Money Crashers: Four new articles

Four more of my articles have just popped up on Money Crashers. They're not particularly connected to ecofrugality, but they might have some interest to some of you.

The first piece is for you if you've never had a 401(k) plan — or if you have one but don't really understand how it works. It explains the tax benefits of a 401(k), its limitations, and the advantages and disadvantages of using it for your investments. (Spoiler: Yes, you should definitely invest some money in a 401(k) if you have one, and no, you definitely shouldn't do all your investing this way.)

What Is a 401(k) Plan and How Does It Work? – Limits, Rules & Benefits

The second piece is about something pretty much everyone has these days: a credit report. And if you have a credit report, you could have errors on it that you don't know about. In a In a 2012 study, about 1 out of 4 Americans found inaccuracies on their credit report that could affect their credit scores. Luckily, most of the affected consumers were able to correct the errors and improve their scores as a result. Here's what you need to know about how credit report errors occur, how they can hurt you, and how to fix them.

How to Fix Errors on Your Credit Report for Free

Many families look to health care sharing ministries (HCSMs), such as Medi-Share, as an affordable alternative to traditional health insurance. HCSMs work on the same principle as insurance, collecting premiums ("shares") from all members and using the money to pay for the health care costs of those who need help. But make no mistake: HCSMs aren't insurance, and they don't offer the same benefits. This piece explores how HCSMs work, what they cost, how they differ from a regular insurance plan, their pros and cons, and when they can be worthwhile. (Spoiler alert: if there's any way at all you can afford a real insurance policy, choose that instead.)

Health Care Sharing Ministries: A Good Alternative to Health Insurance?

And now for something completely different: Academy Award parties. Many movie lovers delight in throwing Hollywood-style Oscar night parties, complete with real red carpets, signature cocktails, and lavish swag bags for guests. But what if you don't happen to have a Hollywood-style budget? No worries: just substitute planning and creativity for money. This article explains how to plan a truly fabulous Oscar extravaganza on a budget, including Oscar-worthy invitations, glam decorations, red-carpet attire, fabulous food and drink, award-related party games, and your own fabulous swag bags.

How to Throw an Oscar Viewing Party on a Budget  

The best way to make coffee

One of my birthday presents this year was a new AeroPress coffee maker. I had put this item on my gift wish list because I was intrigued by its versatility. You can use it to make either regular-strength or espresso-strength coffee, and you can make either one, two, or three cups' worth at a time. And since I can't remember the last time I needed to make coffee for more people than that at once, I thought the AeroPress could potentially take the place of all the coffee-making apparatus in my cabinet: my big 10-cup drip machine, my single-cup pour-over cone, the filters for both, and the little moka pot I use for espresso. And on top of that, it was reputed to make a pretty darn good cup of joe.

Having tried it several times now, I can report that the AeroPress does everything it claims. It does indeed brew up a very good cup of coffee: rich, not too bitter, and free from sediment. (And I haven't even tried using it in cold brew mode yet, which could potentially be even better.) It's also very easy to use and very easy to clean. But what struck me most about it, after a week of use, is that it's probably the most ecofrugal way to brew coffee.

The method I've been relying on most for my everyday coffee was my little pour-over cone. It's quite simple to use, with minimal equipment, but it does require the use of disposable filters. True, they go into the compost bin (used grounds and all) rather than to the landfill, but they still require resources to produce. And of course, they're not free to buy either. The last box I bought was from Trader Joe's and cost $2.00 for 100 unbleached filters (size 2), so that's 2 cents apiece — not a lot, but it adds marginally to the cost of each cup of coffee. And the filters take up additional space in the cabinet.

I could, of course, eliminate the cost and the waste of paper filters by using a reusable filter made of cloth or metal. I even tried it for a while, but I quickly gave up on it because it was such a hassle to clean the grounds out of the filter. Even after I'd dumped the contents out into the compost bin, there was still quite a large volume of wet coffee grounds clinging to the cloth filter, and I had to run water through it for at least 30 seconds to get the thing clean. So whatever resources I saved by not using the paper filters were offset, maybe completely, by the amount of water it took to wash it. Not to mention all the grounds that ended up going down the drain, which probably weren't the best thing for the plumbing.

Other methods of brewing coffee have similar problems. A French press uses no paper filters, but requires just as much water (and work) to clean. An automatic drip machine uses even bigger paper filters and requires a significant amount of water (and work) to clean all the parts of the pot itself and the drip apparatus. They also waste the coffee itself if you brew a whole potful and only three people take any. And of course, the increasingly popular single-cup brewers, most notably the Keurig, produce a ludicrous amount of waste. According to the Story of Stuff project, the number of single-use K-cups trashed to date could circle the globe more than 10 times.

The AeroPress isn't zero-waste, but it's pretty close. It does have a filter, but only a tiny one, a flat disk just 2.5 inches in diameter. These "micro-filters" cost $5 for a package of 350 — only 1.4 cents each — and the amount of space they take up in the cabinet is negligible. And best of all, they make it incredibly easy to clean the press. When I finish brewing a cup of coffee, I just remove the filter cap, position the chamber over my little bathroom compost bin, and ram the plunger home. This ejects filter and grounds together into the bin, and all I have to do is rinse off any grounds clinging to the plunger. Then the whole gadget can go into the dish drainer to dry, and it's ready for its next use.

All in all, this coffee maker seems make the best possible use of limited resources compared to other methods. It saves paper by using such tiny filters. It saves both water and time by reducing the need for cleaning. It also saves time by brewing up a cup of good coffee faster than any other method I've tried. It saves cabinet space by replacing three different coffee gadgets with one. It saves energy by brewing coffee with water below the boiling temperature (ideally around 175°F, though to be honest, I usually just guesstimate it), so I don't have to bring the kettle to a full boil. And all of this, of course, saves money.

Please note, I am not trying to shill for AeroPress here. I was not paid anything to write this post (like they'd waste the money on a blog as tiny as this one, anyway), and I'm not trying to convince anyone who already has a coffee brewing method they like to switch. Indeed, I'd be delighted if you'd share your experience in the comments and tell me why you think your favorite method is superior. I don't promise to be convinced, however, because I'm pretty darn pleased with my new coffee maker — and with all the extra space I have now in my cabinet.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 7: The Final Lesson Learned

During this week of vegan eating, one thing that hasn't posed much problem for me is snacking. My usual afternoon snack of a bowl of popcorn (with olive oil and salt) and a cup of cocoa (made with almond milk) required no changes to make it vegan, so I've been able to enjoy it every day with no disruptions.

Last night, however, we went over to a friend's place for some RPGs. Normally, whoever is hosting the game for that evening provides munchies for the group, but I knew that I couldn't count on the snacks being vegan-friendly, so I made a point of bringing along some salted nuts for myself (and others) to nosh on. But all the same, it was a little frustrating not being able to enjoy any of the other treats that were available, like caramel peanut clusters or M&Ms. (I did find the tail end of a bag of veggie chips, which I did not scruple to polish off.)

So I'll call this my Fifth Lesson learned from my week of vegan eating: If you go out anywhere, make sure to bring some snacks you can eat. Don't count on your host to provide them for you. This will probably be my Last Lesson Learned, since we have only one dinner left to go, and it's going to be roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes with scrambled tofu. We've had this meal before, though I didn't blog about it at the time, and it doesn't pose any real challenges.

