Two Frugality Meters

These days, my frugality is a pretty big part of my identity. After all, I write about personal finance and smart shopping for Money Crashers and ConsumerSearch during the week, and then I come here on the weekend to post about my thrift shopping adventures and DIY projects. When someone asks me, "What do you do?" the most honest answer I could give would probably be, "I tell people how to save money."

So on those rare occasions when I do spend a large chunk of money, it kind of throws me for a loop. Yesterday, for instance, I went on a bit of a shoe-shopping spree. As I've noted before, it's very hard for me to find shoes that fit both my oddly shaped feet and my vegetarian lifestyle, so any time I see a pair that looks like it could possibly be suitable, it's very tempting to snap it up—even if I know I might end up just having to return it. Last year, in fact, I ended up buying and returning several pairs of shoes in quick succession, spending about $20 in shipping fees and still having no shoes to show for it. After that, I started refusing on principle to buy shoes online unless both shipping and returns were free, so at least I wouldn't have to pay just to try the shoes on.

This time, however, I found a way around that problem. After discovering an attractive, comfortable-looking, leather-free pair of three-season shoes on a website that did not offer free returns, I did a little investigation and found that the same shoes were also available online at Kohl's—so if they didn't fit, I could return them to a Kohl's store at no charge. And since several reviewers on the site said the shoes run large, I decided to order them in both my usual 6 1/2 wide and a 6 wide, figuring I could keep whichever pair fits and return the other. While I was at it, I decided to check the same site for a nice pair of boots—and when I didn't find any, I surfed over to Payless and took advantage of a sale there to buy two pairs of boots, a dressy pair and a sturdy snow boot.

So altogether, I spent about $140 on shoes in one day—something that's extremely out of character for me. Admittedly, no single pair cost more than $60...and I was able to use coupon codes on both purchases to knock an additional 15 to 30 percent off...and I know I'm going to return at least one of the four pairs. But even so, it kind of shook my self-image. Could anyone who spends that much on footwear, I asked myself, really describe herself as frugal?

Fortunately, I knew just how to set my mind at ease on this point. There are two different tools available online that prove I'm frugal—at least compared to other Americans of my income level.

The first one, called the Frugal Meter, lives on the Shnugi Personal Finance website (a name I swear I am not making up). It's incredibly simple to use: you just punch in your monthly expenses, based on your household budget, and then list the income range to which you want to compare yourself. When I tried it, the site told us we spend "a bit less than average" compared to others in our income range: however, by "a bit less," it means "for every 100 people there are about 7 who spend less or the same." To me, that sounds like a lot less, but I guess it's the number that really matters.

Unfortunately, after looking at the comments on the article, I started wondering whether the number itself was all that useful. For instance, one commenter asked whether the figure for expenses was supposed to include taxes and got the reply "Expenses include all taxes." Well, my household budget doesn't cover taxes as an expense, so I had to go consult last year's tax returns to figure out how much we actually pay in taxes per month—and when I tacked those on, our household expenses jumped from the 7th to the 21st percentile. But then I realized the numbers still weren't right, because the site also says expenses should not include "your retirement saving contributions (pension, SS, 401k or IRA)," and the figure I was using for taxes included Social Security taxes. And trying to sift out how much of last year's tax payment was for Social Security, while allowing for all the various deductions we take, was just too tangled a task to be worth the effort.

So, since this simple little calculator proved so complicated in practice, I moved on to the Frugalometer on the Frugal Fringe site, which looked a little more sophisticated. This one asks for three numbers—your annual pre-tax income, your annual expenses ("excluding social security and pension payments"), and your annual state and federal taxes—and gives specific instructions on how to calculate each one. Once you enter them all in, it compares the numbers to data from the Bureau of Labor's annual Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) and gives you a "Frugalometer score" to show how you stack up.

When I punched in our numbers on this one, it gave me a score of 251 (as compared to the average of 100) and a grade of A+++. However, I quickly realized that this calculator, too, had one serious flaw. I was already familiar enough with the CES to know that it includes health care costs as part of "annual household expenses"—but our biggest health care expense is the insurance premiums that get deducted directly from Brian's paycheck, and thus never make it into our household budget at all. Frugal Fringe's instructions for calculating your annual expenses don't account for this; they just say to figure out how much you charge to each of your credit cards in a year, how much you pay in checks and online bill payments, and so on, and add it all together. A pre-tax premium that never makes it into your bank account obviously doesn't come out of it. Given that the average "consumer unit" spends $2,868 a year on health insurance, and the average couple spends $4,040, that's a pretty big expense to leave out.

