Renaissance Festival Bingo

As I've mentioned in previous posts, last weekend and I Brian attended the Maryland Renaissance Festival with some friends who live in the area. At $22 a ticket, this is not exactly the most frugal form of entertainment, but the real hazard to your wallet comes once you pass through the fairground gates: there's a whole host of vendors inside on the lookout for the chance to part you from your hard-earned ducats. Food booths line the grounds, selling both legitimate Renaissance fare like sausages and beer and decidedly non-period goodies such as ice cream cones. (Turkey legs are also a perennial favorite, even though the turkey cock wasn't introduced into England until the 1540s—well after the joint reign of Henry VIII and Catharine of Aragon, who presided over the court at this festival.) Food sellers also wander through the crowd plying their wares, from pretzels to sweetened nuts (in authentic Renaissance plastic bags, of course). Merchants in their stalls hawk goods of every kind: period costumes, armor and weapons, games, musical instruments, pottery, wood carving, metalwork. Games masters invite you to try your skill at archery, skittles, and contests of strength, all for a modest fee. If you spent an entire day at this event, you could easily end up spending two or three times what you paid to get in.

Fortunately, there's also plenty to see and do without spending any extra cash. The festival has a huge array of entertainers—some on stage at specific times, others wandering through the crowd—but one of the best diversions the festival has to offer is the people-watching. So for this Festival, to help keep myself occupied and reduce the temptations of the merchants, I decided to make a game of it: Renaissance Festival Bingo. I first came up with the idea when I was researching ideas for cheap Renaissance garb for women and I came upon the instructions for making your very own duct-tape corset. I made a mental note to keep an eye out for anyone wearing one of those at the fair, and then I started thinking of other things it might be amusing to look for, and after a while I decided to try and fill a whole Bingo card with them.

Some of my Bingo items proved much harder to get than I had expected, while others were much easier. For example, Brian proposed "glitter on cleavage," which was apparently a hugely popular accessory at the Renaissance Faire he'd attended in California—but while cleavage was as much in evidence as ever at this festival, we didn't see a single wench adorning hers with glitter. "Steampunk," by contrast, was one that we threw in more or less on a whim, thinking that there might be one or two people who opted to wear their steampunk garb to the Renaissance Festival in spite of the fact that it belongs to a fantasy world of a completely different historical period. Yet to our surprise, we saw huge numbers of people in steampunk costume, some of it very elaborate indeed. Steampunk costumes were much more popular than such period-appropriate fantasy costumes as fairies and elves, and perennial Renn Faire types such as gypsies and pirates were hardly in evidence at all. One idea that we actually considered for the Bingo card and then rejected was "Starfleet uniforms," thinking that surely no one would wear a costume from the 23rd or 24th century to an event set in the 16th—yet we saw three of them. The Doctor (as in Doctor Who) was also on the scene, although only in his current incarnation—but then, since he's a time traveler, he's period-appropriate in any setting.

Sounds, as well as sights, were harder to find than I'd expected. I heard only one "Huzzah!" in the whole afternoon we spent at the Festival, and I didn't hear a single incidence of such mangled Renaissance grammar as "How dost I look?" I also didn't encounter a single sourpuss complaining about clothing, music, foodstuffs, or anything else being "not period"—even though we did come across such obvious anomalies as funnel cakes, folks in full period get-up using cell phones, a bagpipe band playing "We Will Rock You," and of course, the aforementioned steampunk outfits.

Overall, we spent about four hours at the fair, and I managed to score a bingo only a few minutes before we left—and even that was perhaps a stretch, as the person we identified as dressed in a Robin Hood costume might actually have been just some sort of woodsman. But I did still fill in more than half the squares:

Duct tape corset	Ironic use of modern songs	Glitter on cleavage	“Huzzah!”	Elves
Fairies	Homemade armor	“That’s not period!”	Jester	Turkey legs
“How dost I look?”	Steampunk	Period garb with cell phone	Robin Hood	Gypsies
Funnel cakes	Pirates	Kilt (bonus if worn regimental)	Juggling	Spike heels
Japanese tourists with cameras	Harry Potter	Noteworthy piercings	Dragons	Bikini armor (worn)

I think this game would certainly be worth playing again, but next time I'd probably use a free bingo card generator such as this one to randomize the list for me. Perhaps that way I could make several cards, drawing from an even longer list, and include some of the additional characters that we saw last weekend—as well as a few other items that didn't make the final cut, like "period clothing with running shoes."

