As a follow up to the post I wrote a few days ago about the new consumer protection laws and the possibility that thrift stores would have to stop selling children’s items, I was happy to come across this article tonight.  Looks like second hand stores will be ok.  Now we just have to make sure that the same is true for mom and pop businesses that make clothing and toys for kids… call your congressional reps!

And now for my two cents on credit scores.  Since we’re considering buying another house, we decided to take a peek at our credit scores.  We get our credit reports every six months or so, but have never paid to see our credit scores until now.  We went to the annual credit report site and picked Experian.  Credit scores were $5.95 each, and the credit report is free (we normally just get the free report).  We got my husband’s score first, and it was great.  It put him in the “super prime” category, which is what Experian calls their best credit scores.  No surprises there.  Then we pulled my credit report, and I was in their “prime plus” category.  I was two points below the cutoff for super prime, and my credit score with them is still considered very good.  But I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and when there’s a super prime option out there, I don’t want to be prime plus (pout).  My husband, who is very good at finding humor in just about any situation, thought it was quite funny that I (Miss Frugal Babe, and household money czar) somehow had a lower credit score than he did.

Just about all of our accounts have been joint for at least the last six years.  But I’ve never had a car loan, and he had one when we met.  He hasn’t had a car loan since 2002, but it does still show up on his credit report, and I’m sure that’s giving his score a bit of a boost.

But here’s the part that gets me.  Experian gave me a list of things that are lowering my score.  Of course time was a factor (when will this not be the case?  I’ve been in their files since 1997).  But the number one reason they listed was “The average loan amount across open, recently reported real estate accounts, such as a mortgage, is too low. Having low loan amounts has a negative impact on your credit score.” Are you kidding me??!  After the mortgage debacle that has ripped through the American economy over the last year or so, that is still considered a valid reason for a credit score to be lowered?  Maybe someone should let them know that people are defaulting on mortgages all across the country right now, and a big reason is that mortgage lenders approved people for loans that were too big (and used creative financing to seal the deal).

Ugh.  I checked my report closely, and everything is in order.  And I gotta say, I’d rather have a credit score that is two points below what Experian considers “super prime” than have a higher score and a higher mortgage balance.  Mostly I’m just amazed that any credit reporting agency is still encouraging bigger mortgages right now, and penalizing for smaller ones, considering the state of the mortgage industry.

Have any of you ever paid to see your credit score?  Ever been surprised by what you saw, or by the explanations given?

After the firestorm that yesterday’s post created in the comments section, today’s is going to seem pretty mundane.  I’m happy to report that I cleaned the living room Frugal Zeitgeist style.  I moved the couches, cleaned up all the dust bunnies and dog hair, dusted everything, put away all the clutter, and it looks like a magazine picture.  Now to keep it that way…  So that’s one room done.  We have nine rooms in our house, so eight days from now my house should be sparkling.  Of course eight days from now the living room will need to be redone.   But that’s the nature of cleaning I suppose.  Anyway, it feels good.

I made a couple of fleece liners for my son’s diapers.  I bought a large fleece sweatshirt in a thrift store for $2.50 a while ago, and I’ve used it as the inside section of three diapers.  I love how it stays nearly dry to the touch even when the soaker layer and outside of the diaper are wet.  Fleece is definitely good diaper material.  The third diaper liner was pieced together because I didn’t have a big enough section of the shirt left to make it all in one piece.  And after that I was left with just the sleeves and some small scraps.  So I cut 12 inch lengths off of the sleeves, sewed them shut (so I have two layers of fleece sewn together), and now I can lay them inside one of his non-fleece diapers.  Perfect for overnight.  I think I’ve gotten my $2.50 worth out of that sweatshirt!

One of my readers commented on another post asking for more details about our hydroponic garden and where we got the materials to set it up.  My husband did a lot of research online before we started.  He ordered some stuff online, but most of our original setup came from a local hydroponic store.  We bought hydroponic-specific reservoirs and plant trays that don’t degrade in the intense UV light of a hydroponic garden.  We bought a few different grow lights (different spectrums are needed for leafy plants versus flowering plants – we have one light on our greens and another light on our peppers and tomatoes).  And we had to buy a range of stuff for testing and fixing pH and adding nutrients to the water.  We cut costs wherever we could: we made our own reflective surround for the garden by attaching mylar sheets to old shower curtains and hanging them from the joists around the garden (you want as much light as possible to stay in the garden).  My husband cut little circles of mylar to go around each plant and keep the light out of the pots and away from the roots (you can buy pre-cut mylar circles, but it’s more expensive that way).  We needed water pumps and bubblers, which he found at a thrift store in the aquarium section (again, you can get them at hydroponic stores, but the thrift store was much less expensive and fish tank equipment works just as well).  If you’re interested in hydroponics, I’d suggest using google as a resource and learning the ropes before you buy any equipment or set anything up – that way you’ll know what you’re getting into beforehand.  Our experience was that forum-type sites were the best places to find detailed information.  Good luck!

