I was talking to a friend a few days ago, and she mentioned that she was worried about possibly losing her job, as there has been talk about her office closing.  She and her husband have always made more money that we do.  They live in a $600,000 house, and drive a new Prius and a hybrid SUV.  Their lifestyle is quite a bit fancier than ours, although she will happily join me for a day of scouting around a thrift store, and isn’t a pretentious person at all.

Anyway, she mentioned that money is pretty tight these days.  I told her I understood exactly what it’s like – we’ve been there too.  And then she went on to tell me that she had spent $1000 that morning on an eye exam, new glasses, and new prescription sunglasses.  We do know what it’s like to have to spend money at the eye doctor’s office, but her story reminded me that there’s usually a frugal way to get around even the most necessary of expenses.  My husband has pretty bad eyesight.  Without his glasses or contacts he can’t see much of anything.  Luckily his prescription hasn’t changed in years, and he’s been wearing the same glasses since 2003.  They were the least expensive glasses we could get at the time – nothing fancy about them at all.  I can’t remember exactly what we paid for them, but I think it was around $200.  And maybe $100 for the eye exam, although it might have been less than that.  He goes to see the eye doc periodically for an exam in order to replenish his supply of contacts.  But he’s very frugal with his contacts, and only wears them when glasses are impractical, for stuff like snowboarding, mountain biking, swimming, etc.  And then there’s sunglasses.  He has a pair of regular sunglasses that he can wear if he’s wearing contacts.  But since he wears his glasses most of the time, his sunglasses are almost always a pair of clip ons.  They are not what you would call cool sunglasses.  But they’re functional.  They block UV light and keep the sun out of his eyes – what more do you really need?  And the best part is that he got them at a thrift store for one dollar.

Prescription sunglasses are a luxury item.  They’re nice – and I know my husband would have loved a pair over the years – but they’re expensive, and clip-ons do the job for a whole lot less money.  Now that we’re on pretty solid financial ground and have the money saved in our HSA, we’re looking into LASIK.  But during the years when money was really tight around here (and still to this day), a pair of thrift store clip ons fit our budget a lot better than prescription sunglasses.

Last week we got a box of baby stuff from a friend who lives in another state.  She loves to shop, and had bought us several baby boy things from Target.  Mostly clothes, which we have oodles of already.  We’ve gotten more hand-me-downs than our baby will ever need.  He’s going to outgrow some of his clothes before he ever wears them.  So… I took the clothes back to Target.  My friend had included a gift receipt, and she lives in another state so it’s not like she would have seen him wearing the clothes anyway.  (I sent a thank you card of course, and I did keep some of what she sent).  I got an $18 gift card when I returned the clothes, and promptly used it to buy groceries.  I ended up with two bags of food instead of cute baby clothes.   I just really didn’t need any more clothes for our baby, and I figured groceries were a lot more practical way to use the money.  Have you ever returned a gift and bought something totally different instead?

My husband had his knee surgery on Monday, and it went far better than we had hoped.  They didn’t have to do as much to his knee as we had thought they would, and it’s looking like the recovery process is going to be a lot faster and easier too.  The surgeon is considered one of the best knee docs in the world, and his pt program is highly regarded, so we’re excited to be working with him.  They had my husband in pt within 3 hours of surgery.  Then we went back yesterday for two pt visits, one at 9am, the other at 5pm.  In between visits, he’s in a machine that moves his leg constantly, going from a straight leg to a bend of 50 degrees, and back.  We also have a little automatic ice machine that’s keeping his knee chilled to prevent swelling.  Overall, we’re feeling great about the whole experience.  The people all around us in the pt room yesterday were from all over – a couple from Europe, one NFL player, a lady from California… we didn’t meet anybody else as local as we are (the hospital is about a 3.5 hour drive from our house).  Luckily, we’re not having to drive back and forth every day, because my husband’s sister has a condo in a town about an hour from the hospital.  I’d much rather drive an hour each way than 3.5, especially when the day starts at 9am and ends at 7pm and it’s snowing.  So we’re feeling very lucky and grateful to her for letting us use the condo.

We knew we’d be up here Mon – Thurs, so I worked extra hours last week in order to avoid having to take vacation time this week, and we planned carefully to avoid having to spend any more money than necessary.  Both the town where the hospital is and the town where we’re staying are expensive resort communities, so we wanted to avoid eating out or passing time window shopping, etc.  We went to the grocery store before we left home and spent $30 on food.  On Sunday night, I made a lasagna and froze it, then on Monday night I was able to cook it after we got back to the condo, and that lasted us for two nights.  Yesterday, we had 6 hours between pt appointments, so we set up a little nest in a quiet corner of the hospital lobby.  We had my husband’s various equipment running the whole time, as well as the laptop so that we could get work done, and our cell phone charging nearby.  I had bread, almond butter and bananas in the car, so I was able to make sandwiches for us.  The hospital staff were quite amused by us – I think they’re a little more used to the jet set crowd that goes out for $50 lunches between appointments.  But we enjoyed our day, got a lot done, and spent almost no money.