Breaking all the rules

Today I got the bill for my primary credit card—the one I use for everyday purchases like groceries and gas—and, as I always do, I went through it line by line, checking each purchase listed against the receipts that I'd stashed in an envelope to make sure everything matched up. I didn't find any suspicious charges, but I did find something else that interested me: of the twenty-seven individual charges included on this month's bill, eighteen were for groceries. And that wasn't even all the grocery shopping we'd done in the past month: I also found receipts in the envelope for groceries bought with cash at Aldi and at Terhune Orchards, and my expense log for the past month shows two additional cash purchases at our local farmers' market. So we have made at least 22 separate grocery purchases—counting as "groceries" any food not meant to be eaten right on the spot—in the last month. And 15 of those were purchases of $10 or less, representing trips on which which we popped into the store for just a handful of items.

Now, this is exactly the opposite of what most budgeting "experts" advise you to do. This Bankrate.com article on grocery savings, for instance, recommends that you plan a week's worth of dinners ahead of time and then make just one trip to the grocery store (thus avoiding impulse buys and taking better advantage of sales) and, at least once every three months, spend an entire week eating from your pantry and avoid visiting the store at all. Both Trent Hamm of The Simple Dollar and Emily Guy Birkin of Live Like a Mensch say they plan their grocery shopping this way. Annette and Steve Economides, who describe themselves as "America's cheapest family," advocate shopping no more than once a month, arguing that quick trips invariably result in impulse purchases—in most cases, they claim, more than doubling the total purchase.

Moreover, the fact that we even use a credit card to pay for groceries is a big no-no according to some budget mavens.  This Investopedia article, for instance, claims that despite the consumer protections offered by credit and debit cards, it's "almost always" best to pay in cash, because paying in plastic makes it too easy to overspend. Michelle Singletary of The Washington Post makes the same argument about "the perils of plastic" in promoting her 21-Day Financial Fast, which I discussed on this blog last year. (As I noted at the time, financial writers and bloggers always seem more eager to pounce on the studies that show credit promotes overspending than on the ones that show the reverse.)

So in theory, at least, we're doing it exactly wrong by making frequent, small trips to the grocery store and using our credit card even for small purchases. But for us, there are several reasons why it makes sense to shop this way. First and foremost, we buy items wherever they're cheapest. If we did all our grocery shopping for the month, or even the week, in a single trip, then we'd have to buy everything we needed from just one store. Our system, by contrast, involves visiting many different stores to take advantage of the best deals at each. Just in the past month, we've visited more than half a dozen stores and picked up different bargains at each one:

• At Trader Joe's, 2-ply recycled bath tissue for $4.50 per dozen, organic raisins for $2.99 a pound, organic sugar for $1.75 a pound, organic chicken drumsticks for $1.99 a pound, and a toothpaste that's both cruelty-free (for me) and SLS-free (for Brian) for $2.29 a tube—something we can't buy anywhere else at any price.
• At Aldi, raisin bran for $1.51 a pound, chocolate chips for $1.79 a bag, grated parmesan for $4.78 a pound, and strawberry jam for $1.77 a pint.
• At the Whole Earth Center, organic white mushrooms for $2.29 a pound, organic bananas for 79 cents a pound, and a Fair Trade chocolate bar for just $1.89 on sale.
• At Shop-Rite, sale-priced orange juice (the good stuff, not from concentrate) for $1.35 a quart and mozzarella cheese (also the good stuff, sold in blocks that you grate yourself) for $1.99 a pound.
• At Pathmark, locally grown apples for 98 cents a pound.
• At H-Mart, free-range eggs for $2.50 a dozen and scallions for 33 cents a bunch.
• And at our own local Stop & Shop, seltzer at 50 cents a liter and whipped cream at $3 a can.

This isn't everything we bought, of course, just the items that were particularly good deals—but everything on this list was cheaper at the place we bought it than it would have been anywhere else. If we'd tried to buy all these items, along with everything else on our list, at just one store, we would undoubtedly have spent more overall.

You might think that making all these individual trips must cost us something extra in gas. This would be true if we made each trip separately, but we don't. When we check the week's sale fliers, for instance, we don't make a special trip to any particular store unless it has several items we need—or the trip can be combined with a visit to a different store that has different items on sale. We visit the Whole Earth Center in Princeton on Thursdays, when we head down there for Morris dance practice; we stop at the Aldi en route to the same destination; when we need to hit the Trader Joe's, we either visit the Princeton store on a Thursday or the Florham Park one as part of a weekend trip to the Morristown area. And of course, the Stop & Shop being right here in town, we can go there on foot—so not only does it cost us nothing in gas, it also gives us an incentive to get some exercise.

