We decided to start taking our son to the pool this summer.  And that means swimsuits.  Our son has several cute ones, thanks to birthday gifts, and my husband is pretty comfy in his standard trunks.  I hadn’t bought a new suit in several years, but I have several that are in good shape, and I tried them on last week.  The bottoms fit just fine.  But the tops are, uh, a little tight.  And I think they will continue to be that way as long as my son is nursing.

So, a shopping trip was in order.  You all know I’m a huge thrift store fan, but for things like socks, underwear, and swimsuits, I prefer places like TJ Maxx, where the clothes are much less than mall prices, but new (it’s an off price retailer, and they have all sorts of name brand stuff at discounted prices).  We have a TJ Maxx just a few minutes from our house, and I went browsing through their swimsuit selection over the weekend.  I found a suit with it’s original retail tag still on it ($109 – yikes!), a perfect fit, and a TJ Maxx price tag of twenty bucks.  The tag said it was irregular, but I can’t find anything wrong with it at all.  Score.  Now I don’t have to worry about flashing the babies in the wading pool.

I also got a nifty sun shade for the jogging stroller, for five dollars.  Our son pretty much always rides in the Moby Wrap or Hip Hammock, but when I go for a run, I put him in the stroller.  I don’t really like putting sunscreen on him, so he tends to wear long sleeves and a hat when we go out.  The stroller is old (it was a hand me down, which we happily accepted) and just has an awning over the top.  The front was completely open, but my new sun shade clips onto the awning and works perfectly.  We were out for a couple hours yesterday afternoon while our house was being shown, and he was in shade the whole time.  Five dollars well spent, even if it was an impulse buy.

I got my hair cut yesterday.  This would not normally be a newsworthy event, but in my case it had been 14 months since I had a hair cut.  Last time, I went to what I consider to be a pricey salon (I think I paid about $50), and got a really great hair cut.  I’ve noticed that when I go to really cheap salons, my hair starts to look funky after just a few months.  But the hair cut I got last winter actually still looked pretty good, even yesterday.  I had noticed that my ends were getting a bit dead-looking, and decided that 14 months was long enough.  I waited so long for several reasons:  Obviously money is always a factor.  Then there’s time, which is usually scarce.  And the fact that my hair was still looking pretty good meant that I wasn’t all that motivated to get it cut.

I decided to go back to the same salon, in hopes that I could get another great cut that would last another year.   I got a less-expensive stylist this time (luck of the draw – she was available when I had time), and the cut was $35 (plus a $10 tip).  She did a fantastic job, and I think I’m good for the rest of the year.  I know that $45 for a year of hair care is pretty darn cheap, but when I went to pay for my cut, the lady in front of me was paying $295 for a cut, color, some hair products, and tip.  And they booked her another appointment for six weeks out (her cut was really short and edgy – probably wouldn’t look so good after 14 months).  When I heard her price, I promptly forgot all about thinking my own cut was expensive, and happily paid my $45.

The stylist mentioned that she was only taking off about 1/2 inch of hair to get rid of the dead ends when she cut my hair.  This reaffirmed my belief that less is more when it comes to hair styling.  I never use heat or styling products on my hair (my blow dryer is in our son’s room – we use it to dry his diaper area before we put a fresh diaper on him, and it’s great for preventing diaper rash).  I wash my hair every two or three days, either using baking soda or Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap.  I use vinegar as a conditioner.  And that’s it.  By skipping heat and chemicals, my hair doesn’t get damaged, and it can actually make it 14 months between cuts without turning into something that scares small children.  Baking soda and vinegar are very inexpensive, and the $13 bottle of Dr. Bronners that I bought last August is still half full, even though we use it for our son’s baths, to wash our faces, and as shampoo.  So all in all, my hair expenses are minimal, even though I went to a fancy salon.