Thus, I can now recap all my Lessons Learned from this vegan challenge:

• Lesson 1: Read all labels. Animal products can be hiding where you least expect them, and if you really want to be a full vegan, you need to check everywhere.
• Lesson 2: The food is the easy part. Animal products are also in personal care products, in clothing, maybe in auto parts for all I know. So this is sort of a corollary to Lesson 1: check all labels on everything, not just food.
• Lesson 3: It's easier to be vegan at home than on the go. Being a vegan when dining out requires planning — checking restaurant locations and menus to find a place that will serve something you can eat.
• Lesson 4: The best vegan recipes (most of the time) are the naturally vegan ones. You can make decent vegan-friendly food with meat, dairy, or egg substitutes, but it's even easier and cheaper to make vegan-as-vegan food that doesn't require them.
• Lesson 5: Be prepared to feed yourself. Wherever you go, bring vegan snacks, because you can't count on anyone else to provide them.

All of which, I have to say, leads me to a conclusion that wasn't exactly the one I was expecting. I thought maybe after a week of eating vegan, I would discover that it's actually pretty easy to do, and perhaps I should try sticking with it a little longer. But my conclusion is actually just the opposite: being a true, 100 percent vegan, even in 2020, is kind of a pain in the butt. Checking every label and every restaurant menu in minute detail, scouring your closet and your medicine chest for hidden animal products, having to say no to snacks at a friend's house if you can't see the exact recipe or ingredient list — this isn't a job for wusses! If vegans really do have superpowers, they have to work for them.

So, my real Final Lesson Learned from this week as a (near) vegan: I don't really want to be a vegan 24/7. I don't want to give up my wool socks or my honey-aloe face wash, or to have to decline all food outside of my home unless I can scan the ingredient list in minute detail. I want to be able to eat a piece of milk chocolate if someone offers it to me, or even share a scoop of real ice cream with my husband.

And fortunately, I can do that while still keeping my food-based carbon footprint pretty darn low. Instead of a full-throttle vegan diet, I'm going to stick to my regular low-carbon diet:

• No beef, lamb, or pork, in the home or out of it;
• No dairy products at home, but no obsessing over them when eating out (and no worrying about minute amounts of dairy-derived ingredients in an otherwise vegan product);
• Fish and free-range chicken on rare occasions, maybe once or twice a month at most;
• Free-range eggs at home no more than a few times per week, and no worrying about whether there are non-free-range eggs in something I'm offered to eat away from home; and
• Honey is fair game.

With these rules, I can feel reasonably comfortable with role in global warming (not perfect, but more part of the solution than part of the problem), without having to worry myself to pieces every day about accidentally eating an egg white.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 6: The best way to vegan

The last two days of my week-long vegan challenge have been not just uneventful, but rather enjoyable. As planned, Brian made Sesame Tofu for dinner on Monday and Pasta Romesco on Tuesday, both of which are favorites of ours — not just favorite vegan dishes, but favorite dishes full stop. And both of them made enough leftovers for the next day's lunch, so I've had two full days of delicious vegan food.

Both of these dishes fit the first of the three types of vegan food I identified on Monday: they're vegan dishes that were made to be vegan, with no changes or substitutions. A lot of our other vegan food favorites — like Brian's Eggplant and String Beans in Garlic Sauce and my favorite soup, Pasta Fagioli — also fall into this category. And this got me wondering: are these vegan-as-vegan dishes, in general, the best?

It's not that we don't like any foods in the other categories. Both of us, for instance, like our chili with Gimme Lean beef more than any chili we've tried with real ground beef, and also more than any "non carne" chili we've tried with just beans. But we've also had some attempts to veganize recipes that were real duds, like our heavy tofumpkin pie and gluey oat milk cocoa. On the whole, it seems like the safest, surest way to find a vegan dish we really like is to pick one that started out vegan, rather than being converted.

It's also, in most cases, the cheapest way. Consider the dinners we've cooked so far this week. The most expensive of the lot was clearly the butternut squash and sage pizza, which used $4.56 worth of homemade vegan mozzarella. (The rest of the ingredients cost less than a dollar, but only because the squash and the sage were home-grown.) By contrast, the sesame tofu, a naturally vegetarian recipe, only cost about $3 for the entire meal (which provided both dinner and lunch for two). And the one vegan product I bought specifically to "take the place" of meat, the seitan, cost $4.69 for the package (though we've only used a quarter of it so far) and didn't even make a significant difference to the flavor of the dish. It probably would have been just as good as a straight-up veggie pot pie — vegan as vegan.

So I'm going to tentatively label this my Fourth Lesson Learned from this vegan eating challenge: the best vegan recipes, in general, are the ones that are vegan by nature. Converting a meat-based or cheese-based recipe to vegan form can still be satisfying, but it probably won't be as tasty, as easy, or as cheap — in short, as ecofrugal — as a dish that's plant-based simply because everything it calls for is a plant.

In accordance with this view, Brian is currently cooking up a butternut squash and barley recipe from our new vegan cookbook. The only ingredients in it are hulled barley, butternut squash, raisins, apple juice, and ground cloves. Nothing, in short, that had to be altered in any way to make the recipe vegan. It's perfectly simple, and I think it can hardly fail to be satisfying.

Money Crashers: Save an Extra $1,000 in Just One Month

One of the presents I gave myself for my birthday was to cash in a bunch of the survey rewards that had been piling up in my accounts with MyPoints, Toluna, and Life Fun & Everything. I've been taking these surveys in my spare time for years, earning maybe 25 or 50 cents for each one I complete, which isn't much — but I've done a lot of them in that time, and I haven't made a point of cashing in the points regularly, so it had gotten to the point where I had over $1,000 in unused rewards just sitting there. So I traded in some of them for Starbucks and Barnes and Noble gift cards, as well as two Visa gift cards that I can use to pay for the new Critical Role book when it comes out this spring, plus another game from the store where we're buying it. Happy birthday to me!

The point of this is that even the little things you to to make more money, or to save more money, really can make a difference in the long term. And if you do enough of them at once, they can make a difference even in the short term.

That's the moral of my new article on Money Crashers, "8 Ideas to Make & Save an Extra $1,000 Fast (in Just One Month)." It's a lesson a lot of Americans could use, because according to a 2018 Bankrate survey, less than 40% of Americans actually have enough in savings to cover even a $1,000 unexpected expense. If the unexpected happens (as it tends to do), they have no choice but to borrow — and then they have to pay interest on that debt every month, making their budget even tighter and making saving even harder.

My article offers some suggestions on how to break this Catch-22. I suggest a variety of strategies —such as cutting unnecessary expenses, negotiating monthly bills, shopping rewards, side gigs, and loan refinancing — that people can combine to get themselves to that $1,000 goal in one month or less. It's not a huge financial cushion, but for many Americans, it could mean the difference between getting by and falling behind.

Thrift Week, Day 5: The restaurant dilemma

Yesterday, Brian had the day off from work for Martin Luther King Day. He ended up working from home for most of the day anyway, but we did take a break in the middle of the day to head out into the cold for a walk. I proposed the Penstock Coffee Roasters coffee shop on Third Avenue (formerly known as OQ) as a destination, since (a) it wasn't too far away and (b) it would be a pleasant place to settle down for a game of cards after braving the cold wind outside. In the back of my head, also, was the fact that (c) this local establishment would definitely have some dairy-free selections beyond plain black coffee, so I wouldn't have to stress about my vegan challenge when ordering.

