce all their prices by half.  Even those who don’t advertise a half-price sale probably will be ready to listen to a lower offer.  No one wants to pack up all their leftovers and take them back inside.

Be aware of the cost of gas.

*When driving around town to hit the sales you may be burning a lot of gas.  Take the cost of gas into consideration when calculating the actual price of the bargains you’re buying.  It’s helpful to draw a map and plot the shortest course before beginning.

*Hit neighborhood, block, multi-family or even city sales so that you can visit many sales in the same area.

Know how much to pay.

*A general rule of thumb is to pay no more than 1/3 of the price of new.  However, many items sell for far less than this and prices vary widely from sale to sale.  Clothing, books, small toys and many other items often sell for 25 to 50 cents each.  When buying clothes for my toddler, I never pay more than one dollar unless I’m buying good quality jeans or a special occasion dress.

*Look for sales where the owner has listed all similar items for a single price.  For example, sales where all clothes and books are marked 50 cents apiece tend to yield better bargains than sales where the owner has taken the time to mark every item separately.

Be cautious about what you buy.

*Check all items over carefully to make sure they are free of stains, cracks, rips, marks and tears.

*Consider what items you are and are not willing to buy used.  We don’t buy couches or mattresses at garage sales – there are too many unknowns.  Some people aren’t willing to buy used shoes.

*Especially if you’re shopping for babies or children, please take the time to familiarize yourself with items involved in recalls to make sure you’re not purchasing unsafe equipment. Check out www.Recalls.gov for the most recent recalls issued.

Keep the bigger picture in mind.

*Sometimes you have to visit quite a few sales to find one that suits your needs, and sometimes you will hit the bargain jackpot at a single sale.  Those jackpot sales make a morning of shopping worth it for me.  Be patient and have fun.

*Be flexible.  If you have a very specific item in mind, your hunt may feel like searching the proverbial needle in the haystack, but if you go with a general list of items you’d like to purchase, you can probably find what you need.  When you do find a sale with items you don’t need immediately but will use within the near future (e.g. children’s clothes for the next season) consider stocking up and storing them until you can use them.

*Your bargain hunting will not only save your family money but also by buying used you are making a more eco-friendly choice than buying new. You are reusing an item that might otherwise end up in the landfill as well as helping conserve the resources and energy costs involved in manufacturing and transporting a new item.

Happy bargain hunting!

Deal Seeking Mom here: What are some of your tips for finding the best deals at garage sales? I’ve found some pretty sweet deals over the years, like a Vita-Mix blender for $5 that I sold on eBay for over $200!

Katherine is a happily married mother of one with one on the way.  She blogs at BeCentsAble where she writes about frugal, eco-friendly living and maintains a comprehensive list of the best bargains at stores around the country in the Grocery Gathering.

The following is a guest post from The Coupon Project.

Photo by mhunter111

As a newbie couponer, it was exhilarating leaving a store knowing I’d just saved more than I spent.  But a couple months in, I knew it was time to buckle down and get serious about formulating a real plan to transform my entire grocery bill.

So at the start of this year, I decided to do something a little different.  I decided I was going to track my savings and spending more carefully.   That way I’d know in any given month how closely I’d hit my goals, what my savings ratio was like, and if I was making any improvement as the months moved on.  Using this information, I could also create goals for what I wanted my spending to look like for the months ahead.

In retrospect, my process for doing this has involved four steps.  Here they are:

STEP ONE – determine how much you are spending now. In order to set a goal, you need to know where your starting point is.  Try to get a 3-month average of what you typically spend on groceries.  You also need to establish what you are going to count in this category.  Household products?  OTC medications?  Baby necessities?  Gifts?  And if you don’t have actual numbers to deal with, estimate what you think you spend and then see how close you come to that figure the following month.

STEP TWO – set both short- and long-term goals. Keep it simple and straightforward.  As an example, my long-term goal is to spend no more than $200/month for my family’s groceries and household items.  Since I just started couponing and stockpiling in November, I knew that this goal might take awhile to achieve.  So I’m easing my way to that goal with short-term (or midway) goals.  For instance, this month my goal was to spend no more than $300.  I can’t say I achieved that, but I will go ahead and keep that $300 goal until I am successful in meeting it.  Once I’ve met that goal, I will lower the monthly budget amount to say, $275. 

