Lazy Man and Money

Let’s Be Cheap

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Be Cheap
Let’s Be Cheap!
When I started blogging in 2006, the personal finance blogosphere focused most of their attention on saving money. I remember reading one article where the blogger wrote that he makes sure not to open the refrigerator too many times a day, because he calculated it costs 4 cents to cool it back down.

That’s far too extreme for me.

However, like most bloggers from back than, I have a central area where you can save money on almost anything. (Those articles may be outdated now. I bet a Google search for “save money [x]” will get you better results until I can update it.)

The reason why so many people wrote about those things was simply because there wasn’t a lot written about it before. Also, it’s much easier to write something concrete like “avoid the artisan grocery store” and “bring your own lunch to work” than “work harder and hope for a raise.” It was especially easy for me to focus on the frugal aspects because I had control over many of my expenses. When I put together the case that I was being paid less than 95% of all software engineers according to Salary.com, the answer I got was, “Sorry, there’s nothing in the budget to do anything.” They couldn’t even get creative with stock option compensation or vacation time.

I didn’t have any control when it came to the company’s business or how they were managing their finances. In this new coronavirus world, many people are feeling the same way. The days of asking for a raise are probably gone for awhile. If you are able to keep your income, you are doing well (financially, at least). There’s talk of potentially a 30% unemployment rate which is something I can’t remember in my lifetime.

This is the time to take control of the things you can control. It may not be much, but it might be the best you can do. It’s time to be a little cheap. Or, if you prefer, frugal.

(Side Note: If you have the means to be financially generous, please do so. Support local businesses like restaurants. They need that support. This article is geared towards those who aren’t fully financially secure.)

I was laid off in the dot-com bust of 2001. I was only out of college for a couple of years. Software engineering jobs were impossible to find. I remember on one interview the hiring manager essentially wanted me to rewrite TurboTax from scratch. He’d pay $2000 when it was completed.

During those tough times, being frugal saved me. Or to just call it like it was, I was cheap. From a very young age, my mother taught me to save money. I had always been a saver at heart anyway. I’d save all my Halloween candy until it went bad. I got more comfort knowing that the candy was there for me if I wanted it than actually enjoying the candy itself.

A month ago B.C. (Before COVID-19), there was a lot of talk on personal finance Twitter about earning more money. I understand why. Life is too short to not enjoy it. People love the idea of being able to have everything they’ve ever dreamt of. It’s easy to sell a “earn more money” message if it fits what people already want to hear. I have also seen some bloggers follow it up with, “Buy my book or buy my course.” To put it simply, by its very definition, it is hard to sell products or training to cheap people.

Making more money is certainly half of the financial success equation. I don’t want to dismiss that. However, it’s a difficult half to write actionable advice about. No writer knows what kind of job your are in or what your education is. Maybe making more money is extraordinarily difficult for your situation. I can suggest adding a side hustle, but that’s not what “Lazy Man” is about. I hope everyone can work smarter and get to the point where their money works for them.

I’ve always been an equal fan of both sides – make more money and save money wherever possible. I’ve known people who make crazy amounts of money, but don’t save or invest much. I’ve known people who don’t make a lot of money, which means they can’t save or invest much.

One of my favorite things to do is to thinking about how to be cheap. Not really cheap, but spend less money as a general habit. For example, I looked at my electric bill and thought, “I wonder if solar power makes sense in Rhode Island.” It does! We’re almost on our 5th year of solar power now. We paid a lot up front, but we’ve saved more than half of what we spent. After around 8 years, any electricity our panels generate will be “free” (compared to what we would have paid if we didn’t get the panels).

The other thing I like to do is save money on groceries. Soon after we moved to our house, we lost the local Best Buy. That was terrible for a technology geek like me. However, Aldi moved into the space. It is one of the best grocery stores for cheap, quality food. That’s a great financial trade-off for us. For example, they have so many chicken deals that I’ve been able to write some creative articles like, “McFly, Are You Chicken?” and Rich Chicken, Poor Chicken.

