When I wrote yesterday about the awesome wooden toys we found at a thrift store, a reader wondered if we would do our holiday shopping in thrift stores.  So I thought I’d share my holiday gift plans.  First, I have to say that we try very hard to keep the holidays pretty low key around here.  We will be getting a little Charlie Brown tree this year, mainly because we have a little boy who will be fascinated by the lights (the last time we had a tree was 2003).  The forest service clears saplings in the hills near our city to prevent overgrowth, and they sell the trees to raise money for forest service projects.  The trees are as cute as can be, take about six minutes to put up and take down, and just have a few branches – simple and easy.

We went to a beautiful park last week and my brother took pictures of our family for our Christmas card photo shoot.  We ended up with some really great shots, and will be picking one to get printed on photo greeting cards.  I saw a sign at Costco last week advertising 50 photo greeting cards for six dollars.  So we will be all over that.

I make Christmas ornaments for our nieces every year.  This year, I’m planning to use a beautiful piece of fabric that I bought ten years ago in Tanzania to make cloth ornaments.  The fabric has been sitting in my closet all these years, and it will make great ornaments (I’ll post pics once I get them done – for now the pictures are only in my head).  I even found a bag of fiberfill stuffing at the thrift store for 25 cents, so I have everything I need to make the ornaments.

My family stopped exchanging Christmas presents years ago, once all of the kids were grown.  My parents are of the view (and I agree) that Christmas and the presents that go along with it are for children.  They gave us gifts when we were young, but stopped when I was in college.  My younger siblings were still living at home, but my parents switched to a tradition of taking them on a trip for Christmas rather than buying gifts.  Now that we’re all adults, we just get together for food and fun, which will involve lots of playing with our son this year.  We’re hosting Christmas dinner for my family at our house – there will be lots of food, but no gifts.

My girlfriends and I stopped exchanging gifts a few years ago.  We’re all adults, we’re all able to buy things that we need, and we all consider getting together for a meal, or a good long phone conversation to be far superior to additional possessions.

My mother in law loves Christmas and always gets us lots of gifts.  But she’s also very easy to please, and she loves simple gifts that involve photos of her grandkids.  With the hundreds of photos we have of our son, and my somewhat crafty nature, I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with something perfect.

We won’t be doing much in the way of gifts for our son.  He’s too young to understand the whole thing anyway, and is just as happy with a wooden spoon as he would be with a fancy toy.  We might get him something from the thrift store, but we might not.  As I said, we keep Christmas pretty low key around here.  We’re not religious, so really it’s just like any other day.  If we end up finding more nifty stuff at the thrift store, we’ll probably just give it to him right away, rather than waiting for Christmas.

I’ll bake several batches of muffins and deliver them to some neighbors and my friends at the library.  I’ll also give some to the men who collect our garbage and recycling, and the people who deliver our produce and mail.

That’s pretty much it.  Homemade gifts in the form of ornaments and muffins are very inexpensive and fun to make.  Whatever I end up doing for my mother in law will be fun too.  We will be spending some money on food for Christmas dinner, but everyone will bring a side dish, so whatever we end spending won’t be a budget buster.

Since we keep everything pretty simple around the holidays, we can relax and enjoy the season.  To be honest, the part I’m most looking forward to is dinner with my family, and going for walks in the evenings with my husband and son, all bundled up against the cold.  I can already imagine the look on our son’s face when he sees Christmas lights all over the houses.  I guarantee he’ll enjoy that just as much as he would if we spent half a day in Toys R Us buying stuff for him.  And going for walks is free.

We got home from my husband’s knee surgery adventure on Tuesday evening, and other than several walks with the dog, we haven’t left the house since we got back.  Working from home makes the whole knee recovery process so much easier.  Especially with both of us working from home, since I’m able to take care of things that my husband can’t do on crutches.

The last couple days have just involved work, housework, cooking, taking care of the baby, and physical therapy (which we do at home for the rest of the week – he’ll be going to a therapist near our home once a week starting next week).  Entertainment has mostly revolved around a good library book, going for walks with the dog, and hanging out with our son.  All free, and all rewarding.  So we’ve had a couple of no-spending days, and there will probably be many more over the next few weeks.

Yesterday I noticed that we had accumulated 10,000 points on our credit card, and I cashed them in for a $100 credit to our statement.  I always take the cash reward instead of gift cards to stores.  When I went on the card website to redeem our points, I noticed that they were offering $10 gift cards to various stores, for 1250 points.  Or I could cash in 10,000 points and get $100, to spend any way we like.  So of course I took the cash.  With that little bonus, our no-spending days look even better.