You might also decide to set a goal around the percentage you save each month.  Right now, I’m running around a 65% savings rate.  Maybe I could try to work towards a 70% rate, as an example.  You want to have goals that push you – but you don’t want to be so unrealistic that you just set yourself up for failure, either.  There’s a balance and it may take a while to find it.  Be patient and don’t give up!

STEP THREE – create a method of tracking your spending and saving. I am a Microsoft Excel nut, so a few months back, I created a spreadsheet so I could just plop in the data from my receipts and leave the calculating to the spreadsheet.  Yes, it took some work upfront, but now it’s quick and easy for me to track my goals.  If you prefer a more manual method, that’s fine.  Just do whatever you can to make the process as intuitive and easy as possible for you.

STEP FOUR – reflect on your progress. If you meet your goal for the month (or whatever time frame you designate), figure out what you did that worked for you so you can replicate your success.  Didn’t meet a goal?  Take the time to determine what went awry.   Were your goals unrealistic?  Did something unexpected come up?  How could you do better next time?  Whatever you do, don’t just throw in the towel and say “to heck with it!  I give up!”  Remember that every dollar you save is one less dollar you now have to earn.  (Remember that old adage, “A penny saved is a penny earned?”)

Yes, saving 50% or more in a single shopping trip is exhilarating.  But knowing you are saving 50% or more on your entire grocery bill for the month is even more satisfying.  I hope I’ve given you some practical advice (and maybe a good dose of inspiration!) for creating your own goals and tracking your spending.

Deal Seeking Mom here: What methods do you use to track your savings? What kind of goals do you have in place?

Angela is the author of The Coupon Project, a blog chronicling her real life couponing adventures.   Her goal is to encourage and educate other newbie couponers how to enjoy amazing money-saving success through easy-to-follow posts.

The following is a guest post from Cha-Ching on a Shoestring.

Photo by ssdg4773

Our family loves vacation.  We spend months planning and preparing and looking forward to another crazy week with our extended family…all 19 of us.  The memories we make each year have become legendary.

That’s why when a variety of circumstances (my husband’s recent unemployment, my sister’s family’s recent move, and my very pregnant self) led us to attempt our very first “staycation” last summer, we were a little nervous.  How would staying home ever compare to our previous beach, amusement park, and camping trips?  Could we possibly find enough entertainment in our little town for a whole week?

In the end, we loved it.  It rates right up there with the most fun vacations we’ve ever had, and it definitely was the least expensive.  We even managed to add a few more memories to our list of vacation legends.

If you are feeling uncertain about taking another pricey vacation, you may want to consider a staycation for your family this summer.  Here are a few tips on how to make the most of your time with a little bit of creativity and even less money:

• Make a plan in advance. It may be too easy to slip into your regular routine without setting up some kind of schedule for the week. Since we had multiple families involved, each family was assigned a day in which they were in charge of the activities. To make things even more fun, each family used Evite.com to send an evite a few weeks in advance to invite the others to their day’s festivities.

• Use this as an excuse to try out something new. Who would have thought that one of our favorite activities would be an art museum? We asked around about what activities other people have enjoyed within driving distance of our home and ended up trying out a new zoo, an Imax theater, and rafting down a local river. If you live in a more rural area, consider taking a couple of day trips to the closest city. If you live near a large city, you may want to take advantage of all-in-one event passes like citypass.com.

• Do what you can to make your home feel like a destination spot. We were lucky enough to have a family friend offer their huge bouncy-house water slide for us to borrow for the week, which the kids LOVED (as well as the occasional uncle). Have a cook-out, don leis and grass skirts, and enjoy a Hawaiian Luau. Borrow bikes, video games, wading pools, tents-whatever it takes to make your home feel a little less like home.

• Don’t be afraid to REST! Often vacations can be exhausting because you feel the need to fit in enough activities to make your trip worth your while. Enjoy the fact that you don’t need to feel this pressure. Set up designated rest times when kids can watch a movie or play games and the adults can put up their feet.

• Remember that sometimes it’s the simple things that matter. Staying at home gave us time to enjoy walks to the park, playing card games, and a late night meteor shower-activities that sometimes get neglected in our hectic everyday lives. In the end, isn’t vacation really meant to be all about simply being together anyway?

