Tag Archives: luxury on less tips

Frugal date nights for around $10

coffee-and-dessert
Photo by justonlysteve

Now that we’re living on a cash only budget for all of our discretionary expenses, one of the areas we’re really cutting down is entertainment. We still want a little fun money, but we’re limiting our entertainment expenses to about $10 per week.

I’ve been brainstorming some things we can do for about $10 a week instead of going out to eat. It’s funny, but these are already some of our favorite date ideas. By cutting out the restaurant meal beforehand, we’re saving $25-$40 a night.

See a matinee.

I realize that in some places, you can’t even get two tickets to a matinee for $10 anymore. Some theaters offer special discounts on movies that have been out for a while or certain showtimes, though. Our theater offers a discount on the last matinee of the day, which brings the matinee price down from $7 to $5.50 per person, so we always go to that show. Find out if your theater offers any discounts, and plan your trips to the movies around their specials.

Pizza and a movie.

If you can’t go to the movies for $5 per person, then just stay in. Order pizza and pick up a movie at Redbox for a dollar. If you use a promo code, the movie is free. Pizza restaurants like Domino’s and Little Caesars are offering large pizzas for $5, making this a $5 date night instead of $10. If you’re like us and you prefer your homemade pizza to fast food, this date costs even less.

Take a drive.

We love to walk our dog around the neighborhood or our city’s downtown on nice nights. But if you’re tired of the same sights, consider taking a drive to a nearby city in the evening. Try to look at the things you may have seen a hundred times through new eyes, or just enjoy a good conversation. Some of our best ideas have come from long car rides.

Add a bottle of wine to a weekend meal.

Wine is one of our favorite ways to dress us a normal meal and make it feel special. There are a ton of good wines available at most grocery stores for under $10 a bottle. Adding it to your regular meal can make it feel like you’re on a date in a fancy restaurant instead of eating at home. Turn off the TV, set the table, and talk to each other like you would at a restaurant.

Coffee and dessert.

If you really want a treat or something to do after dinner, head out for a cup of decaf and some dessert. Sharing the dessert will cut costs and calories, but you’ll still get something sweet. I’ve always thought restaurants were fun, and this is a great way to dine out without spending a lot of money. Sometimes instead of going to a restaurant, we head to Barnes and Noble for a frou-frou Starbucks coffee drink and some book browsing.

What do you do for fun when money’s tight?

A Mother’s Day meal fit for a queen — the frugal way

lobsterThis weekend, my parents are coming to visit. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, and I can’t wait.

Last weekend my mom celebrated her birthday. And of course, this weekend we’ll celebrate Mother’s Day with her. We really want to do something special for her, so we started brainstorming super luxurious meals we could cook.

Since one of our goals for 2011 is cooking lobster at home and it’s one of her favorite foods, we decided surf and turf would be the perfect Mother’s Day feast.

Steak and lobster meals typically cost about $25 in chain restaurants, and even more than that in gourmet establishments. We figured by cooking it at home we could keep it healthier and save a little money. I was surprised to find out just how much this meal can cost even at home.

Tony really wanted to cook live lobster. At $14.99 a pound and roughly 1.5 pounds per lobster, we would have spent about $90 on lobster alone if we each ate a whole one. The most economical option is buying two whole lobsters, which would probably yield plenty of meat for the four of us. But that would cut down on the amount of tail meat that each person gets, and the lobster tail is the best part. Not only that, but I wasn’t too excited about the gruesome reality of cooking a live lobster. I’m a little squeamish about eating anything with eyes. Yuck.

We decided to go for frozen lobster tails instead. Our grocery store typically sells frozen lobster tails at $9.99 each for about 4.5 ounces. That’s about $35.50/pound. I had no idea lobster was so pricey!

In a tremendous stroke of luck, it turns out frozen lobster tails are half price this week at our grocery store. So we’re buying 4 frozen lobster tails for $20, or about $17 a pound. It’s more expensive per pound, but we’re not paying for the inedible waste we’d have with whole lobsters. I have a feeling that when you weigh only the edible parts of the whole lobster, the per pound price would probably be more than $14.99.

