Online Shoppers Blog - Become's Pocket Change: Guest hosting: Festival of Frugality

Buenos ding-dong-diddly dias folks, and welcome to the 50th edition of the Festival of Frugality. Sure, we rock the Carnival of Shopping here (and have one on the way tomorrow) but we figured we'd take a stab at hosting another one of our favorites, because man, do we love stabbing.

Let's start it off with an excellent idea from Kim at Reviews in a Shoe: a frugality blogroll. I'm adding us, although her "clean and family-friendly" requirement does rather preclude the entry I had planned about how to waste your money like a pornstar. Oh well.

Binary Dollar has some good tips for saving money on potlucks, although I'm not sure I trust myself (or, frankly, you) enough to follow the "bring food that's close to expiring" tip. Once when I was in sixth grade I decided to bake a cake from scratch for my class, and I don't know if I used spoiled ingredients or if I'm just bad at cooking, but I think it's safe to say that the disgustingness of the cake definitely kept girls from being attracted to me for the next seven years. Because that's really the only explanation I can think of.

If you're heartless and hate your family, Not Made of Money recommends opting out of Christmas gift exchanging. Actually, they recommend subsitituting cards and photos, but in my book, earnest expressions of emotion will never carry quite the same weight as dropping a bunch of money on me. Hey--I'm trying to be frugal, here. I never said the people around me ought to do it, too.

Debt Free has a post about things to watch out for on Black Friday. Now, both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have technically passed, but that doesn't mean that retailers aren't still trying to get you to sign up for credit cards you don't need, buy things you don't want, promise your first-born, and so on. Seriously, watch out for that last one. I know, we all want a PlayStation 3, but you'll regret it, if only because you can't claim a child as a dependant if you've sold him/her to a corporation.

Ratio(Price,Quality) calls out two cool services:

Pinger lets you record a message to someone, who then receives a text message and can check it. Doncha hate calling people to leave a message, and then they pick up, and you have to talk to them? (I'm not being sarcastic here. I seriously hate that.)
712-858-8883, (run, it would seem, by a company called FuturePhone) which only costs whatever it costs you to call Iowa, and then routes your international call for free. I keep reading about this and have yet to try it, largely because I don't know any foreign phone numbers. Actually, thanks to cell phone address books, I don't know any phone numbers at all. Point is: use your free minutes to call Zimbabwe via Iowa.

Paula at Queer¢ents relays some decent philosophical advice from an otherwise-apparently-lame Fidelity Investments publication.

Priya at Credit Card Lowdown points out the difference in the psychology of paying with plastic vs. paying with cash. Rationally, paying with plastic should make it easier to budget, since you can track your spending very precisely. Practically, that's not always the case. Shoot, I pay for everything with plastic, download my statement into Quicken automatically, and still suck at budgeting since it's so convenient that I never have to pay any attention to it at all. Conversely, I have a friend who takes some 20s out of the bank at the beginning of the week, and only pays for things in cash. That's a budget that's hard to bust.

Money Smart Life recommends looking at saving and spending as a ratio rather than as pure numbers--maybe saving $500 over the course of a year doesn't feel like a lot, but if you set your percentage goal and stuck to it, you've succeeded. At saving money, that is. You're still a terrible heart surgeon.

Thoughtful Consideration broaches a topic that most people just avoid: the impending takeover of our planet by a hostile race of killer robots. Also, how to overcome the awkwardness of talking to people about money. But seriously, people, we've got to start talking about the robots. Ignoring it won't make them go away.

Matt Hutter has some good tips on how to avoid pouring all your money down a restaurant's drain. I'd add to his post: remember that they charge you for a bottle of champagne even if you just shake it up and spray it on the maitre d' and don't drink any of it. Talk about lessons learned the hard way.

And finally, Frugal Upstate has a great post on how to keep your holiday traditions from breaking the bank. Remember: sitting on the floor and staring silently at the wall all month may not cost much, but it's a terrible, terrible tradition. I don't know why my family still does it.

All right, folks, thanks for visiting and letting us host this week. Come back tomorrow for our Carnival of Shopping (shoot us an email if you'd like to be included), keep those cameras safely rolling and honey, untie the mongoose, I'm coming straight home.

Aram

Online Shoppers Blog - Become's Pocket Change

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Guest hosting: Festival of Frugality

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