So, once again, I turned to our records, using Brian's final paystub for 2015 to figure out how much we'd spent in pre-tax dollars on health and dental expenses. That came to about $5,840, which I tacked on to our income in box 2. Our Frugalometer score instantly dropped from 251 to 209—still good, but not nearly as outstanding as it looked at first blush. (I wrote a comment on the Frugal Fringe site to point out the flaw in the Frugalometer's formula and proposed adding a fourth box for health expenses, but so far my comment hasn't showed up on the site.)

The good news, though, is that even our modified Frugalometer score is high enough to earn us an A+++ grade. So as far as A. Noonan Moose, the blogger at Frugal Fringe, is concerned (this is another name I swear I am not making up), we're doing great—my latest shoe-buying binge notwithstanding. And after all, even if I end up keeping three of the four pairs, that's about $100 for what should be at least a year's worth of shoes—not so bad when you consider that, according to the CES, the average couple spends $367 on footwear each year. If I can manage to make even one of my new pairs of shoes last for two years or more, I should be way ahead of the game.

Money Crashers: Difference Between Needs & Wants

About three years back, I posted some musings on the line between necessities and luxuries. I noted that what was a necessity for one person might be a luxury for another; for instance, high-speed Internet, free-range meats were necessities for me, while air conditioning and a smartphone were luxuries.

This post gave me the idea of writing about the same subject on Money Crashers, where I could explore it in a little more depth and from a less personal viewpoint. Here are a few of the facts I discovered during my research.

• Gallup tracks Americans' access to 13 "basic necessities," including clean water, access to fresh fruits and vegetables, a safe neighborhood, and affordable health care. Currently, nearly 1 in 5 Americans is living without at least one item on the list.
• Every few years, Pew asks Americans which of several different technologies they consider necessities, and which they view as luxuries. The numbers have changed noticeably over time; most notably, many items that moved from the luxury to the necessity column in 2006 dropped back to luxury status during the latest recession.
• Economists define "luxury goods" as products that people are much more likely to buy when their income rises. One classic example is a flat-screen TV, which only 5% of respondents rated as a necessity in the last Pew poll.
• A 2014 paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology found that performing tasks that gave people a feeling of accomplishment made them feel more interested in buying luxury brands. Appealing to their feelings of snobbery didn't trigger a similar interest. Yet when people saw others wearing luxury brands, they tended to view the wearer not as an accomplished person, but as a snob - suggesting that people who give in to the impulse to buy luxury goods are actually sending a message exactly opposite to what they're feeling.

And these are just the highlights. To get the whole story, check out the article here:
Difference Between Needs & Wants (Luxuries) and How to Draw the Line

Thrift (Shop) Week 2016, Day 6: Tower Thrift Shop

Of all the thrift shops in Highland Park and its immediate environs, the Tower Thrift Shop is the only one I visit regularly. It's within walking distance, it has a bigger selection than the other Highland Park shops, and its prices are even lower than Goodwill's—just $1 for most tops and $2 for pants. And while the clothes aren't as well organized as at some stores, they are at least loosely grouped into small, medium, and large categories, so I don't have to examine every single garment in the store to figure out which ones are likely to fit me. Its biggest drawback is that its hours are limited, but I can usually manage to make the time to stop by on a Friday—especially during the summer, when our weekly farmers' market is being held in the parking lot just outside the church where the thrift shop lives.

Yet despite these many advantages, my trips to the Tower Thrift Shop are very hit-and-miss. Sometimes I find two pairs of pants in my exact size, just like magic; other times I flip through every rack in the store and find nothing that looks remotely useful. So I had little idea what to expect when I headed down there today. Would I finally hit my thrift-store shopping stride, or would I strike out yet again?

At first, it looked like this trip was going better than any of the others. I actually found several pairs of pants worth trying on, in an assortment of fabrics: shimmery grey fine-wale corduroy, fully lined black wool, and some sort of lightweight synthetic. But alas, not one of them actually fit well enough and looked good enough to be worth the $2 they were asking. I also tried on a grey wool sweater in a boys' size XL that mistakenly got filed on the women's clothing rack. This was something I'd been looking for specifically, and the overall size and sleeve length were actually about right on me, but the boxy boy-sized cut just didn't look good. So, regretfully, I returned that to the rack as well.