However, when we got there, we discovered that a lot of other people had apparently had the same great idea. The place was packed, and with no room to sit down for a drink, there wasn't much point in sticking around. Rather than continue to fight against the wind all the way to the Dunkin Donuts (which also has almond milk, but lacks the congenial atmosphere), we turned around and headed home. Along the way, we passed a couple of other eateries that were open, such as the new bubble tea place on Raritan, and considered going in, but without being able to peruse the menu ahead of time, I just wasn't sure I'd be able to get anything without milk. Heading straight home and fixing a cup of cocoa seemed like the surest way to get a hot drink that would fit my new, temporary vegan lifestyle.

This experience led me to formulate my Third Lesson Learned from my week of vegan eating: It's a lot easier to avoid animal products at home than it is on the go. In your own kitchen, you can control not just what you cook, but what you have on hand to cook with, so making a simple substitution like almond milk for dairy milk is no problem. But when you're out and about, you just can't count on every eatery you visit to have these alternatives on hand. If you have time to plan ahead, you can seek out an all-vegan eatery like the one we went to on Friday, or at least consult the menus of nearby restaurants to make sure vegan choices are available. But if you're just hungry and looking for a quick meal, there's no guarantee you'll be able to find it.

This lesson was further reinforced when I checked my email this afternoon and discovered that my email to Baskin-Robbins about my misplaced Birthday Club coupon had not fallen on blind eyeballs. They sent me a terse but polite apology and a coupon that I can cash in for a free scoop any time before February 4. So, in theory, I could go tomorrow or Thursday, while my vegan challenge is still in effect, and try out the vegan flavor at our local branch. (I checked when I was in there to get my Dunkin drink and verified that they have one.)

The problem is, although I managed to get my birthday freebie by being a squeaky wheel, Brian never got his last month. So what I would really like to do is wait until Brian can go to the Baskin-Robbins with me and get a scoop we can share. Now, if we go this weekend, I could still try the vegan flavor, even if my vegan challenge is over by then — but it's a coffee-based flavor, and Brian doesn't like coffee. So I'd have to choose between sticking to my dairy-free guns or sharing with my poor ice-cream-starved husband, and I think the latter is more important to me.

Once again, this brings home the point that it's just not that easy to eat vegan when eating out. Baskin-Robbins is no doubt ahead of the competition in offering a vegan flavor at all, but it still only has one. By contrast, if we wanted to buy nondairy ice cream to eat at home, we could choose from a variety of brands and flavors just at our local supermarket, with still more options available if we were prepared to venture out to a natural-foods store and pay natural-foods-store prices. (They're a lot higher than the Stop & Shop's, but to be fair, still quite a bit less on a per-quart basis than the regular price at Baskin-Robbins.)

All this is making me quite a bit more reluctant to continue my vegan streak beyond vegan week. I've already discovered that I'm not willing to live a 100 percent vegan lifestyle if it means giving up my warm socks; now I'm beginning to think that even 100 percent vegan eating is too much for me if it means I can't share a scoop of ice cream with my husband, or stop at a cafe for a drink on one of his rare days off from work.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 4: Three types of vegan dishes

When I decided to embark on this vegan challenge, I decided I wanted to incorporate a variety of types of vegan food. As Brian put it, there are three major kinds of vegan dishes:

1. Naturally plant-based dishes. These don't contain any animal products, so you don't need to do anything to them to make them vegan. Example: the Pasta Romesco that was our Recipe of the Month last September, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
2. Vegan adaptations. These are dishes that normally contain some kind of animal product, so you make them vegan by leaving it out. Example: You take a recipe for chicken-vegetable stir-fry and simply leave out the chicken. Replacing the chicken with tofu — a different protein source, rather than a straight-up "substitute" for chicken — would also count.
3. Vegan substitutions. These are recipes where the meat, or cheese, or dairy is an integral part of the dish, and simply taking it out wouldn't work. So instead, you deliberately replace it with a plant-based substitute, like the Gimme Lean beef we use in our chili.

Most of the vegan foods we eat fall into categories 1 and 2. So, to make sure we'd also do some of category 3, I purchased a container of seitan on our last trip to the Whole Earth Center. This "wheat meat" is said to make a good substitute for chicken, so I thought we could try it out in one of our favorite chicken recipes and see how well it worked. It would be like a trial run for the vegan seitan tenders I've contemplated making: a way to put this substitution to the test without all the prep work.

The seitan was a little bit pricey: $4.69 for a 12-ounce package, which works out to $6.25 per pound. That's more than three times as much as the $1.99 we're used to paying for free-range chicken legs at Trader Joe's, but it's less than the $6.99 we'd pay there for free-range, skinless, boneless chicken breasts, and these ready-cut seitan pieces are at least as easy to work with as those are. So, to make the most use of their convenient form, Brian decided to use some in a recipe we've made and enjoyed before: chicken pot pie.

To adapt this recipe, however, he had to make a few more changes than simply substituting seitan chunks for chicken chunks. The way he used to make this pie was to roast the chicken first and make one meal out of that, then save the pan drippings to make gravy, along with the leftover meat. So he had to figure out how to make a flavorful gravy without these drippings, and how to thicken it without using any milk. And, on top of that, he had to make the pastry for the crust without using butter. So this recipe ended up requring not one, but three substitutions for animal products: the chicken itself, the chicken drippings, the milk, and the butter.

All in all, Brian put enough work into adapting this recipe that I think it should qualify as an entirely new dish, and our first Vegan Recipe of the Month. Here it is in full:

VEGAN SEITAN POT PIE

1. For the filling, dice 2 small potatoes and 3 small carrots, and chop 1 medium leek and 4 oz. mushrooms. Sauté in a pan until softened, then add about 3 oz. seitan, cut into small pieces, and 1/4 tsp. salt.
2. For the gravy, combine 2 Tbsp. flour and 2 Tbsp. water in a small bowl. Melt 1 Tbsp. plant-based butter (Brian used Country Crock) in a pan. Stir in 1 cup vegetable broth (he used 3/4 tsp. Penzey's vegetable soup base dissolved in 1 cup water). Blend in the flour-and-water mixture and stir until thickened.
3. For the crust, make a pastry dough of 1 cup flour, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 5 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. plant-based butter. (Note: when Brian made this, he was scaling down the recipe from the one he'd used in the past, and he made a math error that resulted in his using only half this amount of the plant butter. The pastry actually tasted fine this way, but it stuck to the pan. So you could probably get away with using less than this full amount. Try 4 Tbsp. to start, and then adjust as needed.) Divide the dough in half and roll it out to make two crusts.
4. Assemble the pie. Line an 8-inch pie plate with the first crust, load in the filling and gravy, and top with the second crust, cutting off the excess pastry and crimping to seal the edges. Bake in a 400°F oven for about 35 minutes.

The finished pie was certainly nice to look at, golden and crisp, and the smell was appetizing. The crust, as I noted, had a bit of a tendency to stick to the pan, but that was almost certainly due to the glitch with the amount of butter, rather than the type of butter used. And even with only half the butter, the texture of it wasn't at all bad — not quite as flaky as Brian's usual butter crust, maybe, but tender and perfectly edible. And Brian reported that the Country Crock Plant Butter, which comes in stick form, was much easier to work with for a pie crust than the stuff we've been using up to now (Earth Balance or Smart Balance, sold in tubs). So we'll probably stick with this stuff in future for pastry purposes.