I hope that you’ve all had a good week, and are doing some relaxing and exhaling this weekend now that the hustle and bustle are over.  We had a very mellow Christmas with my family.  There were 11 of us here, lots of food, and of course lots of snuggles for the baby.  We went to a white elephant party last night, and then hung out with another group of friends tonight.  We’re normally homebodies, so this has been a busy week.

The house we were at tonight is beautiful.  We’ve known these people for several years, but this was the first time we were at their house.  They’re in their early 20s, but have a house much larger and fancier than ours.  And they have all sorts of great stuff – a treadmill, beautiful furniture, flat screen tvs…

Even though I love being frugal, and love our simple life, I’ll admit to a bit of coveting now and then.  Tonight I was loving the couch (a beautiful chocolate brown wrap around sectional), the treadmill, and the huge master suite.  For a minute, I found myself wanting those things too.  Then I reminded myself that I wrote a check today to pay and additional $2000 towards our mortgage in January.  I suppose we could have a new couch and a bigger house if we wanted, but we’ve decided that we’d rather own our house as quickly as possible.  That means that we’ll just keep on living the way we always have, buying only what we need, shopping in thrift stores, and keeping our expenses to the bare minimum in order to be able to put as much money as we can towards the principal on our mortgage.

Now that I’m back home in our comfy little house, I’m perfectly happy with our thrift store furniture and cozy rooms.  I like knowing that our house will be ours a lot sooner than it would be if we spent our money on things to put inside it.   And when I look at our son, I’m reminded that the best things in life aren’t things, nor can they be bought.  All we really want to do is be able to spend our time with him.  For us, that’s a huge motivating factor to live frugally, since it means that we don’t have to spend as much of our time earning money to pay for our lifestyle.  And it feels really good to know that we’ve managed to nearly triple our mortgage payment for January.  It required some scrimping, but it’s done.  Now to just repeat that process 11 more times next year, and avoid being tempted by wonderful couches…

My husband finished our greenhouse yesterday.  I thought I’d post a picture so that my description would make more sense.  The whole project cost about $160.  The bulk of that was four double-paned glass doors that he found at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store.  Other than the doors, he used scrap wood that he found in the cull bin at Home Depot, screws that we had left over from another project, primer and paint left over from the last time we painted our old fence, insulation, caulk, and metal angle brackets.  I’m really proud of him – I think he did a fantastic job, and the greenhouse will allow us to extend our growing season considerably.  The doors that you can see in the picture are fixed at the bottom and swing open to allow access to the plants inside.  (There are two more matching doors on the other side, facing the fence)  There are stepping stones inside and we can just walk right in to harvest our crops. 

The greenhouse is on the south side of our house, and although it gets very cold here, we get a lot of sun all year round.  We’ve planted some cold-hardy greens, and we’re letting our existing swiss chard keep growing in the greenhouse – we’ll see how long it goes.  We’re excited for our winter gardening.  Between our hydroponic garden and the outdoor greenhouse we should have a pretty good amount of homegrown produce.

I just made my final contribution to my Roth IRA for this year.  So far this year, we’ve maxxed out our HSA ($5800) and my Roth ($5000), and my husband’s traditional IRA will be maxxed out by the end of the year (we have an automatic monthly contribution going into it, and it will hit $5000 in mid-December).  This is the first time we’ve ever managed to max out all of our retirement savings accounts.  It’s been a long journey from 2003 when we stopped putting any money at all into our IRAs (because we barely earned enough money to pay our mortgage).  In 2004, we started contributing $100/month to each of our IRAs – and that was a pretty big stretch.  But we made saving a priority, and as our income increased, we focused on putting more money aside each month.  At the end of 2007, I posted about our financial goals for 2008.  Max out the HSA, max out both of our IRAs, and pay off at least $5000 in principal on our HELOC.  We have three months left to go in the year, and I’m optimistic that we’ll actually be able to get the HELOC payoff amount to $10,000 by the end of the year.  It will take diligence, but we’re very motivated to get rid of the HELOC for good.   In addition to meeting our savings goals, we’ve done a lot of home improvement this year.  A remodeled kitchen, new floors in our upstairs, a new fence, a hydroponic garden that has been yielding tons of produce already, and new exterior paint.  All for about $6000.

