Money Crashers: 17 Benefits of Having a Dog

My latest Money Crashers article is a companion piece to my last one on the costs of owning a dog. Having examined the costs, it was only fair to examine the benefits as well — and there are lots of them, with actual scientific studies to back them up. Among other things, the piece discusses how having a dog in the home can:

• Get you to exercise more
• Lower your blood pressure
• Reduce your stress levels
• Improve self-esteem
• Help you make new friends
• Strengthen existing relationships
• Protect you from burglary
• Teach responsibility to kids

Learning all this wasn't enough to convince me that it's time for us to adopt a dog, especially since some of the studies suggest our two kitties can provide many of the same benefits. But it has made me look more positively on the idea of getting one some time down the road, perhaps after Brian has retired (or at least reduced work hours) and can take a bigger role in its day-to-day care.

17 Benefits of Having / Owning a Dog – Can It Save You Money & Health?

Money Crashers: How Much Does a Dog Really Cost?

Although Brian and I both grew up with dogs in our homes, we've never had a dog of our own. From time to time we've thought about adopting one, but we keep concluding that we're not ready for the commitment involved. Because there’s no way around it, a dog is more work than a cat. It needs more space, and it has to be let outside or taken for walks instead of just using a box to do its business. And whenever we went on a trip, we’d have to put the dog in a kennel, instead of just having someone come in every day or two to tend to it, like we do with the cats. It’s a responsibility we just don’t feel ready to take on right now.

When we think about getting a dog, it's the time commitment that deters us more than the financial cost. But that's not trivial, either. According to the 2017-2018 National Pet Owners Survey conducted by the American Pet Products Association (APPA), the average dog owner spends $2,883 a year on their pet. That cost includes $235 a year for food, $109 for grooming, $322 for kennel boarding, $257 for routine vet visits, and over $1,000 for other veterinary care — sick visits, emergency care, medications, and surgeries.

However, these costs are only averages. In some areas, it's possible to spend significantly less without any risk to your dog's health or happiness. At the same time, there are other areas in which it definitely doesn't make sense to cut corners. The trick is knowing where to save and where to splurge.

That's what my latest Money Crashers article is all about. I go into the costs of owning a dog, then examine ways to cut these costs where appropriate (like grooming and training). I also talk about the areas where it often makes sense to spend more (like food and veterinary care), and about ways to keep these expenses under control without harming your pet. I hope it will come in handy for all the dog owners and potential dog owners out there — and someday for me and Brian, perhaps when we've retired and have more time to spare.

How Much Does a Dog Really Cost? – Where to Save & Where to Splurge

Vegan Recipe of the Month: Layered Noodle Dish

When I first picked up our new vegan cookbook at Half Price Books on our last trip to Indianapolis, one of the recipes in it that caught my eye was the Layered Noodle Dish on page 147. It called for veggie sausage, eggplant, onion, tomato sauce, and lasagna noodles — all things I like, and things that seem like their flavors would be compatible together. I didn't see how it could possibly fail to be tasty.

So, this week, Brian gave it a try. He picked up an eggplant specifically for the purpose and used our favorite Gimme Lean veggie sausage. The only change he made to the recipe was to substitute roasted-garlic pasta sauce in place of the plain tomato sauce that the recipe called for. (We'd inherited this jar of sauce from my folks, who bought it by mistake, and since we basically never eat pasta with plain red sauce, he didn't think we were likely to have any other chances to use it.) The recipe called for two 15-ounce cans of tomato sauce; Brian made only a half recipe, but because he was using a thicker sauce, he still had to use roughly 20 ounces of the jarred sauce to coat the noodles fully. So the version he ended up making was proportionally saucier than the original recipe.

The recipe, in brief, goes like this: You sauté half a pound of veggie sausage, a pound of peeled and cubed eggplant, and a finely chopped onion together in a cup of vegetable broth. Cook it for a good 15 minutes, until everything is softened. Then layer it in a pan with cooked lasagna noodles and sauce, in this order: sauce, noodles, veggies, sauce, noodles, veggies, sauce, noodles, sauce. Then stick the whole thing in the oven and bake it for 20 minutes at 350. I'm not sure why this last step is necessary, since the noodles, veggies, and sausage are all cooked already, but maybe the idea is to let the flavors blend more, or something.

