Frugal Intuition

Today’s post doesn’t have much do to with saving money. Well, depending on how prone you are to believing the forwards that land in your inbox, I suppose it could, but I’m thinking about this more in terms of time savers and courtesy. Forwards are, as far as I’m concerned, one of the banes of email. To me they are just a lazy person’s way of sending some communication and say to me “You aren’t important enough to me to actually take the time to write a personalized and real letter.” Call me old fashioned if you will. Now I’m willing to admit that some of the ones out there are pretty darn funny or cute (I have a weakness for cute puppy and kitty pictures), and those aren’t the ones I’m talking about today. No, the ones I want to talk about are the ludicrous, alarmist forwards that proclaim that there’s some huge computer virus coming, that if some dude approaches you in the parking lot of the mall and tries to give you a business card the drugs on it will absorb instantly into your system and knock you out so that you can be kidnapped and brutalized, etc. My mom sends these to me all the time, and it drives me NUTS.

So for those of you who aren’t already familiar, I want to introduce you to Snopes.com. Snopes is this really awesome website where you can actually verify the truth of the rumors running rampant on the internet. Whenever my mother or someone else sends me a forward (assuming I haven’t deleted it without reading in the first place), I immediately check it out here, then reply to sender that the claim in the forward is bogus (100% of the ones I’ve ever gotten are). Sometimes there’s a grain of truth to them. The one she sent me yesterday (which prompted this post) was about a drug recall. It was alarmist, in big, bold, red font claiming that there was a drug recall on a long list of OTC medications containing some chemical I can’t even pronounce. The forward claimed it had been verified by Snopes and you should pay attention. Naturally, I went to check it out. And color me surprised, it was a legitimate drug recall…

8 years ago. As it turns out, there were methodological issues related to the study that the FDA based the recall on and the risk was incredibly low.

This idiot forward has been making the rounds of the internet, cluttering up people’s inboxes, wasting their time for EIGHT YEARS. Now add that kind of time to all the OTHER forwards out there and you start to realize what an incredible TIME SUCK forwards are. Even if you don’t read them, they take time to delete. So do us all a favor and don’t send them. Or if you do feel compelled to share one of these, take a moment to check that it’s a legitimate claim before wasting anybody else’s time and adding to the general hysteria.

The holiday season is upon us (and has been for a month if retailers are to be believed–Christmas stuff out before Halloween–c’mon guys!) and with it comes the headache of shipping.  This means that you have to package your stuff to ship, take your happy self to the nearest Post Office, where you’re likely to face long lines, eating up your precious lunch break and leaving you entirely cranky the rest of the day.  Maybe that’s just me…

In case you can’t tell, I hate going to the Post Office.  There’s not one that’s truly convenient for me, and it’s never a zip in and out sort of prospect.  The reason this is on my mind today is that I have my first book to ship for Bookmooch, which I talked about this weekend.  I was convinced I was going to have to go to the post office to ship it, as I have never before been able to print a shipping label for media mail from my home (or in this case, work) computer.  But ah, then I discovered Stamps.com.  With their Postage On Demand service you:

• Eliminate gas-guzzling trips to the Post Office.™
• Save over 80% compared to a postage meter.
• Make mail look more professional.
• Never overpay for postage again.
• Print on envelopes, labels or plain paper.

I was able to print my media mail label for $2.41, and I’ll be able to drop it in the outgoing mail for work.  No extra gas.  No waste of my lunch break.  I was forced to buy the delivery confirmation for $0.18, but given how things tend to get lost in the mail these days, that’s not a bad idea anyway. It was absolutely worth the avoidance of a headache.

And then I went to read the details for this post.

I discovered that there is a $17.99 monthly charge for this service.  Apparently in my haste and excitement at having found somewhere to print media mail postage, I missed that part.  Oops.  So I logged into the account and went to cancel the service.  Of course I had to call customer service to do so.  I will say that their customer service was prompt, incredibly polite, and a pleasure to deal with as far as customer service goes.  They do have a cheaper plan that’s $9.99 a month, and for people who actually do ship stuff on a regular basis, it might be worth looking into.  As this is the first thing I have shipped in months, it’s not practical for me.  The upside, I canceled within what was apparently a 4 week trial period, so no harm done.