We’ve made another step towards becoming self-sufficient.  Yesterday we bought everything we need to set up a 4 foot square hydroponic garden in our crawl space.  This came after much discussion and research – we decided that the sizable upfront cost ($800+) will be a good investment that will pay for itself many times over.  We spend about $60 – $70/week on fresh produce, plus about $100/month on frozen produce at Costco.  The majority of our diet is veggies and fruit, and everything we buy is organic.  We do have a garden that has cut down dramatically on what we spend on swiss chard, kale, and spinach.  But we live in a pretty harsh climate for gardens.  October – April it’s too cold to grow anything outdoors.  Then from May – October we’re able to have a garden, but it requires a ton of water and gets baked in the sun.  We’ve had a total of 3 inches of precipitation this year, and every day now it’s just hot (near 100) and dry.  Plants have a tough go of it.

We want to grow our own food for lots of reasons.  We know exactly what went into it, we minimize the ecological impact by eliminating transportation issues, and the food is as fresh as can be.  But our yard is very small, and the area where we live is categorized as “high desert” – gardens struggle.  Perfect scenario for hydroponics. (my sprouts are hydroponic, and they do fantastically in our kitchen cupboard, with a new supply ready to go every few days)

Our crawl space is huge.  It’s under half of our house, and more than four feet tall (if they had just dug a little more, we could have had a basement, dang it!).  We’ve been using it for storage, and there’s tons of unused space under there.  So now a bit more of it is being used.  Our hydroponic system includes two water reservoirs and two trays for plants (each one is two feet by four feet) so that we can have leafy greens in one and fruiting plants in the other (they each require different levels of nutrients in the water and different pH levels).  For now, we have one full-spectrum grow light, although we may add a couple more that are specifically designed for certain types of plants.  We’re on a mission to find seeds this afternoon, although it’s August and the pickins are slim.  I think we’ll end up ordering most of our seed online.  One of the major advantages of hydroponics is how fast things grow and how much they produce.  Plants grow 4 – 5 times faster, and by adjusting the light you can make fruiting plants (like tomatoes) produce more tomatoes and less plant.  In the store where we bought the equipment, they had a tomato plant that was a seed in May and is now covered in red tomatoes.  My tomato plants were seedlings in May, and are now about 18 inches high, with no tomatoes in sight yet.

So we’re very excited about this project.  Obviously we can’t grow apple and avocado trees in our crawl space (we did have an indoor avocado tree for a few years, but alas, no avocados).  Things that grow on bushes and trees will still have to be purchased.  But we should be able to cut our produce bill by about half.  16 square feet of hydroponic garden will produce a lot of veggies – way more than you would get from the same space if you’re growing in soil.  If we can save $30/week, that’s $1500/year – which means we break even in less than a year, even if we have to go buy some more lights or equipment (the lights are the most expensive part).  And we’ll know that our produce is garden fresh, year round (there’s no such thing as “not in season” when it’s growing under lights in your crawl space) and hasn’t been transported from half way around the world to get to our kitchen.  We’re very excited about this project.  I’ll keep you posted.

Yesterday we bought a VitaMix blender.  I’ve wanted one for years, but could never justify the price.  Yesterday we were in Costco, and they were selling them for $50 less than the online price.  We had our laptop in the car, so my husband went out and checked Craigslist again (we’ve done it before, to no avail) and the only VitaMix for sale was about 35 years old.  There were two ads for people wanting VitaMix blenders, but none for sale – as usual.  So we decided to just do it.  We have a lot more money these days than we used to, and although most of it goes into savings, we do allow ourselves an occasional splurge.