A great new health food store is opening less than a mile from our house tomorrow.  We’re both very excited about this, and have been waiting for months for the grand opening.  I always ride my bike or walk to the regular grocery stores near our house, but having a health food store just around the corner is going to be awesome.  We had planned to bike there tomorrow, but my husband won’t be able to bike for at least three weeks, and crutching a mile each way to the store would be a painful endeavor.  So we’ll be loading up the car and heading over there tomorrow to scout out the store.  I’m especially excited to check out the bulk bins and stock up on organic dry goods.  We’ll be budget conscious though, and limit the pricey stuff to a few splurges.  But for me, going into a health food store is like Carrie Bradshaw going into a Jimmy Choo store.  It’s a good thing that most of my trips there in the future will be on foot or by bike – it will limit the amount I buy to just what I can carry.

We had another great weekend day, no spending, lots of productivity.  We finished painting the last little bit of our house.  Whew!  It was a small part of trim at the top of a second story gable, but it’s over a trellis and vine porch roof, so it’s pretty hard to get to.  We finished the rest of the painting about a month ago, but we had been procrastinating on this part.  Today we finally got it done.  It involved a sheet of plywood on top of the trellis/vine structure, lifting the ladder onto that, and then my husband perching himself on the ladder and painting the trim while trying not to wiggle (so as to avoid having the ladder slide off the piece of plywood and fall through onto the porch).  So anyway, we’re stoked to finally have a completely painted house, and no injuries from the process.

Our baby had his first outing in the jogging stroller today.  The stroller was a hand me down from friends who had outgrown it.  They gave it to us before we were even pregnant – they knew I love to run, and they knew that we eventually wanted a child; they were going to donate the stroller and offered it to us first.  We’ve been storing it in our crawl space for a couple years.  Today we pulled it out, aired up the tires, wiped it down, and it was as good as new.  So now the dog and I have a new running companion, and he has a sweet recycled stroller to ride in.  Life is good.

Lots of good stuff in the Frugal Blog Network this week.  At Tight Fisted Miser, Andy has his take on the financial bailout.  He says “My life was good at the beginning of the year and it is still good now.  Until that changes for the worse or looks like it is going to I’m not going to worry.”  I like this sentiment, and I feel the same way.  Not having consumer debt, and having a small mortgage relative to our income, means that financial downturns don’t hurt as much as they could otherwise.  This current financial mess is just giving me more motivation to pay off our mortgage as quickly as possible, and spend as little as possible.

The Frugal Zeitgeist has also written about the economic mess, and what it means for the average person – everything from our jobs to how we spend our money and give to charity.  And I agree completely that working towards getting out or staying out of debt is a good goal for just about everybody.

The Frugal Duchess has an article about what happens to your money when your bank goes under.  Helpful reading for anyone who used to bank at WaMu.

Not Made Of Money has a post about fall garage sales – it’s not too late to cash in on bargains that abound at garage sales, or on getting rid of the clutter that is taking over your basement.

Almost Frugal has written about how to put together your own travel emergency kit. Small enough to go in a purse or a diaper bag (which we moms tend to use as a purse for several years… I’ve forgotten what my purse even looks like), economical, and simple.  I love it.  I think I’m going to have to find a little box and get busy making an emergency kit to stash in the diaper bag.  On another diaper bag note, I stashed an old sheet in ours a few weeks ago.  It’s perfect for an impromptu seat on the grass wherever we happen to be (and keeps the baby from eating pesticide-laced grass), and it’s easy to toss in the washer and line dry when we get home.

Ok, so it’s only the 4th, but we haven’t spent any money at all so far this month (other than fixed expenses, like health insurance, the mortgage, and the HOA dues). I’m feeling pretty good about that. Four no-spending days in a row. My inspiration comes from Frugal Trenches, who is also counting her vegan days now, in addition to no-spending days. Head over to her site to be inspired yourself.

Here are a few other tidbits that I found around the web this morning:

No Impact Man has a great post about sharing resources. It’s not the owning of a thing that actually brings happiness. It’s the doing, and the sharing, and the learning and growing. When you look at it this way, it’s obvious that we should be living in the smallest houses we can comfortably fit in, and spending our free time outside, with other members of our community.