Anyway, it came out of the oven looking kind of like a naked lasagna without the cheese. However, it wasn't as easy to slice as a lasagna, because without the cheese, there was really nothing to hold it together. You had to sort of go through one layer, then pin down that top layer with a fork while you worked your way through the next one.

Once we'd managed to get the food dished out, it tasted fine, much as I'd surmised it would based on the recipe. The eggplant was tender, the sausage was savory, and the roasted-garlic sauce probably tasted better than plain tomato sauce would have. However, I couldn't really see that cooking the dish in this layered form had done anything to make those ingredients work any better together. In fact, it was kind of a disadvantage, since the slippery, lasagna-style layers were harder to eat than a normal pasta dish. Both Brian and I ended up spilling pieces off our forks at least once because it didn't hang together well. It would probably have worked much better to cook the eggplant, onion, and sausage as directed, stir in the tomato sauce, heat it through, and then just serve it over a regular pasta like penne or rotelle.

The layered dish didn't improve with age, either. As it sat in the fridge over the next couple of days, the noodles — which were still largely exposed, despite all the sauce Brian had put on them — started to dry out, making the dish even harder to slice and serve. The first time I tried to reheat some for lunch, I gave up entirely on trying to eat it as a layered dish and instead sliced it into the smallest pieces I could manage with a knife. So basically, I just ended up turning it into a regular pasta dish with smaller noodles, and it would have been a lot easier to make it that way in the first place.

So, bottom line, we definitely won't be making this again in the layered form the recipe calls for. And while we could make it as a standard pasta-plus-sauce dish, there's not much advantage to doing so. We already have a recipe for pasta melanzane, with cooked eggplant, tomato, and mozzarella, and we've already tried making that without the cheese and found it's still fine that way, so all we'd be doing is adding veggie sausage to it. That does have the advantage of making it a heartier dish with some extra protein, but it isn't really necessary for flavor; it's not even a noticeable improvement.

So at most, all we've learned from this recipe is that we can, if necessary, add veggie sausage to our regular eggplant pasta to give it a protein boost. Which I guess is a reasonably useful thing to know, but not exactly the same thing as a new dish to add to our repertoire. Better luck next month, I guess.

Money Crashers: Luxury Items for Less

Being ecofrugal, as I've often said, isn't simply about spending as little money as possible; it's about getting the best value for the money you spend. In many cases, spending more money up front is the smart choice, because it gets you a better product that will last longer (so you spend less in the long run) or work better (so you spend less money and time repairing it) or simply work better.

But paying more for quality only makes sense if you actually get what you pay for. And with many products — particularly luxury products — you don't.

My latest Money Crashers article is about four types of luxury products that aren't actually worth the money you spend on them, and about four alternatives that offer you better value:

• Lab-grown diamonds (as opposed to mined gemstones);
• Online opticians (as opposed to the uniformly pricey eyewear sold in stores);
• Inexpensive wines (which often taste as good as the fancy stuff or better); and
• Drugstore shampoos (which have the same ingredients as the expensive salon brands).

I realize it's unlikely that any of my ecofrugal readers are regular buyers of any of these luxury goods in the first place. But for anyone who's been assuming that spending more for fine wine or salon shampoo was a worthwhile investment because you get more for your dollar, this article should be an eye opener. And for those who don't buy these pricey items, but have sometimes wondered if they should, it should provide a very satisfying sense of justification.

Luxury Items for Less: 4 Affordable Alternatives to Luxury Goods

Cheap tools for role-playing games, part 2

This year for my birthday, Brian took me to The Only Game in Town in Somerville, the closest thing we have these days to a local game store. We were there not to shop for games, however, but to pre-order the new Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, an official Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) guide based on the setting of our favorite show in any medium, Critical Role. We have been Critters (the cute name for fans of the show) for several years and already have the earlier campaign guide based on the show, so as soon as I heard about this new one, that was the only birthday gift I really wanted. (We could have ordered it online, but Matt Mercer, the creator of this imaginary world, urged all Critters to buy it from their neighborhood game stores if possible, and, well, we don't argue with Mercer.) We can go back to pick up the book as soon as it comes out in mid-March.

