Frugality

The biggest expense you can save money on when taking a vacation is airfare.  One way to cut costs is to fly on a chartered airline.  They usually have special fares that are much lower than regularly scheduled airline´s fares.  On this trip I was able to purchase my flight to Cancun for $229 including taxes.  The next lowest price I could find was $449.  That is a significant difference.

To be able to take advantage of these special fares it helps to be flexible on your travel dates and not need to plan too far ahead.  I booked my flight two weeks before leaving. The company I used is Worry Free Vacations.  They serve seven cities primarily in the Midwest.  There are other charter companies that serve other regions.  A look through your Sunday Travel section will probably enable you to find what companies are in your region.

The following is a guest post from Jacob of
Early Retirement Extreme. I am on vacation this week and will be having guest posts while I am gone. If anyone else wants to submit a guest post please email me.

When I was a student I saved a ton of money and time by not having a
TV. Instead I just watched DVDs on my laptop. Now one might think that
this could be pretty pricey in terms of buying or renting DVDs.
However, this was not the case as I joined a “DVD exchange” that had
been started by one of my fellow grad students. The basic idea is that
everybody provides a list of the DVDs they own. These lists can either
be collected in a central database, or simply sent around via email or
a mailing list. One thing you can count on is that your friends
probably share the same taste in movies and series as you do, but that
you may not own exactly the same DVDs. For instance, I own all seasons
of Startrek TNG while my wife owns the entire ten seasons of Stargate.
Conversely, friends of our owned all of Babylon 5 and Black Adder
(welcome to nerd central). So instead of all of us getting a couple of
DVDs at a time from netflix or pursuing the impossibility of getting
them from blockbuster or each paying $50 or more per season at the
store, we simply borrowed them from each other. My recommendation is
that the entire network somehow agrees on how to properly treat a DVD
(like fine optics!) and how long one should generally keep a DVD (not
more than a week!) before handing it back. Surprisingly not everybody
is into sharing, but there is also many people who think it’s a great
idea but who haven’t thought of sharing. Therefore if you are starved
for home entertainment just make a list of your DVDs and start putting
out feelers.

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly recently had a post “Extreme Personal Finance:America on $10 a Day.”  It was about a man who lives on about $3,700 a year.  I found it interesting that some commenters couldn’t imagine living on anywhere close to that.  Some didn’t think they could live on that much for a month.  Although somewhat odd the man does seem to be quite content living on that amount.

It makes me wonder how little I could live on.  There have been many years that I’ve lived on less than $10,000.  It was pretty simple to do because I made less than $10,000.  Since I  avoided debt I couldn’t spend money I didn’t have leaving me with no choice but to live on what I made.

If I were free from the expenses associated with earning an income I think I could live quite comfortably on less than $10,000.  If I were to spend six months hiking the Appalachian Trail and the rest of the time in Guatemala I think it would be fairly easy to live on $6000.  That does include paying for health insurance.  That year would probably be much more enjoyable than the present one too.

How little could you live on?

After doing some calculations I have determined that my new underwear will pay for itself. I normally do a very small load of whites every week. This isn’t my preference but I only have enough clean underwear to last a week. I often wear pants or sometimes shirts more than once but not underwear. Even a miser has his limits.

The math works like this. A load of laundry costs me approximately $1.50. I was able to buy seven pairs of underwear for $5 at Target. I used a Target gift card I’d received for Christmas making the purchase free to me but I’ll stick with the $5 figure. Now that I have the additional underwear I only need to do a load of whites every two weeks. That makes a savings of $1.50 every two weeks. In eight weeks I’ll have saved $6 which is a dollar more than the underwear cost me. That makes it underwear that pays for itself.

My latest gas bill was for $103.  This is much more than I paid last year.  My highest heating bill last year was $61.  The gas customer charge is $15 higher than last year but most of the increase in my bill is from using more gas. I know the apartment I’m in now is poorly insulated but so was the apartment I was living in last year.  The furnace in my current apartment must be extremely inefficient.

Being a tight-fisted miser I don’t like paying this much for heat so I’ve decided to try an experiment to reduce my heating bill.  I’m turning down my thermostat to 55 degrees and am going to use an electric space heater to take off the chill in the evenings.  I won’t need it when I’m sleeping because I use my down sleeping bag as a blanket and it can keep me comfortable at temperatures much lower than 55 degrees.  Also I’m going to try to take my showers at the fitness center.  I still haven’t gotten into the habit of working out this year but this will give me one more incentive to get to the fitness center.

I have no doubt this will work to cut my gas bill.  I’m just not sure I’ll save enough on my gas to make up for the extra electric cost.  I receive my electric bill a couple weeks ahead of my gas bill which will give me an idea if this will pay off.