While I’ve had the best luck with Aldi, but occasionally, I can find some deals at our local Shaw’s. The local military base is a good source as well. I don’t go to different stores looking for great deals. I’ll only give it a look while I’m doing the rest of our shopping. It’s easier to “shop our chest freezer” from previous deals.

Why Being Cheap Matters

Here’s an example that many people can relate to. Let’s say you have a $60 cable bill. (Mine is over $100 and I don’t have any premium channels.) A cheap person might say, “Netflix has more television than I could ever watch at $10 a month.” I’m going to cut my cable bill and save $50 a month.

You might be thinking, “Big deal. That’s nothing.”

That $50 a month is $600 a year. This is where we need to apply the Rule of 25. The Rule of 25 states that in order to afford a $600 annual expense, you need to have 25 times more saved. It’s mathematically derived from a bunch of economic analysis that shows people can live on 4% of their saving mostly indefinitely by investing a large sum of money.

At the risk of putting an example in an example, if you have $1,000,000 you can roughly take out $40,000 to live on. And with the rule of 25, if you need $40,000 to live on, you should have $1,000,000 in savings.

When we convert that $600 annual cable bill into Rule of 25 terms, we realize we need to have $15,000 in our investments.

That’s just one bill. If you multiply it by many extravagances you’ll have a hundreds of thousands of dollars in your savings. Being cheap always makes a big difference when it comes to reaching financial freedom.

A bunch of small savings can add up. They have a snowball effect. It is very difficult to try to make an extra percent or two investing in the stock market. Even if you do, it’s likely to be mostly luck. However, by saving 75% on something like food it gives us more money to invest. Getting that money in the market early has been critical to our secure financial position now.

A lot of that started with being cheap.

Four Unexpected Ways We Saved Money on Back To School Clothes Shopping

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Save Money on Clothing

So many people say that kids are expensive. They certainly can be. However, sometimes they are not. It can run the whole spectrum.

I don’t know where are on that spectrum. On some things we are extremely spendy. On others we are extremely thrifty. In the end, it probably averages out.

Here are some of the things that we don’t spend much money on: clothes, toys, food (they don’t eat much, and they will only eat the cheapest, processed, most unhealthy foods).

Here are some of the things we spend a lot of money on: private school/day care, after school activities.

Today, I’d like to cover about some of the ways we saved money for back-to-school clothing shopping. Typically, I’d give my old standby, “Go to TJ Maxx and Marshalls.” It’s always served me well in the past.

1. Outlet Malls are Back in Style

This year we did something a little different. We found ourselves travelig near the Tanger Outlets in Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. I didn’t have very high hopes and thought it would be a waste of time, but I decided to humor my wife. Besides, with stores like Gymboree, there will definitely be some cheap clothes.

I hadn’t been outlet shopping in years, maybe even a decade. I used to love it around 2002, but it seemed that the stores caught on and made the deals a little worse and the quality of clothes a little worse.

Well, in my recent experience, the deals are back! Maybe it’s because retail clothing companies have run into difficult times?

My wife and I were tempted so much we ended up upgrading our own wardrobes as well as the kids. We picked up a mix of very frugal clothes (the aforementioned Gymboree) and some “special” clothes. Due to the private school, there’s a certain amount of “keeping up with the joneses” when it comes to clothing. When it’s time to wear more formal clothes, we won’t stick out like sore thumbs.

2. Kohl’s is King

I think that Kohl’s is a strange store. It’s almost like they intentionally price some stuff at $30, just so they can put it at 60% off and sell it for what the real price should be. It’s probably not as bad as I make it out, but we had no problem finding tons of quality clothes on clearance.