We didn’t take a fancy vacation this year.  I’ve bought two thrift-store shirts in the last 5 months.  We use cloth diapers and wipes that we made from old t-shirts and flannel sheets.  All of the clothes our son has were gifts or hand me downs, with the occasional thrift store find thrown in.  Although we’re saving for a new car (for the distant future), we’re still driving our old cars and riding our bikes or walking whenever possible.  To be honest, I don’t feel like we’re sacrificing anything at all – we have a great life.  But I know that some people would see our old cars and our lack of trips to the mall as a bummer.  But if we had new cars and paid $60 for our jeans, we wouldn’t have a college fund for our son.  We wouldn’t have been able to max out our retirement funds.  We would be living on the edge.  So I’d much rather keep wearing the clothes I already have (especially since I have far too many as it is) and be able to feel confident that we’re going to be ok financially.

The stock market sucks right now.  (although I’m just about to spend the $5000 I put in my Roth this year on an ETF, so I’m looking at the bright side – now is a probably a pretty good time to be buying stocks).  Nobody knows when things will get better for the economy.  For us, this provides even more motivation to keep our expenses to a minimum.  Growing our own food, making do with what we have, and saving everything we can – it all helps create a feeling of security in an uncertain economic environment.  You can’t get that from a pair of pants, no matter how cute they are.

Obviously, I’m an advocate of frugal living.  I think an ability to live on a small income will stand you in good stead, regardless of how big (or small) your income eventually becomes.  The festival of frugality is up at Living Almost Large, and there are lots of great ideas to kick-start your frugal self:

The Iconoclast Investor has a post about living in tiny houses.  If we were buying our house now, I think I’d go for something smaller (our house is about 1300 square feet, we have one child, and both work from home), but not much smaller.  Given that we’re already here and love where we live, I doubt we’ll ever move.  But I love to get books about tiny houses out of the library.  They always inspire me to purge clutter, since the houses in the books are invariably clutter-free.

The Financial Wellness Project has a post about drying clothes outdoors.  I dry everything on drying racks that are portable.  I put them outdoors if it’s nice outside, and leave them inside if it’s not.  The sun bleaches all the stains out of our son’s diapers, which is a huge bonus.

MoneyNing writes about his adventures living on as little as possible for a week.  His total?  $34.01 (not counting rent).  If you’re looking for inspiration, here it is.

On August 12th, we transplanted our seedlings into their own containers in our hydroponic garden.  Today we harvested our first greens, 12 days later.  Here are pictures, taken 8/12 and 8/24.

I’m just about to go harvest a few basil leaves, and put them on a sandwich with some tomatoes from our outdoor garden.  Life is good.

I just noticed that this post never published last week.  It was languishing away in my drafts folder, so I figured better late than never, eh?  Fellow Frugal Blog Network member Shanti hosted the Festival of Frugality at Antishay Ventenne last week – thanks Shanti!

I love the post from My Two Dollars about borrowing or renting instead of buying. We’re all about the library for entertainment. We need an extra long ladder to finish painting our house, and we’re going to rent one this weekend (even on Craigs List, the ladders we need were at least $125 – we can rent one for a day for a lot less than that – and how often do you need a 36 foot ladder?) update – we rented a 40 foot ladder for $26.  Much better than spending $100 to buy one!

Squawkfox has a great post about using reusable shopping bags instead of plastic or paper. We’ve gotten so much better about this – we keep our reusable bags in our car, so they’re there when we get to the store. I have a basket on my bike, and whenever I go to the stores near our house, I take reusable bags in my bike basket. The only problem is what to use to pick up after our dog… but my MIL brings us newspaper bags whenever she visits – those are better anyway, since they’re much smaller, so there’s less waste every time we pick up after the dog.

I got an email from a reader over the weekend, asking if I knew of any credit cards offering balance transfers without a fee, and zero percent interest on the transfered amount. I did some searching this morning, and every offer I saw for zero percent interest on balance transfers includes a balance transfer fee, although there are still some really good balance transfer offers out there. I suppose it doesn’t hurt to see if you can get them to waive the fee for you – the worst that will happen is that they’ll say no. I’ve seen some cards that have a max of $75 for balance transfers, and others with a max of $90. If anybody knows of one with no fee for balance transfers, please leave a comment!