We were prepared to serve any type of steak, but after shopping around we discovered that we could get beautiful cuts of filet mignon for $7.99 a pound at Costco. We normally wouldn’t spring for a pricier cut of meat like that, but this is my mom’s birthday/Mother’s Day meal after all.

For side dishes, we’re serving creamed spinach and baked potatoes. All together, this feast for four people will cost less than $60, or about $15 per person, including a nice bottle of wine. That’s a pretty pricey home-cooked meal, but when you consider what we’d spend at a restaurant, I’d say it’s a steal.

Tony says lobster tails don’t count and he still wants to cook a live lobster, but I’m still going to cross that one off the list anyway. :)

Photo by tangaroo

Don’t waste your money on individual snack-sized treats

Every afternoon around 4 pm, I start craving something sweet. There are always treats hanging around my office, but none that I want to eat since I’ve been trying to lose weight.

At the grocery store over the weekend, I decided it might be nice to bring sugar-free Jello snack packs. They’re sweet, and at only 10 calories they wouldn’t add on to my calorie count for the day. When I saw the price on the snack packs, though, I couldn’t bring myself to pick them up. Almost $4 for six little half-cup snack packs? Ridiculous considering the cost of a package of Jello.

So I decided to make my own snack packs. I have little half-cup Tupperware that we use for condiments and snacks. I bought a package of sugar-free Jello for 89 cents, poured it into the individual serving-size cups, and voila! Snack packs for 1/4 the cost!

If you pack your own lunch for work or your kids’ school lunches, then you’re all too familiar with the high cost of individual serving sizes. Instead, invest in some good snack-sized Tupperware (or reuse plastic baggies) and make your own snack-sized treats.

Snacks like chips, crackers, Jello, and pudding are cheaper in bulk. Split them up into individual serving sizes for convenient lunch snacks or just to control your portions. You’ll eat less and spend a lot less on snacks, and that works for me.

What do you think about Netflix online movie watching?

netflix-dvds
photo by katiescrapbooklady

We love renting movies from Redbox. For only a dollar a night (often free with Redbox promo codes) we can rent recent releases.

For older titles, we rent from the library. Tony’s university library has a wide array of art films, mainstream titles, and TV series. They’re also pretty good about adding new titles quickly, but there’s often a long wait list for newer films that become available. We’ve rented a ton of great stuff from the library for free. It’s our favorite way to rent movies.

While Redbox and the library are perfect for new releases and mainstream titles, we often want to see art films and TV series that aren’t available through Redbox.

Lately, we’ve been considering other options for movie rentals. Online movie rental sites like Netflix and Blockbuster now offer online movie watching. Instead of waiting for a movie to be shipped to us, we can select what we want to see and watch it right on our computer. We like this idea, because it would allow us to watch a lot of movies even with the minimum one-DVD-at-a-time membership.

We’re considering joining Netflix with the minimum membership so that we can get art films and TV series either mailed to us or streamed to our computers. (We looked into Blockbuster, too, but their streaming service requires Internet Explorer on a PC, and we both have Macs.) For $8.99 a month, we could rent one DVD at a time and watch unlimited movies online.

We’re going to do a free trial first. Before we sign up, though, I just wanted to see if any of you have used this service. Are you happy with it? What is the selection of online movies like? I know they have a huge selection of movies by mail, but are all of the titles available to watch online? Do you still find yourself using Redbox or other rental services for convenience?

Healthy frugal meals for work

Since I’m still working on losing a few pounds I’ve gained since I started by desk job, work lunches are an obstacle for me. Most of the people in my office go out for lunch every day. Since I’m frugal, I obviously bring my lunch.

I often bring leftovers from the night before. Many of our recipes make enough for 4 to 6 people, so there are plenty of leftovers for both of us to eat some for lunch the next day.