In fact, there are some cases in which we could, theoretically, save more money the more trips we make. That's because some of the stores where we shop give us a discount for bringing our own bag (as we invariably do). Our local Stop & Shop, the one store we visit most often, has discontinued its 5-cent bag discount, but we can get 2 cents off at Shop-Rite and Pathmark, plus an impressive 10 cents for each reusable container we bring at the Whole Earth Center. Thus, if we happen to need five items from one of these stores, we actually save more money by spreading out the purchases over five separate trips and getting the bag discount each time, rather than making one trip and putting all five items in just one bag. (We don't actually plan our trips this way, because it's just not enough money to worry about, but it's still an effective counter to the argument that more shopping trips invariably add up to more money spent on each trip.)

Lastly, we actually save money by putting groceries on our credit card rather than paying in cash. That's because the card we use most often for groceries is our Chase Freedom card (the one I picked up as part of my financial tuneup in 2010), which gives us 1 cent back for every dollar we spend. Moreover, we get a whole nickel back on purchases in certain categories, which change from quarter to quarter, but at least occasionally include groceries. Thus, if we spent $750 on groceries during a three-month period when groceries were one of these special categories, using our card for every grocery purchase would save us $37.50 over the three months—certainly not a huge sum, but not a negligible one either.

Now, you may be thinking at this point that all this is well and good in theory, but how does it work out in practice? How much, in short, do we actually spend on groceries, compared to others who follow different strategies? It's a fair question, and I'll answer it as directly as I can: our average monthly spending on groceries for the two of us is $232.16. This works out to $3.87 per person per day, which, as I've noted before, is comfortably within the spending limits for SNAP (the program formerly known as Food Stamps) in our state. Our monthly grocery spending is about 87 percent of what the USDA estimates a family of two would spend under its Thrifty Food Plan (the cheapest of four possible food plans that all meet the standards for a nutritious diet). Moreover, our actual grocery spending is probably a bit lower than $232 per month, because this number includes various nonfood items purchased at grocery stores (such as the toothpaste and toilet paper I mentioned above), while the USDA's numbers are specifically meant to reflect spending on food and nothing else.

So as you can see, we don't do too badly following our many-stores shopping plan. But could we do even better by adopting the one-trip-a-week or the one-trip-a-month paradigm? Well, Trent Hamm, in his latest Simple Dollar post, estimates that he spends about $100 a week to feed his family of five. This is well below the USDA's Thrifty Plan estimate of $159 a week (assuming two adults between 19 and 50 years old and three children ranging from 3 to 7 years old). In fact, it's about 63 percent of the Thrifty Plan cutoff, which makes the Hamm family more frugal eaters than we are. However, it's worth noting that they haven't always been this thrifty: seven years ago, when they were following much the same basic shopping strategy they have now, their monthly spending was $770 for a family of four—placing them firmly in the "Moderate-Cost Food Plan" range, the second-highest of the USDA's four spending tiers. So while it clearly is possible to save a lot of money following Trent's shopping strategy, it's also clear that following it isn't guaranteed to save you money.

So basically, I think it comes down to a question of personal preference. Both Trent's family and mine now fall well within the boundaries of the Thrifty Plan, yet we follow very different shopping strategies. So clearly, it's unreasonable to say either that his approach is "right" and mine is "wrong," or vice versa; it all comes down to what works best for you. Moreover, just as the Hamm family has brought its grocery bills down significantly in the past seven years without changing its overall shopping strategy, I have no doubt that a family could spend far less than Brian and I do by following the same basic shopping strategy we have. In fact, I know it's possible, because I more or less learned this strategy from the Tightwad Gazette books by Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!), and her family of eight (!) used to spend just 28 percent of the USDA's Thrifty Plan level. Her number puts both me and Trent to shame, but it also is oddly comforting to me, as it shows just how much room I still have for improvement—and all without any major changes in the way I currently shop.


[EDIT, 6/23/14: I just took another look at the Simple Dollar post in which Trent Hamm discussed his family's food-buying strategy, and I noted that in fact, he does not recommend making just one trip to just one store for the week's groceries. He actually says, "Most of the time, when we go grocery shopping, we make at least two stops, but the exact stores we stop at varies from week to week." So it's possible that his ability to cut his family's monthly grocery bill from $770 for four people to around $430 for five people was partly a result of his decision to shop more stores for the best deals—in other words, adjusting his shopping strategy to be a bit more like mine.]