The other weird thing about Kohl’s is that they allow you stack discount after discount. My wife has the credit card (the only store card I think we have) and got a mailing for an additional 30% off. Then there’s Kohl’s cash for spending so much money. I think we ended up getting around $300 worth of clothes for $100.

At this point, there’s an argument to be made that we didn’t really save much money at all. It’s very popular in for personal finance bloggers to say that the best way to save is to not spend the money in the first place. I don’t think we overbought considering we have two kids to outfit and could also get some summer clothes for next year.

3. Shopping My Mother’s Closet

My mother has always done a fantastic job combing the a second hand store in her town. Her ability to pick up any kind of clothing, even winter coats, for around $2 or less is one of the reasons why we have never really had to spend much on kids clothes.

The store hasn’t has as many deals as it has in the past, but my mother still had quite a pile of clothes in the closet. I know not everyone has a bargain-hunting grandmother. However, if you happen to have a store like this one and the time to drop-in, it can pay off.

4. That Neighbor Down the Street

I’m pretty friendly with my neighbors. That means that I give them a head-nod and half a wave every now and again. I’m exaggerating that part a bit, but most people tend to keep to themselves.

There’s a couple of neighbors who I talk with a little more… usually while our dogs are running around on the lawn. Earlier this year one of my neighbors offered their kids’ old blazers. I obviously said I’d take them, but it hadn’t come up again in months. Earlier this weekend, we found a present at our door, two blazers that appear as if they were worn only once.

Final Thoughts

I had originally intended to write this article to cover the outlet malls and Kohl’s as a way to get cheap clothes.

However, I felt like it was necessary to point out that we do have a couple of unique sources for cheap clothes that help out. You can consider them bonus ideas such as looking at second-hand stores yourself, or maybe even BEING the helpful neighbor paying it forward.

What are some of the ways you save money on clothes (either kids or your own)? Let me know in the comments.

Solar Power is Still Awesome (Three Years Later)

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It’s been more than three years since we’ve paid an electric bill… and it feels every bit as good as it sounds.

Yesterday we got our bill for May. It’s amazing to look forward to getting a bill in the mail. This was our best bill yet:

Electric Bill

No, THANK YOU for letting me use your DirectNOPay Program.

For newer readers, I wrote an article here about how and why we transitioned to solar power. Solar power worked out for us based on a confluence of three things: house orientation (facing south), state and federal subsidies, and the price of electricity in general. The last two are Rhode Island related, but it make sense for you in your state. I think the federal subsidies are still in place, but you may want to investigate this quickly. To put it mildly, I don’t think environmental causes are near the top of this administration’s priorities.

We’re currently in the “sweet spot” of solar power. In the spring, the days are long which means a lot of sun. We don’t use much electricity as we don’t need heat or (much) air conditioning. We are starting to get into air conditioning season though, which is when we’ll start drawing down on that negative balance. (Or is it drawing up, because we’re in negatives?)

I think we’ve gotten as close as a -$50 balance, but this recent -$255 bill is the biggest credit I can remember. This June has been cooler than I remember and we were on vacation for part of the month. Maybe we’ll get to -$300.

It’s funny (and weird) to feel as much pride in that number as I do. In the grand scheme of our net worth, $255 is a round off error. Don’t get me wrong, I still run around to several groceries stores to save a couple of dollars, but we’re in a financial place where the difference between $125 and $255 isn’t a big deal… unless you “earn” it in small increments as we have. (I put “earn” in quotes there, because so much of it is passive and has nothing to do our active involvement.)

The best thing about not paying for electricity is just that… eliminating expenses. And as much as I gloat about it here, it’s a little dishonest to say we aren’t paying for electricity. Solar panels are not cheap. We took out a HELOC to cover them. A reasonable person could make the very valid case that we’re just paying someone else (the bank, plus interest) each month and we did not eliminate an expense.

If you want to make that case, at some point, we’ll eliminate the expense. The timeline on that seems to change every few months, but we are making good headway. If not for some other unexpected expenses, we would probably have been down to zero a little back.