Once we managed to get it dished up, the pie was not lacking in flavor. The vegan gravy was as rich as all our Penzey's-based soups tend to be, and the vegetables contributed their own flavor as well. However, the seitan didn't really add much to it. In fact, the chunks of seitan in the pie had practically no taste of their own. Their chewiness added texture interest, and the protein in them no doubt made the dish more filling, but taste-wise, you couldn't even really tell they were there. So for our next veggie pot pie experiment, I'm thinking we should either go all the way and whip up a batch of the seitan tenders, which would presumably add more flavor to the mix — or go the other way and make this a type 2 recipe, with just veggies and no meat substitute at all.

We're now halfway through the vegan challenge, and this is probably the most complicated dish we'll make for it. Brian is planning our favorite Sesame Tofu (a type 1 dish) for tonight, and Pasta Romesco (also type 1) for tomorrow night. And for the final night, Thursday, we might actually be able to cruise past the finish line on leftovers.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 3: Food is the easy part

Well, I've fallen afoul of the laws of veganism a second (and third) time. Yesterday, while washing my face, I realized that I was, once again, using an animal product. My homemade face wash, which works better on my skin than any commercial product I've ever tried, contains honey—and unlike the bread, it won't work with some other sweetener. Honey has special properties that make it good for the skin, and agave or corn syrup just can't do the same job. So I realized that if I wanted to truly live as a vegan for the duration of this week, I'd have to go out and buy myself a container of face wash that I didn't want, and wouldn't use anymore once the week was over.

Then, thinking it through still further, I realized that I'd also have to set aside all my wool sweaters and SmartWool socks—which I'd already worn that day and the day before—during the coldest week we've had this winter. Which, since I have basically no other socks that are truly warm, would mean either running out to the store to look for synthetic socks warm enough to get me through the week (which would hardly fit my ecofrugal charter) or spending the rest of the week indoors and getting basically no exercise (which hardly fits the ideal of a healthy vegan lifestyle).

Faced with these alternatives, I took the easy way out. Reasoning that my challenge was to eat vegan for a week, not live vegan for a week, I decreed that I was only going to worry about things I actually put into my body.  I also drew from this my Second Lesson Learned: The hardest part of being a vegan isn't actually the food. It's all the other animal products in my life, like my warm socks and DIY face wash, that are truly hard to live without.

By contrast, eating vegan—aside from the one glitch with the bread on Day 1—has really been no challenge at all. So far, it's involved:

• A soup that we make all the time anyway;
• A dinner out at a place with good food, good service, and not-unreasonable prices;
• A birthday cake that's actually quite a bit easier to make than most cakes with eggs and dairy;
• A minor substitution in a bread recipe, which made no significant difference to the taste;
• A simple milk switch in a latte, discussed below;
• And, yesterday, whipping up a batch of vegan mozzarella to take the place of regular cheese on Brian's Butternut Squash Pizza with Fresh Sage. Doing this is, admittedly, more work than just cracking open a package of real cheese, and it's significantly more expensive ($4.56 for two cups, as opposed to just $1 for sale-priced mozzarella). But it's not a lot of work, and the taste and texture are just as good as the real thing. Even left over for today's lunch, the texture was still fine.

Even our local Dunkin Donuts, as it turned out, didn't bat an eye when I went in yesterday and requested my birthday latte made with almond milk. In fact, considering all the special requests I was making at once—the birthday freebie coupon, decaf espresso, almond milk, and my reusable cup—the transaction was amazingly smooth. The only question the guy behind the counter asked me was, "With sugar?" and I said no, as I usually find the mocha latte too sweet with sugar as well as chocolate syrup added.

However, upon tasting the almond milk version, I found it was actually significantly less sweet than the mocha lattes I've had in the past. I'm not sure if this was because the new "Cocoa Mocha Latte" formula has less sugar, or because they're using unsweetened almond milk, which is much less sweet than lactose-laden dairy milk. Whatever the reason, my latte had only a faint hint of sweetness, which was not what I'd expected, but wasn't at all unpleasant.

So will I always ask for almond milk in my mochas from now on? Honestly, I'm torn. The drink itself tasted fine that way; what I truly missed was the whipped cream on top. The coconut whipped cream from Trader Joe's makes a perfectly acceptable (if rather pricey) substitute at home, but coffeehouses are only just starting to get the hang of providing plant-based milk; they haven't gone as far yet as plant-based whipped cream. So until they do, I think I might prefer to enjoy dairy drinks, complete with whipped cream, as a once-in-a-while indulgence. If I'm going almost entirely dairy-free in my daily life, I figure I can treat myself once a month or so without pumping up my carbon footprint too much.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 2: Hits and misses

Well, I've only been on my one-week vegan challenge for one day, and already, it seems, I've committed one technical foul. This morning, Brian realized that his Basic Brown Bread—the same bread I ate for breakfast last morning, and with my lunch—contains honey. So technically, my very first meal of the one-week challenge was not vegan.

Fortunately, this was only a minor infraction. The amount of honey in the three slices of bread I ate yesterday was only a trivial percentage of the total volume of food I ate yesterday. And although honey is undoubtedly non-vegan (all animal products are off-limits, and bees are definitely animals) it's far less destructive to the environment than most animal products (and, as The Guardian points out, has a lower carbon footprint than most other sweeteners that could replace it). And more to the point, declaring my one-week vegan challenge to be a failure right out of the gate, simply because of a trivial amount of animal product I didn't even realize I was eating, would make this a really boring Thrift Week. So I'm simply going to declare this my First Lesson Learned of the challenge: Going 100 percent vegan is harder than it looks, and you have to check and double-check everything to make sure you're doing it right. Which I will do for the rest of the week.

Brian was very contrite about this oversight, and he's making two fresh loaves of bread today with organic sugar rather than honey. And he made it up to me by fixing me oatmeal for breakfast this morning, which I ate with raisins, brown sugar, chopped walnuts, and almond milk. Plenty of fiber, some healthy fat, and not too much sugar. And it's only a bit more expensive than my usual breakfast, which is pricier now since I switched to almond milk and quit using artificial sweetener for my cocoa (after seeing some disheartening studies about its possible effects on metabolism). The two slices of toast still cost around 14 cents, but the cocoa now costs 40 cents: 34 cents for the almond milk, 2 for the sugar, and 4 for the cocoa. This breakfast costs about 16 cents for the oats, 13 for the raisins, 15 for the walnuts, 17 for the almond milk, and maybe 5 for the sugar. So it's 66 cents as opposed to 54, which isn't bad.

On the plus side, I can report that last night's dinner was definitely a successful vegan experience. The restaurant I chose for my birthday meal, Veganized, more than lived up to its high star rating on Yelp. Perhaps because we chose to go on Friday night rather than Saturday, the place wasn't very busy, so it didn't take long at all to get our food. And what food it was! We started with an order of grilled oyster mushrooms with a garlic rosemary marinade, which cooked up exquisitely crisp, and which both Brian and my dad swore tasted like steak. (I haven't tasted steak in over 25 years, so I couldn't say.) My dad said they really cried out for a piece of bread, which does not come gratis with your meal, but when he asked our server to bring some, she went and fetched a couple of slices of their sandwich bread, which was firm and pleasantly chewy.

