Frugality

So, I've been thinking a lot lately about frugality...something I haven't necessarly been good at but want to make a bigger effort to strive for. Maybe what got me thinking along these lines was that in living with a bunch of other people (and especially kids) leads to a lot of clutter and "stuff" (add up 5 households that were fully furnished before and what should you expect?). Well, i've found myself actually feeling anxious about it and wanting to at least reduce what I own and use to as little as possible. I did a huge weeding of my books and clothes and other items and am now trying to think much more before any kind of purchase of something that is not absolutely necessary that will take up space (since we do not have a lot of it). So, anyway, I've been reading some frugality blogs which is really fun (http://frugalupstate.blogspot.com/ is one of my favorites) and doing some reading, but mostly just thinking...so that's why I figured I'd blog.

I also have been thinking about my finances and why most people my age seem to be stuggling A LOT. I was trying to pin down the choices Austin and I have made that have helped a lot. First of all, I have started a bit frugal minded thanks to my parents (and my mom who asks for a small plastic cutting board for Christmas! and parents who go frequent garage sales, and wait, yes, did make me wear black snowpants from a thrift store as a child to my dismay). So, here are some things that have made all the difference....

1. Cars. Where to start...Austin and I have never had a car loan and don't intend to ever have one...and have decided to avoid ever buying a new car. How did we do this? (especially since austin loves cars???). Well, it involves a deal of searching. We very rarely have looked at dealerships because the cars always are overpriced and you could never sell one the next day for what you bought it for. Our first car together did come from a tiny dealership, but it was a decent price ($5K), a 1993 Honda Accord with $125,000 miles and did I love that car! In fact, it's still running now out in Seattle, being driven by a good friend of ours and I think it'll go to 250,000 miles, if we had not reduced to one car I would have driven it until it died. Ok, but I'm getting off track. Our next three cars were from private sellers and we made offers less than the bluebook value, and yes, they got totalled (another story there), but we have ALWAYS gotten more insurance money after driving the car for a year than we paid for it! We've looked in a search radius of about 2 hrs to find these deals, so it does take a little effort. And our current car (although it is a bit nicer than our other ones) was also a great deal ($3K) under the bluebook value :-). And from the insurance a bit extra we paid it in full when we got it. I can't understand why more people don't do this? But, you must be careful not to get too cheap of a car either...if it costs under 2K there is probably a reason, and you'll spend 3K a year fixing it. So, in our experience, buting a car with around 100K miles for about $5K works best: it will last you several years without significant repairs.

2. Student Loans. Well, we've just been mostly fortunate in this category because our parents paid most of our undergraduate costs (my parents made significant sacrifices to do this and I'm very grateful- once again, maybe that frugality paid a part :-). As for graduate school, I had to go for 3 years so I chose the cheapest way to do that- state school. I still ended up with a large chunk of loans, but about 1/3 the amount of many of my peers and we are making an effort to completely pay off the loans over 3% interest in the next year.

3. Apartment/Condo. Well, we can tell you horror stories about our trailer and cheap apartment in college, but assuming you don't want to go there we still made some choices that worked out excellently. We started looking for an apartment before I started grad school but found out we could not afford the $900-1000/month most of the one bedrooms costed in our area. So, we looked into buying a condo, and too our surprise, it was affordable. We were able to get a MASSHousing Loan at 5.1% interest and find a nice little 1bedroom condo near my school for $80K (it did take a lot of searching to find this price, a lot of commuting for austin). But with this condo we were able to pay only $700/month in total costs (including taxes and condo fee). And, we re-capped all that $ when we sold it- we highly recommend people buy affordable condo's if possible becuase in only owning it 2 years it was very worth it. Now we own a house, but again, we searched for a good mortgage (www.naca.com) and bought in a low priced area with low taxes.

4. Lunches. It may not seem like a big deal, but we have tried very hard to bring our own lunches to work/school. Austin of course is not hard to please with his 15 years of eating 2 balognia sandwiches with chips, and I change a lot, but it ranges from left-overs to soup to wraps. I've seen people spend a lot of money on lunches and not realize how much it adds up to. We do meet friends for breakfast 1x/wk, but we would rather spend money doing that then on a lunch.

5. Clothes. Well, we don't spend a lot of money on clothes, but maybe it's just because we don't care about them much. We wear our $1 thrift store t-shirts the most and I've discovered that if I don't love something when I try it on, it will just spend years in my closet. I NEED to be comfortable, so I just wear the clothes I love A LOT. I'm also trying to go more with basic items that won't go out of style. So if I don't feel great and look great, I don't buy it. And I'm picky so those items don't come around all that much :-).

Well, I've been writing way too long, but this is something I want to spend much discussion on. I want to pay off the rest of my student loans and need to be frugal and smart in order to do that. So, please share your great $ saving and space saving tips with me. I have some problem areas such as eating out: I LOVE it (and I love to meet friends for dinner)! Austin and I have found some ways to help, like we love to go to Boston Market and split the 1/2 chicken (comes out to $8.49 total!). We also spend a lot of lunches at Friendly's (but that's getting more expensive). I always get water, but can't convince austin to do that and sometimes get appetizers for the meal...any other suggestins?