How smart are smartphones?

A recent article at DealNews.com lists nine electronic gadgets that, acccording to author Simon Hill, are likely to be a waste of money. Hill says that, while "it typically pays to buy slightly older devices" that cost far less than the latest models, it's silly to invest any money at all in technology that's either obsolete or clearly on its way to being so. Thus, he argues, DVDs and Blu-Rays are a waste of money because you can stream all the content you need from the Internet; thumb drives are unnecessary because you can store and transfer files via "the cloud" (which, as far as I can tell, is just "some location on the Internet that you can't exactly identify"). However, the main technology that he identifies as having supplanted a whole slew of other, older technologies at one fell swoop is the smartphone. If you have one of these, he argues, you have no need for

• a GPS unit, because you can put Google Maps on your Android or iOS device for free;
• a point-and-shoot camera, because smartphone cameras are just as good and make sharing easier;
• an MP3 player, because you can play music on your phone (or tablet, or laptop);
• a handheld gaming console, because you can play lots of casual games on your smartphone for free;
• a camcorder, because smartphones and tablets can already record video in HD; or
• an alarm clock, because your phone already has a built-in alarm and can play music of your choice.

The obvious snag in all this, of course, is that it assumes you already have a smartphone, and there are still some of us out there—yours truly included—who don't. But Hill's article made me wonder: just how much am I missing out on by not having one? If a smartphone has this many uses, might it be worth spending the $100 or so to get one?

Well, if that $100 were the only cost, perhaps. But as the comments below the article point out, when you buy a smartphone, the price tag on the phone itself is only the tip of the iceberg. Even Hill himself notes parenthetically that the $149 Nokia Lumia 1020, with its 41-megapixel camera, requires a 2-year contract—which, since this is an AT&T phone, will cost you a minimum of $40 a month for voice and $20 a month for data. At $60 a month, plus the $149 for the phone itself, this smartphone will actually cost you a whopping $869 in its first year of use. Seriously, if you listen you can actually hear the sound of it whopping.

Now, let's compare that to the low-tech—or at least lower-tech—way of doing the same things:

• GPS: Hill points out that with Google Maps, "it is now possible to load up a map and directions before a journey" onto your phone. However, it has always been possible with Google Maps to look up your route on your home computer before you leave and print out the directions on a plain old piece of paper. The cost is about 0.5 cents for the ink (if you refill the cartridges the way we do) and nothing for the paper (because it's all single-side-used paper scavenged from Brian's workplace). This does require a computer, Internet connection, and printer, but if you already have those, then a smartphone pre-loaded with a map and route provides no additional functionality.
• Photos and video: Our Canon Powershot A2300 cost us $99.99 at Amazon a year ago. It was already slightly out of date at that time, but it was certainly good enough for the limited picture-taking I do (mostly for this blog). It can also shoot video in HD, though I must confess I've never felt any need to use this feature. I've used this camera for a year now, and I haven't had to spend another penny on it—aside from the negligible cost of the electricity to recharge its battery.
• Music: We do have an MP3 player, but we don't use it much anymore. When we first received it as a gift, our plan was to use it to play music and podcasts in the car on long trips, via a little MP3-to-tape converter to plug it into the car's tape deck. (Remember tape decks?) However, not long afterwards, that car bit the proverbial dust, and our new one, while it does have an input jack for an MP3 player, also has an even handier feature that allows you to plug in a thumb drive and play music off of that directly on the car's stereo. This is much easier to do while driving (or even while riding) than manipulating the tiny controls on the MP3 player, so these days, we get most of our auto audio off this little thumb drive. However, for those whose cars are slightly less tech-savvy, a basic MP3 player like this Sandisk Clip can cost as little as $23 and holds plenty of music for a cross-country road trip (and can also go jogging with you).
• Gaming: Playing games on the go is something I've never actually felt much need to do. For killing time on long trips and in doctors' waiting rooms, I prefer a paperback book (which I can borrow from the library for free, or pick up for a buck at its annual book sale) or a crossword puzzle (which I can download and print out from a site such as the Wall Street Journal or Theresa's Cryptic Crosswords). However, if nothing but a game will do, I always carry a pack of real live playing cards, which costs as little as one dollar and can be used for a virtually infinite variety of games, group as well as solitaire.
• Alarm clock: Most people, I suspect, already have one of these and don't really need to replace it with a cell phone. But even if your old alarm clock should meet with a sudden accident (such as being beaten to a pulp on a Monday morning), you can choose from a vast array of new ones for under ten bucks—from a retro analog model equipped with an actual bell to a color-changing digital with a built-in thermometer and a choice of four "soothing nature sounds" to wake up to.

