Yard-sale haul 2026

This year's town-wide yard-sale weekend—normally one of my favorite occasions of the year—didn't get off to a great start. When we set out on Saturday morning, it was cold and grey out, and I was shivering even under four layers of clothing. The weather seemed to have deterred a lot of sellers, too. Many of the sale sites marked on the official map weren't actually there, and many others were just tables or piles at the curb labeled "free," where the hosts had evidently decided the few bucks they might earn from their stuff weren't worth spending the morning out in the chill.

So, after finding only a couple of small items, Brian and I decided to abandon the map and focus on the few parts of town that were sure things. We started at the library, which always hosts its fundraising book sale on yard-sale weekend. Despite the tempting prices, we kept our purchases moderate, knowing that we'd have to carry them with us for the rest of the morning. We came away with just seven books totaling $10—mostly fiction, plus a cookbook titled The Voluptuous Vegan that will probably be the source for October's Recipe of the Month.

That $10 worth of books, as it turned out, accounted for most of the day's spending. Although we visited several other hotbeds of sale activity—Felton Avenue, the parking lot behind the Reformed Church, and after lunch, a long swath of Lincoln Avenue on the north side—most of the items we actually picked up were from free piles. By the end of the day, we'd acquired a total of eight books, three board games, a small skillet, an assortment of cooking ingredients, a bicycle taillight, a set of flavored lip balms, and a small bagful of scallion bulbs for planting, and we'd only spent $15.50.

After Saturday's experience, I took extra care to bundle up before setting out on Sunday, but it proved unnecessary. Although the air wasn't much warmer, the sun was out, so I ended up shedding my coat and stuffing it into one of our bags within the first half hour. And the sun seemed to be shining on our excursion, too, as we found a lot more useful items for sale this time around. Over the course of the morning, we scored a couple of Pyrex storage containers, assorted office supplies, a string of battery-powered holiday lights, a couple of potential holiday gifts, and a Philips screwdriver to replace our old one that's stripped out. (This last one was something Brian had been explicitly looking for, and the sale where he happened to find it was at the home of a former coworker, so we had a nice chat with him as well.) Our most fortuitous find was a couple of sealed packages of our favorite hand soap from Trader Joe's, which, as we discovered on our last trip, has just been discontinued because the supplier has gone out of business. With luck, these four extra bars will be enough to get us through until the store finds a new supplier to work with. After returning home with three full bags and $13.50 less in my wallet, we decided we'd done well enough that we didn't need to go back out in the afternoon.

However, that wasn't quite the end of our sale adventures. Today, we returned to the library, which was disposing of the leftovers from the book sale at just $5 per bag—no matter how big or how full that bag happened to be. Since the prices were so good, and since we didn't have anyplace to go afterward but back home, we were much less selective this time around, stuffing our bag with a total of 14 books (mostly mysteries and science fiction). So, all told, we spent $34 over the course of the weekend—exactly twice as much as last year—and acquired a pretty good mix of entertaining and practical items. And we've made a nice start on this year's holiday shopping, too.

The best platform for selling art online

Every so often, people ask Brian what he's been up to since he retired back in February. He usually answers, truthfully, that he hasn't tackled any big new projects; instead, he's just doing more of the things he used to do outside of work. For example, he's spending more time in the garden, on his bike, and on the couch reading books. But he has also embarked, with my help, on one little project we haven't revealed until now: a shop to sell his artwork.

Folks who were around back when this blog first got started may recall that it was originally an offshoot of Brian's blog, Modern Troll, which he used mainly to share his drawings. After I started mine, he let his fall by the wayside and hasn't updated it since 2010. But I always had this vague idea that it would be cool at some point to make some of his art available to fans in a physical form, like posters or T-shirts. So, once he was officially retired and had some time to spare, I suggested setting up an online store for this purpose.

The first thing we did was go through his collection of artwork and select various pieces we thought might be appropriate for different uses. For instance, we thought this piece, which I've dubbed "Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear," would work well on a T-shirt, as would his "Killer Tofu" sketch (which I envisioned with a snarky caption like, "Don't mess with Soy Boy"). Some of his bigger pieces, like "Mind" and this cartoon inspired by a trip to the Grounds for Sculpture, seemed suitable for posters. And a few of his little sketches, like this little guy, looked like they'd be nice for note cards.

Once we'd figured out what kinds of merch we wanted to sell, I started looking at websites that offered these types of products on a print-on-demand basis. That way, instead of having to order a whole batch of, say, 100 shirts and then try to find buyers for them (and a place to store them in the meantime), we could just list our choices online and wait until someone placed an order to print one up and ship it out. The two most familiar sites of this type are Redbubble and Zazzle, which have the advantage of a wide reach, making it easy for people to find the products they sell. The downside was that these sites charge both high prices for shoppers and high fees for sellers. For instance, the base price for a T-shirt on RedBubble—not counting the artist's cut—is $20.39. You can set your own markup on top of that, but with a basic account, RedBubble also keeps half of all your earnings as an account fee. So if Brian were to charge, say $24 for a T-shirt—which is more than he'd personally consider a reasonable price—he'd only get to keep $1.80 in profit for each shirt sold. Zazzle is a little more generous, keeping only 30 percent of the profits, and the base price for the cheapest "value" T-shirt is only $16.24. That means we could price them at a slightly more reasonable $20 and earn $2.63 per shirt—better, but still not great.

