This is really cool! We sent several advanced copies of our new book to a bunch of our frugal friends to see what they thought.
Usually when frugal people read a new book on frugality, they'll say something like, "This book is a good beginner manual, but I didn't really learn anything new."
Question: I am a big saver and “cheapskate,” married to a big spender. The more I save, the more he spends. We have two young children and I have to resort to trash picking to get the things we need while my husband drives his new sports car and wears his new clothes. He thinks he’s entitled because he’s the one earning all the money. We don’t have any credit card debt and we do have some savings — I know I should be grateful, but I’m frustrated.
In addition to about 30 citrus trees, we have nine large pine trees on our property. The pine trees provide great shade, but they also drop a lot of pine needles. For years we used to spend hours raking them up and almost as long stuffing them into 40-gallon trash bags to be thrown away. It wasn’t a fun job trying to bag pine needles, they poke you and scratch you and get stuck in places that really hurt—even if you wear gloves.
We're hosting a dinner party tonight for our daughter Becky's birthday. Annette ran to the store to pick up a few loaves of french bread (for garlic bread) to accompany the huge pan of lasagna she made. Whenever we go to the store we always walk past the meat case and look for marked down meat. Today she stumbled on a great deal.
What do you do if you're the butcher and someone higher up ordered too many cases of chicken breasts and they're about to go out of code (today is June 5 and they go out of code on June 6)? What would you do?
We love the internet for finding great deals on top of GREAT DEALS! We've been sick and ran out of Echinacea and Vitamin C. We wanted to wait until Puritan's Pride ran their summer sale, Buy 1 get 2 Free (June or July), but really need those two items to build our immune systems. So we're placing a supplemental order tonight.
Today the house is filled with the fantastic aroma of a turkey cooking in the oven. Ohh, it smells great. Is it Thanksgiving or some other celebration? No. We cook a turkey about once each month (except for the super hot months of July and August, when we rarely use the oven). Tonight we'll serve a turkey dinner and then freeze the left-over meat to be used in other meals which will be prepared on our once-a-month cooking day.
For the past 28 years May first has been special for us — it was on this day in 1982 that Annette and Steve said I do. Since we said "I do" we've been saying "We Don't" to debt and paying retail. And our anniversary celebration was no different.
It just doesn't seem like we've been married 28 years — we can still clearly remember our wedding day, the day our first child was born, moving from our apartment to our first house — it just can't be 28 years. We're still laughing, loving and living life to its fullest (maybe just at a little slower pace than in 1982).