If you’re considering balance transfers, there are lots of issues to take into account. How much debt to do you want to transfer? If you only have $500 in credit card debt, it’s probably not worth the hassle and transfer fees (likely $15, as most cards seem to charge 3%). But the more debt you have, and the longer the zero percent interest period lasts, the more likely it is to be a good deal. Here’s a site I found that shows a comparison of several balance transfer credit cards, with the interest rates and balance transfer fees for each one. It looks like Discover has several good offers – one of the balance transfers we did several years ago was to a Discover card, and it worked very well for us. We got the zero percent rate for as long as we liked, provided we made one purchase each month on the card. So every month we’d buy something for a dollar, and keep extending our balance transfer offer. We did have to pay interest on the stuff we bought, but even after a couple years, it was only adding up to about a dollar a month. That balance transfer saved us hundreds of dollars in interest, but it did require diligence on our part to make sure that we kept the deal going. Obviously the savings depend on how high your interest rate currently is, how long the introductory balance transfer offer will last (try to get at least 12 months), and how high the interest rate will be once the real rate kicks in. Finally, I would say that once you’ve done the balance transfer, do everything you can to pay off the balance by the time the introductory rate expires. And whatever you do, don’t be late with a payment – all bets are off if you don’t live up to the terms of the deal, and you could find that all of a sudden you’re paying double digit interest rates along with late fees. Of course this can happen with any credit card, but it’s especially painful if you go through all the effort of a balance transfer, get the zero percent interest rate, and then lose it because you miss a payment.

I’ve made it very clear throughout my blog that I’m a fan of credit cards. My husband and I put all our purchases on one credit card, with the exception of Costco, where we use AmEx, since it’s the only credit card they take. We earn rewards on our cards, have a clear statement of where all our money goes every month, and can pay for everything with the click of a mouse at the end of the month. We’ve never been burned by credit cards, but that’s because we’ve been very careful with how we use them. During the first year after starting our own business, we barely made enough money to pay our mortgage. Pretty much everything else went on our credit card. For most of 2004, we were not able to pay the balance in full each month. Once we started making enough money to pay more than our mortgage and utilities, we started working in earnest to pay back our debts. We used balance transfer offers twice, taking advantage of zero percent interest for as long as we could. I kept careful track of when those offers expired, and we made sure that we focused on our highest interest debts first. We did pay plenty of interest on credit card debt in 2004 – 2005. But we minimized the damage, and came out the other side with our mortgage as our only debt, which we’re working to pay off as quickly as possible. Without credit cards, we’d have had a much tougher time in those early years of having our business. I know that we could have waited a few years and saved more money before quitting our jobs and starting a new business. But we were miserable at the jobs we had, and getting out of them as fast as possible was a huge priority. I guess that you could say that the interest we paid on credit card debts for those two years was the price we paid for not having to spend those years in jobs we hated. To me, that was worth it, although others might strongly disagree.

Most pf bloggers are squarely in one camp or the other when it comes to credit cards – either love em or hate em. I have no problem with credit cards, but you have to enter into the agreement with an understanding that the credit card company is in business to make a profit, and is far more concerned about their own bottom line than they are about yours. But isn’t this the case with any business? If you don’t trust yourself with credit, probably best to avoid it. But if you know that you’re careful with money, don’t spend beyond your means, and aren’t already in debt, you’ll probably do just fine with a credit card. But how do you choose a card? I got my first credit card when I was in college. I can’t remember how I chose which one I applied for, but I’m pretty sure that I just responded to the first mailing I got from a credit card company once I decided I wanted one. The other option was to sign up on campus and get a free t-shirt or bag of M&Ms… either way, I know it wasn’t a very scientific process. These days, my husband and I have a card that gives us a cash back reward – every time we get 10,000 points, they give us a $100 credit on our statement. For us, that’s much better than shopping through rewards catalogs, because we can spend the $100 on whatever we like – groceries, gas, etc.

I found a site that will help you compare options and find the best credit card for you, based on what you’re looking for. They are currently listing three cards with zero percent interest for at least a year on balance transfers, which is becoming harder to find these days (when we were at the peak of our debt, we were getting offers in the mail every other day for zero percent balance transfers, but they aren’t as easy to find now). So if you’re in the market for a credit card, do some shopping around and find the one that will work best for you. Whatever you do, don’t just sign up for one because they’re going to give you a free set of BBQ tools and a t-shirt.

I’m trying to find the best deal on getting digital pictures printed.  Any thoughts?  I’ve used Snapfish, Flickr, and Shutterfly in the past, as well as taking my chip to Walmart, Target, and Costco.  Everyone has different prices – Shutterfly is good for 4 x 6 prints, but their 8 x 10s are a lot more expensive than Costco and Walmart.  I don’t want to drive all over town with my chip, getting different size pics at different places.  I love to scrapbook, and I just sorted out 100 shots that I want to print in various sizes for my son’s book (I know, he’s only 2 and a half months old, and I have way too many pictures already, and his baby book is going to be six inches thick, but I’m sure we’re not the first new parents to go a little overboard on pictures).  I’ve used so many picture printing services that they’re starting to blur in my head… so let me know your favorites – I need a good one that won’t break the bank.