Travel Frugality

Jason and I just returned from a trip to Nashville, TN.  It wasn’t a trip we were originally planning or budgeting to take.  However, Jason won a handbell contest in May, which paid for about half of the expenses to experience Pinnacle (a national handbell convention).  Given that his career as a handbell  composer/arranger is still in the developing stages, we saw this trip as more of an investment than an expense.  Still, we wanted to keep costs as low as possible.

Food on the Cheap

For those of you who follow the blog, you know Jason makes our money work for us, and I try to find as many ways to save as possible.  To save money on this trip, we tried to spend as little as possible on food.  First, I called the hotel and found out the “full-service” hotels supposedly do not offer refrigerators or microwaves in the room.  Nor do they offer free continental breakfasts.  (They also don’t offer free wireless access in the rooms, but that’s beside the point).  However, they would provide a microwave and refrigerator upon request, if there were enough available.  We requested.

Because we weren’t certain that there would be appliances for us, we tried to pack food that would work for us regardless of what was available in the room.  We packed grapes, bananas, sandwiches, pretzels, granola bars, and nuts.  Those foods worked well for the drive down (no stopping for lunch) and would work with our cooler if no refrigerator arrived.

When we got there, we requested the refrigerator and microwave three times.  After the fridge came with no microwave, we figured that was good enough.  We headed to Kroger to buy:

1 Loaf of Fresh Italian Bread - $1.00
4 Packs of Deli Meats - $1.96
1 Pack Provolone Cheese $3.99
1 Container Hummus $2.00
1 Box Cereal $3.99
1 Container Mini-Donuts $1.00
1 Quart Non-Fat Milk $1.39
Tax - $1.22 (apparently groceries are taxed in TN)

Total - $16.95

These groceries were enough for us to have 5 breakfasts, 2 lunches, and a dinner for each of us.  This comes out to about $1.06 per person per meal.  That's even with fancier items like hummus and provolone cheese.  If we tried, we could have gotten this even cheaper, but we figured we were on vacation and deserved a few fun items. 

If we had spent just $4 dollars in each of those meals, we would have spent an extra $47 on the trip.  While that doesn't seem like a lot, if you saved $47 on one trip each year, invested into an account earning just 4% interest, in 30 years, you would have $2,883.16!

What other money-saving travel suggestions do you have?  Tell us about them in the comment section below.

Up In Smoke

Driving home last night from my folks' house, I quickly lost count of how many fireworks exploded within my field of vision, or how many cracking reports I heard from behind me.  After a minute or two of this, my mind invariably turned to money, and I realized something truly mystifying -- I wasn't seeing and hearing fireworks; I was seeing and hearing money going up in smoke.

Now I'm not a huge fan of fireworks so that does prejudice me just a bit.  I haven't set foot in a fireworks store or looked at a fireworks display in the local supermarket in years.  But it still occurred to me that what I was seeing was a tremendous waste of money and resources.

Math time -- Even with some of these outlets offering buy-one-get-six-free deals, you have to figure that for the sort of up-in-the-air cloud-burst fireworks I was seeing, we're talking minimum $.50 to $1.00, probably more.  Again, I'm making assumptions here because I have no idea, but I think that's a conservative estimate.  For each firework, figure that to light the fuse, run like mad to get out of the way, watch it fly in the air, then explode, we're talking ten seconds.  That means that, for an hour's worth of continuous firework excitement, we're talking ten seconds a shell, six shells a minute, 360 shells for an hour, at a cost of somewhere around $180 to $360 an hour.

Again, this is hideously rough math: if the shells are more expensive, the cost goes up.  If you take longer to fire a shell, the cost goes down.  I also realize that nobody is going to fire off these shells one after another after another for an hour straight -- the number is just a per-hour cost, nothing more.

Now, let's look at some other per-hour costs:

Dinner - Meal for two, nice restaurant, figure an hour's worth of time and, with drinks and dessert, perhaps $60 or so.  That makes the hourly cost about $30 a person.

