Yes!! Glad you joined the “club”. Because of the price (I’ve never paid over $50 for bifocal glasses!) I’m able to purchase numerous colors and styles. I love having options, especially when you wear something all day, every day. I’ve also purchased prescription sunglasses from Zenni that I’m very happy with.
Can you explain? What are the different ways to cancel a credit card, and how is it that one method is better for your credit score?
Perhaps not in the spirit of the OP, but an argument against buying older used cars is the vast improvements in the safety features in new cars today. Yes, you’ll save money driving an older car, but if there’s an accident, you might have fewer injuries in a newer car.
ETA: Not meaning to copycat / pile on. Hadn’t seen Dewey Finn just above when I picked Voyager’s post to respond to.
These two sentences don’t go together real well.
Most cards with really good introductory offers waive the annual fee for the first year. When the fee finally hits after the first year, you just call the credit card company and cancel. That assumes you aren’t carrying a balance which is a very important part of this recipe. Then you just move onto another card. Cancelling individual cards will not hurt your credit score much if at all unless it is your oldest one. It can help in fact because the number of your historical accounts is a positive factor.
I will occasionally get a card with a first-year annual fee if the offer is good enough. My new Frontier airlines card cost $69 but it is good for at least two free round trips anywhere in the U.S. and that is a really good deal even with the fee. I am still kicking myself for not getting a Chase Sapphire Reserve that recently came with 100,000 miles, a $300 annual travel credit, access to lounges, TSA pre-check and lots more but it costs $450 a year. It would have easily been worth it but I waited too long.
In general though, I just take the ones with at least 40,000 introductory miles, a first year waiver on the annual fee and then just chew and screw after the first year. There is no catch if you do it the right way and always keep some cards and miles in rotation. It sounds time-consuming but it isn’t. I can apply for a new card in five minutes online and then cancel it on the other end in another five once I notice good ones pop up and there are always some. Chase is the only credit card company that has ever given me a hard time about it and even they let you have 5 new cards (among all credit card companies) every two years.
They make sense when you consider the car falls apart in the crash.
I try to go grocery shopping on Tuesdays. My local store will mark down any meats that are within 2 days of their “sell by” date, and usually Tuesdays are the day that all the extra from the weekends get marked down. I’m often getting $4 off of $9 worth of hamburger or chicken. Sure, $6-$8/week isn’t huge, but I’ll take it (or rather, keep it).
My deep freeze. I stock up on meat (see above), frozen veggies, frozen pizza, etc, when it’s cheap, and use it over the next few weeks.
My splurge is the farmer’s market. It’s unfortunate that farmer’s market veggies are typically more expensive than store bought, but the extra taste is worth it.
Buy your groceries over on the poor side of town. There will be some high quality items not available, and some items of lesser quality you’ll not wish to select. But you’ll be surprised at the price difference in numerous, identical, everyday things you’ll see. It’s always worth the gas in my opinion.
Whenever, out of convenience, we opt to shop nearby, we are always taken aback that so many common everyday thing are a dollar or more over what we pay across town. Not fancy things either, toilet paper, laundry soap, cereal, etc. That shit adds up really quick!
I don’t golf or use any form of tobacco. That has saved me a fortune.
When you shop for groceries, see what meats are on sale and plan your menus around that. We have 3 grocery stores quite close to us, we check their weekly ads and split the shopping so that we’re buying things on sale whenever possible. They’re close enough to us that driving costs are negligible.
Get the Sunday paper and go through the coupons. You’ll probably find enough you can use to more than offset what the paper costs. Many stores offer online coupons, just a few minutes a week cans save you a few bucks.
SWMBO and I have Kindles and are voracious readers. Our taste in books matches fairly high.
Freebooksy.com and bookbub.com send us emails with links to free books. Between the two of us, we probably have well over a thousand books on the cloud. The only ones we’ve paid for are ones where the freebie was the first in a series and we wanted to read the rest. So, say about 90% of the books were free…at $7 or so a book, that’s a big honkin’ pile of money.
I use Bookbub also and love it! But I just recently discovered Overdrive which goes through your library. Everything is free. I walk for exercise 3 times a day (2 miles each time) and have found that listening to an audible book is very enjoyable and makes the time fly. I’ve even started listening to them in my car. I get my Bookbub books through Amazon and there’s anywhere from $1.99 to $7.99 charge to get the audible version of the books. Overdrive has a ton of audibles…free!!