Thanks for reading :-)

Family Time

So I had a really neat weekend (missy writing). I got to see my Aunt, Uncle, and cousins who I haven't seen in 8 years! I also got to hang out with my mom who came out from Whyoming so that was super cool. I of course didn't get my camara out as much as I should, but i was able to get a picture (although a bit fuzzy) of me and my 3 couz's, 2 of whom I got to meet for the first time...

and it's always nice to have a reason to just hang around and chat and go do fun stuff instead of put up drywall and what not :-)

Lawrence Pics

Hello all,

For about a week here last week we had quite a house-full of visitors. Steph's parents were here as well as some friends of Deb's (with two little ones!). We had lots of fun and lots of great meals, but now we are back to the quiet (and yes, it feels awefully quite compared to last week :-). So, anyway, steph's mom took some great pics of lawrence while out here and I thought I'd upload them for you all to see who haven't been here...or maybe have been here but haven't explored much..

Kitchen? No...Bedroom

So, once upon a time, 8 of us shared this kitchen! I'm not even sure how we did it except that it was during the summer and fall and we ate outside on the patio most of the time. But, as you can see in my other posts, we did finally start using our new kitchen in November sometime and then we left this old 2nd floor kitchen as is- an empty room that was very bare and depressing. We finally got around to doing something about it a few months ago- Danielle came over (hmmm- it seems like most of the demo stories we have begin this way) and we decided to take some hammers and screwguns to the cabinets....
Here I am in action...and yes I always do demolition in awkward positions, haha :-)

Here's Danielle doing demo in some sort of tough crime-fighting way :-)

We got Theo to take the cabinets apart for us, then patched the walls, painted a few weeks later, and then...we had a bedroom, mine in fact

Seen below is the bedroom all done:

And there we are...a kitchen that is now a bedroom.

Guitar Hero

It all began with a night of hanging out with Nigel and Danielle, Nigel had borrowed his friend's Guitar Hero game for playstation and wanted to play. We looked at him and rolled our eyes as we thought to ourselves, "this is lame". But, soon enough we each tried a turn, and within 10 minutes we were addicted! We soon borrowed the game from Nigel and then the games began. We had a little jam session in the house with each person giving it a try...and it was a blast! We've since given the game back but we miss it dearly...

1st floor updates

Well, I was trying to think of some chronological way to update you all on our progress, but it was just to daunting, so I'm just gonna give you and update and show show some pics of where we are now. We started using the 1st floor in November, and it was a welcome relief to our cramped space we were using before. We've been doing little projects here and there and now are almost completely done with teh 1st floor...all we have left is to put in 2 kickboards under the cabinets. So here are some current pics :-)...
Here is our newly painted stairway thanks to a wonderful paint job by our friend Dave

Here is the living room, we manage to all squeeze on the couch for movies

Ahh, and the kitchen. We abosolutely LOVE it, these are our IKEA cabinets, installed by 8 of us in 1 day, not too shabby :-)

This is our magnetic chalkboard that I painted on the wall, it's been lots of fun for messages and for Theo to draw on (yup, he drew all those lovely lines at the bottom)

This is our future "Sewing and Craft" room, since all us girls here have some sort of craft hobby: sewing, scapbooking, quilting, etc... We plan to put up some tables and shelves to hold all of our stuff :-)

The dining room, with our table without a leaf...

And last of all, our study/library/game room. We love this room cause it's a great place with lots of seating to hang out (and there's no TV!).

If you want to see more, feel free to come over and check out what we've done...it's been a lot of work!

-Missy

Back to Blogging

Ok, OK, I know, I need to update the blog. But in August I did this wonderful entry with lots of photos and it took like an hr and then it got lost into cyberspace! I was so frustrated I gave up blogging for a while. Now I'm trying to make my way back but it's become a daunting task since so much has happened!!!!

But I will try to take it step by step, so you must know the events and photos I'm going to use may be quite old news now :-)

-Missy

Demo Day #2

Well, we sucessfully filled another dumpster this weekend! Thanks to the help of our beloved connection group buddies, we filled 15 cubic yards full of trash! We also were able to get up all the stick down ugly tiles in the attic and empty it so that we could get carpet today- and it looks great! So we're busy now doing last minute finishing touches on the bathroom wall that we moved up there- filling in joints with wall jt compound and finishing trim around the doors and a few pieces of baseboard. We're in a bit of an overdrive mode since we're having a couple and a 1yr old joining us on Saturday. We're super excited to have them, but want to have the attic completely done so that it will be nice for them up there. And you know how it is, once you move in it is doubtful that you care anymore about a few nail holes in the wall and some unpainted trim, so we know we must do it now or we'll never get to it again. Well, more to follow once I get some more pictures together. Thanks again to Greg, Marie, John, Nathan, Spence, Steph, Nathalie, Lanny, Nigel, Jared, Kelly, and the Carroll folks for all your help- It would have taken us DAYS to do what you helped us to do in 2.5 hrs :-).

