<$Monday, June 23, 2008$>
Let the hiatus be ended. I come bearing links.
Hidey-ho, boys and girls! Since I've been absent for so long, I'll waste no time giving you the goods.
That's all I've got. Unless you also want excuses as to where the hay I've been for the last month. I don't really have any of those, either. I just felt a little burned out on blogging--especially on blogging-for-hire--so I put this blog on the back burner while I decided whether or not I wanted to continue it. And the decision I reached is that, indeed, I do. So although, like with my other blog, posting will remain a little sporadic while I try to finish the rough draft of my novel, I will be posting here again. And I will try my very hardest not to let it descend into all rants about our nightmare house non-hunt (which is a whole 'nother post), although as things currently stand, that certainly is tempting. It's good to be back! Labels: bargains, coupons, food problem, link roundup, meta, personal |
<$Wednesday, January 30, 2008$>
Do sacrifices alter your personal style?
| I used to love to wear jewelry. Costume jewelry, mainly--I've never been in a position to afford or be gifted with much of the real stuff. In my younger days working in retail, I usually ended up working in the jewelry department, surrounded by cute baubles that I couldn't resist. My jewelry was a big part of my personal style. The old me would have adored some of this wholesale fashion jewelry. But that was back in the days when I didn't think much about my spending, or about putting shiny things on a credit card. The new me hardly wears any jewelry. Other than my wedding ring and a necklace my husband let me pick out for my birthday last year, all I usually wear are a few pairs of inexpensive discount store earrings that I rotate, and often I don't even bother with those. I'm not sure when or why I stopped being a costume jewelry ho. It happened pretty gradually, although I'm sure lack of funds had something to do with it. Being forced into frugal habits had a major impact on my personal style, but I'm sure getting older (and busier) also had something to do with it. Where I used to love trendy outfits, now I wear more classic clothes that won't go out of style. I still have girly phases where I love to dress up and put on makeup, but for the most part I've got a pretty basic beauty routine that lets me get ready for work in fifteen minutes. These things cost less to maintain, too. A lot of jewelry just doesn't fit into that equation. Sometimes, this makes me sad, and I wish I could go back to my girly-girl days of yore. Mostly, though, I'm proud of myself for scaling down and figuring out how to look feminine and stylish while saving a lot of time and money. My new personal style fits in a lot better with my new lifestyle. There's no room here for the old, fashion-conscious, spendy me. Labels: bargains, disclosure, frugality, personal, shopping |
<$Friday, January 25, 2008$>
Furnishing my dream house
 I'm once again hypothetically shopping for my hypothetical future house. I know I really shouldn't, since it will only lead to temptation to get spendy after we move. Really, we plan to make the most of the furniture we've already got, and fill any gaps with Craigslist and thrift shop finds. I consider myself to be fairly creative, and once I get a sewing machine, between that and knitting and borrowed ingenuity from Curbly and other web sources, I'm pretty confident I'll be able to make our new house look like a cozy home without breaking the bank.One thing we do need to replace, though, is our bed. Our bed--actually, our entire fashion bed group, is a matching set of antique hand-me-ups that came to me only after a few years of rough treatment at the hands of my then teenage sister. It's all pretty battered, and not in that stylishly distressed way. I never use the vanity table, anyway, since when I'm not getting dressed at the gym I usually do so in the bathroom, and the chest-of-drawers isn't big enough for the two of us. Neither, really, is my full-size bed, with its broken foot board and aging mattress. So one thing I keep shopping around for to get an idea of how much money I need to save up is a quality bed. I figure once we get a new bed, we'll have it for at least a decade, so to me it's well worth it to shell out for something as sturdy and durable as it is comfortable. I really like the looks of these platform beds; right now they're on sale at prices that wouldn't kill us. It's doubtful that they still will be when we move, but we're not in a huge hurry. We can wait until they go on sale again, even if we have to sleep on our mattress on the floor for a while. Actually, a lot of the prices at Home and Bedroom look pretty reasonable. I'm going to have to bookmark this site for the future and remember to come back to it when we're ready to actually buy new furniture. Their Hillsdale Furniture collections include some gorgeous beds that I might consider if we decide to go with a more traditional look, and those prices aren't making me cringe, either. Once we get our 2007 taxes done, we'll finish our mortgage application and, hopefully, start shopping for a house. Our goal is to be in our own place by this summer. The thought of it is both scary and exhilarating, and despite the scary, I can't wait. This sort of web-window-shopping for good furniture and decorating bargains and dreaming about what I want my new home to look like helps me to wait patiently until it all become a reality. It can be agonizing to wait, but sometimes the best part of waiting is the anticipation and imagining what it will be like when the time finally comes. Labels: bargains, disclosure, frugality, house-hunt, shopping |
<$Tuesday, January 22, 2008$>
Good Deals on Dental Care
| *Sponsored Post* My husband hasn't been to the dentist in years. He knows he needs to go get his teeth cleaned and checked, and that he'll probably have cavities that need to be dealt with. He also needs to eventually have his wisdom teeth removed. So when the open enrollment period for my employer's benefits came around at the end of 2007, I enrolled him in the company's dental plan. I didn't like it; at $35 per paycheck--$70 per month--that seemed kind of steep to me, especially when a month's worth of premiums would almost cover the cost of a cleaning. But not knowing what kind of work he'll need done to his teeth, and not wanting to be caught with our pants down if he needed something major, we bit the bullet and signed him up anyway. That's what I get for not doing my research first. Instead of expensive insurance that only pays a percentage of most procedures anyway, we probably should have checked into discount dental plans. These are different from dental insurance in that instead of premiums and copay, you simply pay a one time annual fee to receive steeply discounted services for the entire year. Annual fees run as low as $79.95 for individuals--that's a heck of a bargain compared to my $75 monthly premium--and $129.95 for entire families, regardless of how many children you have. That particular dental plan also covers prescriptions, vision and chiropractic care, and includes three extra months of coverage for the first year. It's pretty frustrating to find out about this after we committed to a year of expensive insurance, let me tell you. I'm bookmarking this site, and when open enrollment comes back around for 2009, we're going to seriously consider switching over to this. Labels: bargains, disclosure, frugality, healthy living, insurance, PPP |