So all in all, I see no need to spring for a smartphone and data plan unless I should someday happen to actually need 24-hour connectivity everywhere I go. However, there is another option that might offer the best of all possible worlds: get a smartphone without a plan. A new phone, as I noted above, may not be available without one, but an older phone can still perform many of the functions listed above without any need to connect to the Internet. As this article on the British site TechRadar.com points out, an older smartphone can double as your GPS (or SatNav, as they call it across the pond) with the help of some pre-loaded maps; it can serve as a video camera, music player, and game console; and it can perform a variety of other functions that you'd never want to entrust to your actual phone, such as baby monitor, universal remote, "kitchen assistant" (coordinating your recipes and shopping lists in one handy spot), and even a toy for kids (once you've disabled its Wi-Fi connection, of course). And with used smartphones selling for as little as 35 bucks on Amazon, you can do all this for a lot less than the $869 a real, live, fully functional smartphone would cost you in its first year alone.

The Ecofrugal Java Jive

Last Christmas, when we went to visit my in-laws, I accompanied them on a trip to Costco and was smitten by the variety of organic and Fair Trade foodstuffs on offer. In particular, their price for Fair Trade decaffeinated coffee—just $13 for a two-pound bag—was enough to have me reconsidering the value of a $55 Costco membership. After all, I reasoned, at a pound of coffee per month, the membership could easily pay for itself in the savings on coffee alone.

That, however, was before I actually tasted the stuff. I still had the remainder of my last 5-pound shipment of Dean's Beans to get through, plus the bag of Caribou Coffee I'd snagged at Target, so it was some months before I actually got around to cracking open the big two-pound bag of Costco beans and grinding some up. And the result was...disappointing. I found the flavor very bitter and heavy, without any of the underlying fragrant sweetness that I associate with good coffee. I know there are some folks who really like their coffee as dark and bitter as possible, but for me, this was just too much.

So I figured it was back to the old drawing board, searching the supermarket racks for sales on anything with a Fair Trade label. Unfortunately, the decaffeinated version of our local supermarket's organic brand, Nature's Promise, was $7 for a 10-ounce bag, which made it pricier than the Dean's Beans. But fortunately, I managed to grab a bag on sale for $6, or just under $10 a pound, and I assumed that was probably the best I could do. However, that bargain paled in comparison to the one I discovered at IKEA when we went there in search of patio furniture last July. In the café just beyond the checkout, I came across 250-gram bags of their various house coffees, which included a decaffeinated medium roast. All of them were Utz Certified, and all were marked down from their already remarkable price of $3.49 a bag—which works out to about $6.35 per pound, less than Costco's price—to an absolutely jaw-dropping $1.99. Naturally, I couldn't pass up a deal like that, but my experience with the Costco coffee had made me cautious. Rather than stock up at this bargain price, I decided to get just one bag at first to make sure that I liked it. Besides, I already had a mostly full bag of the Nature's Promise coffee to get through first, and in the August heat I wasn't drinking coffee at my usual rate anyway. In fact, as it turned out, it wasn't until yesterday that I actually finished off the last of the Nature's Promise coffee and brewed up my first batch of the IKEA stuff.

So how was it? Well, like the Costco coffee, it was definitely on the dark side; in fact, my friend Doug, who got the first cup, remarked, "If that's their medium roast, I'd hate to see their dark one." But while I'm generally no lover of extra-dark coffee, I actually found this one quite likable. It was bitter, but the bitterness wasn't overpowering like the Costco brand's; it let the subtler, aromatic flavors of the coffee come through. Usually I find I can't drink a very dark coffee without sugar, but this one actually tasted fine to me with just milk. It wasn't the best cup of coffee I'd ever had, certainly, but I agreed with Doug's assessment of it as "decent but not extraordinary"—which, as we both noted, is pretty much what we've come to expect from IKEA in general.