A hole in the roof

So, we have a hole in the roof, but before you start feeling bad for our unfortunate circumstances, you must know that WE put it there. Last Saturday we decided to put in a skylight in a little room in the attic with no windows. We'd like to make it a little nursery for a 1yr old, and thought he'd appreciate a little natural sunlight :-). So, crazy as we are, we thought, "Hey, how hard can it be? I bet we can figure it out"....and so we did....
Ah, light at last...

"Lord, please don't let this skylight leak!"Ah, 14 hours later and done at last :-)... now we'll just have to see what happens when it rains...

An Urban Garden

Well, on a different note than the normal construction talk, I thought I'd share some pics of our little urban garden here. We do only own about 50 sq ft of grass, but we've managed to create quite the litle jungle. The Church next door was kind enough to let us use about a 15ft strip of their grass for some gardening and Spencer and Steph also built 3 large planters. Our garden is doing amazing mostly due to the wonderful soil we got from a 15yr old compost pile we got from Spencer's parent's back yard. So, this first picture is our little side patio area next to the large church next door. We have a number of plants and herbs (one tomato plant, peppers, beets, thyme, basil, eggplant, sunflowers, squash, zucchini, carrots, mint, soybeans, and a few other just flowering plants) Then behind our house where there is more sun we've planted 5 other tomato plants that are getting HUGE! As of a few days ago we had over 30 little green tomatoes growing which we hope will ripen soon.
We're so happy to have Spence and Steph's gardening skills with us since we never would have thought to create such a great little garden ourselves. We've even started composting in a bin ext to the side patio garden and it has been really fun to see all our extra kitchen waste turn into beautiful dark soil. We're looking forward to building a little plastic greenhouse next spring so that we can stat all of our plants from seed with our own soil.

Super Basement Demo Day

Well folks, in case you've never seen our basement or have just forgotten what it looked like...this is what our basement looked like when we moved in...


But as you guessed, it no longer looks anything like this.

Thanks to the awesome help of our friends Greg, Marie, John, Laura, Nathalie, Lanny, Spencer, and Stephanie and Austin's parents and Spencer's Dad, the basement is now completely gutted. We were very busy on Sunday riping things out and carrying them to our 15-cubic yard dumpster (which actually turned out to be about 5 yards too small). So, here are some pics of the action (used without permission :-).

Whoops, looks like we cought Greg and Marie on a little rest break :-) So, after we got all the stuff leared out, Austin and Missy began the long processes of building shelves for storage down in the basement. Contrary to popular believe, it takes FOREVER to take all the screws out of 80 two-by-fours. Austin worked about 9 hours and Missy about 5 hours today on building these shelves for our future illegal hostel bunk beds...just kidding...but here's the pics you've been waiting for...the AFTER pictures...

Demolition Derby

The demolition is well on its way! We've been quite busy and every chance we get we rip apart our first floor. Thanks to the help of our house-mates Stephanie and Spencer and our good friends Nigel and Danielle, we've removed all the trim from doorways and windows, removed 2 walls, remove the plaster from an outside wall, and removed all the old kitchen cabinets. The only demolition task we have left is widening one more doorway on the 1st floor and makig a door in a closet and then cleaning out the basement (which we are doing in a week and a half with the help of several friends). We are very excited to get this stage over with since smashing things and having to protect your face with a mask and goggles in hot humid weather while dust and plaster flies at you can be very tiring and uncomfortable work. Well, enough talk, time for some pictures...




Here Danielle is just gettin started....








and this is a little later...




Here we are after just a few more days...and then Spencer and Steph doing a little more destruction.












And finally, here are some of where we are now...

The Demolition has Begun!

Sorry I've been idle for so long, I am just learning the ways of a blogger...Life has also been busy and has delayed our house plans for a bit...I've graduated...begun studying for the liscensure exam...hosted my parents for a week visit...and helped 3 friends move into our community house! Yup, we're up to 5 people now and I'm loving it...and we may soon in the fall be up to 8 people! So, as you can imagine we've realized we need to kick it into high gear with our renovation plans. So, while Austin was away having a grand ole time hiking and camping in the rain for 4 days, my house-mate Stephanie and I decided to take this demolition thing into our own hands. So, as you can see we put on some music, grabbed some crowbars and hammers, and begin ripping apart the old kitchen.

And we sure did a good job, except at the one point when we decided to unhook the sink and were spraying water everywhere. But after a quick trip to the hardware store and some thinking like a plumber, I fixed the problem and we are enjoying hot water again :-).

So, the journey has begun, I'll try to update more often with lots of photos :-)

-Missy