This goes for local restaurants, too. If I want a burger at the sports bar in my local downtown (a trendy, high-rent district due to its walkability and 1950s feel), it’s about $12 plus drinks. If I go to local sports bars in the neighborhoods of Dearborn, the same thing is about $8. I just had a $16 prime rib on Wednesday that would have cost me twenty-eight bucks in my own town.
Sitting here, eating my lunch, I am both horrified and highly amused at this thread. Having finished lunch, I can contribute.
You don’t need a whole bidet, I am surprised bum guns haven’t become popular the world over. I really miss them when I travel outside of Asia as do most people I speak to, and they’re cheaper than bidets.
The thing I save most on is coffee. I have two Aeropresses, a drip maker and a cafetiere, which is quite the outlay but I buy two or three coffees each year. One aeropress is at home to make espressos and cappuccinos (I froth milk using a jar, hand wand and microwave), one is for when I travel and I take a metal filter and ground coffee, the drip machine hasn’t been used for a year, the French press is for the office.
Oh and I make my own wine which works out cheaper than buying it. I buy the ingredients and juice online and have several five gallon fermentation containers going so I never run out.
Falling apart in your driveway is not the same as falling apart in the road. And falling apart really means that the repairs cost a lot more than the car is worth. That’s what happened to my Saturn after 15 years or so.
Putting liquid soap full strength on itchy bug bites stops the itching. No need for special ointment
And a wet aspirin will burn out a canker sore. And give a new dimension to your concept of PAIN
Look carefully at the list of ingredients in your favorite shampoo. Then look at a bottle of dish soap. They are the same. If you pay attention, you can get a gallon of palmolive for $5-ish rather than spending $15-20 per month to support the Paul Mitchell advertising budget. I use it for hand soap as well. I have extremely sensitive skin, and have found that the Dawn/Olay soap is the gentlest on the market in any category. Ajax, for me is the zenith of the cheap/gentle ratio.
If you really need for the word “Shampoo” to be on the bottle, then go down to the local Beauty Supply store and get a gallon of that for $7. Ditto hairspray.
I buy cheap cars and don’t have them breaking down all of the time. I did back in the day when I’d by $1000 cars, but my wife finally talked me into paying a bit more. I bought a 2001 Mazda MPV van for $3400 with 90k on the odometer that we’ve now driven for our business every day for the past 3-4 years. It now has over 155k on it and is going strong.
I bought a 1991 Toyota Paseo that I drove for 8 years for $2400.
I currently have a 2000 Ford Focus Wagon that I bought for $2400 or so (can’t remember exactly now) that had 89k on it and I’ve driven for years.
For me the sweet spot is $2500-$3500, but I care about mechanicals above all else. Still, it isn’t like these cars look like garbage. They aren’t sexy, they aren’t new, but they get driven and while they do occasionally have an issue so do most cars and I can have a couple in the drive for cheap. I do a ton of research before buying anything though, and I try hard to pick something with decent miles and I want to know what the common problems are with the cars before I buy. All of them have weak spots somewhere.
I shopped my insurance this year and saved over $1000 annually between my home and cars for the same, if not better, policies. I went through Geico online and crushed what my local broker was getting me. I had gone local thinking a local guy would provide better service but it sucked anyway so I might as well save money, so I shopped a little and it paid off big.
We log everything we buy into an app called You Need A Budget. It helps us track our expenses and shows us where maybe we’re going off course at times. There are other similar apps out there as well.
We all gotta be a little bit careful with that.
Many experiments with “New Urbanism” failed when the vast majority of folks living in that nice walkable neighborhood decided to drive away from it to shop and eat so they could save a few bucks.
Then all those convenient stores, restaurants, and boutiques closed for lack of business. Which kinda ruined the walkability and the resale value of the extra-pricy condos & row houses nearby. Oops.
IOW, tragedy of the commons applies. If everyone shops only at Walmart & Amazon and buys only Chinese-made goods, don’t be surprised later when there’s only those two places to shop, no non-Chinese goods, and damn few jobs left in the USA.
That’s true, but I work in the cheap town, so spend time there, naturally. I truly believe that my time has value, and I won’t venture to far in order to save a pittance. But if I’m already someplace, then I give it a go.
For the nearby “city” (it’s a city; I’m in the township with the same name), I could care less if the little boutique shops close, as long as the restaurants stay open (despite the higher cost). I suppose their survival affects my property values, so, yeah, my non-frugal advice to everyone else is, please continue buying $8 bespoke dog biscuits.