Then, for Valentine's Day, Brian followed up by presenting me with this card (S.W.A.K. stands for "Sealed with a Kobold"):

And inside, it said this:

In short, just as he promised me a rose garden four years ago, this year he was promising me something even better: a D&D campaign based on the Wildemount setting.

Of course, he can't really start planning this campaign until we actually have the new book, so it will take a while for this gift to come to fruition. But he's already started planning ahead by coming up with some improvements to the paper minis he designed for our last, sadly short-lived D&D campaign. Those minis were printed out on a PDF, "laminated" with packing tape, and then placed in stands made from little binder clips. They were cheap and compact, but they had some shortcomings. First of all, it was a fair amount of work to print out and laminate all the monster minis that might potentially be needed for a given game session — and even with all that work, you couldn't be sure of having every mini you needed. If the druid decides to turn into a rhinoceros, or the wizard polymorphs one of her enemies into a snail, it's unlikely you'll have that particular image ready to hand. Also, while the pieces of paper could be scaled up to represent larger creatures, the big binder clips weren't all that much larger than the small ones, so the amount of space the minis took up on the board didn't really reflect the creatures' actual size.

So for this new campaign, he's decided to go with a different, equally cheap and simple design. The minis are still printed out on paper, but they're now simply folded over and taped to a flat, round base of some sort. For these sample minis he made, he used pennies for the humans, which are size Medium in game terms; a poker chip for the horse, which is size Large; and the lid from an empty jar of peanuts for the dragon, size Huge. Should he need to make larger or smaller creatures, he could find appropriately scaled, inexpensive bases for them as well. The lid from a peanut butter jar would probably work for a Gargantuan creature (the largest in the game), while little sequins could work for Small and Tiny ones.

These new minis are less sturdy than the old ones, but since most of the monsters in a game only show up once, they don't actually have to hold up well over time. And they have several advantages over the old design:

1. They're easy to assemble. All that's required is a single piece of tape, doubled over (or a piece of double-sided tape, if you have it) to attach the printed pieces to the bases. And once you're done with a monster, you can disassemble it just as quickly to reuse the base for something else. And you still have the option of laminating the minis you use for your PCs (player characters), which have to last through multiple games, while using plain paper for the others.

2. They're compact. The flat bases used for these minis take up even less room in a box than the binder-clip bases used for the others, and much less room than three-dimensional commercial minis.

3. They're appropriately sized. Each of these minis has a round base that takes up the appropriate amount of space on the battle map for a creature of its size, unlike the binder-clip bases for the old ones. This makes it much easier to visualize, for instance, how many PCs can surround and attack the dragon at once.

4. You can create them on the fly. If you find you need a mini that you don't happen to have, you can just grab a blank one, draw a little image on it (with a label, if your drawing isn't good enough to be identifiable) and tape it to a base. The little "Sir Stick" that Brian has added to the collection above is an example.

5. This is perhaps the best feature of all: You can write directly on the minis. This has all kinds of useful applications. For instance, if you have a whole bunch of identical monsters, you can number them, so that you can easily tell which monster is attacking or being attacked by which PC. With his old minis, Brian would often add numbers to the PDF if he was printing out, say, a horde of skeletons, but this was a bit of a pain to do; with these new ones, you can add the numbering on the spot. You can also use the base of the mini to keep track of any conditions affecting a creature, such as "poisoned" or "restrained." (With laminated PC minis, you can add notations like this with a dry-erase marker.) And, if a creature is flying, you can use a pencil to mark just how high the creature is off the ground, so you don't need to contrive elaborate "flying stands" to raise the minis off the board.

