Browse Tag: Frugality

Frugality

How I Saved Over 20% While Shopping For Groceries

AldiLast week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the German discount grocery chain Aldi (subscription required).

In the article, author Zeke Turner notes that Aldi already has over 1,700 stores in the United States, and recently announced it would invest $3.4 billion over the next five years to increase its store count to nearly 2,500. If Aldi’s planned expansion is successful, it would rank as the third-largest grocery retailer in the U.S. by locations, behind only Wal-Mart and Kroger.

Aldi entered the U.S. market in the Midwest in the 1970s, and currently has stores in nearly three dozen states. Aldi stores are known for their low prices, small size, limited selection, and focus on their own store brands.

If frugality is your thing, you might like Aldi. If you like to be pampered while shopping, Aldi may not be for you.

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My Costly – and Depressing – Trip to the Dump

DumpThe ROMT family tries to live a reasonably frugal and environmentally-friendly lifestyle.

We have our own vegetable garden and berry plants to provide a small, but healthy, portion of our diet.

We try to encourage the ROMT children to be members of the clean plate club.

We’re certainly not conspicuous consumers, and try to purchase only things we need.

We donate what we can’t use anymore to family, friends, local charities, our church, or Goodwill.

We recently embraced solar energy.

And we recycle everything we can.

Even so, we still have a way of accumulating junk.

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Can You Be Frugal If You Own A Lot Of Stuff?

Self Storage
If you are truly frugal, you probably won’t have stuff that ends up in a place like this!

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published an article about how the tech sector is trying to disrupt the self-storage business model (subscription required).

In the article, author Peter Grant noted startups such as Clutter Inc. and MakeSpace Labs Inc. are trying to use  logistics and technology to provide a more efficient and user-friendly self-storage experience than established companies like Public Storage, CubeSmart, and Extra Space Storage Inc.

The article noted Clutter charges $100 to $110 a month in New York to store a closet worth of stuff, in line with local self-storage facilities. Clutter differentiates itself from the traditional self-storage companies by packing up and photographing items before hauling them off to their storage facility, and then delivering them back to the customer’s home after they select the photographs of the items they want returned online.

For this service, Clutter charges $35 per hour per mover for on-site labor in the packing and moving process associated with pick-ups and deliveries.

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Our Solar Installation: The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

 

Solar Energy
Solar Facts, courtesy of a nutritional sticker on our solar inverter!

One of my favorite songs by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is “The Waiting.”

I’m not usually that good at discerning the meaning of lyrics, but in this case I’m pretty sure Tom was singing of his anticipation about the installation of a new home solar energy system.

Last week, I shared my thoughts on our decision to go solar.

The process took several months from start to finish, and the waiting was definitely one of the hardest parts!

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Should We Go Solar?

Solar Panels
Not a picture of our home!

Over the past several years, I’ve noticed the installation of more and more solar panels in the area we live.

I’ve long been intrigued by the idea of solar energy, but as someone who tries to base most of his financial decisions on facts and numbers, rather than emotions or peer pressure, it never made sense to me.

A local solar provider recently offered an incentive program through my employer. While the incentive was modest, it was enough to get me to seriously run the numbers, and do some further research about the pros and cons of solar energy for our family.

The verdict?

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Smart Financial Decisions: Pay Attention to the Little Things

Sandwich
Mmmmm… sandwich!!!

Last month, our friends at Rockstar Finance challenged readers to avoid eating or drinking out for an entire week.

As someone who has purchased his lunch on roughly 99% of the working days of his career, I decided to give the challenge a try.

And you know what?

I was successful, and the world didn’t end.

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Smart Financial Decisions: Chase Freedom Credit Card

As I have become more involved in the FIRE community over the past several months, it’s been hard to avoid articles about optimizing one’s use of credit cards.

Initially, I was skeptical. It seemed like the primary focus was travel hacking, which didn’t do a lot for me.

I am not a big traveler.

I am a middle-aged man, with a full-time job, a long commute, a wife, a dog, and two young children.

It’s a challenge for me to find time to travel to the local Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and grocery store, much less exotic locales around the world!

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