Today and tomorrow we get to do pt in the same town where we’re staying – the hospital has a clinic here, and the surgeon at the hospital doesn’t need to see us again for a month.  So we’re having a much more mellow day today.  I took the dog snowshoeing this morning, then we went to our first therapy session and were able to just come back to the condo afterwards.  We go back again this evening at 5, then we’ll be able to come back here for dinner.  I’m in the middle of cooking a lentil/tomato/roasted pepper sauce to go over pasta, which we’ll eat when we get back this evening.

Since we’ve been here, we’ve spent about $25.  We did have one trip to subway, and we bought a gourmet hot chocolate mix for a hospital employee who went out of his way to help us over the last couple days.  We bought ice for the cooler that’s keeping my husband’s knee from swelling, and I bought us each a little piece of chocolate from a fancy chocolate shop – everyone needs a treat now and then.  But overall, we’ve managed to maintain our frugal lifestyle just fine.

We’re looking forward to getting home tomorrow night and hoping that my husband’s recovery continues to go as well as it has been so far.

Ever since we remodeled our living room and added an extra office in January, I’ve been lucky enough to have an office/craft room to myself.  But once the baby is born, my office will become a nursery.  So I’ll be back to sharing my office with our guest room, which I’ve done before, so no big deal.  But I still wanted a place where I could scrapbook and make cards and other crafts. 

The closet in our current guest room (soon to be my office and the guest room) has been filled with ’stuff’ for the five years we’ve lived here.  It’s got our snowboarding gear, our sleeping bags, sporting equipment that we rarely use (the stuff we use all the time is in a downstairs closet), old yearbooks, extra dining room chairs, etc.  Stuff that we needed to put somewhere and the closet seemed like a good place.  Well, I decided to turn that closet into a scrapbook nook.

We took all the stuff out and found better places for it (including the thrift store for stuff that we hadn’t used in the last year).  Then we dug around in the garage and found pieces of wood to use as batons for a desk surface.  We went to our local Habitat for Humanity thrift store and bought a 2 foot wide door to use as the desk (this was my father’s idea, and was a very good one).  We had originally planned to get plywood at Home Depot for the desk surface, but the door was only $5, already painted white, and had a pre-drilled hole for a door handle, which I can use an electric cord hole at the back of the desk. 

My husband painted a fresh coat of paint on the door, and we trimmed it to fit – that was the hardest part.  The closet has some funny angles, and even the ones that are supposed to be square aren’t really, so we had to do some fancy trimming.  But it turned out great.  We mounted the door-turned-desk into the closet today, and tomorrow I’ll put all my supplies in there.  We’re thrilled with how the whole project went.

The best part?  It cost us $5 for the door, and $4.50 for a lamp I bought at a thrift store to put in the closet for light.  We used wood and screws that we already had left over from other projects, and I’m just going to use the storage supplies I already have to arrange my stuff in the closet.  So for under $10, and a day’s work, I have a custom-made place to craft in my new office.  Now I just need to finish cleaning up the mess we made and find homes for all the stuff that we have stored in the closet of the future nursery…

My trusty Honda Civic has 211,000 miles on it, and I decided it was time she got a tune up.  My dad loves to work on cars, and I was asking him questions about it when he offered to help me with the project.  Sweet!  Last weekend, I went to my parents’ house (they live just over an hour from us) and we spent the whole day working on my car.  I was able to do a lot of the work with my father offering guidance, although he did some of the more complicated stuff with me just watching (and hopefully absorbing details).  I spent $83 at the car parts store and $12 at a junkyard for back door struts from a car just like mine (incidentally, that car had 269K miles on it when it went to the junkyard, so I still have a lot of driving to do on mine!).  For the $95 I spent, plus several hours work, I got:

• new distributor cap
• new distributor rotor
• new spark plugs
• new spark plug wires
• serviced the battery and terminals
• filled all fluids
• back door that stays up without a broom handle wedged into it
• 35 miles/gallon! (I had been getting about 26)

The last time I went in for an oil change – I know, I should be doing it myself, but I had a coupon which made it really cheap, about $14 – they printed a list of all the things they recommended I do on my car.  The total estimate came to about 2 grand, which is funny, cause I only paid $2300 for the car 4 years ago.  Anyway, they mentioned the distributor cap and rotor, and they wanted $60 for just those two things.  They wanted $25 to service the battery, which took us about 15 minutes to do.