I was so excited to use it – I made a green smoothie last night, and it was so much better than the ones I make in the food processor.  That VitaMix has some get up and go.  Anyway, I made another smoothie this morning, washed out the container, and left the container on the counter to dry, with the lid plug inside it.  This afternoon, I decided to make another smoothie.  I cut up some pineapple, washed a bunch of grapes and spinach, added a carrot and some celery, and dumped it all into the blender.  When I turned it on, it made the most horrific noise – I couldn’t figure out what in the world was going on – it was only fruits and veggies, but it sounded like I was grinding rocks.  Oops.  The lid plug.  Yep – it was still inside the blender container.  Damn.  I had to compost the entire smoothie, since I think that little ground up pieces of plastic probably negate the health benefits of the spinach.  And of course the lid plug has seen better days.  Happily, the blender itself is just fine, and I looked online and found that I can order a new lid for $15.  And the blender still works just fine without the lid plug, I just have to put my hand over the hole in the lid to make sure stuff doesn’t splatter out.

When it first happened, I cried.  I was so bummed.  I’d only had the blender for 24 hours and I’d already ground up part of the lid! Who does that??  But my husband reminded me that now that we have our son, any mistake we make that can be remedied by just buying a new part, isn’t that big a deal.  And luckily the blender is fine, except for the lid plug.  So I’m out a $15 lid plug and about $5 or $10 worth of produce.  A bummer, but I guess it could be worse.  And I’ll never again put food in that blender without looking inside!

We started talking more about our quest for solar panels last night. Our local energy company does some pretty huge rebates when you install panels, and that’s a great big plus. We started contemplating the possibility of financing the panels in order to start using them sooner, but eventually decided to continue on our current path of saving the money first. I’m not promising that this won’t change down the road a ways, but for now, we’re sticking with plan A.

Our solar panel fund is at ING. So the money is very liquid and works as a back up emergency fund. Let’s say that a year from now we have some emergency that costs more than we have in our emergency fund. We could take money out of the solar panel fund to cover it. And if we come upon hard times and can’t afford to put $300/month into the solar panel fund, we can just stop putting money into it for a while. But if we finance the solar panels, we’re stuck. We have to keep making payments until they’re paid off – regardless of our financial situation at the time. And since we’d be making payments to them instead of to our ING account, the money could not be used for anything else in the event of an emergency. Yes, we’d have the benefits of the solar panels right now, and would likely not have our $100+ monthly electricity bill, but there are a lot of drawbacks. We don’t want to be in debt is pretty much the long and short of it. We didn’t mind financing our kitchen remodel through Home Depot, because the interest rate is zero as long as we pay it off by next February, and we only charged $2000. We had the money (and still do) to pay it all off at once, but we figured we might as well let the money work for us in savings accounts over the year, and just pay the Home Depot account off little by little. But in the case of solar panels, we do not have the money in savings to pay for them now. We would truly be going into debt to do it, and it’s just not something we’re comfortable with. So for now we’re going to continue saving for them. We might start with a solar hot water system, which is much cheaper than setting up solar for the whole house, so it would give us some instant gratification. I’ll keep you posted!

NtJS has tagged me to post our five biggest budget busters. We try really hard to avoid budget busters. For the most part we do a pretty good job, but there are always things that we spend money on that we hadn’t planned. So here goes…

1. Uplanned meals away from home. A day of running errands tends to result in a meal out somewhere. When we plan to be gone for the day, I normally pack sandwiches and snacks, but it’s the one-errand-that-turns-into-six-and-takes-forever kind of day when we end up stopping somewhere to eat.

2. Costco. I don’t mind the expense, because we always end up with good food, and it doesn’t go to waste. But we don’t ever leave that store for less than $100, and it’s normally closer to $250.

3. Scrapbooking supplies. This is why I don’t go to scrapbook stores anymore – I haven’t been since last summer. I decided to just work with the supplies that I have for now. Going to the stores just means you’ll find 500 new gizmos and widgets that you didn’t know existed and now want to buy…

4. Organic food. I don’t particularly mind this, because I feel really good about how and what we eat. But we spend a huge amount of money on food. It’s by far our biggest expense category after housing. I buy a lot of fresh produce, whole grains, organic meat, eggs and dairy, etc. We’re healthy, but our budget takes a few knocks at the grocery store.