We weren't even finished with these before our main courses arrived. I ordered the BBQ skewers, which were hearty and flavorful, with big chunks of chewy seitan, onion, and tomato in a spicy (almost too spicy) barbecue sauce. They were accompanied on one side by saffron rice and white beans (which were a little bland, but served to cut the spiciness of the skewers) and on the other by some more of those grilled shrooms, served with a maple dijon mustard sauce. All beautifully presented, as you can see here.

I didn't taste any of my mom's dish, which was "Pasta and Neat Balls" in a kalamata olive sauce, a flavor I don't care for. But I tried a smidgin of both Brian's and my dad's meals, and both were excellent. My dad got the "Angelica" sandwich, with smoked tofu, roasted veggies, cashew cheese, and lemon pesto on more of that chewy bread, which had plenty of flavor and a pleasing variety of textures. My normally tofu-skeptic father liked it so much that he wondered aloud whether it's possible to buy smoked tofu in stores, which we assured him it is—if not at the nearest Shop-Rite, then certainly at the Whole Earth Center.

Brian got the Deluxe Burger, which is the kind of veggie burger we both like best: one that doesn't try to taste like meat, but instead to create the most interesting possible combination of flavors and textures from veggies. It was a flavorful blend of lentils and mushrooms, served with grilled eggplant, onion, and other fixings on a tender sweet potato bun. For a side, he chose the sweet potato wedges with cashew cheese sauce, which was the only part of the meal I found less than extraordinary; it was just a mild white sauce, slightly salty, and I didn't feel like it really added anything to the dish. But everything else was delicious, and my meal was generous enough to leave me with leftovers for lunch today.

The atmosphere of the place was really interesting, too. It was obviously an old building, with lots of exposed brick, dark woodwork, brightly colored walls, and Tiffany chandeliers. Even in the rest room, the dividers between the toilets were dark wood with antique-looking brass fittings. And the dining area was spread across multiple levels. You enter at street level and descend to a below-ground-level bar area with some tables, and the main dining room is upstairs, with a couple of tables on a secondary level a little higher than that. I commented to my parents that the place looked as if it might have started life as a speakeasy. Altogether, a very congenial atmosphere for a meal, enhanced by our server, who was unbelievably pleasant and attentive.

I don't know what the bill came to since my dad picked up the tab, but based on the menu prices, it was probably around $110 with tax and tip — certainly less than the cost of my mom's and Brian's birthday dinner at The Blue Bottle, and I actually liked my dinner choice at this place better than that one. Although the place has a liquor license and some interesting-looking cocktails on the menu, we stuck to water and skipped dessert in favor of the chocolate cake with coconut frosting that Brian had made for me at home. (This time, he used plant butter instead of coconut oil in the frosting, which meant it didn't have quite as strong a coconut flavor, but the texture was creamier. And the cake itself was, in the words of the immortal Jonathan Coulton, delicious and moist.)

So, despite the minor setback with the bread, I'd say my first day as a vegan (okay, an imperfect vegan) was on the whole successful. Day two will continue with restaurant leftovers for lunch and, if all goes well, a birthday drink from Dunkin whenever we venture out into the snow to see if we can pre-order the new Critical Role book at our "friendly neighborhood game store." (It's not really in our neighborhood, but at least it's within a half-hour drive, which is better than some people have.)

Thrift Week 2020: The Vegan Challenge

For the past year or so, readers on this blog have been hearing all about my efforts to cut down on dairy products in order to reduce my carbon footprint and do my part to avert the climate change apocalypse. Brian has cheerfully joined in the process as well, switching to a homemade walnut milk for his morning cereal and learning to whip up a homemade vegan mozzarella that's both better and cheaper than any nondairy cheese at the store (though still quite a bit pricier than the real thing). As I've noted throughout these posts, Brian and I aren't really trying to eliminate all animal products from our diet; we have no plans to stop eating eggs, which have a pretty low carbon footprint, or honey, which actually does the environment good because of the pollination services provided by commercial beekeepers. We're even allowing ourselves the occasional portion of fish or free-range chicken. Our goal is mainly to get our use of the biggest carbon culprits — beef, dairy, and pork — as low as possible.

However, in the course of learning to eat this way, it's often happened that we found ourselves eating meals that were entirely vegan. For Brian, it's almost become a game to see how many days he can go without using any animal products at all in his cooking. And so, since I'm so fond of challenges (from rationing to local shopping to living on minimum wage), I started thinking about doing a one-week vegan challenge to see just how difficult it would be to go a full week without consuming any animal products. And then I thought, well, if I'm going to spend a week on this anyway, why not do it for Thrift Week and share information about how much it costs to eat like this?

So, starting today, I am going to become a vegan for a week. And each day, here on the blog, I'll relate what I ate that day, and how (if at all) it differed from what I would normally eat — in taste, preparation time, and cost.

At this point, I've been on the challenge less than one day, and so far, nothing has been all that different. Since I'd already switched to almond milk for my morning cocoa, the only thing I had to do differently was to switch out the Blue Bonnet spread I normally put on my toast (which is made mostly from vegetable oil, but contains some whey) for vegan Country Crock Plant Butter. Made from a blend of palm, canola, and avocado oil, this stuff has a taste and texture much more similar to real butter than the Blue Bonnet. It's harder at room temperature, so it takes a little more work to spread, but it actually melts more readily, disappearing into the warm toast within seconds.

Nutrition-wise, the plant butter has more fat and calories per tablespoon, and twice as much saturated fat (although it is trans-fat-free), so switching to this stuff on a regular basis probably wouldn't be a good move for my health. As for cost, we got the Country Crock with a "try it free" coupon from our local Stop & Shop, so technically I'm saving money by using it. But at full price, it would be roughly twice as expensive as the Blue Bonnet — so I don't think switching to it full-time would be a good value. Once this vegan week is over, I plan to go back to my mostly-nondairy spread and save this stuff for baking.

Brian realized last night that this "one-week" vegan challenge would actually have to start a day early for him, since whatever he cooked on Thursday would have to provide me with leftovers for Friday's lunch. So, after quickly evaluating what we had in the fridge, he cooked up a soup that we've had many times before: the Garlic, Chick-pea and Spinach Soup from Linda Fraser's Vegetarian. As written, this recipe calls for heavy cream (or, since it's a British cookbook, "double cream,") but he switched years ago to making it with coconut milk and found that it's just as good that way, if not better. It also works just fine with frozen spinach in place of fresh, and our Penzey's vegetable soup base, as always, makes a rich stock for it. So my lunch was a bowl of this hearty and flavorful soup, accompanied by a slice of Brian's whole-wheat bread, a clementine, a chocolate-chip cookie (made according to Brian's vegan-friendly recipe), and a cup of almond milk.

I had hoped to be able to write about putting my new, temporary vegan lifestyle to the test at Starbucks, where I'm entitled to a free drink on my birthday as a member of Starbucks Rewards. However, actually taking advantage of this offer has become very difficult. They used to send me a coupon for my free drink each year a few days before my birthday, and I would have a full week to cash it in whenever it was convenient. But in 2015, they cut the redemption period down to just four days, and as of 2018, my birthday drink is free only on my birthday itself. I can't wait until the weekend to swing by a Starbucks while out running errands with Brian, or even check the weather to determine which January day surrounding my birthday will have the most reasonable weather for a walk across the river to the nearest Starbucks; I have to cash it in on my actual birthday or miss out for the year.