Spark plug wires for my car are pricey – about $50.  So I got all the other parts, including the perfect back door struts, for $45.  When I compared everything with what was on the list from the repair shop, I think I saved about $200 on the stuff we did, not counting whatever the door struts would have cost to buy new.  We still have other work to do later on, but it’s a bit more complicated and doesn’t have to be done right away.  The stuff we did was pretty simple, didn’t involve taking lots of parts out of the engine, and the new parts were very inexpensive.  It’s amazing what a difference it made in my gas mileage, and I have renewed confidence in my car (and myself – if I can do this stuff, anybody can!).

Today a lady came into the library wearing a huge diamond on her finger.  The engagement/wedding band set took up all the room from her palm to her first knuckle – I am not kidding.  The wedding band was covered with diamonds, and the rock on the engagement ring was probably 4 or 5 cts.  She was a very pleasant lady, and obviously a diamond connoisseur.  She noticed my new ring and said how beautiful it was.  She said that she could tell that it was a very high quality stone from the way it was shining.  I just smiled and thanked her.  $231 well spent. 

Yesterday I came home from the library to find my husband lying on the living room floor with his leg up on the ottoman and an icepack on his knee.  He had been unicycling in a rocky drainage area near our house (a favorite pastime for him), when he fell just the wrong way and blew out his knee.  He unicycles all the time, and wears tons of protective gear.  Unfortunately, it didn’t help his knee.  He’s had a bad knee since he was a little kid and had a skiing mishap that resulted in a kneecap on the side of his knee.  Since then, he’s re-injured it several times, so he knows the drill.  He has to first push the kneecap back into place (ouch!) and then ice, compress, elevate until it feels better.  This is the first time it’s happened in the six years we’ve been together though, so it has been a while.

He was sort of hopping around the house this morning, so I decided to see if I could find him a pair of crutches.  Our local thrift store has a huge bin full of them, so that was my first stop.  I dug through the bin until I found two that matched, were aluminum, and were adjustable to his height.  Those two didn’t have prices on them, but just about every other crutch in the bin was labeled $2.99, so I figured I’d pay about $6.  Not a bad deal.  I got to the register and the lady asked me how much they were.  I told her that the others were $2.99, so she rang it up and asked me for $3.25.  Oops, I explained again that they were $2.99 each, and that I was expecting to pay about $6.   So she voided out the sale, started over, and then asked me for $1.62.  I must have looked confused, because she explained that she was giving them to me half price.  OK.  If I kept talking, I was going to get them for free, so I just paid the $1.62 and left.  Chalk it up to a lucky day.

I washed the rubber parts of the crutches with hydrogen peroxide, and my husband is happily crutching around the house now.  I wonder what crutches would have cost if we had gone to a doctor to get them?

We spent all day yesterday working in our front yard.  We used to have mostly grass with a small perennial garden.  Now it’s the other way around.  We have a little peninsula of grass wrapping around from the side yard – the rest is mulch and hardy perennial bushes and plants.  We spent a couple hours yesterday digging the grass up by hand, and then decided to go rent a tiller.  Best $30 we’ve spent in a long time.  The tiller did in 90 minutes what would have taken us 6 hours to do by hand.  And it did a much better job.  Then we put down weed-blocker fabric over the tilled area.  That cost about $40, so it wasn’t cheap, but we decided it was worth it.  We know that neither of us has any extra time as it is, so there was no way that we were going to be in the yard weeding all summer long.  I don’t mind pulling a few straggler weeds now and then, but I don’t want it to be a weekly project.

We spent about $60 on perennials.  We got plants that spread and get very big without requiring much water.  I also have a friend who has offered me some of her hen-and-chicks and some valerian that we can go dig up next weekend (free!).  For this year, our yard will look a bit sparse – mostly mulch with a few plants.  But in a few years, everything should fill in nicely.

The best part is the mulch.  We’re getting it for free from the local tree-recycling center.  They have a mountain of wood chips free for the hauling.  So we lined the trunk of our car with a tarp, and we’ve hauled two loads of chips back so far.  My husband is over there right now getting the third load.  We’ll probably need about two more loads to finish the job.  I can’t imagine what all that mulch would have cost to buy in bags…

We haven’t decided yet how we’re going to do the rock border.  We have a bunch of rocks that we salvaged from the open space behind our house last year for our small perennial garden.  They had just been dumped with a big pile of dirt, and we hauled them back to the house one at a time.  But there are no more left, and the ones we have only go about half way around the new border.  We saw another pile of dirt and rocks in an empty lot a few miles from here, so we’re going to go check that out.  But we’re not in the business of stealing rocks, so if it looks like anything is going on there besides dumping rocks, we’ll leave them be.  We know of a few places that sell remnant rocks, but we have no idea what they charge.  This afternoon, once we get the plants in and the mulching finished, we’re going on a rock-hunting mission.  We’ve decided that we’re not going to spend more than $50 on the rest of the project, including the rocks, so if they cost more than that, we’ll have to find another solution.