All is not lost!

Well, as I said, there is a 4 week trial period, so if you have access to a Pitney Bowes machine or scale to weigh your packages without going to the P.O., you could still sign up at Stamps.com to print all your postage for the holidays and mail stuff.  You just have to remember to cancel the service at the end of the trial to avoid the monthly fee.  

That having been said, the actual U.S.P.S. website allows you to print postage as well for first class, priority mail, and express mail–without a monthly fee, so if you want to ship that way, you can still avoid the hassle of going to the P.O.  This whole quest started for me because I wanted to ship something media mail, which the U.S.P.S. website doesn’t appear to allow for reasons that escape me.

If anybody out there knows of a way to do this without having to pay a fee, let me know!

I am a huge fan of anything that saves me time in cleaning the bathroom.  The bathroom is that chore that my husband and I both hate and tend to put off (which, let’s face it, is just gross).  But I couldn’t bring myself to pay $2-5 for a daily shower spray that wasn’t going to last more than a couple of weeks in our house.  So I set out on a search to make my own.  If you google “shower spray recipe” you’re going to find all kinds of combinations of stuff.  Common ingredients are alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, vinegar water, tea tree oil, and a number of other things.  I wanted something simple, made of stuff I generally keep around the house.  Somewhere (and I no longer remember where and can’t find it, but let it be known that this is not my recipe) I stumbled across this recipe:

• 1 cup rubbing alcohol
• 1 cup hydrogen peroxide
• 1 capful of Jetdry
• about 6 drops of grease-cutting dish soap like Dawn
• enough water to fill the remainder of a 32 oz. spray bottle

You can get good sturdy spray bottles in the garden department at Walmart.  They aren’t exactly pretty, but this lives in the shower behind the curtain, so nobody’s going to see.

I’ve had marvelous results with this concoction.  A bottle lasts our family a little over 2 weeks (longer if everyone showers back to back and only the last person out sprays it) and it’s so cheap to make.  We have all the ingredients as staples in our house.   I cleaned the shower thoroughly before I started using it, and other than an occasional wipe down with a Clorox wipe about once a month, I haven’t had to clean my shower in three or four months.  No more creepy pink mildew on the caulk.  No more soap scum.  No more having to buy a new shower liner ever two months because of mildew or mold.  This stuff is awesome.  And I love the fact that it’s green.  There are no creepy chemicals with unpronouncable names.  Just spray on the walls and shower curtain before you hop out of the shower and be sure to close the curtain so that it can dry more easily when you’re out.

Now if only someone could come up with an easy way to tame dog hair…

For the last couple of years gas prices have done nothing but go up up up.   Prices were approaching $5 a gallon on a recent trip to Atlanta.  Recently prices have been going down (I got gas for $2.19 last night), but I’m firmly convinced this is just because of the election and that they’re going to go back up in short order.  No matter what prices do, it pays off at the pump to be savvy about your usage of gas.

First off, do some scouting before you purchase.  Check out Gas Buddy.  This site allows you to enter your zip code and find all your local gas prices (or as many as have been reported).  Once you have the prices in sight, it’s time to do some planning.

Rather than waiting until the last minute and making multiple runs to pick up this or that, plan your errands for the week.  Make your lists for the grocery, Walmart, the drug store, dry cleaners, wherever.  Plot out your route for all these stops and get them all done on the same day.  It’s more efficient to drive from one stop to the next than spreading them out on separate days.  While driving, try to stick to the speed limit.  Take the shortest route from stop to stop. This means you use less gas overall.  On your errand day, plan that route to go by the cheapest gas price in your area and fill up.

Also, be sure to keep up maintenance on your car.  Get that oil changed on time.  Keep your air filter clean.  And from time to time, hit your tank with fuel injector cleaner.  It makes your engine run more efficiently.