5. Home improvement. This has been a huge one so far this year. It generally isn’t an issue for us, but for the last few months we’ve been renovating our house, and there have been lots and lots of trips to Home Depot. We bought all of the major supplies in one trip to HD back in February, and got a bunch of cabinets and appliances used, which helped a lot. But since then I doubt that a week has gone by without us spending more money on the house. We’re very close to finished though, so this particular budget buster should be over soon.

Now to tag three other bloggers…

NCN at No Credit Needed

Trish at Blogging Away Debt

SavingDiva at Saving For A Home Of My Own

I just got my hair cut.  It was the first time I’d had it cut since the beginning of October, and I’m stoked with my new style.  I’ve had my hair long and a little bit layered for the last couple years, and I was getting tired of it.  I always go to Fantastic Sams or Cost Cutters (whichever one I have a coupon for), and I usually only go a couple times a year.  My husband suggested that if I wanted a drastic style change I might want to go somewhere a little more upscale, and I’m so glad I listened to him.  Sometimes I get so caught up in being frugal that I need reminders that it’s ok to spend a little money now and then.

I found a salon very near where we live, that does $40 haircuts (I know this might not be considered extravagant, but for me it’s a very expensive haircut).  They had a 20% off coupon on their website for new clients, so I got my haircut for $32 plus a $10 tip.  The lady did a wonderful job.  She spent about an hour with me, and my hair looks better than it has for a very long time.  It’s much shorter, with a lot more style than I had this morning. 

When I first met my husband, I used to go to the place that charged about $50 to cut my hair.  But for the last five or six years, I’ve been going the cheap haircut route.  I’m not going to all of a sudden start paying $50 every six weeks to get my hair cut, but I think I’ll go back to this place every three or four months.  Some things in life are just worth it.  When we were in debt, there was no way I would have spent $42 on a haircut.  But now I feel like it’s ok every now and then.  And it helps that I started cutting my husband’s hair last year.  I’ve gotten very good at it, and we have the same clippers that they use when he pays someone else to do it.  He likes to get his hair cut every couple months, and used to pay about $15 each time.  So by doing it at home, we’re saving about $90/year. 

On another good note, I found a baby sling on Craigslist that I’m going to pick up tomorrow night.  I’ve been eyeing the exact same sling for months online ($40) and I’m getting it for $15.  And a lady I work with just offered me a baby bathtub and a baby play mat that her kids have outgrown.  We have yet to buy anything new for our baby, and we have just about everything we need/want.

After my husband’s knee surgery on Monday, the docs and physical therapists were going over all the things we need to do for the next few weeks to give him the best chance of a full recovery. One of the things they emphasized was ice, and their recommendation was an automatic icer. It’s basically a cooler with a pump inside it and two hoses that come out of it and plug into an insulated wrap that goes around the knee. Then there’s a cord that plugs the unit into a wall outlet and has a control to adjust the level of coldness. All we have to do is refill the ice as it melts, and keep it plugged in.

The other option was to use plain old ice packs. But the catch is that he’s supposed to be icing his knee pretty much constantly all day and all night. If we use ice packs, we have to take them on and off to make sure that we don’t ice for more than 20 minutes each hour (to avoid over cooling the area). But the automatic icer cycles on and off, so you can leave it on all day and it will maintain the right temperature.

In the hospital, they told us that they would bill the ice machine to our insurance, but that there was no guarantee that it would be covered, and that we would be responsible for the price if the insurance company doesn’t pay for it. They told us it runs $200 – $300, depending on what insurance network you have.

We decided to go for it. We took the icer and the hospital is billing the insurance company. We hope that they cover it, and we think there’s a good chance they will (and we’re brokers for that insurance company and sell a good number of policies for them every month, so we do have contacts there and a bit of leverage if we need to use it). But even if they don’t, we consider it $300 well spent. Every night, we’ve been able to just plug the icer in next to our bed and go to sleep, knowing that it will keep his knee cool all night. I get up after about 6 hours or so and add more ice, but that’s a whole lot better than taking an ice pack on and off every hour. If we didn’t have the automatic icer, his knee would probably not be getting iced nearly as well, despite our best intentions.