Whatever we end up doing, we know that the yard will look great.  We’re both really excited about it, and the whole thing is costing us about $200.  I have a friend who spent $15,000 on landscaping last year, for a yard about the same size as ours.  She and her husband bought a new house that just had dirt in the yard, and they paid someone 15k to put in rocks (big ones), flowers, grass, and irrigation.  It looks great, but so will ours.  I had no idea how much landscaping cost until she told me that story.  Now I know what a deal we’re getting by doing it ourselves and looking for bargains as we go.

Yay!  My new ring arrived yesterday!  We were both very excited when the DHL guy showed up.  The box was huge – they padded it well.  The actual presentation of the ring was great.  They had a white box tied with ribbon, and inside it were two smaller boxes, also tied with ribbon.  One box had two chocolates in it (aw, how sweet!) and the other had a beautiful wooden ring box, with my new ring inside.  It’s perfect, except that I ordered the wrong size.  So sad, cause I had to send it back to get re-sized, so I only wore it for one day so far.  Before I ordered the ring, I measured my finger with a piece of string, using a ring size gauge I found on line.  But I guess I was off a bit – it doesn’t take much, since the sizes are only a couple mm from each other.  Anyway, I ordered a 5.5, and it was flopping around all over my finger.  I called the company to see about resizing, and they suggested that I go to a jeweler to get my finger sized, since they only do one free resizing.  So this morning I went over to the Shane Company, and they said I’m a 4.5 - good thing I didn’t just send the ring back and ask them to take it down to a 5 (that’s what I had planned to do before the guy said I should go get sized by someone who knows what they’re doing).  I guess I have really skinny (bony?) fingers. 

So I sent the ring back today, and now I have to wait for it all over again.  But at least I’ve seen it and I know how great it is.  I’m so glad that we made the decision to sell my old one and get this one instead.  The money we got from the first one has been divided up between our HSA and my Roth IRA, and the new ring is just as good as the old one.  The craftsmanship of the ring itself is perfect – equal to what I had before.  And the “diamond” is awesome.  Unless I tell them (which I have no problem doing), no one would ever know that it wasn’t mined out of the ground in Africa.   I’m going to let both of my brothers know about my new ring.  I can’t imagine either of them marrying a girl who gave a rat’s ass about getting a “real” diamond – so this would work great for them.  I would never recommend deception – it wouldn’t be good to let someone think you spent $5,000 on a ring when you actually spent $400, but if both people agree that it’s a great deal, then it’s a great deal. 

We ordered my new engagement ring last night.  It’s slightly different than the first one I had picked out – we both like the 4 prong setting better than 6.  It cost $231 – and they have free shipping, so that’s it – $231.  The guarantees that they provide sound just about identical to the ones we got from the Shane Company four years ago.  We’re stoked!  I can’t wait for it to get here!  They said it will take about two weeks, so I’ll just have to be patient. 

My husband went to the Shane Company yesterday to meet the people who were buying our ring.  They had a few different rings that they had bought from other people – all Shane Co originals.  They were trading them in for credit towards the ring set they were buying.  (huge, with tons of diamonds – a bit tacky, but if that’s what you like, they sure were resourceful about how they were paying for it).  Shane Co will allow you to trade in your ring at any time, for the price that you paid for it, as long as you use the money as credit towards a more expensive ring.  So this couple paid us $1150, then gave the ring back to Shane Co and got a $2000 credit towards their own ring.  And they did this with a few other rings as well, so they probably saved a few thousand dollars on the ring they were buying.  Quite creative, and if you really feel that you gotta have a real diamond, this is a pretty frugal way to go about it. 

My husband said the guy wished him good luck when they were finished.  I’m sure they thought that we must be getting a divorce.  It must have confused them that he was wearing his wedding ring.  We went out for sushi last night to celebrate (we didn’t go crazy – it was $32, and we drank water).  Tomorrow we’ll put the money in the bank, and then divide it between a new Roth IRA and our HSA.  Right now my hand looks a little naked, since I’m just wearing my wedding ring.  But soon I’ll have a beautiful engagement ring, plus $900 working hard for our future.  Life is good.