We also considered alternatives like Printify and Printful. These stores charge only a base price for the materials (for example, a unisex T-shirt from Printful costs $9.44) and you can decide how much profit you want to tack on top of that. The catch is that these sites provide only the printing; you have to set up your own online store to sell your products through another site. If we used a platform like Shopify for this, we'd have to pay a monthly fee of at least $29, which we'd almost certainly never sell enough product to cover. If we went with Etsy, we'd pay a one-time fee (of an unspecified amount) to set up the store, plus a multitude of other fees for product listings, sales, and payment processing. For a little store like Brian's, all these fees would probably more than eat up all our profits—and while we weren't expecting to make much money from selling Brian's designs, we weren't willing to set ourselves up to lose money.

Eventually, we settled on a platform that seemed like a happy medium: Fourthwall. It allows you to set up your online store right on the site, with no up-front fee and no listing fees for its basic plan. There's no fee for sales, either; all you pay to the site is a reasonable flat fee for its materials ($11.75 for a unisex tee, for instance, or $5.50 for a matte poster). You can set your own final price, so how much you earn on each sale is up to you. The site handles sales and customer support for you. It even has an AI assistant to help you create your designs (though, once I figured out what I was doing, I found it easier to go in and build the products myself).

So, without further ado, it is my pleasure to present Modern Troll Designs. So far, we've only created listings for a small handful of products (two T-shirts, a poster, and a notecard), but I thought we'd go ahead and unveil the store now so we could get feedback on these few products, and on the layout of the store itself, before adding more. Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you're a fan of Brian's art who would like to put in a request for a specific product featuring one of his pieces, like a sticker or a mug or something, let me know—we can probably make it happen.

How to feed a family for WAY less than $28 a day

Last summer, the New York Times Cooking section published an article called, "How to Feed a Family for $28 a Day." (Warning: the article may be paywalled. I tried to share it as a gift link, but apparently my subscription doesn't allow that for Cooking articles.) In it, recipe developer Kevin Pang chronicles how he challenged himself to feed his family of three (himself, his wife, and their "picky 10-year-old") for a whole week on a budget of just $200. He says that may sound like "a nice, big number," but it's actually less than $10 per person per day, which he claims is roughly equal to the $196.25-plus-tax limit set by the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan. (Actually, according to the site, that isn't quite right. For a 10-year-old, picky or otherwise, and a man and a woman between 20 and 50 years old, the Thrifty Food Plan budget is $187.90 per week. But it's possible the number has come down a little since he checked it in August.)

For Pang, this was a major challenge. The budget left "no room for impulse buys" and forced them to cut corners in several places, swapping out strawberry jam for cheaper grape jelly and a $4.35 tub of baba ghanoush for $3.77 hummus. They also had to forgo convenience items like "a microwavable frozen dinner here, a jar of marinara there." But they succeeded in feeding themselves three meals a day, using some new recipes that he links to in the article, such as carnitas, bacon cheeseburger meatballs, and sesame soy chicken. At the end of the piece, he proudly outlines the lessons they learned, such as "Assign a role to everything in your cart" (as opposed to "buying whatever looks good"), "Give leftovers a new life," and "Buy produce that lasts."

That's all sound enough, but it struck me as awfully elementary. Brian feeds our two-person family on a grocery budget of around $3,535 per year, which works out to only $4.84 per person per day—roughly half as much as Pang's. Even if you adjust for the two weeks or so per year we spend visiting, and eating with, friends and relatives, it's barely over $5 per person per day. I thought perhaps his higher budget reflected the high cost of living in NYC, but no; the Pang family lives in "the Chicago suburbs," where living costs generally and grocery prices specifically are nearly identical to what we pay in central NJ.

After reading the article, I thought maybe I should write my own, following the same structure as Pang's, to explain how we feed our family on roughly half as much as his budget. I could list all our grocery purchases and their cost, outline exactly what we ate every day for a week, and wrap it up with some general budget eating tips. But after thinking about it for a minute, I realized I'd already done this (except in even more detail) in my 2014 Reverse SNAP Challenge. Our eating habits have changed a bit since then, as we've shifted away from dairy products and started making more foods from scratch. But our principles remain roughly the same:

• Eat plants. Pang spent $43.60 of his $200 budget—about 22 percent—on meat. Six of the seven dinners the family ate were meat-based. Brian and I, by contrast, eat fish maybe once every week or so, poultry only a few times a year, and red meat basically never. As I outlined in my 2022 Ecofrugal Manifesto and observed again at the supermarket checkout this spring, skipping the meat and getting most of our protein from beans and grains cuts a big slice off our grocery budget.
• Cook from scratch. Convenience foods are an even bigger budget-buster. Pang recognized this, which is why he steered away from frozen meals and jarred pasta sauce. But it didn't occur to him to make his own hummus, which would have taken all of ten minutes and shaved an extra dollar off his budget (according to the Homemade Hummus Cost Calculator, which apparently is a thing that exists). And he certainly didn't go so far as to make bread, granola, or tortillas from scratch, all things that Brian does routinely.
• Shop around. I think Pang put himself at a disadvantage right from the start of his challenge by purchasing his entire week's worth of groceries in one go at "our favorite grocery store, Fresh Farms in Niles, Ill.," which doesn't sound like a particularly budget-friendly place. Our approach is to keep track of prices at different stores and make the rounds of them all over the course of a month, picking up whatever we need at whichever store has the best price.
• Use a discount grocery. Although we shop at multiple stores, the one we rely on most heavily is Lidl, a "limited assortment" grocery that sells primarily its own store brands. Before Lidl opened, we were regular patrons of Aldi, which works along the same lines. And we spring for a Costco membership because, while it doesn't have the best prices on all foodstuffs, just a few truly unbeatable bargains in the grocery aisle are enough to cover the membership cost three times over.

To anyone who reads this blog regularly, none of this comes as news. But it's always nice to get a little confirmation that what has worked for us all these years is still working, and that our bargain-hunting skills can beat the smart kids as handily in 2026 as they did back in 2012.