6. However, if you prefer to use a flying stand, these round minis fit very neatly on top of a simple, inverted drinking glass, as shown here with the dragon. Because the glass is clear, you can see the terrain of the board through it and even put other minis under it if they want to attack from below.

For each game session, Brian can create pages with all the minis he expects to need in Inkscape, a free page-layout program. (Here's a sample.) However, his ultimate goal is to come up with some sort of script, perhaps in Python, that can create them automatically. If this works, all he'll have to do is provide the images he wants to use, the number of each creature to print, and the size they should be, and the script will generate the PDFs for him, ready to print.

With these printable minis, his picture-frame battle map, his homemade cardboard GM screen, his turn order cards, and his turn and ability cards, Brian has all the tools he needs to create a memorable Wildemount campaign. Now all we need is the book...and, ideally, some players who can make it to a game session more regularly than once a month.

Toothbrush dilemma

Recently, I was asked to contribute to an article for The Savvy Retiree on ways for retirees to save money at home with small, eco-friendly changes. This is right in my ecofrugal wheelhouse, so I was happy to provide input. I answered the first question, about products for the kitchen, by recommending rags to replace paper towels and a water filter to eliminate the need for bottled water, with some rough estimates for cost savings with each one. And in answer to a question about products for the bathroom, I planned to recommend my trusty Fuchs Ecotek toothbrush with the replaceable head, which both Brian and I have been using for years now. I have always considered this toothbrush a model of ecofrugal design because it allows you to replace only the part that actually wears out, the bristles, rather than forcing you to discard a handle that's still perfectly good as well. And it also saves you money because the replacement heads cost less than most new toothbrushes — although, since they're hard to find in stores, you often have to buy online and pay shipping costs.

Since I wanted to give readers good information about cost savings, I figured I should check the current price of Ecotek replacement heads online, including shipping, and compare that to the average cost of a new toothbrush. And there I ran into a problem. When I went to the site where we most recently purchased Ecotek toothbrush heads, iHerb, it appeared they were no longer available. I tried searching other sites, including Amazon, and still came up blank. And when I went to the manufacturer's website and clicked "buy now," it took me to a page with a description of the toothbrush but nothing actually available for sale. I was eventually forced to the conclusion that this old standby of my ecofrugal life simply wasn't available anymore.

This left me with two problems. The first, figuring out what to put in the Savvy Retiree article, was fairly simple; I simply recommended my cleaning hack with the combination of vinegar and dish soap in a scrubbing wand. But the second was a much bigger dilemma: Where was I going find a new toothbrush?

Fortunately, this wasn't an imminent need. In recent years, I'd taken to buying my Ecotek replacement heads in bulk to save on shipping, so I currently have five replacement heads squirreled away. And since I just replaced the head on my toothbrush this week, those should hold us for around nine months. But once those are gone, our long-serving toothbrush handles will become useless, and we'll both need new toothbrushes. So what would be the most ecofrugal model to replace them?

My first thought was to go looking for another toothbrush similar to the Ecotek, with a reusable handle and replaceable heads. And at first, I thought I'd found it in the Eco-Dent TerrAdenT, which has a snap-out head much like the Ecotek's. The manufacturer claims, "With TerrAdenT you save the handle and only need to purchase replacement heads in convenient multi-head packs" — exactly what I was looking for. But there was a problem: when I looked for these "convenient multi-head packs" online, I couldn't find them anywhere. Eco-Dent sold refills for the child-sized version of the TerrAdenT, but the adult-sized toothbrushes came only in packages with one full toothbrush and a single replacement head. So instead of being able to keep the same handle indefinitely — as the manufacturer claimed, and as I'd done for years with my Ecotek — I could replace the head exactly once with these tootbrushes before being forced to discard the whole thing and start over. The TerrAdenT, in short, would cut my toothbrush waste (including packaging waste) by less than half. And at $7 (not including shipping) for each toothbrush-plus-extra-head combo, they weren't even any cheaper than regular toothbrushes from the drugstore.