Sometimes, though, we don’t have any leftovers. Last night, for instance, we roasted a chicken for dinner. There was plenty of leftover chicken, but it will be used for chicken and dumplings on Wednesday.

I’ve struggled to find healthy frugal meals to take to work on these days. I want something tasty so I’m not tempted to join my co-workers at a restaurant.

For a while, we bought Romaine every week, and I threw together a salad in the morning. Romaine, tomato, a little cheese, and some turkey or chicken with low-fat salad dressing. I brought that every single time we didn’t have leftovers (usually 2-3 times per week) for weeks. Finally, I was so bored with salads that I couldn’t look at them anymore let alone eat them.

I found a solution in last month’s Real Simple that works for me, so I want to share it.

The magazine suggested buying a pound of whole wheat pasta, cooking it up on Sunday night, and then using the plain pasta to make a different pasta dish every day for lunch.

The magazine offers some great pasta salad recipes that I won’t copy here, but I’ve found some other good ones that I’ll share.

It takes no time to cook the pasta, and because each recipe is a little different I don’t feel like I’m eating the same thing every day. If you buy whole wheat pasta and keep your portions to about a cup, it’s a healthy, satisfying lunch option.

Here are some of the recipes I’ve tried. I just use the recipe as a guide and cut down ingredients based on how much pasta I’m actually using for that day (anywhere from 1 to 2 cups depending on whether Tony wants some):

Artichoke pasta salad
Pasta with meatless marinara
Pasta with spinach and tomato
Spinach pesto pasta (Spinach pesto is a much cheaper alternative to traditional basil pesto. Use regular parmesan cheese instead of Romano to cut costs.)
Antipasto salad

Some of these recipes seem expensive and difficult, but the most expensive ingredients can often by omitted. With some creativity you can usually find a frugal substitute for pricey ingredients without changing the flavor of the dish too much.

If you’re worried about adapting full recipes to one serving size and you don’t mind eating the same thing several times in one week, you could always make the whole recipe and try a new dish each week.

I haven’t experimented too much with it yet, but I’d imagine it would also be easy to make a full batch of pasta dishes or sauces like pesto and marinara and freeze or refrigerate them to use the following week. I hope this works for you, too!

Our frugal (and not so frugal) trip to Washington D.C.

We’re back home now after a wonderful weekend in Washington D.C.

A little getaway was exactly what we needed. We left our laptops at home and spent the weekend just enjoying each other’s company. With two visits from family and friends and a business trip coming up this month, we really needed some time away.

I booked and paid for the hotel room in November ($120). Then I budgeted $200 from our tax refund for food and fun while we were there. It’s a high number, but we get away so rarely so I wanted to really enjoy ourselves and be (just a little) frivolous for once.

Here’s how we did:

Frugal

  • Our hotel was in a fantastic location right downtown, so we spent the entire weekend on foot. We didn’t use any money for cabs or the Metro. Bonus: I didn’t feel so guilty for missing my daily workout.
  • We visited free museums and sites. We went to the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of American History, and Ford’s Theater (which ended up being closed, but we saw the house where Lincoln died, a national historic site).
  • We ate relatively frugal breakfasts and lunches (coffee and pastries for breakfast, Subway for lunch), so we could afford the high price of downtown D.C. restaurants for dinner.
  • We ate at a moderately priced pizza place on Friday night, where we enjoyed delicious wood fired pizza. On Saturday night my brilliant husband found a “certified-green” restaurant owned by a partnership of family farmers. It has a modern, casual, and family-friendly atmosphere; amazing organic food; and the prices were unbelievable considering its downtown D.C. location. Our meal with an appetizer and dessert was only $55 with tip included. Most of the places we considered in that area would have cost twice that at least. It’s called Founding Farmers, and I highly recommend it if you’re in the D.C. area.