With the unseasonably warm weather we were having earlier this week, I'd hoped that maybe this year the seventeenth of January might be a reasonably nice day for a walk—but instead, after nearly a week of highs in the fifties and sixties, today it was 30 degrees out with a steady 12-mile-per-hour wind. Yeah, that's the way I want to spend my birthday. In theory, I could take a bus to New Brunswick, but the fare would offset the value of the free drink, so what's the point?

I had even worse luck with the Baskin-Robbins Birthday Club, which is supposed to entitle me to a free scoop every year. I was looking forward to trying out their new vegan chocolate chip cookie dough flavor, but this year, they never sent me a coupon for my free birthday scoop at all. Brian never got his for his birthday last month, either, so this appears to be a site-wide problem. We both checked our spam folders, and the coupons hadn't ended up there; I checked the website, and it confirmed that I'm still registered for the program; I even sent an email to customer service, and they never responded. Maybe they've decided that Brian and I are simply too old to be entitled to free ice cream on our birthdays anymore, but they might have had the decency to tell us so.

Still, all is not lost on the free goodies front. Dunkin Donuts, bless their hearts, came through with their coupon for a free birthday drink as usual, and I have until next Wednesday to use it. And my parents are also treating me to a dinner out for my birthday as they do every year, so I've requested to check out Veganized, an all-vegan restaurant in New Brunswick that gets mostly good reviews on Yelp. (The general consensus seems to be that the food is very good, but you may have to wait quite a while before you get it.) Check back tomorrow for my review of the place.

And now, time for my regular afternoon snack. Popcorn with olive oil and salt for the win.

Money Crashers: How to Save Up to $1,465 per Year Shopping Online With Coupon Codes

The Money Crashers posting frenzy continues! Today, they published a piece I wrote last summer on coupon codes. While I'm not a big user of in-store coupons, which don't generally sync up well with my eating and shopping habits, I do generally make the effort to search for coupon codes when I buy something online. It only takes a minute to search for a coupon code (or, if you use a browser add-on like Honey, not even that), and while you don't always find one, if you do you can usually save several bucks instead of a dollar or less. There's really no downside.

In this piece, I discuss all the ins and outs of coupon code use: how much you can really save this way, which types of items tend to have the best coupon codes, and how to maximize your savings.
Forget extreme couponing — I'm all about lazy couponing.

How to Save Up to $1,465 per Year Shopping Online With Coupon Codes 

Money Crashers: Two kid-themed articles

The new articles on Money Crashers just keep popping. Today, two articles on gift ideas for kids that didn't quite make it in time for the holiday season hit the site. The first, 15 Best Magazine Subscriptions for Kids of All Ages, names the best magazines for different age groups — preschool, primary school, tweens, and teens — based on recommendations from parents, booksellers, and educators. Getting your kids hooked on one of these magazines (such as Cricket, which I avidly read from ages 6 through 16) is a great way to give them the gift of a lifelong love of reading, which will stand them in good stead in school and throughout their lives.

The second article, 13 Subscription Gift Boxes for Kids That Keep on Giving, is about subscriptions of a different sort: those monthly boxes that give you a new surprise treat every month. Personally, I've never found one of these I considered to be a good value for me as an adult, but I can see how they could make great gifts for kids. Instead of giving a child just one toy, which that may or may not be a hit, you can give them a whole new surprise to open to each month. If one of them turns out to be less than exciting, perhaps the next will be better — plus they get the pleasure of anticipating the next one all month long. These 13 subscription boxes — featuring child-friendly clothing, books, toys, and educational activities — are parents' favorites.

Money Crashers: 4 new articles

In the past two days, a whole bunch of my backlogged articles that have been sitting on Money Crashers' back burner have popped to the front. Here's a quick rundown of what you can now find on the site to inform and entertain you:

12 Best Financial Podcasts About Money, Business & Investing in 2020

Money Crashers already had articles about the best personal finance books and TV shows, but none about the most modern medium for learning about financial topics, podcasts. This piece remedies that, providing a roundup of the 12 most useful podcasts for learning about a variety of topics: general personal finance, business, investing, and FIRE (for Financial Independence Retire Early).

Podcasts are handy because you can listen to them hands-free while you're doing something else, like driving or doing laundry. I personally like to turn one on every day while I shower. When I started this piece, I didn't have one for every day of the week, so I took advantage of the research process to explore several and discovered two new favorites, "Planet Money" and its shorter sister podcast, "The Indicator," which are now part of my regular rotation. (I liked the one episode of the Tim Ferris Podcast I listened to as well, but it's far too long for me to tune in every week.)

10 Inexpensive Yet Romantic Valentine’s Day Date Ideas

Money Crashers has evidently learned its lesson since the time it published one of my holiday articles a mere three days before Christmas, when Hanukkah was already over. It's now fast-tracking all pieces that are time-sensitive, which means this roundup of tips for inexpensive Valentine's Day dates is actually out in plenty of time for Valentine's Day. It counters the advertisers' messages about what a romantic date "should" be (a lavish dinner at a four-star restaurant, a weekend getaway at a charming B&B, a hot-air balloon ride) with budget-friendly options for dining and entertainment, whether you're looking for a night out on the town or a cozy evening at home.

10 Ways to Enjoy a Romantic Weekend Getaway for Less

Continuing in the romantic vein, this article on romantic weekend getaways had been in the pipeline since last August, but the impending arrival of Valentine's Day finally gave Money Crashers and incentive to push it out of the "to edit" folder where it had been languishing for months. So if you've been thinking this year's Valentine's Day weekend would be a nice opportunity for a romantic getaway with your partner, but you just don't think you can afford it, this article comes right on time for you. It explains how you can plan the weekend getaway of your dreams on a tighter budget by thinking outside the box about where you go, how you get there, and what you do while you’re away.

Estate & Inheritance Tax – Threshold, Rates & Calculating How Much You Owe

And now for something completely unromantic: estate and inheritance taxes. As the old saying goes, nothing's certain except death and taxes, and nobody likes either one. However, the combination of the two — estate and inheritance taxes — is easier to avoid than most people realize. Both the federal estate tax and state inheritance and estate taxes (in the states that have them) are steeply progressive, hitting only the richest of the rich. And even for them, it's possible to minimize the tax with careful planning. Here, I explain in detail how the federal estate tax works, what is and isn't included, the difference between an estate tax and an inheritance tax, which states have each kind, and how to plan ahead so that taxes will hit your heirs as lightly as possible. (Personally, I'm on board with the 50 percent of Americans who think the estate tax has already been cut too much and we really need to push it back up a bit — but I'm willing to concede that until the government gets around to doing that, there's no reason to make your heirs pay more than they actually have to.)

Fix the climate and get free money

Most of the time, I use this blog to tell you about two kinds of things:

1. Ways to save money that are also good for the environment, and
2. Ways to help the environment without spending more money.

This week's topic is sort of in between the two. It's something you can do to help the environment that doesn't cost you any money right now, and that could help put a little more money in your pocket in the long run. The only catch is, it requires cooperation from Congress, which isn't easy to get these days. But that's where you come in.