So IKEA's Mellanrost decaf turns out to be pretty much everything I could ask for: flavorful, Fair Trade, and a great value even when it isn't on sale. There's just one catch: it's only sold at IKEA, and the nearest IKEA to us is in Elizabeth. We have to take the NJ Turnpike to get there, paying $4.90 in tolls. Thus, if I made a trip there solely to buy coffee, the price of two bags would jump from $6.98 to $11.88, or $10.80 per pound— exactly the same price I've been paying for Dean's Beans.

Fortunately, this isn't an insurmountable obstacle. We usually end up visiting IKEA at least once a year already, so we can just add coffee to the list of items to stock up during these trips, along with jars of lingonberries for Swedish pancakes. We can also make a point of popping into the nearest IKEA when we're on the road; when visiting our friends in the DC area, for example, we'd only have to backtrack one exit along the Beltway. So one way or another, we can stock up on the Mellanrost coffee whenever the opportunity presents itself—and if our stock runs out between trips, we can fill in with a bag or two the Nature's Promise. It should still work out cheaper overall in the long run than buying Dean's Beans five pounds at a time.

Or, what with Hanukkah coming early this year and all, we could just plan to do some of our holiday shopping at IKEA. :-)

Fewer chances to "save"

Last week's Tip Hero newsletter featured a video from blogger Ramit Sethi, of the modestly named finance blog I Will Teach You To Be Rich, in which he promises that you can save "well over a thousand dollars" just by making five phone calls. The idea is, you call up companies you do business with, tell them that you're a long-time customer who "would hate to switch" to a different company, and ask them flat-out if they can offer you a better deal than you're getting now. The five companies he proposes calling are:

1. Your cell phone provider
2. Your gym
3. Your cable company
4. Your insurance company (or companies)
5. All your credit cards

Now, there's just one little problem with this: you can only save "well over a thousand" with these phone calls if you're currently spending well over a thousand per year on your cell phone, gym membership, cable TV, insurance, and credit card fees. Apparently Mr. Sethi's idea of "teaching you to be rich" is to teach you to live the expected lifestyle of a rich person—complete with a cell phone plan, a gym membership, and premium cable—for (somewhat) less money. He doesn't seem to consider the fact that it's actually possible to give up many of these amenities without any real sacrifice. Yet many frugal folks—the kinds of people who read Tip Hero—are already doing just that, as the second comment on the video illustrates:

We gave up cable months ago and watch our favorite shows free online. I'm on a promo-rate for internet service with cable company. Once a year before it runs out, I give them a call reminding them of my 20+ years of loyalty and how disappointed I would be to have to go to another provider, quoting comparison teaser rates. I ask to speak to whomever can help keep my rate affordable. No gym, $0 balance on credit cards, and unlimited prepaid cell phones. All tolled [sic], it's much less than one month of cable tv service.

We're in a similar boat. We don't belong to a gym, and we use a prepaid cell phone for emergencies only, paying around $40 per year. We don't pay any interest or fees of any kind on our credit cards, so there's no potential savings there. I did try shopping around for lower rates on our insurance policies a couple of months back and found that we could save a whole $140 by switching both our homeowners' and our auto policies from our current, trusted providers to one we know little about—but when I tried going to our current providers and asking them to cut me a deal, I had no luck. True, we do now have cable, after going without it for most of our married life—and we did succeed, after suffering sticker shock when we received our first bill, in getting our monthly rate lowered. But first of all, we were only able to do this by cutting back to a lower tier of service, something that Mr. Sethi probably doesn't advocate. And second, now that we've done it, we've already harvested the low-hanging fruit as far as savings are concerned. So calling our cable company a second time and asking for yet another price reduction would probably get us nothing.

The basic problem with Mr. Sethi's tips is the same one I've noted so often with financial advice in general: it only saves you money if you're spending way too much to start with. It's the same problem I've encountered when looking at ways to cut energy use or reduce household waste; in order to improve, you have to be doing some fairly wasteful stuff to start with. So for those of us who are already frugal, already eco-conscious—already, in short, doing all the obvious things—there just aren't as many opportunities to "save" as the articles aimed at a more mainstream (i.e., wasteful) audience would imply. It's the same problem that Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) noted in her article, "Read This Article and Save $150,000," which appeared in her third Tightwad Gazette book:

sometimes to "save" the most, you have to spend the most...If this woman wrote a diet book and marketed it on the claim that she lost 75 percent of her weight, you'd immediately conclude she must have weighed a lot before the diet. Unfortunately, when fuzzy claims are made about how much money can be "saved," we don't always grasp the implication.