I suppose it would have been frugal to use ziplock bags of ice cubes and take them on and off all day for the next few weeks. But the results would probably not have been as good, especially at night. This is one of those times when the more expensive option ends up being the better value, both in convenience and in overall outcome. I’m glad we take the frugal option 95% of the time, because it makes it easier to take the more expensive option when it really matters.

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We did our major grocery shopping trip for the month this weekend, and have a well-stocked pantry, fridge, and freezer now.  In addition to food, we spent $37 on two stainless steel water bottles, $25 on a fire extinguisher, and $20 on three new smoke detectors.  I had been wanting to get away from plastic water bottles for a while now.  We never buy disposable water bottles, but we each have refillable bottles that we take everywhere with us.  We have a high-tech reverse-osmosis water filter system at home, and I always take the filtered water to work with me.  But I had started to wonder if the plastic bottle was an issue in itself.  A few weeks ago, I started carrying a glass canning jar with me to work, but I was nervous that it would get broken.  So now I have a stainless steel bottle that could arguably last a lifetime.  So does my husband.  We’re very stoked about them.

The fire extinguisher and smoke detectors are something we needed, and being pregnant added motivation.  We already have two smoke detectors in central locations upstairs and down, but my husband decided he’d feel better if we had one in the baby’s room and the garage as well.  Costco had a three pack, so we’ll probably add one in our own bedroom too.  Feels nice and safe. 

I generally don’t like spending money, but I feel good about the stuff we got this weekend.  Of course, now I don’t want to spend any money for the rest of the month… 

Yesterday, my husband went for his consultation with the knee doctor.  He had to drive 2.5 hours to get there (the doctor is considered one of the best in the world, but the only downfall is that it’s quite a drive.  But compared with all the people who fly to see him, we’re not doing so badly to have to drive a few hours).  He left the house at 6:30 am and got home at 8pm, so it was quite a day.  They did x-rays and an MRI, and have determined that they definitely need to do surgery on one knee, possibly on the other as well - lots of issues. 

When they did the MRI, they required payment upfront.  They hadn’t mentioned anything about that when he scheduled the appointment.  They had told him what kind of clothes to wear (shorts, with no metal in them) for the MRI, but nothing about payment up front.  They’re on our insurance network, and typically providers bill the insurance and then send the patient a bill a few weeks later for the deductible amount.  Our deductible is $3000, and the MRI cost about $1200 (our insurance company’s rate).  But this doctor’s office just ran the numbers right there, determined what portion the insurance would pay (zero, since we haven’t met the deductible yet), determined the insurance rate for the MRI, submitted it as an expense to our insurance so that it would get counted towards the deductible, and then asked for payment.  Good thing we always carry a credit card.  I’m a big fan of credit cards.  We have one personal card and one business card (plus the AmEx that we only use at Costco, so I’m not counting it).  We pay them off every month, so we don’t pay interest.  In this situation, we have the money to pay for the MRI, it’s in our HSA.  But to access that money, we have to call the HSA and have them initiate a balance transfer to our checking account.  The money shows up in the checking account in a few days. 

Since this doctor’s office had a bit of an unorthodox billing method (upfront payment from patients with insurance), we would have been in a pickle without a credit card.  As it is, my husband just put it on the card, and then today we’ll call the HSA and have the money transfered to our checking account.  Then when the credit card bill gets here, we’ll just pay it off. 

Having a credit card and still spending less than you earn takes discipline.  But it also offers a safety net in unforeseen situations.  I’d rather force myself to have discipline on a day to day basis with our card, and always know that it’s there in my wallet if I need it.