Green Baby Guide has a post with lots of good ideas for birthday parties for kids. I especially like the idea of muffins instead of cupcakes. Muffins are usually my baked good of choice when I have to take something to a party. I use lots of ingredients like whole wheat flour, oats, pumpkin, flax seed, raisins, blueberries, etc (and very little sugar) and they always get lots of thumbs up. I’m also a big fan of the idea of sidewalk chalk for a party with little kids. And it’s a lot less expensive than renting a pony or a bouncy castle!

I found a site that compiles tons of online coupons and special offers in one place. FindSavings is a great resource if you do much online shopping. JC Whitney is on the list – my parents ordered car parts from them all the time when I was a kid. JC Whitney kept our family’s 1974 cars running well into the 21st century. There’s also a coupon for 10 cent 4 x 6 prints from Kodak Gallery (one of the few photo places that I haven’t tried yet. Perfect timing, since I have about 100 pictures that I’m ready to order!). And I saw a coupon for clearance items at VistaPrint. My husband and I have been using VistaPrint for business cards, fliers, and corporate greeting cards for years. I highly recommend them if you have a small business and need to project a professional image without spending a fortune.

Consumer Credit Counseling Services – a nonprofit credit counseling agency – has launched Household CFO to help people better handle their finances in a difficult economy. The website is full of free information about a host of financial topics, including identity theft, home foreclosure, breaking the debt cycle, creating emergency savings, and preparing for retirement. This is an especially relevant site in the pf blogosphere, and I know they would appreciate it if other bloggers would spread the word about the site.

Happy Thursday!

Cap at Stop Buying Crap has a great post from a couple weeks ago that I just found today. Check out five things I’ll never buy for my future kids. He’s got some good humor sprinkled in, but I have to agree with the serious points he makes – kids don’t need any of this stuff (I didn’t even know $20,000 playhouses existed!) They need love and attention, not computer games and DVD players. We just have one TV, and it dates back to the 90210 era. We are only ever going to have one TV, and there won’t be one in the car. My family managed to take plenty of road trips, and there were four children. Two is our max – so I think we should be able to handle driving with our child(ren) without adding a TV to the car.

I didn’t have a car until I graduated from college. I’ll encourage the same thing with our son, and we certainly won’t be paying for a car or gas or insurance if he chooses to get one before then. I remember when I was in college that parking permits were expensive and even then people would still have to circle the lots looking for a space – much easier to bike or walk to class. Anyway, by the time our son is old enough to drive, gas will probably be $50/gallon and he won’t be able to afford to drive even if we wanted him to.

Our son is nearly 3 months old. Our strategy so far has been to avoid shopping in places like Babies R Us or Target… you go in those places and see stuff that you never even knew you didn’t have. We’re doing just fine with the stuff we got as hand-me-downs and gifts. Our son does enjoy his vibrating bouncy chair and the play mat that has little toys hanging off of it. Both were recycled from other families that had outgrown them, and while they’re not fancy, they do the job. The playmat came with the mat and the crossed tubes above it, but no toys. So I took several small soft books with loops on them and tied them to the cross bars with yarn. He loves to grab at them, and we can lie on the floor next to him and read the stories to him while he grabs at the books.

I know that we can’t shelter our son from consumerism forever. One day he’ll be in school and he’ll want the same jeans/toys/phone/shoes, etc. that all the other boys have (but wanting and getting are two different things). I know I went through that phase for a lot of years myself. But for now, we’ll avoid consumerism wherever we can, and shower our little guy with our time and attention instead of with stuff.

My two sisters in law and their five children are visiting us this week.  Today some of us went to a local amusement park, which I much preferred to the big Six Flags style park we went to a few days ago.  There were seven of us today, including the baby.  This park allowed us to just walk in, and then pay for rides as we did them, which was great for moms pushing newborn babies in strollers – free! (at the big amusement park, my ticket still cost $25, even though I didn’t ride anything and spent the day with my baby).

My sister in law is famous for her frugal ways, and I had to smile when the children started asking for food.  Of course there were food vendors all around, but my sister in law reached into her purse and pulled out a loaf of bread and some turkey and cheese that she had just taken out of the cooler in her car.  We found a shady spot and she made sandwiches for all of us.  Amusement parks usually charge quite a bit more for food than regular restaurants (which are spendy enough as it is), so it probably would have cost $40 or $50 for all of us to eat at one of the food places in the park.  But thanks to her frugal ways, we escaped without spending anything.  I am used to being the frugal one in any group, and I love having a someone else around who thinks the same way I do!