In the interests of giving the store every possible chance, I made a point of checking out the bookshelves, as well. Our town doesn't actually have a used bookstore anymore (in the 13 years we've lived here, two of them have gone under, and so far no new one has emerged to take their place), but the Tower Thrift Shop has a rather motley assortment of volumes at truly unbeatable prices: just 25 cents for hardcovers, 10 cents for paperbacks, and if you buy two, you can get a third for nothing. But this time, nothing on the shelves particularly jumped out at me. I suppose I could have bought something just to buy something, but right now, we already have several books at home on the "to be read" pile (including our new Wilkie Collins from Hole in the Wall Books), and I just didn't feel the need to bring home any more. So once again, I walked out with plenty o' nuttin'.

Unfortunately, I fear that I won't be able to make my final Thrift Week excursion tomorrow, either. I was planning to stop by The Second Time Around in Pennington, a somewhat larger and nicer thrift shop that I seldom get a chance to visit, before going on to a belated birthday dinner with my parents. But it looks like both plans are going to have to be postponed, as we're currently expecting blizzard conditions all day long, with total snow accumulation of about a foot. So it looks like my Thrift Week thrift-shop binge is coming to a premature and rather unsatisfying end. Still, I will make a point of visiting the Pennington store some time in the next month or two and reporting on the results. I remember patronizing this store in the past, back when I lived in Hopewell, and it was pretty good back then—and at this point, I feel like it's become my personal quest to discover at least one good thrift store in Central New Jersey where I can reliably find useful stuff.

Thrift (Shop) Week 2016, Day 5: Greene Street Consignment

Greene Street Consignment in Princeton is a far cry from our so-called consignment shop here in Highland Park. Where Pure Green is dim and cluttered, Greene Street is bright and spacious. The racks are well organized, with clothing actually sorted by size; there's plenty of room for hangers to slip on and off the rack, and plenty of room between the racks for shoppers to pass by. Shoes are neatly stacked on racks, so you can actually see the entire available selection at a glance. And there are plenty of fitting rooms—clean, well-lit rooms with hooks for your clothing selections and a stool to sit on as you take off your shoes. For me, after the low-rent thrift shops I've been experiencing the rest of this week, this was unimaginable luxury.

Compared to those other stores, Greene Street also offers a much wider selection, with a focus on upscale brands. For instance, I spotted sweaters on the rack by the likes of Ralph Lauren and Ann Taylor, and pants by Michael Kors (without the words "for Target" tacked on). Clothing tends to be newer, too; I happened to overhear a conversation outside the fitting rooms between an employee and someone who was interested in bringing in some clothes to consign, and the employee was explaining that anything more than a year or so old probably wasn't worth bothering with, because they wouldn't be able to sell it.

Of course, this posh atmosphere comes with much higher price tags than the ones I'm used to seeing at Goodwill, or even at the local "vintage" and "consignment" stores. I saw sweaters ranging from $20 to $50, and some pairs of pants for as much as $70—comparable, or in some cases even more, than I'm accustomed to paying for new clothes off the rack. Of course, I'm sure that it's much less than those particular brands would cost to buy new, but then, I wouldn't be shopping for those particular brands if I had to pay full price.

Still, I was determined not to be put off by the prices. I figured that I probably wouldn't be spending any more on these consigned clothes than I'd pay at Sears or Target, and I thought, or at least hoped, that with the wide selection on the racks, I'd actually have a better chance of finding something I liked. Unlike the local stores I'd visited on Tuesday and Wednesday, this one actually did seem to have a good assortment of practical clothes for everyday wear, including shirts, slacks, and sweaters in a reasonable range of sizes. So it looked like if I was going to find anything, this was my best shot.

At first, matters looked promising. As I browsed up and down the racks, I found several garments worth pulling off the rack for a closer look, but none of them looked like it would really serve to fill a gap in my wardrobe. I did try on one pair of pants that looked like they might fit me—a bit long, perhaps, but they could be hemmed—and weren't too outrageously expensive at $32. But though I was able to get into them, they turned out to be a low-rise style that looks absolutely awful on me (something that wasn't obvious from the way they looked on the hanger). So the entire bottom floor of the store, from sweaters to shoes, yielded no treasures.