So in short, whenever you see an article claiming in big, bold capital letters that you can "save" thousands each year—or hundreds, or even just $100—by following a few basic tips, be suspicious. Chances are, the only people who can really save this much are those who were spending way more than they needed to in the first place.

Rolling in clover

It was early July when, after a week of steady work, we laid down the last paver of our new patio. It's now late September, and we're still in the process of trying to put the rest of the yard back together. First we had to clear the pile of leftover gravel and stone dust from our driveway (in the process giving ourselves the permanent surface for our garden paths that we'd been seeking for over a year); then we cleaned up all the leftover bricks and stashed them in the shed for possible future use; then we started the process of using the leftover fill dirt to smooth out the surface of the slope we'd built up around the patio itself, and we also transferred the pile of waste concrete from the middle of our yard to a less obtrusive spot in a back corner (where it will remain until we find either a use for it or a place to dispose of it). And finally, last weekend, we took the last major step required to restore normalcy: planting the dirt-covered slope with grass seed.

Neither of us has ever actually planted grass before (we've always sort of accepted as "grass" whatever mixture of weeds happened to be in our yard when it came into our possession), so my first step, naturally, was to do a bit of research. I was particularly interested in a seed mixture containing clover, since I knew that clover is a nitrogen-fixing plant that acts as a sort of natural, no-work fertilizer. I'd already filled in a few bare patches in the back yard with Dutch white clover, and it seemed to grow very well in our clay soil—a bit too well, in fact, since it quickly reached heights of six inches or more, which is a bit higher than most people would consider desirable for a lawn. So I did a little digging and found that a company in Denmark has developed and patented a low-growing variety of clover called microclover. If the manufacturer's claims are to be believed, this stuff blends unobtrusively into a grass lawn, crowds out weeds, requires little water, and stays green year-round. What's not to like?

Actually finding a grass seed mix containing microclover, however, proved a bit difficult. When I searched, I discovered a blend on the Home Depot website that looked ideal, but when we actually went to Home Depot looking for it, they didn't have any on the shelves. So we ended up having to special order it through the website and then wait about a week for it to be delivered to the store. We picked it up on Monday, and last weekend we got down to business planting it. First, we added a bit more dirt to the sloped area, smoothing it out as much as possible. Next, following the advice on the seed bag, we mixed in the last of the bagged compost we had left over in the shed (we'd already disposed of the bags that failed the compost test, so we knew this stuff wouldn't kill all our clover seed). We then watered it down thoroughly and left it to dry overnight, as the seed bag recommended. Unfortunately, it rained heavily during the night, so the dirt still wasn't really dry the next day, but we couldn't really put it off any longer, so we just went ahead and started spreading the seed. Since we had such a small area to do, we didn't bother buying or renting a seed spreader; we tried making a makeshift one out of an oatmeal box with holes punched in the lid, but it proved too awkward to use (the lid wouldn't stay put and had to be held on with one hand), so eventually we gave up on it and just spread it as evenly as we could manage by hand.

Once all the seed was down, Brian took the additional precaution of laying down some burlap over the part of the slope where water tends to run off during storms, in the hope that this would keep our seed from washing away downhill. Now all we have left to do is water it regularly for the next two weeks—aiming to keep it moist, but not soaked—and hope the birds don't decide to eat it all. (Since I haven't seen them swarming over the newly seeded area like it was the world's best salad bar, I think they must not consider it food.)

As I had suspected, the process of smoothing out the slope didn't use up all the remaining dirt left over from our patio excavation. Fortunately, however, we had another use for it: Brian discovered some holes in the back part of the yard, possibly left by our old nemesis the garden rat or some other burrowing critter. So between filling in the slope and filling up the holes, we managed to dispose of pretty much all the dirt left in the pile. The rest we simply raked smooth and covered with more grass seed. Unlike the area nearest the patio, it didn't get any compost, since there wasn't any left, but our soil is pretty rich, so I guess we'll just keep our fingers crossed.

Naturally, I'm hoping the grass will fill in both areas nicely, but I can't help wondering: if this stuff really does provide the kind of lush, green carpet advertised on the package, will it make the rest of the yard look bad by contrast? Will we need to start tearing up the rest of the lawn, a bit at a time, in order to replant it and bring it up to the standards of this newly seeded area? Or will the "very aggressive" microclover just spread on its own, gradually battling and defeating our existing lawn weeds as it works its way across the yard?