We’re in the middle of painting our house, but thanks to my family we’re a lot closer to the end of the project than we were two days ago. We’re painting because the HOA told us we had to – as they did with about half the neighborhood, from the looks of the semi-finished painting projects going on all around us this month. My husband and I spent the last two weekends working on it, and it was pretty slow going. I was having to stop every couple hours to feed the baby, and a house just seems to get larger and larger as you paint. (man am I ever glad that we don’t live in a 3000 square foot house!!).

Then a few days ago, my parents called and said that they were rounding up the family and everyone would be coming to our house on Friday to paint. They showed up yesterday morning at about 7:30 – my parents, my sister, both my brothers, and one even brought his girlfriend along for the project. So all of a sudden, things started to get done on a much more grand scale than before. My parents brought ladders, scrapers, a paint sprayer and brushes, so there were plenty of tools, and lots of hands working them. We worked until after 5pm, and what’s left of the project suddenly seems much more doable – we’re no longer facing another month of painting. We have about 90% of the body of the house painted, and a good start on the trim. My little brother did a lot of work on the highest sections of the house, which was a huge help. My mother spent the whole day working on the miles of trim on the front of the house and the porch, so the house is starting to look really nice from the front. My sister got so into her section that we had to drag her off the ladder to come inside for lunch.

As a huge bonus to the day, my dad fixed my muffler. My boxer shorts fix was good enough to get home the day the pipe broke, but probably not much of a permanent solution. But for $25 in supplies from the auto parts store, and a wire coat hanger, my dad got everything ship-shape in about an hour. Feeling very grateful that I have a whole family full of frugal DIYers.

My family is very good at pitching in and helping each other out. My parents move every few years to a new fixer-upper house, and whenever they do, the whole family gathers for the weekend to pack everything up and clean out the old house. When my brother bought a fixer-upper house a couple years ago, he had to do several projects before the closing in order to get his mortgage approved (things like a new roof and wiring – not small projects). My parents and sister spent a whole week at his house, helping him meet the deadline for the closing. They also spent several weekends at our house earlier this year helping us with our kitchen remodel. And on the days when my mother and I have been working on diapers and various sewing projects, my husband has spent the day doing yardwork at my parents’ house. We all work together very well, and everyone comes out ahead. Although admittedly my husband and I have come out a bit further ahead this year, since we’ve been the beneficiaries now of two major group projects – the kitchen and the house painting. Hugely grateful for that. My brother and his girlfriend might be buying a condo soon, so we’ll be able to help them move and fix up the new place. Taking care of each other – with each person bringing unique talents to the table – is one of the best ways to maintain a frugal lifestyle. Maintaining strong family and friend ties, and pitching in with whatever help you can provide, makes DIY projects much more doable and enjoyable.

We’re taking today off from painting, in order to catch up on all the other stuff we need to do. Then we’ll be back at it tomorrow. But now that so much of it is finished, it feels much more manageable. A huge thank you to my family!

Just found this post from Mrs. Accountability about using baking soda and vinegar on her hair.  I’m excited to start doing this myself.  I’ve made a lot of changes in personal hygiene over the last few years.  I only wash my hair every third day, and I switched to chemical free shampoo a year or so ago, but dang is it every expensive.  I switched to vinegar as a conditioner around the same time, and I’m excited to use baking soda instead of shampoo now.  I gave up all my normal body lotions too, and switched to just plain organic cocoa butter, which I love.  I use baking soda and vinegar to clean just about everything in my house – why not my hair? Thanks for the tip, Mrs. A!

And here’s a post from Money Blue Book that reminded me of a recent car problem I had… A few days ago I drove to a nearby town to meet a friend for lunch.  My car spends most of its time in the garage (I’ve driven it 1900 miles in the last 9 months), but lunch was about 15 miles away, so I drove.  On my way home – luckily only about three miles from home – I heard a clunking noise and pulled over.  I was bummed to see that the pipe going from my engine to the muffler had broken and the muffler was only supported on the tailpipe side, and clunking rather noisily along the ground on the other side.  Not good.  The muffler was too hot to touch, and I obviously couldn’t keep going with it dragging on the ground.  I didn’t have a cell phone with me, and all I could think about was that my baby was going to start getting hungry pretty soon, and his only food source was under my shirt, by the side of the road, three miles from home.  So I dug around in the car and found an old sock that we had been using to wipe the dipstick when we check the oil.  I was able to use that to keep from burning myself when I held the muffler up.  Then I found an old pair of boxer shorts that had been turned into a rag (not sure why they were in my car, but I’m glad they were).  I tore the shorts to make a rope, and used it to tie the muffler up to a bracket on the underside of the car.  It was pretty sketchy – I could see the shorts straining under the weight of the muffler, and I could only get the end of the muffler about 2 inches off the ground.  But it would have to do.  I got back in and drove – very slowly – home.  I’m sure I provided a good deal of entertainment to the people driving behind me (“are those boxer shorts holding up her muffler? – I wonder if she knows about it?!”).  My brother has offered to come over and help us replace the broken pipe later this week, for which I’m very grateful.  Because while the boxer shorts were a huge help, they’re probably not the best long-term solution.