Eventually, I was able to track down one toothbrush with the same ecofrugal design as my old one: the Snap toothbrush from Greener Step. Available only from the manufacturer, it would cost us $19.95 for a "value pack" of two handles and 12 toothbrush heads. Add in $3.50 for flat-rate shipping, and it would come to roughly $2 per toothbrush — more than we'd been paying for the Ecotek, but it's less than the price of most toothbrushes sold in stores. After that, replacement heads in six-packs would cost $9.95 each, so if we bought two six-packs at a time we could keep the price steady. And the packaging, Greener Step assures, is "100% recyclable" — though that could just mean it's made from some kind of plastic that can theoretically be recycled, but isn't actually accepted by any program in our state.

The Snap toothbrush handles have a curvier shape that wouldn't fit our old toothbrush holder, but we've got a household hack to fix that problem. The bigger problem is availability. With these toothbrushes available only online and from the manufacturer, we'd be entirely dependent on this one source for our replacement toothbrushes. If Greener Step went belly-up at any point — an all-too-plausible scenario — we'd be back to square one.

Still, this would clearly look like the best possible option if not for one thing. While stumbling around the Internet in search of lower-waste toothbrushes, I happened across a whole slew of toothbrushes online with handles made from sustainable, biodegradable bamboo. And these supposedly eco-friendly toothbrushes are much cheaper than the Snap or even the Ecotek — as little as 60 cents each when you buy them in bulk. They generally get good ratings from users. They're easy to find online, so even if one brand were to become unavailable, there would still be plenty of others. The packaging they come in is generally recyclable. And the handles would actually fit in our toothbrush holders.

Of course, these bamboo toothbrushes have their problems, too. For one thing, although many of them proudly claim to be "100% biodegradable," it's really only the handles that are; their bristles are made of nylon, just like any other toothbrush's. (There's one company, Brush With Bamboo, that has bristles made from a castor-bean-based bioplastic, but they're still not biodegradable, and the brushes cost a whopping $5 each, plus shipping.) So you'd have to remove the bristles somehow — pull them out with pliers? saw off the head? — before tossing the handle in the compost bin, and even that wouldn't exactly break down quickly. Every time we throw sticks more than a few millimeters in diameter into our bin, we find them largely unchanged the next time we go to turn the compost. But we could always burn them in our outdoor fire pit (which we'll definitely be firing up this summer to dispose of all the brush we've produced by taking down that big hedge out front).

When you come right down to it, though, reducing waste isn't the real point — with toothbrushes or anything else we use. The waste our household produces is simply a handy stand-in for the resources it uses. By reducing waste, what we're really trying to do is reduce the amount of resources that go into the stuff we buy. So the real question here is, which type of toothbrush is more resource-hungry? One made entirely from plastic, but with only a small portion of that plastic discarded regularly? Or one that's made mostly from bamboo, a plant that grows fast and absorbs plenty of carbon, but is mostly grown in and shipped from China — and that still contains a small amount of plastic? How do you even compare the two? And is it reasonable to consider the price differences between them as part of this equation, or is the difference between $1 and $2 per toothbrush (a difference of only $8 per year for both of us) really too small to be an issue?

I'll admit, I don't have a good answer to that question yet. But I've got nine months to figure it out.

Money Crashers: Two Valentine pieces

Four years ago, I wrote a piece for Money Crashers on affordable gifts and activities for Valentine's Day. This year, the editors decided it was time to update it — but instead of just revising the old piece, they asked me to split it into two, one on affordable dates and one on affordable gifts. The first of these was published three weeks ago, and the second was all ready for publication when the editor suddenly got back to me with a request to split it yet again, this time into a piece on gifts "for her" and one on gifts "for him."

I didn't quite see the point of this, since (a) I'd already done a pair of gender-specific gift guides for Christmas, and (b) with society these days moving toward a more fluid idea of gender, there's no real reason to draw a rigid line between girl gifts and guy gifts. But according to my editor, there's still a lot of search traffic out there for Valentine's day gifts "for him" and "for her," and we have to give people what they want to stay competitive.