Not so frugal

  • It was unseasonably warm in D.C. on Friday evening, so we walked to the Georgetown neighborhood where we stayed on our honeymoon. We stopped at our favorite sidewalk cafe. Since we’d already eaten dinner, we decided to order a bottle of wine. It ended up costing $32. Ouch. But we had a wonderful evening sitting outside drinking wine, and I don’t regret it. The memory is worth $32 to me. But the frugal thing to do would have been to stroll through Georgetown and skip the wine. :)
  • Around lunchtime we were only halfway through the Museum of American History. We were starving, so I broke my own advice and grabbed a snack at the museum cafe. We split a single slice of pizza and a soda, and it ended up costing $10. Doh. Always pack a snack!

So did we stay on budget? Here’s the tally:

Gas: $30
Breakfasts: $15
Lunches (including stops on the road): $40
Dinners: $85
Wine: $32
Boarding for dog: $65 (I budgeted $50 since he was only there two nights, but because we were running late this afternoon we were charged for three.)
Parking: $30 (I wasn’t expecting this because I mistakenly assumed parking would be provided by the hotel, but it cost $15 a night.)
Gift card used to pay for meals: -$50
Total: $247

We overspent by $47. :( Luckily, the overage can be worked into our March budget.

While we technically stayed within budget (the unexpected costs for parking and boarding surcharges weren’t in my original budget), better planning could have helped us include or avoid those extra costs.

While $248 for a weekend trip ($368 if you include the hotel) isn’t frugal, sometimes — sometimes — it’s ok to be a little frivolous. After all, isn’t that why we work so hard to scrimp and save? We spent a fraction of our tax refund to have a fantastic time, and we’re still putting a huge chunk into savings this month. I’d call it a success.

Frugal extras that bring me joy

Between the economy, the freezing temperatures throughout the country, and the post-holiday blues, everyone can use a pick-me-up right now. I know I can.

In the past, I often used money as a method of cheering myself up. If I was feeling down, I’d spend. But that only led to guilt and more depression when I realized I was broke.

It’s possible to treat yourself without breaking the budget. Here are the little extras I splurge on when I’m feeling down.

Gourmet coffee

It would be too expensive to drink gourmet coffee every morning, but sometimes we buy enough beans for one pot. For about $3, we create our own coffee house at home.

Movies

Most of the time we rent from RedBox (which is usually free with a code), but sometimes we see a movie at the cheap theater for $2 or splurge on a matinee for $5. Watching a good movie with my husband takes me back to the days when we first started dating.

Dessert

Sometimes after dinner we go out to a local bakery for a cup of coffee, and we split a slice of pie. For about $6, we’re out of the house enjoying something sweet.

Cooking fancy meals

If we’re craving a restaurant meal, we buy the ingredients in the grocery store and try to make it ourselves. Cooking together is fun, and it’s so much more rewarding to enjoy a meal you made yourself (not to mention cheaper).

What frugal extras bring you joy?

Shave your grooming budget with a safety razor

This is a guest post from my wonderful husband, Tony. You can read more from him at his movie review blog, Screen Savour. But first read about his experiences with an old-fashioned safety razor.

When we began to live the frugal lifestyle, I started looking for a way to become a frugal shaver. Shaving is something that’s required of me (growing a beard isn’t currently an option in my world), and if I’m going to do it, I think my face should feel good afterward. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to drop a fortune to do it.

When I began shaving as a teenager, my first razor of choice was the electric razor for its quickness. But the skin on my face has always been too sensitive, and the electric razor not only irritated my skin but it never gave me the smoothness I wanted. Furthermore, for an electric razor to function well, the mechanical blades inside need to be replaced at least annually. Depending on the make and model of your razor, those can set you back. It wasn’t worth it to me.

Bags of disposable razors are cheap. I’ve used them before, and believe me, the little torn-off pieces of toilet paper covering up my shredded face are proof enough that there’s a reason they’re so cheap. So they’re out, too.

Replacement cartridge razors were my choice for most of my life. I initially used the three-blade model, then upgraded once to the four-blade and again to the five-blade. As the number of blades increased, so did the price of replacing those cartridges.