Upstairs, in the clearance section, the pickings were slimmer, but the prices were lower—not as low as Goodwill's, but getting closer to that range. I tried on a deep-pink wrap dress that looked like it might be a reasonable deal at $15, but it proved to be too big in the shoulders, too low in the neck, and too skimpy everywhere else—though that might have been partly because I had a lot of trouble figuring out exactly how the thing was supposed to fasten. It was a bit like trying to tie myself into a pink toga.

So, sadly, despite the nice selection and atmosphere, I still left Greene Street empty-handed. It was a bit of a consolation to know that at least I had managed to get a look at everything on the racks, so if I hadn't found anything, it must have been because there was nothing to find, and not because there was some hidden gem buried so deep that I couldn't unearth it. But this was cold comfort when I reflected that even a really good thrift shop apparently couldn't provide anything to suit me. If my ultimate goal for this thrift-shopping binge is to fill all the gaps in my wardrobe, thereby eliminating all need for cheap, mass-produced clothes from third world sweatshops, then the prospect of completing my quest successfully seems to be looking dimmer and dimmer.

Thrift (Shop) Week 2016, Day 4: Pure Green Consignment

My week of thrift-shop-hopping continued today with a trip to another local establishment, just a block away from the one I visited yesterday. Pure Green Consignment is not a complete store in its own right; it shares a building with Pure Light Gifts, a sort of New-Age-y shop that sells crystals and incense and hosts meditation classes. There's no real overlap between the two businesses, though; Pure Light occupies the back of the store, in an open space smelling faintly of patchouli, while the front half is crammed with overcrowded racks of clothing, tables full of knickknacks, piles of shoes, and ladies busily chatting together in Mandarin. I think there's probably also a dressing room in there somewhere, but I couldn't easily spot it.

The selection of clothing at Pure Green overlaps a lot with what I saw yesterday at Sibel's Vintage: there's a heavy emphasis on coats and shoes, particularly fancy ones. However, the tightly packed racks do also appear to have a reasonable selection of everyday garments. Unfortunately, searching through them was rather difficult, since everything was so tightly crammed onto the racks that it was almost impossible to extricate anything. I managed to pull a few garments partway out so I could get a closer look at them, but what I saw wasn't encouraging. Most of the clothes, particularly the few pairs of jeans on the rack, appeared to be in tiny sizes. I did dig out a colorful skirt—which actually turned out to be two skirts clipped to the same hanger—in a size that looked reasonable, but the price tags on the two skirts were $15 and $16 respectively. I'm sure that's a significant savings over retail, but it's still more than I'm really willing to pay for a garment I definitely don't need and might not ever wear at all.

My search of the shoes was equally fruitless. They weren't sorted in any way by size, of course, but that's par for the course at thrift shops and I didn't really expect anything different. But most of them also weren't set out on any sort of racks; they were just lined up on the floor, pair after pair, where you had to crouch down to get a look at them. I stooped once or twice to pick up a pair that looked like it might be my size, but none of them actually had the right number on them. A couple didn't appear to have any size marked on them at all, and I might have attempted to try them on, but since there was no place in the store to sit down, it didn't seem worth the effort to try and change shoes while standing on one leg.

One of the racks, near the back of the store, had some men's clothing on it, and I gave it a quick glance—but there aren't really any gaps in Brian's wardrobe that need filling at the moment, and anyhow, I wouldn't want to spend $15 on a garment for him if he couldn't try it on first. So after about ten minutes of browsing, I ended up leaving the store empty-handed.

So, halfway into Thrift Week, my tally is:

Thrift shop visits attempted: 5
Thrift shops successfully visited: 4
Items purchased: 4 (1 book, 2 pairs pants, 1 pair tights)
Items purchased that were actually secondhand: 3
Total spent: $20.50

So far, the numbers aren't exactly encouraging. But tomorrow I'll have a chance to visit a bigger and more upscale thrift shop in Princeton—two of the factors that I usually find add up to a better selection of secondhand merchandise. So perhaps I'll have better luck on that trip.

Money Crashers: 9 Valentine’s Day Ideas on a Budget

Last year, after years of ignoring or stumbling awkwardly around Valentine's Day, I finally decided that I wanted to do something to celebrate the holiday. And since most traditional gifts—like roses imported from Chile and jewelry mined at great environmental cost—are far from ecofrugal, Brian and I both came up with alternative gift ideas that fit our personalities and lifestyle. I gave him an e-book with a romantic theme, with a series of heart-shaped notes as clues to help him find it; he gave me a framed photo of our ailing cat (who actually died not long after, so this turned out to be a final memento of her) and a pair of earrings from Ten Thousand Villages.