Movie - Ah yes, that cheapest of pleasures (he said sarcastically).  Figure $9 for a ticket and another $12 for a vat o' popcorn with drink, you're talking $21 for a two-hour movie, or just over $10 an hour.  Your costs may go down if you share the popcorn, up if you go for a 3-D movie.

Video Games - This is one I'm gravitating to more and more.  My wife just bought me a Nintendo DSiXL for my birthday (a few months early, but who's complaining?), at a cost of about $190.  In that time, we've bought a handful of games, at a cost of maybe another $130 or so.  Total of $320 on a new video game system.  However, the longer we play it, the less our per-hour cost runs.  Even if we only used the system for an hour, we're still only near the high end of our fireworks example.  In the month we've had it, however, we've probably spent, between us, a good forty or fifty hours playing it, at a per-hour cost around $7.  The key is to get a system you'll actually use, and then buy games with lasting play and re-play value.  Our most frequently-played games?  Mario Kart DS (even after you've competed the Grand Prix mode, you can still play online for free with people from around the world), and the EA Sudoku game (which we downloaded for $2.00 from the DS online store).  Even factoring in recharging costs, it won't be long before playing this gets as low as a buck or two an hour.

There are so many more examples I don't have time to go into here, but you get the drift: fireworks may be fun, but the per-hour cost is a killer.  My family and I stood in their driveway for ten minutes and just watched the shells exploding in the sky all around us.  Cost to us?  Nothing.  When it comes to celebrating independence, seems to me that getting that much bang for your buck is right on the road to financial independence.

Small Moves

It's summer, three weeks past the end of the school year, and our debt repayment has slowed drastically.  Since I get no money from school when I'm not working there (unlike my wife, where they prorate her money and pay her every two weeks for the whole year, not just during the school year), our income -- at least for the time being -- has dropped by a fair bit.  It hasn't dropped enough to put us in the poor house or anything quite so awful, but it has made a difference in how much extra we're able to put against our loans.

It's at times like this I'm reminded of the movie Contact, where the young Ellie (the old Ellie is played by Jodie Foster, but heaven and IMDB only know who played the young Ellie) is playing with her ham radio and is having trouble finding anyone on the other end.  Her father comes in and tells her the secret to ham radio success: "Small moves, Ellie.  Small moves."

Even at times like this where I can't put $300 or $500 at a time toward a loan, I can still put $15 or $25 toward them.  True, it doesn't drop the balance as much as I might wish, but it does drop it nonetheless.  If I stop to think about the whole life of the loan, even $300 is a "small move" toward paying it off, but as I'm not likely to get $80,000 or so to toss at the loan at a time, small moves is the only way to get it paid off.

No matter what the goal -- financial, physical, career, or whatever -- small moves are the best way to get it done.  Small moves + persistence = success.  Anyone else succeeded with a goal using small moves?  Let us know in the comment section.

Good-bye $110,000

Thanks to the power of putting small yet continuous sums of money against our two loans, we just crossed beneath the $110,000 owed threshold.  In just under 6 months, we've paid off over $14,000 in debt.  Now, to be fair, that's a little behind where we need to be if we want to be paid off in that 40 month time period.  But bear in mind two things:

1. In that time we've gone in to "crisis mode" and socked extra money away in a rainy day account, as well as refinanced our mortgage.  Unless something truly insane happens, we won't have to do either of those again in the near future.

2. The later it gets and the more principal we pay down, the less of our regular monthly payment will go toward interest.  A regular monthly payment toward a $90,000 mortgage won't lower the principal balance as much as it will if the loan's balance is $20,000.  The closer to 40 months we get, the faster the principal reduction starts happening, like snow in an avalanche.

Things will be slowing up in the next few months -- summer means no income from school for me and less piano lesson income -- but we still hope to make great strides in our program.  Our next big hurdle (hopefully in the next week or two) is to get the mortgage down below $90,000.  Small goals, to be sure, but they help us stay on track and stay focused when we'd rather go out and splurge needlessly. 