The item in question is the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act, currently before the House as H.R. 763. Its supporters are billing it as a "bipartisan climate solution," but that's a bit of an exaggeration; to date, it has exactly one Republican cosponsor (Francis Rooney of Florida), along with 74 Democrats. Which is a pity, because in theory, it's the kind of market-based solution Republicans are supposed to love.

See, one of the big problems with greenhouse gas pollution is that the people doing most of the polluting aren't the ones paying the biggest price in terms of climate change. That burden is falling largely on developing countries, where homes are threatened by sea level rise, crops are threatened by unstable weather patterns, and lives are threatened by severe storms. The problem is, so long as fossil fuels remain cheap to produce and use, folks in developed countries have no incentive (or at least, not enough incentive) to switch to more sustainable forms of energy.

The easiest way to provide this incentive is to simply make fossil fuels more expensive. Add a fee based on the amount of carbon they contain, charged right at the source (the coal mine, oil refinery, or gas pipeline). This immediately makes fossil fuels less profitable for producers — and if they try to compensate by charging more for them, it makes them more expensive for consumers, who will respond by consuming less of them. In short, you bring the market price in line with the actual amount of social harm, and let Adam Smith's invisible hand take care of the rest.

Now, of course, this has a catch for consumers: It makes it more expensive to heat your home or put gas in your car. And while that gives you an incentive to drive less or turn down the thermostat, there's only so much of that you can do. So if this bill were simply a tax on carbon, it would put a burden on all consumers, and especially on the working class, who spend more of their income on fuel than others.

However, that's where the dividend part comes in. Because the beauty of this bill is that all the money collected in carbon fees goes directly to American households as a monthly dividend. And this dividend is exactly equal for every household, rich and poor. And while poor people spend a larger share of their income on fuel, still use less of it in absolute terms than rich people — which means that they will, on average, come out ahead. And since middle-class Americans can to some extent control how much they spend on fossil fuels, they can pretty easily game this system so that they also collect more than they pay out

In fact, according to the creators of the bill, the "average" American will come out ahead as a result of this bill, to the tune of an extra $500 per year. This, in turn, will allegedly stimulate the economy, creating as many as 2.1 million new jobs. Now, this is probably an overly optimistic estimate, but it's not unrealistic to say that the average American family will end up with more money in their pocket as a result of the dividend. Canada already has a system much like this one, adopted in 2018, and the government estimates that in its first year, the average Canadian household would pay between $244 and $403 extra for fuel — and collect between $300 and $598 in dividends. And this cash bonus will only grow as the carbon fee rises over time.

If you'd like to see how just how the carbon dividend would affect you financially, there's a section on the bill's website where you can do that. Just answer a few questions about your lifestyle (household size, home and car type, average monthly energy bills), and it gives you a back-of-the envelope estimate of how much you would pay in increased energy costs and how much you would get back in dividends. I put in the numbers for me and Brian, and it estimated that we would pay an extra $29 per month in fuel costs, but would get back $34 per month from the dividend, for a net gain of $5. It's not much, but we certainly wouldn't be any worse off — and if it helps keep New Jersey from sinking into the ocean, that would definitely be a big benefit for us.

So what can you do to help make this happen? Well, first of all, you can write to your senators and representative urging them to support the bill. There are sample letters on the website of the Climate Change Lobby (CCL). This will be particularly helpful if any of your legislators happen to be Republicans, since we're going to need a lot more of them on board to get this thing through Congress. You can also, if you are so inclined, sign up for the CCL's mailing list to learn about future actions that can help, or even join a local chapter of the CCL to participate in more focused campaigns of calling, lobbying, and writing op-eds.

Also, if you happen to be the head of an organization or another "prominent individual" (the CCL counts anyone who owns a business, even a small one, as a prominent individual), you can publicly endorse the bill and spread the word about it to all your followers on social media. (Heck, even if you're not a prominent individual, you can do that — it's basically what I'm doing right now.)

Basically, just keep pestering the heck out of all your legislators, and spreading the word about the bill and the benefits of carbon pricing to everyone else you know. It's the kind of climate legislation even a climate skeptic can love, because hey, who's going to say no to free money?

Money Crashers: 12 Ideas to Save on Super Bowl Party Food, Recipes & Supplies

It looks like the key to getting Money Crashers to publish my articles instead of sitting on them for months (or years) is to write about topics that are time-sensitive. Like, for instance, this article about how to host a Super Bowl party on a budget. I started on the assignment ten days ago, and it's already live on the site.

Which is good news for you, too, if you happen to be planning to have friends over for the game. A 2018 survey found the average Super Bowl party host spends $207 on the event, but this article can help you do it for much less. It covers such ideas as:

• Reusable dishes
• Dollar-store decorations
• Homemade snacks
• The power of potluck
• Keg vs. canned beer pricing
• Festive and colorful party punches

All this and more! Check it out here: 12 Ideas to Save on Super Bowl Party Food, Recipes & Supplies

How to (maybe) repair a vinyl window shade

This week, the repair or replace dilemma reared its ugly head once again. This time, the culprit was the vinyl window shade in our bathroom. The only window in the bathroom is right in the tub, where it's regularly exposed to high levels of heat and moisture from the shower, which have apparently caused its vinyl material to pucker and warp slightly. This, in turn, resulted in a couple of small tears along the bottom seam, one of which has grown gradually bigger because I occasionally snagged it while squeegeeing the walls. Last week, after discovering that mildew was proliferating along these torn edges, I finally decided the problem had reached the point that we had to either repair the shade somehow or replace it. But which?

On the one hand, a new shade wouldn't be all that expensive. This one only cost around $10, but it also hadn't held up very well — so spending $10 another one just like it would probably mean resigning ourselves to spending another $10 on a replacement every year or so. Sure, we could easily afford that, but it seemed wasteful, particularly when the only part of the shade that's damaged is the bottom seam. There was still more than enough good material on the roller to cover the window, and it seemed ridiculous to just throw it away.

However, to get our money's worth out of this this still-useful material, we'd have to find some way to mend that tear, and that wasn't as simple a job as it sounded. When we encountered this same problem with our old bedroom window shade, we fixed it by applying a long strip of duct tape along the entire bottom seam, which enabled us to get another year or two of use out of the shade before the roller mechanism went kaput. But that was a blackout shade, so the duct tape applied to the back of the shade didn't actually show on the inside. This one is a translucent "light filtering" shade, so the duct tape would definitely be visible through the material. Plus, duct tape doesn't really hold up that well to moisture, so this would only be a short-term fix at best.

We've also tried fixing this problem on a bathroom shade with our hot glue gun. We cut off the damaged bottom portion of the shade, then put a dowel along the bottom edge to weigh it down, rolled up the vinyl material around it, and used hot glue to create a new seam. That repair held for a little while, but it didn't take long for heat and moisture to
loosen the glue's hold on the vinyl, and we eventually had to scrap the shade entirely and replace it with this one. So that, once again, was at best a short-term solution.

Thinking that there must surely be some kind of adhesive that could hold up in wet conditions, I started searching around online, and I discovered Tear-Aid Vinyl Repair. The manufacturer claims, and reviewers confirm, that this stuff can make a torn inflatable raft seaworthy again, so it seemed it should certainly be able to hold up on a vinyl shade that's only getting splashed with water, not submerged. And it was available at Dick's Sporting Goods, which is within striking distance of other stores where we shop regularly. The only catch: it was $10 for a kit that contained just one large patch (3" by 12"), one medium (1 3/8" square), and one small (7/8"). It would be good for maybe two or three repairs — if it worked at all. Was it worth the investment when we could just spend $10 on a new shade and be done with it?