Deal Seeking Mom here: Have you perfected the art of the staycation? Do you have any additional tips for fun and frugal summer activities?

Kaley blogs with her husband Wes at Cha-Ching on a Shoestring, chronicling their journey of learning to live large on a limited budget and helping others do the same.

The following is a guest post by Sharon at Good, True & Beautiful.

One of the challenges with gaining any new skill is the learning curve – the time that it takes to become an expert at something and the bumps and bruises that you get along the way.

As we all know it takes work to master a task, and while it would be nice to jump right to the expert stage, we really need to give ourselves the grace to get there through incremental steps.  Trial and error are really valuable lessons, and you need to learn them if you are going to succeed.

This seems especially true with learning to save money – it’s easy to set your standards too high and be frustrated when you fall short.  But if you start out slowly and lay a good foundation, you will gain the experience you need to save over the long term, not just as a flash in the pan (’cause we all know that frugal is pretty trendy right now!).

If you are struggling to get started here are a few “training wheels” to help you find your balance:

Focus on reducing your spending by a certain percentage. If you watch the news you’ll see amazing examples of talented shoppers buying a cartload of groceries for pennies on the dollar.  It’s exciting to see what an expert shopper can do when she applies all the strategies, experience and wisdom she’s gained.  But do you think she started out here?  Do you think that she scores those deals on every single trip she makes?  Probably not.  And you won’t either.

It’s unrealistic to expect that you are going to save 95% on your groceries when you are just starting out.  Give yourself a chance to learn, and set a reasonable goal.  Can you save 25% on your groceries this month?  Can you identify two high ticket items that you can make at home or do without?  Can you look for clearance items and see if you have a coupon?  My current goal is to “save more than I spend” when I go grocery shopping.  Do I hit this target every time?  Of course not!  But it’s a good challenge for where I’m at and it keeps me stretching toward that mastery level.

Start out with one store, a specific list and the coupons you need. The very first time I shopped with the “deliberate intention of scoring good deals,” I put aside a lot of time to get prepared.  I didn’t try to do it with my regularly grocery run. I left my son with my husband, and I designated this shopping trip as a chance to learn.

What did I do? First  I came here to Tara’s site and pulled up the list of deals for Walmart.  I wrote out on a piece of paper everything that I was interested in and what the price could be (since Walmart’s prices vary regionally).  I then found the correlating coupons from the fliers I had been saving, cut them out, put them in an envelope, and wrote down their value on my shopping list.  I told myself that I couldn’t buy anything that wasn’t on my list and that I had to use the coupon.   Only then did I go to the store.

Because I was a newbie, it took forever!  I  had to find specific products, look at my list, organize the information . . .  I felt like a moron.  But this initial investment of time reaped a lot of rewards. I learned the fundamentals of strategic shopping and started to lay a foundation for my organizational methods.  Plus, I got to experience the thrill of saving a lot of money!  I just needed to give myself the chance learn. I had to set aside time to prepare and the time shop.  I had to recognize that I was new and that I would get better with practice.  And I have!

Don’t focus so much on the deal that you lose sight of your budget. The biggest rookie mistake I found myself making was getting so excited about the deal, that I lost sight of my budget.  I was so super-charged about stockpiling, buying things at rock bottom prices, and using my coupons that I never passed any of them up.  You might imagine my disappointment when I sat down at the end of the month to “see how much money I had saved” only to realize that I overspent!  I got too focused on the deal that I lost sight of my goal.

I’m not trying to get an adrenaline charge. I want to reduce my out of pocket expenses on groceries.  I learned the hard way that my first focus needs to be staying within my budget and then I can focus on stretching those budget dollars are far as I can.  And based on marketing research I don’t think I’m the only one with this problem – coupon shoppers spend 76% more annually than total households!  Keep your focus on saving – otherwise you might have a lot of stuff, but no extra money at the end of the month!

It’s an exciting challenge to learn how to save money and if you give yourself the grace to walk before you run, you might be finishing marathons before you know it!!

Sharon is the woman behind Good, True & Beautiful, and she is learning how to live abundantly on a budget!  After 15 years of a successful corporate life, she is now applying her business skills to the best job of all – mom.  She lives on a small farm in Upstate NY with her husband and infant son.