Or maybe we won’t truly ever eliminate our monthly electricity bill. We are a couple of months away from paying off both of our SUVs (they were on 5+ years of low/zero interest loans), so in another 8 years maybe we’ll look into an electric SUV. At that point the SUVs will be 13 years old. If we don’t have Uber gPods, we’d likely be looking for an electric SUV with 4-wheel drive (for New England snow), which is a bit of a tall order right now. If it becomes a reality, we’ll shift some of our transportation costs towards our electricity bill. I’m not sure how that will impact things, but we’ve got nothing but time to figure it out.

Have you looked into the cost of solar in your area? Let me know in the comments.

I Feel Scammed by Red Pocket Mobile (Cell Nightmare 1)

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Sometimes trying to saving money is an extremely difficult job.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about this Red Pocket Mobile Deal. In short it was unlimited cell service on AT&T Network (5GB LTE) for a year at $240. That’s $20/mo. for those who are math challenged. I’m paying $35 a month for similar service at Cricket Wireless.

Who wouldn’t want to save $15/mo., right?

It looked to me that Red Pocket Mobile is one of those resellers who run on very thin margins, which is what leads to the low price. I’m used to going with the frugal option and giving up customer support. My view is that typically once you get service up and running on reliable network (AT&T) it’s smooth sailing.

One thing concerned me about the deal, the return/refund policy. I’d need something very solid if I’m committing to buying a year’s worth of service. Hidden away at the bottom of the Ebay store listing is a tab of “cancellation/refunds.” Clicking it gives you their policy, which is:

“We want you to be delighted with your purchase of this prepaid service. If you are not satisfied with your service and it is within 30 days of receiving your starter kit, we will refund your purchase in full. However, if you have consumed more than 30 minutes, 30 texts, or 30MB of data, it will be considered buyer’s remorse and a refund will not be available.

If you do not contact us to cancel the plan within this 30 day period, or if you consume more than 30 minutes, 30 texts or 30MB of data, your purchase will be considered buyer’s remorse and you will no longer qualify for a refund.”

Okay, if it’s within 30 days, they’ll refund… great. Oh wait, if I talked to someone for 30 minutes, received 30 texts, or used 30MB, they’ll consider it buyer’s remorse and not give a refund.

This scared the hell out of me. I took to Twitter.

That last request drew a wise response by @MLM_Police:

I followed up on DM and asked the same questions that I did publicly. On April 20th, they said escalated the request. By April 23rd, I reached back out to them, as it had been 4 days and I feared the deal would be removed or sold out before I received my response. On the 24th, they got back to me and said that they hadn’t received a response yet.

I decided to take a chance and buy, mostly because I believed that paying $20 for AT&T service is better than paying $35 for AT&T service.

I ordered my sim and it sat a few days while I found the free time to focus on getting it installed and activated. I started the process on Friday, May 4th early in the day. I decided to port my phone number because some of my dog sitting client text me directly. In hindsight, this was probably a bad idea.

Here’s the number portability section of the Red Pocket Mobile’s activation website. I highlighted two interesting sections.

Let me tackle the second highlight first. It’s very strange that a pre-paid phone company would ask for your Social Security Number. This Forbes article covers it a bit. In this case, Red Pocket Mobile doesn’t require it, which tells me they don’t need it. They’d like to have it. I remember thinking, “Hmmm, you escalated my question about the return/refund policy 2 weeks ago and I haven’t gotten a response yet. I’m not sure I’d like you to have my Social Security Number. Thanks!”

The other highlight is the “Account Password” of my (then current) carrier, Cricket Wireless. I used the password for the Cricket Wireless website. Big mistake.

This is the first time I’ve ported a phone number in years. I had read it takes a couple of hours. Here’s the thing they don’t tell you about porting your phone number. You never get notice (such as an email) about the completion of the port. And you have to reboot your phone for the new activation to take effect. So you fill out this form try back in 3-4 hours and hope for the best.