So, with some reluctance, I've produced the requisite two pieces on romantic, budget-friendly gifts: 7 Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Her (on a Budget) and 9 Valentine’s Day Gift Ideas for Him (on a Budget). I've done my best, at least, to avoid extreme gender stereotypes; I didn't want my piece for men to red like so many other gendered gift guides, which one of our editors summed up as "He Frank. Frank like meat. Frank like beer. Frank live in mancave." I've tried to go for a more nuanced approach ("Frank study art history. Frank have blog to share his haiku") and avoid making any assumptions about the gender of the reader. If I've done my job right, ladies seeking gifts for their wives, or men for their husbands, should find these pieces just as useful as heterosexual couples.

Gardeners' Holidays 2020: Renewal

Although I'm not putting too much stock in Punxsutawney Phil's prognostications of an early spring, I can definitely say that the first Gardeners' Holiday of 2020 was much warmer than it was in 2018 or 2019. Even in the morning, the temperature was well up into the 40s, and we didn't even get chilly as we headed out into the yard to kick off our gardening year by pruning the plum trees.

As I predicted, this job has become much easier than it was the first time we attempted it in 2018. Many of the most problematic branches on the trees have already been cleared away, so it was mostly smaller offshoots that we had to lop off this year, not whole limbs. We cleared out the ones that were overhanging the sidewalk and the flagstone path, then pruned away any that were in direct contact with other branches and any that were pointing inward toward the center of the trees. In the end, we cleared away enough branches to make three small bundles for burning in our backyard fire pit once the weather warms up...

...and to make an indoor display to tide us over until we have flowers to gather in the spring.

And not a moment too soon, it appears, because our backyard trees look like they're ready to jump the gun on spring any time. When we went out in the back to put away our tools and the bundled sticks, I saw that our cherry bushes are already starting to bud. Which leads me to hope that the marmot soothsayer was right after all, because otherwise, these poor little tender buds are going to get nipped as soon as winter reasserts itself.

Pruning the plums was only the first of many spring chores we have to do this year. We also plan to take the trimmer to the big hedge in the front yard and cut it down to a size that won't obstruct our path to and from the house. (If taking that much off the bushes turns out to be fatal, just as well; we'll pull them out completely and replace them with a nice little low fence that doesn't need nearly as much maintenance.)

And we have to pull out some garden soil and bake it to start our seeds in — not just our vegetable seeds, but also the flower seeds for the new flower garden I'm planning to put in this spring. Since our various attempts to plant a wildflower bed (first with a mixture of annual and perennial seeds that caused the plot to be overrun with bachelor's buttons, then with an all-perennial mixture that produced only scattered blossoms that quickly gave way to weeds) have been unsuccessful, I've decided to clear the entire bed and plant larger clumps of specific plants that I know are well adapted to clay soil. I've selected five plants:

• Confetti Cake hellebore (Lenten rose), which will produce white-and-purple blossoms starting as early as February;
• Early Sunrise coreopsis, with 18" tall yellow blossoms from April through July;
• Summer Pastel yarrow, with 1-to-2-foot blooms in yellow, pink, and red from June through September;
• Purple confeflower (echinacea), which will produce tall 2-to-4-foot purple blossoms from July through September and can go to seed after that, becoming an attraction for goldfinches;
• Autumn Joy sedum (stonecrop), with 2-foot-tall pink-and-copper blossoms through the end of October;
• And, to fill in the gaps, little clumps of  6-inch, yellow-and-purple Johnny-Jump-Ups (violas).

If this works, it will give us continuous blooms from February through October, so our garden will only be bare from November through January. We've ordered the hellebore and sedum plants from Wit's End Gardens (the only place I could find both of them), to be delivered in the spring, and we bought seeds for the rest along with our yearly order from Fedco. We'll start a couple of seeds for each plant, and when the others arrives, plant them in large clusters throughout the bed and fill in the spaces between with mulch to combat weeds. And if that doesn't work, we'll at least be able to tell where the actual flower clumps are, so we can identify the weeds and pull them out without taking the flowers with them.

All in all, we have our work cut out for us going into the 2020 garden season. There's more to be done than usual, but if it works out, we should have better results this year and every year going forward.