Tag: frugal living
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Handmade holidays: experiment in wreath-making
27 December 2011On even-numbered years, Jak’s kids are with us for Christmas, and we often end up spending the holiday with his extended family as well. On odd-numbered years — like this one — the kids spend Christmas with their mother, and Jak and I are usually alone. I wasn’t too keen on buying a whole tree [...]
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9 December 2011
The calculations are complete. Total cost per person for our Thanksgiving meal (one generous serving each of six dishes and two desserts): $3.50. Note that I didn’t skimp on quality of ingredients — I used such expensive items as pine nuts, heavy cream, whole vanilla beans, and real maple syrup. I also did nothing different [...]
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On shrimp, or how to balance ethics and thrift
19 November 2011Pocketmint now spans three and a half years, and while there are certain posts I would write the same today, other things in my life have changed over that time. I think this personal evolution is often meaningful, so periodically I’ll be highlighting something I said in the past and updating it with my current [...]
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22 October 2011
Three years ago, in October 2008, the stock market crashed and — not coincidentally, as I was then employed by the brokerage arm of an international bank — I promptly lost my job. The following month my partner Jak took a 10% pay cut, as the market continued dropping and layoffs and hiring freezes broke [...]
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Supper club: an alternative to potlucks and dinner parties
15 January 2010This entry started out as a comment to Kris’ potluck post on Get Rich Slowly, but it soon became too long for a mere comment, so I moved it over here. In addition to being frugal-minded, I’m also an unabashed foodie. When I was lucky enough to have three friends nearby who also liked to [...]
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Save those crusts: a yummy use for your extra bread bits
11 December 2009For the past few months, my newfound love for easy homemade bread got sidelined by my difficulties with excema. Even easy bread sort of requires being able to use both hands. So it was back to the Costco multigrain loaves for sandwiches and toast. It’s always pained my frugal soul that a certain amount of [...]
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5 November 2009
We’ve done a pretty good job of cutting back on unnecessary expenses during this period of reduced income. ‘Magazine subscriptions’ seems like an obvious category to eliminate, right? Yet I kept mine. Here’s why: they save me way more money than they cost. Consumer Reports My first-ever magazine subscription, when I was 19 years old, [...]
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25 September 2009
Alert readers may have noticed that lately the frequency of posts here at Pocketmint has been somewhat reduced. One reason is that some of my recently personal-finance writing has gone to Get Rich Slowly instead. In addition to the aforementioned discount grocery store adventure, I did a post on Discovering — and challenging — your [...]
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An unflinching look at America’s dangerous fascination with ‘cheap’
5 September 2009Even before I’d finished Ellen Ruppel Shell’s new book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, I decided I should review it on Pocketmint. I then spent two weeks artfully procrastinating on doing so. Apparently I have a block on writing formal ‘book reviews’. I have no trouble discussing books, verbally and informally, but the [...]
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Credit cards (part three): use ’em … and lose ’em anyway
7 August 2009It was a brief segment on NPR’s Marketplace last month that alerted me to the newest scary thing about credit cards: banks have begun to curtail or withdraw credit based on where you shop and what you buy. Here’s one example: consumer Kevin Johnson had his credit line slashed by two-thirds despite a stellar credit [...]
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A visit to the Island of Misfit Foods
4 August 2009The first of my two guest posts is up at Get Rich Slowly. GRS has long been my favorite personal finance blog, and was one of the main inspirations for Pocketmint. (Which is sort of a neat karmic circle, since JD credits my online personal journal of twelve years ago as the inspiration for his [...]
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One more for the ‘no-knead’ bread revolution
1 July 2009I love fresh homemade bread. Once, in my early twenties, I made a loaf by hand. I had picked up the classic Tassajara Bread Book from a remainder table, and one afternoon I went at it for several hours, kneading and punching away. It made a glorious loaf which we happily devoured straight out of [...]
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Downsizing appliances to save money
20 June 2009When we bought our house in December 2006, there was a surprise in the garage: the former owners had left us a huge old chest freezer. Now, Jak and I had a chest freezer already, a smaller model we’d bought at Costco about five years earlier. So this one was a bit superfluous, more than [...]
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Frugal foodie: agony at the farmers’ market
21 August 2008I had a sort of mini-vacation last week; didn’t go anywhere, but took off work to hang with a visiting friend. I had every intention of posting during the break, but … I was too busy playing. And eating. Stacy and I are both unapologetic foodies, which means we spent much of our time bouncing [...]
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Fillet or fish: picking the better bargain
10 July 2008The weekly grocery fliers arrived yesterday, and when I saw the QFC ad for ‘Fresh Wild Coho Salmon’ I was reminded of a frequent shopping dilemma: should I buy whole fish or fillets? This week’s offering is $9.99 for the fillets, or $6.99 for the whole fish. I have no idea which price is the [...]
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Gas mileage: we’re doing it wrong
24 June 2008Gasoline prices are on the mind of nearly every American right now. Here in Seattle, where gas is currently climbing past the $4.50 mark, we like our hybrid cars. A lot. But Seattle had an environmentally ‘green’ culture long before the recent spike in gas prices, which suggests that a lot of those hybrids are [...]