When my service wasn’t activated in 4 hours I called Red Pocket Mobile. They said that the PIN didn’t match. I said, “Of course it isn’t going to match my PIN… your website asked for the password. If you wanted the PIN you should have asked for it.”

I gave them my PIN and they submitted the new request to port my number. Four hours later, I still didn’t have service. Time for the second call to Red Pocket Mobile.

After one person disconnected me when they went to investigate, I got one who would work with me. She said that the PIN was denied. I asked what she had for the PIN information. She read the same information I submitted from the website hours ago, not the information I gave in my last call. It seems as though the call that I had four hours ago never happened.

Four hours later, I still didn’t have service. At this time, it’s getting late, so I decide to resubmit the activation and port request with the correct PIN from the website. My theory is that it can’t hurt. Maybe they are only allowed to go off of what is submitted through the website?

The next morning I call back and the customer service representatives tell me the PIN was denied again. Once again, she reads me the same password that I originally submitted and not the PIN that I’ve now corrected twice over the phone and once online. After I explain to her that I seem to be caught in a low-budget, direct-to-video version of Groundhog Day 2, she puts me on hold to investigate some more.

She comes back and says that it should work now! And amazingly it does! I can make a phone call! She painstakingly reads me through at least 10 APN settings to get the mobile network configured. Near the last one, my phone inexplicably erases the previous 9. I thank her and tell her that I’ll just do it through the Red Pocket Mobile app as the company intended.

It works without a hitch. I decide to take my dog on a short walk around the block while I check up on some news, Twitter, and email. (We were off the “beaten path”, so not this “phoning and walking” wasn’t really a danger.) Everything seemed normal and great with the LTE coverage.

I got back and it was time for the kids soccer practice. My wife drove the mile (maybe 1.5 miles) down the street. I don’t know why I had my phone out for such a short trip, but I noticed that I didn’t have LTE coverage. I only had “H” coverage and pages were slowed to a crawl. Uh oh. It’s panic time!

I looked at how much data I used. It was at 28MB. I had 2MB of data to spare before I had wasted $240 on cell phone service that I wouldn’t be able to use. In a panic, I quickly put my phone into airplane mode.

When I got back home, it was time to call Red Pocket Mobile again. I asked if they’d waive the 30MB requirement like I did in all the Tweets. Instead of promising they would, the phone person jumped to “Let’s see what we can do about this coverage. Turn your phone off airplane mode and we’ll get started.”

It seemed that he couldn’t understand the position I was in. If I turn the phone back on, it could get email updates and get over the 30MB limit. In order for Red Pocket Mobile to attempt to troubleshoot my problem, they’d effectively be demanding that I waive any right to a refund.

We went back and forth like this for what seemed to be forever. It was unfortunate, but I feel that Red Pocket Mobile put me into a corner where I couldn’t be their customer.

Finally after number calls over the 24+ hours, I decided to give up on Red Pocket Mobile. My wife was quite relieved.

I called up Cricket Wireless and said, “Please let me come back!” Their customer service representative said, “Sure, no problem. We’d love to have you back.”

Oh there were problems! We’ll continue that story in Cell Nightmare 2…

Red Pocket Mobile Conclusion

Like everything in this article, this is just my opinion based on my experience. It’s quite possible that the service is good and that I freaked out due to the refund policy before I had the chance to get a good feel for it. However, their lack of customer support and that policy really made it difficult for me to fairly review the actual phone service itself.

If you are thinking of giving Red Pocket Mobile a try, I’d recommend porting your number to something like Google Voice and then using that to route a new Red Pocket Mobile number to that Google Voice number. This has worked well for me in the past, with the exception of people getting confused when their caller ID gives them the underlying carrier number instead of my Google Voice number on outgoing texts and calls.