Tough Choices

The scene went something like this ...

     End of the day, both our heads throbbing, I ask my wife, "Why don't we just grab something to eat on the way home."
     She agrees, if only because we're both still shell-shocked from teaching a bunch of 10- and 11-year-olds just a week from summer vacation. 
     We head to the parking lot, pull out, and head for home.  Along the way begins the inevitable discussion.
     "We pass right by Subway.  You want that?"
     She frowns.  "We had a coupon for it, but it's at home."
     "It's fine," I say.  "We've only got $99 charged on the credit card so far this cycle."
     "Yeah, but it's so expensive."
     We fall into silence for a couple of minutes before she says, "We could do Little Caesars.  It's not too far out of the way."
     Well, she's right, but it's also right near the interstate, and by the time we get there it'll be the start of rush hour.  Heavy traffic and beginnings of a migraine don't go well together, so I hem and haw and finally say, "What about Arby's?  That's always good when we've got a headache."
     She's quiet for another moment, then drops the bomb.
     "We could just eat something at home."
     When it comes right down to it, she's the one who more often than not has to reign in our spending.  I'm not a spendthrift by any stretch of the imagination, but I don't mind spending five or ten bucks here or there, especially if it's for something for both of us.  Part of me enjoys eating out as long as it's simple, so suggesting something at home causes a wrench in my gut, but in the interests of marital harmony (not to mention I just want to get home to take some Excedrin), I agree.
  
And you know what?  The meal we ate at home (frozen pizza, about $2 from Meijer with some green pepper thrown on top) was every bit as easy as eating out would have been.  It may not have been terribly healthy, and not as tasty as eating out (if only because there wasn't as much dripping fat and lard), but between the pizza and a few pain pills, the headache is gone, and I feel like I can get back to my life.

In the heat of the moment (especially when we're tired and don't feel our best) making decisions that are better for our finances can be hard, but like most things, I've found we have less "buyers remorse" if we go the frugal route, and we usually don't suffer on the fun side of things.  Anybody have a similar situation they want to share?  Comment section's below -- comment away!

A Stroke of Good Fortune

I've been meaning to blog about this (or anything) for a very long time.  My excuse?  I've been very busy this semester with homework since I decided to go for my masters degree.

How does this relate to becoming debt free in 40?  I recently received excellent news.  In helping my mother explore the veterans benefits available to her since my father passed away, I discovered something amazing called "Remission of Fees."  While in the service, my father had cancer.  Because of this, he received disability benefits for the rest of his life.  What I didn't realize?  I was entitled to 124 college credit hours of tuition because of my father's disability.

This means I will only pay a small fee of my graduate fees per credit hour rather than the full-tuition.  This saves us close to $10,000 for my masters degree, and I will still have 88 credit hours available to me. 

Needless to say, we're overjoyed at our good luck.  Are there benefits in your financial life that you are not taking advantage of?  What wonderful surprises have you experienced?  Tell us about it in the comment section below.

$10,000!

Just crossed the $10,000 paid off threshold!  Less than 6 months ago, we started this quest to get our debt gone, and in that time, we've paid off over $10,000 in principal on the loans.  There's still a long way to go, and we're still a bit behind the pace we'd like to set, but with a goal this big -- whether it be paying off debt, learning a new skill, or losing weight -- you have to celebrate the milestones along the way.  Each little victory, even one as small as getting rid of just over 8% of our total debt in five and a half months, is that added psychological boost which will help us get to the next milestone. 

Are any of the rest of you out there trying to eradicate your debt?  If so, drop us a note in the comments section and let us know how it's going.

Also, I realize we have been bad (okay, really bad) about posting on a regular basis.  I'm hopeful we'll be able to post more routinely here in the near future, including a couple of posts about how we're tackling our debt now and how we're allocating our money.  For those of you who have stayed with us and kept tabs on our progress, I thank you for being here, and we'll try to once more provide you (horrid split infinitive ... sorry!) with good financial advice and suggestions to help you get to where we're going.  Thanks for being along for the ride.