These gifts struck me as not only less expensive than the typical Valentine offerings, but also much more personal. I thought other people facing the annual Valentine Dilemma might also benefit from some ideas for ways to get around the problem, so I wrote up a piece on the subject for Money Crashers. First, I calculate the cost of several "traditional" Valentine's Day gifts and activities—cards, candy, flowers, jewelry, and a candlelit dinner—and discuss some ways to give gifts along the same lines for less. Then I explore some less traditional alternatives, such as books, music, heart-themed gifts (such as this pillow from IKEA, a cute idea that got cut from the final version of the article), and inexpensive date ideas like a game night or a rented video.

The other good news is that, unlike my article on green gifts for the holidays, this one actually got published far enough ahead of the holiday for it to be useful. So if you're trying to work your way through the Valentine Dilemma, you can find lots of ideas here: 9 Valentine’s Day Ideas on a Budget – Affordable Gifts & Activities

Thrift (Shop) Week 2016, Day 3: Sibel's Vintage

When I first came up with the idea of thrift shopping for Thrift Week, I couldn't manage to think of enough local thrift shops to fill out the week. So it came as quite a happy discovery when a brand new secondhand store opened up last December in a spot on Raritan Avenue that used to be a bead and jewelry shop. It actually changed hands quite suddenly; one week it was Ashley's Pearl and Jewelry, the next it suddenly had brown paper over all the windows, and before that week was out, the paper had come down to reveal a new display of assorted furniture, tchotchkes, and jewelry, and the awning over the store had been repainted to read "Sibel's Vintage."

Based on the contents of the window, I initially guessed that the "vintage" items for sale at Sibel's were mostly along the lines of furnishings and accessories for the home, but a pile of fliers at my local bank soon dispelled that idea. It promised that Sibel's carried a wide assortment of goods, including:

• Vintage Silver Jewelry
• Vintage Furs
• Vintage '30s and '40s Clothing
• Vintage Party Dresses
• Vintage Hats & Shoes
• Vintage Purses
• Vintage Accessories
• Antique Jewelry
• Antique Furniture
• Antique Mirrors
• Antique Lamps
• Antique Paintings/Art
• Antique Collectibles

After seeing this mouthwatering menu, I entered Sibel's for the first time today with high hopes. The front of the store was filled with jewelry and various gewgaws, but toward the back, up a short flight of stairs, I found several racks of clothing, as promised. I didn't see much that looked like it dated from the '30s and '40s, but there was indeed a display of colorful party dresses, a rack of antique coats—fur and otherwise—and a wide assortment of shoes and purses, of varying provenance and price.

Unfortunately, I wasn't really in the market for an evening dress or a coat, and there didn't appear to be much in the way of practical, everyday garments. I did examine the racks of shoes, though, and actually went so far as to try on a pair of grey felt booties bearing the label "Blowfish Shoes." I couldn't find this exact style online, but similar styles on their website appear to sell for around $50, which would have made these a bargain at the marked price of $15—but sadly, they were far too tight across the instep. The proprietor, who I assume was Sibel herself, tried to interest me in other pairs of boots, including a size 6 pair of Uggs (definitely too small) and a pair of what I can only describe as mukluks, but nothing seemed suitable.


I felt a bit bad for Sibel, since I was the only customer in the store—perhaps the only one she'd had all day—and she seemed eager, even desperate, to find me something I would like. However, I wasn't about to blow $15 on a pair of shoes that didn't fit, or $75 on a velvet evening bag that I'd almost certainly never have a use for, just for the sake of giving her my business. But I did find a rack of tights for sale behind the shoes—new, not secondhand, though I guess they may have been acquired as remainders from other stores—and I figured I could always use another pair of those, so I spent $5 on a nice black cable-knit pair. They're actually not the ideal size for me, but the stretchy fabric is accommodating enough to adjust, and the price wasn't unreasonable.

So today's mission was, at best, a partial success. I managed to find something useful and give a bit of support to a local thrift shop that I certainly hope will thrive, even if it didn't happen to have anything to my taste. But if my ultimate goal was to devote more of my clothing budget to secondhand clothes rather than cheap, mass-produced ones, I'm afraid I didn't do anything to further it today.