Reminder: Libraries Can Save You Hundreds of Dollars

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Last weekend, my son told us that other children in their school have watched Star Wars. I thought 5 (almost 6) might be a little too early, but even if a lot of it goes over his head there’s not much harm there.

Dog Book - library
The library doesn’t bite, but interrupt me again and I will!

My wife and I went through the age-old question of which order to introduce the movies. Fortunately, we both agreed on the chronological order of release date – we started with the 4th movie.

There was just one small problem. How do you watch Star Wars nowadays? I couldn’t find it streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime. Star Wars isn’t there. Amazon and Google Play were willing to sell me the digital movie for around $20. We were simply looking to rent it for the day and maybe explore buying a collection in the future.

We went down to the local Blockbuster, but strangely they only had pizza and subs there. I looked online to see if it was at my local Redbox kiosk. That was a dead end as well.

My wife was going to start calling up random friends and co-workers, before she came up with a better idea, “Why don’t we go to the library?”

This may sound strange, but we had never gotten library cards. For whatever reason we’ve been running around from one thing to the next or simply enjoying all the books, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video that we already have at home. We were long overdue to become members and reap all the benefits of our taxpayer dollars at work.

Libraries: Much More Than Books

Of course the Library had all the Star Wars movies. We grabbed episodes 4 to 6… even “upgrading” to Blu-Ray for A New Hope. I put upgrading in quotes because it was the same price of “free” as the DVDs. They also had a bunch of new releases in Blu-Ray as well. While it isn’t a new release, I never got around to seeing Deadpool and that caught my eye.

We watched the Star Wars movies and my kids picked up some of the large plot ideas. Show off my ability to talk like Yoda did I? My kids didn’t know that Dad was good friends with Yoda. (More accurately, his college linguistics class analyzed such sentences and how we still what he’s saying.)

When I returned the movies, I noticed that they had a section of kids movies. There we found the original Pete’s Dragon, which is something my wife and I wanted to introduce to our kids. It’s been very hard to find that on streaming services as well. Next, I spied a real treasure: School House Rock: Multiplication. I grabbed that just to watch my kids’ heads explode at Three is a Magic Number. They only know the Jack Johnson version from the Curious George movie Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Multiplication is not typically taught to a 5 year old (much less our 4 year old), so my expectations are zero. However, the songs were fun for everyone. Any math that stuck is a bonus. (Note: There should be a much more extensive post about my planned “Summer of Math” with the kids coming soon. Don’t worry, we got them in camp and soccer – stuff that some silly kids think is more fun than math. Update: The Summer of Math is here!)

Beyond books and DVDs, libraries have a number of very cool things. My library even has few fishing poles and tackle boxes that you can borrow with a library card. That’s the most unusual thing they have.

There’s one more huge benefit of my library (and I bet your library too): Free digital content. Last night I signed up with < a target="new" href="new">Hoopla, which has videos from The Great Courses. I grabbed the one on chess and was watching it in minutes like it was Netflix. (I don’t think Hoopla and Chill is going to catch on, especially with my chess video.) I grabbed an episode of Mr. Wizard’s World and the first episode of the 4th season of Octonauts (which I don’t think has made Netflix yet.) My library limits me to 6 pieces of content per month, so it’s not going to replace Netflix, but it’s a very good supplement.

There’s a similar service for free music via a company called Freegal. I haven’t looked at that yet. There’s also something called Mango Languages, which is normally $20/mo.

The library also a 3-D printer and 3-D classes. I think the only cost is the plastic for the printer itself. We’ll probably explore this sometime in the near future.

I realize that this article fits squarely in the “But Lazy Man, I already knew all this!” area. I had an idea that most of these things were available, but I had simply forgotten them. I’m going to have to start a spreadsheet of things like, “Rainy Day activities”, so that I can remember to take advantage of all the awesome stuff the library has.

We have an affiliate relationship with one or more of the companies linked in this article.

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