Applying the guidelines I learned from Jeff Yeager, I decided that the answer was probably yes. For a tear this small, I reasoned, the $10 kit should be good for at least two repairs, which meant that the cost of the repair was only half the cost of the replacement. Spending $10 to replace both this shade and the next one that developed a tear would be cheaper than spending $20 to replace them both, not to mention less wasteful. So during our Saturday round of grocery shopping, we swung by Dick's and picked up a box of the Tear-Aid to attempt the repair.

However, when we opened the box, we realized there was an additional problem. According to the package, the kit was supposed to contain three patches, a 12" "reinforcement filament" for repairing tears on edges (like the one we had), two alcohol prep pads, and a set of instructions. That didn't sound like a very good value for $10, but we hadn't gotten even that much. Our kit contained only the large patch, the small patch, and the instructions — no medium patch, no reinforcement, no alcohol prep pads. It would still be enough to complete this one repair, but it might not be enough for even one more.

Our first instinct was to go back to Dick's and return it. But there were two problems with that: first, we'd already cut the small patch in two (to repair the smaller tear) before realizing the other parts were missing, so technically, we'd already used the kit at this point. And second, if we did go all the way back to Dick's the next day to return the kit, then what? Exchange it for another one that might also be defective? Or go back to the drawing board looking for something else we could use? I did manage to track down another product, Gear Aid Repair Tape, that might work, but it was only available at REI. The nearest store was in Princeton, which meant we'd probably have to wait until Thursday to pick it up. Faced with the choice of making a second trip to return the Tear-Aid, then yet another to pick up the alternative product (if it was available) and having to wait at least a week before we could attempt the repair again, or simply moving forward with the bird in the hand and getting the stupid thing fixed today, Brian decided to treat the $10 we'd spent as a sunk cost and forge ahead.

Even with the product in hand, however, it took us two attempts to actually make the repair. The first time we tried it, even though we'd allowed the shade to dry for a full 24 hours and it felt completely dry to the touch, the minute Brian tried to apply the patch to it, water squeezed out of the seam. He kept wiping it off and then trying again, and each time, water continued to squeeze out. Eventually, the small patch he'd cut (from half of the small one we'd been provided) was completely useless, and he just had to throw it out. So he had to hang the shade back up and gave it another 24 hours to dry, then tested the seam thoroughly to make sure there was no water left in it before attempting the repair again.

This time, fortunately, it went off without a hitch. First, after wiping the shade down with alcohol, he carefully applied the other half of the small patch to the small tear on the right side. This tear was small enough that even this tiny patch was big enough to wrap around to the back of the shade, sealing it on both sides. He also used scissors to round off the corners on the patch before applying it, so there would be no sharp edges for a squeegee or a fingernail to snag on and pull them loose.

Then, he cut a strip off the large patch that was just big enough to cover the larger tear — on one side, not both. Once again, he rounded off the corners before applying this patch to the front of the shade. Then he cut another one the same size, rounded it off similarly, and applied it to the back. This was less fiddly than trying to wrap the material around, and it seems about as secure. The repair isn't flawless — if you look carefully, you can still see the tear — but as long as it holds up, we won't complain. (We're giving it the rest of the day to dry before getting it wet, though, just to give it as good a chance as possible.)

So did we make the right choice? I guess it's too soon to say. We'll need to see how well this repair holds up, and compare it with how long the new shade took to get damaged in the first place. But one thing I can say for sure is that if I had to try it again, I wouldn't buy Tear-Aid. I'd wait until we could hit an REI and try the Gear Aid tape. It might not work as well, but it gives you nearly twice as much material (20" by 3") for half as much money — and since there's only one roll in the box, you know you're actually getting everything you pay for.

A DIY travel toothbrush holder

Back when my purse was stolen in 2018, one of the things I lost was a little travel toothbrush. It isn't often that I need to clean my teeth while out and about, but it has certainly come in handy at least a couple of times — when crashing at a friend's house, for instance, or after eating something sticky that I really want to remove right away. Fortunately, the toothbrush I'd lost came as part of a set of two, so I simply took its mate from the overnight bag where it had been living and transferred it to my new purse. Then I took one of the free toothbrushes I'd received from the dentist (which we don't normally use, since we prefer the kind with replaceable heads, but have saved a few of to accommodate unexpected overnight guests) and put it in the overnight bag to replace the travel one.

This worked out fine, except for one problem: a toothbrush isn't the easiest thing to store in a toiletry kit. Brian has a long plastic container (like these) that he keeps his in, but it's a bit bulky, and anyway, it seems to be so I thought maybe I could get away with just keeping mine in the plastic-and-cardboard packaging it came in, held closed with a rubber band. And that worked okay for a while, but over a year or so of use, the cardboard slowly started to disintegrate. By the time we took it on our recent trip to Indiana, it had become so soggy that I had to tear off the bottom part of the cardboard, and it seemed clear that the top part would soon follow. So if I wanted to keep my toothbrush clean and non-grubby, I was going to need a better solution pretty soon.

The simplest approach, of course, would have been to simply use the travel toothbrush I already had in my purse while on vacation. But since I'd already started using the non-travel one, I thought I'd prefer to continue using it while it still had some life in it. What I really wanted was one of those little snap-on plastic things that covers just the head of the toothbrush to protect it (like these), taking up less room than a case that holds the entire toothbrush. There were some of these at the local drugstore, but they cost more than I expected, and they all came in packages of three or four, when I only needed one. Buying three unnecessary plastic objects in order to get the one I wanted seemed pretty pointless and anti-ecofrugal, so we came home without buying anything.

Back at my in-laws' house, I started rooting through my toiletry bag, looking for something else — a plastic bag, a container, something — that could do the job I wanted done. My eye lit on my little travel-size container of dental floss (another freebie from the dentist), and I thought, hmm... this is about the same size as one of those snap-on toothbrush covers, and removing the little metal piece that dispenses the floss would probably leave a space big enough for the handle. Could it work?

The answer turned out to be yes — with a little modification. Once I used up the last of the floss, I pried open the container and found that there were two parts I'd have to remove: a set of little plastic prongs that held the floss spool, and a plastic lip that the metal dispenser was attached to. But the prongs turned out to snap off easily, and Brian was able to score the other plastic bit with a utility knife and snap it off as well. This left an empty shell that, as I predicted, was easily able to accommodate my toothbrush.

As ecofrugal accomplishments go, this wasn't a huge one. It only saved us a few bucks, and it wasn't something I absolutely needed in the first place, since I could have just tossed the big toothbrush and made do with the travel one. But as an illustration of the ecofrugal philosophy, "Waste not, want not," it's hard to beat. Rather than simply buying the thing I wanted (along with three things I didn't want, which would just create waste), I found a way to make it out of something that had cost me nothing, and that would have just ended up in the landfill itself. It's exactly the kind of small victory that makes up the ecofrugal life — and thus, I thought, an ideal project to share with you all as a start to 2020. Here's to a year of many more scraps salvaged, dollars saved, and precious ounces shaved off the old carbon footprint.