My parents go thrift store shopping every Monday.  It’s mostly a hobby for them; they enjoy the scavenger hunt that ensues in a thrift store.  And Savers stores – in our state anyway – have 99 cent sales every Monday.  Items with particular color tags are 99 cents on Monday.  So the goal is to see what they can find with that color tag.  My father likes to work on old clocks, and has found several treasures (his most recent is an old-fashioned alarm clock made of mahogany and brass).  My mother likes pretty china, and has found several complete sets of Pfaltzgraff and Lenox that retail for hundreds of dollars.  Yesterday they got a walnut table and matching china cabinet for 99 cents each.  They found my sister a couch for 99 cents a few months ago.  I think they’ve furnished half a house for about $20 over the last six months or so.  They’re remodeling two houses at the moment, so they have a place to store all the stuff they find, and they’ll have plenty of furniture for the houses once they’re remodeled.

One of the clocks my father found is a beautiful pendulum clock, but it was missing its pendulum.  Ever resourceful, he bought it anyway and made a pendulum for it.  He used a piece of metal out of the back of an old computer as the part that hangs down, and then used a flat jar lid (the kind that fits into a canning jar style ring) as the bob on the pendulum.  It looks fantastic, and when we complimented him on how good it looked, he gave it to us!!  He was planning to use some gold paint on the jar lid, but I told him I like it the way it is.  It has a “use by” date stamped on it, so if you look closely you can tell that it’s a lid – I love it!!  You can’t cover up that sort of creativity.  So now we have a beautiful clock in our living room, thanks to my parents’ thrift store outings and my dad’s creativity.

I’m not sure if all the Savers stores around the country have the 99 cent Mondays – all the ones in our state do.  If you live near a Savers, check it out and see what you can find for a buck.

We got our $1200 economic stimulus payment today.  We put the whole thing into our HELOC, since we have decided to make the HELOC a priority for the time being.  We’ve already maxxed out the HSA and my husband’s IRA for the year, and instead of moving straight to my IRA, we’ve been focusing on stashing some extra money in the HELOC first.  We’ll probably do that for the next few months, and then go back to our original goal list and tackle my IRA in the fall.  Paying off part of the HELOC principal was part of our goal list for the year anyway, we’ve just changed up the order of things.  We decided to work on the HELOC for now because the money is very liquid in that account.  Hopefully we won’t need it for anything, and can just pay down the principal on the loan.  But if we do need the money, the HELOC is linked to our checking account, and we have instant access to the money.  We have our ING account emergency fund, which is up to about $1600, and of course there’s the HSA in case of a medical emergency.  But with a brand new baby, it would be nice to just have some extra money in the HELOC just in case. 

I called our health insurance carrier to add our son to the policy, and it’s going to be $158/month.  Ouch.  We were expecting about $100 – $120.  But our policy has a family deductible, which we already met this year when my husband had knee surgery, so if our baby does happen to need anything medically for the rest of the year, we don’t have to pay anything for it.  So the HSA money should be safely locked up at least until next year. 

I’m going to start checking out college savings options, and I hope to have a 529 plan set up by next month.  We don’t plan to fully pay for college for our son, since we think that it’s important that the student have a part in the financial outlays of getting an education.  But we do plan to put aside $100/month from now until he graduates from high school, which should make at least a dent in whatever college costs in 2026.

So for the time being, our expenses will increase by $258/month for sure, just for insurance and college savings.  After that, we don’t anticipate a huge amount of additional expenses for now.  We have everything we need and then some as far as baby stuff goes.  Our homemade diapers are working great, we won’t have any additional medical expenses until at least 2009, and we’ll be staying far far away from Babies R Us.  If the last few days are any indication, our other expenses should go down for a while, since we’ve barely left the house since he was born.  Our already small entertainment and eating out budget will probably actually get smaller for a while, since it’s so much easier to just stay home and have family time.  And since all we want to do it sit and stare at him, that works just fine.