Or, given that not one of the seeds we just planted has actually sprouted yet, should I quit counting my chickens (or my clovers) before they've hatched?

Gardeners' holidays: Harvest Home

Of all the quarter- and cross-quarter days in the year, the fall equinox is one of the few that doesn't currently have a holiday attached to it, either sacred or secular. Many of the old festivals still have their modern descendants, like Groundhog Day in February and Halloween in October; the spring equinox is linked to Passover and Easter, and the winter solstice is tied to Christmas. Even lesser-known holidays like May Day and Lammas have a few lingering traditions attached to them. But practically no one except orthodox Wiccans actually celebrates the fall equinox anymore, and it's a pity. Because really, Keats's "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" is the most satisfying time in a gardener's year. The hard work of digging and planting, weeding and watering, is mostly done, and all that remains is to gather in the fruits of our labors. The next six weeks—from the start of fall until Halloween—are really the culmination of everything the gardener has worked for all year long.

In our own garden, the zucchini has finally passed its peak and the plants are slowly drying up (though there are two more wee squash that we should be able to harvest before they fade completely). Our cucumber vines also seem to be pretty much played out, with just one tiny cuke left on the vine that we may be able to pick and add to the big jar of homemade pickles in the fridge. Our tomatoes, however, are still producing like mad—particularly the Sun Golds, which I've concluded we planted way too many of this year. (Next year, I'm planning to restrict the number to two, and ideally I'll keep those two isolated from the rest of the tomatoes so they can't take over the whole trellis.) We're picking more of them than we can possibly eat whole; earlier this week Brian processed about a quart of whole tomatoes into a small batch of thick sauce. Turns out that the Sun Golds make a very tasty sauce, especially for pizza; however, it's important to label it as "Sun Gold sauce" before stashing it in the freezer, because in color it's pretty much identical to butternut squash puree.

And speaking of butternut squash, we've got a plentiful crop of those on the vine. I counted seven good-sized squash ready to harvest, not counting the one we picked already—and there might be some smaller ones that I overlooked. It's not quite as big a crop as we got from the volunteer plant that seeded itself next to the compost bin back in 2010, eventually taking over the entire side yard—but it's the best we've managed to do so far growing butternut squash from seed, and I'm fairly pleased with the results. Next year, I think I may put them in the ground even earlier and see if we get a bigger harvest yet.

Our pepper plants, sadly, have been a bit of a disappointment. The one seedling that we thought might be big enough to plant didn't survive, and the three plants that we bought at the spring sales—a Chocolate Beauty, a Paladin, and a White Hungarian—have produced only tiny fruits. They're pretty enough, particularly the White Hungarians (which start out not so much white as pale green and then ripen to a reddish-orange), but they're not providing us with all that much actual food. I guess we'll have to keep experimenting to find varieties that can thrive in our garden and still produce well.

Elsewhere in the garden, there's a somewhat scraggly assortment of scallions and leeks ready to pick whenever we want them, as well as all that Ventura celery that we planted to fill in the gaps in the rhubarb bed. So far, there's little sign of the lettuce and spinach that I planted last month; however, I did find one unmistakeable lettuce leaf poking through the ground, and several tiny sprouts that might be incipient spinach, so there is still some hope of that crop of fall greens. Meanwhile, our arugula, which produced almost nothing in the spring, has suddenly started flourishing, so we should be able to get a couple of good salads out of that. The parsley is thriving too, and the basil has grown up into a veritable jungle. I'm seeing a massive batch of pesto in our near future.

So how are we going to celebrate our harvest? Well, given what we have in the garden at the moment, this would appear to be an ideal time for one of our favorite dishes, pasta à la Caprese. The recipe comes from The Clueless Vegetarian, perhaps my favorite of all the vegetarian cookbooks on our shelf; author Evelyn Raab calls it "the perfect midsummer pasta," but around here, it looks like the start of fall is actually the perfect season for the combination of ripe tomatoes, fresh basil, and ripe bell pepper that goes into the sauce (steeping together with olive oil, garlic, and a touch of salt and pepper to produce, through some sort of mysterious alchemical reaction, a product that's far greater than the sum of its parts). However, as it happens, we just had pasta earlier this week (with pesto and some of those ubiquitous Sun Gold tomatoes), so instead, Brian is turning several of our larger tomatoes into a batch of salsa to accompany tonight's quesadillas. And, to complete the celebration, we've just invited over a friend to join us, because half the joy of the harvest is in sharing the bounty with others. A Happy Harvest Home to all!