Replacement cartridge packs for the last razor I used were running me more than $25 for eight cartridge heads. If one cartridge head lasts for two weeks, that means I’m still spending about $100 (depending on the deal) to buy enough cartridges to shave for one year. And that’s not even counting the cost of shaving cream and aftershave!

Earlier this year, I found the solution to my shaving problem in the unlikeliest of places: a pro-environmental lifestyle magazine. The magazine urged readers to abandon the replacement cartridges (which waste tons of plastic each year) and convert to using a safety razor.

The safety razor is the cast-iron skillet of the shaving world. If you buy one and properly care for it, you’ll never have to buy another.

It’s an old-school device that screws together and sandwiches a single sharp, steel blade between two layers of polished and brushed metal. All that is exposed is the thin edge of the steel blade. When the blade becomes dull, the safety razor unscrews and all you throw away is a thin piece of steel (which is completely recyclable).

The device is very retro in appearance, and although it takes a little while to get used to, the shaves have been unparalleled.

You pay up front for the safety razor. The actual handheld device cost me about $25, which is on the lower end of the spectrum. (Editor’s note: Price of one safety razor = price of 8 disposable cartridges. Just saying. :) )

The real savings come in the replacement blades. They’re very sharp and functional, but also thin and cheap. Amazon is selling a pack of 30 razor blades right now at less than $15. That’s 50 cents per blade, compared to over $3 each for replacement cartridges. Even if I changed the blade every week, I would only spend $26 a year on razors. If I changed the blade as often as I did replacement cartridges for my old razor (every other week), I would spend just $13 a year.

I can’t speak to how well a safety razor works on shaving legs, but my face and wallet have been thankful for the change.

So there you have it. If you’re tired of filling up landfills and spending a fortune on plastic replacement cartridges and you’re willing to try something new, the safety razor might be right for you. It would make a great gift for the frugal, environmentally conscious man in your life.

Christmas presents, not status symbols

Over the weekend, Tony and I were picking up a gift card as a Christmas gift for his grandparents. A month ago when we worked out our Christmas budget, we agreed upon an amount that we could afford. But as we stood in line I found myself second guessing our decision. “Do you think this is enough?” I asked him.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. I ask myself that question almost every time I buy a gift. “Is this enough?”

That’s a pretty silly question, though, isn’t it? Enough for what? After all, anybody who would receive a gift only to think it isn’t good enough really doesn’t deserve the gift at all.

Of course I wasn’t worried that Tony’s grandparents would feel that way. They’re probably not expecting anything from us at all, and they’ll be thrilled that we thought of them. So where does this doubt come from?

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this doubt is more about me than it is about them. I enjoy giving gifts to the people I love because it makes them happy, but the desire to give more than I can afford comes from the same place as the desire to buy fancier things than I can afford.

It’s a tough thing to admit, but in the past I’ve used gift-giving as a status symbol. I’ve charged up credit cards and spent money I didn’t have on gifts. I’m sure the people who love me would be horrified if they knew that buying them gifts was putting me at financial risk. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to risk their financial security to buy something for me.

I told myself that I was being generous. I wasn’t being generous, though. It was quite the opposite. Buying those fancy gifts made me feel good about giving them. Sure, it made the person who received the gift happy, but that’s not the real reason I was doing it. The people I love would be just as happy with a thoughtful gift that I could afford to give, whether it be something small, homemade, or even baked. The truth is, I liked the way it made me feel to give fancy gifts.

The past couple years have taught me valuable lessons about spending that I’ve learned to apply to gift-giving. Spend only what you can afford, and give only what you can give.

I’m still tempted to break my gift budget, but I have to remind myself that the people who love me would much rather I didn’t risk getting myself into trouble. After all, the safety and financial security of the people I love is much more important to me than receiving Christmas gifts. When I’m tempted to overspend, I remind myself that the people who love me want the same security and safety for me much more than they want presents.

The holiday season is a great time to make the people I love feel special. Spending more than I can afford just isn’t the way to do it.