Our Second Chance Basement – Saving Big by Buying Rejects

November 21, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Shae, Frugal Boy, and I have been working tirelessly on redefining half of the basement into a second living room. When Shae and I toured the house almost four years ago, the space was for lack of a better word, gross.

70’s wood paneling covered the walls. Some sort of black mildew or mold was growing on the walls along the floors and corners. A finished ceiling had been half ripped out, but the furring strips remained. The singular window had bars over it. Our house isn’t in a rough neighborhood, so it seemed very out of place. The remaining windows, while visible from the outside had been covered up from the inside. There was only one electrical outlet for the entire room and that room was labeled “Play Room” on the electrical panel. Maybe at one time it was a fun play room, but it had certainly degraded past that point years ago.

Fast forward almost four years and below is a picture of the space now.

It is not finished, but it looks so much better. The best part, by combining a barge full of sweat equity and a penchant for using other people’s rejects, we didn’t break the bank doing this renovation.

In previous years we tore down paneling, repaired/replaced windows, and repointed the brick mortar. That gave us a clean slate to start rebuilding the room. The first item of business was insulation.

We used reclaimed polyiso rigid board insulation sheets that had been removed from a commercial building roof.

2″ thick 4×8 polyiso boards such as these normally retail for around $30 a sheet. I was able to pick them up second hand for $14/ea. That is a $16/sheet difference. Multiply $16 by the 12 sheets that we used to insulate and you end up with a cost savings of $192.

The next big cost savings we scored was by using factory seconds porcelain tile. One of the big current trends/fads in floor tile right now is large format, wood-like, porcelain tile. This tile often comes in 8×36″ or 8×48″ and features an ink jet printed surface that looks like real wood grain because it comes from pictures of real wood grain.

This type of tile normally runs around $4/sqft at big box stores. You may be able to find a sale and get it for less. We bought 336 square feet of factory seconds tile at $1.30/sqft for a total of $437. Buying the same thing from a big box store would have cost us $1344. By taking factory rejects, we saved a whopping $907.

While laying the tile floor was hard work, it only took about a week to get it all done working nights and weekends. Looking around the internet, pegs porcelain tile labor costs at around $5/sqft. That is another $1680 saved by rolling up our sleeves and taking a couple of ibuprofen before bed.

Sometimes the savings are smaller. For instance, I bought a snap tile cutter for $20 at Lowes to install this floor. Our neighbor was throwing out an old cutter and offered it to us for free. It worked ‘well enough’ to get our job done. We saved $20 by using an older, less-than-perfect tool.

I rejected the notion of buying a projector mount and opted to make my own instead. $10 in hardware was adequate to mount our slickdeals.net projector deal to the ceiling.

We saved $5 on the DIY mount and $80 on the projector.

Getting furniture into the room is very difficult because of the narrow stairwell. We barely fit the water heater down four years ago.

We finally found an interesting deal on a futon through Craigslist.

For $180 we picked up a brand new, in the box futon that normally retails for $290 + $24 in tax. The craigslist seller was running an interesting side business of buying RETURN lots at auctions and then reselling them.

The general gist of the business is that people buy furniture at Walmart or other retailers, get it home, open it up, and realize that it is broken, the wrong color, or just not what they wanted. They return it to the store where they bought it from, but the store doesn’t want it. The instruction booklet even has a big STOP printed on the front telling customers NOT to return it to the store. Instead, unhappy customers should call the manufacturer, often DHP or Ameriwood. So the store is left with a box that they cannot readily resell. They load it up on the next outgoing truck and it ends up at a processing center. All these rejected returns are then bundled up into a lot and sold off at pennies for the dollar at auction.

A middle man can then buy these rejects and sell them in their own store or eBay or craigslist. A thrifty shopper like myself would buy it, realize that a part is damaged and then get a replacement part for free from the manufacturer.

The craigslist reseller gave us two options. She could request the replacement part, or we could do it ourselves and she’d knock off $20 from the price. We chose to do it ourselves. The process could not have been simpler, and it was FREE.

Not only is our new sofa well traveled like us, but we also saved $134 by following simple replacement instructions.

We bought a media cabinet as well from the same craigslist reseller. It had no damage.

We paid $50 for it when it retails for $74+tax. $30 saved.

You think that would be the end of the post, but wait, there’s more!

We saved $20 by buying a refurbished 4th generation Apple Tv.

It streams content just as well as a brand new one.

For those of you keeping score at home, the total savings of buying rejected second hand material for this project and doing the tough tiling work ourselves comes out to a humongous savings of $3068. That doesn’t even take into account all of the other sweat equity that we put into the room including, demolition, framing, electrical, drywall, painting, and trim. Taking some time to shop around and look at alternative sources can really pay off. You don’t always have to buy things brand new or from traditional retailers. There are a lot of little resellers that can often cut you a much better deal on the same material.

Our $100 Vacation to Costa Rica – Part 2

June 7, 2016 by Andrew 1 Comment

Shae, her sister (Auntie), Frugal Boy, and myself just returned from an 8 day trip to Costa Rica. We went horse back riding in the mountains, zip lined at 50 mph past a volcano, and forded a river in our 4×4. The frosting on the cake, we did it all for just $100! * Find out how at the end of this series. See Part 1 here.

* Auntie paid some of her share of the trip and that isn’t included in our Out of Pocket total.

Day 3 – Exploring Monteverde

On our third day, we woke up early to the deafening sound of howler monkeys. They sound a lot like dogs. Speaking of dogs, there was a large population of mutts wandering about Costa Rica. They were easy going and seemed fairly harmless, but it still surprised me a bit to see so many dogs just out and about.

Shae and I were eager to try out some local baked goods, so we hiked down the hill to Stella’s Bakery. To our dismay, the panaderia section was quite small. Instead it was more of a sit down restaurant. You may have heard of “Island Time”, well in Costa Rica, it is “Tico Time”. Tico time is the pace that things get done by the locals. From when we ordered, to when the food came out, it was about an hour. If you are going to travel abroad, get used to the idea that “XX Time” is a real thing and will likely affect your schedule. I took Frugal Boy outside to play while we let Tico Time happen inside.

We had #2 of our top 5 grossest moments at Stella’s Bakery when Frugal Boy lost the contents of his stomach on Shae’s breakfast platter. Sometimes you just really wish you left the kids at home with grandma and grandpa.

With half of our party fueled up and ready to go we made the short drive to Selvatura Park so we could walk on the hanging bridges and be among the canopy dwellers.

One of the big differences that Shae and I noticed on this trip from our Mexico trip was the handling of US dollars. In Mexico, we paid for almost everything in the local Pesos, and by doing so we got a better deal. In Costa Rica, prices were advertised in US dollars and paying by colones wasn’t advantageous. A prime example was Selvatura Adventure Park. The advertised rate for the hanging bridges admission was $30 per adult ($90 all together). I paid in colones and was charged 49,000 CRC, or about $92.45. After realizing there wasn’t much savings to be had by paying in the native currency, we used our IHG World MasterCards with 0% foreign transaction fees to cover most of the remaining tours. We didn’t have these cards in Mexico and only had credit cards that charged foreign transaction fees, so it was nice to have a new option. We did encounter some places that only took CRC, but they were few and far between.

The hanging bridges themselves were very cool. It was a self guided 2 mile walk that included 7 or 8 suspension bridges that placed you either above or among the forest canopy.

It was hard to capture on camera the full scope of your surroundings, but just think Jurassic Park and you’ll get an idea.

After completing our walk we ate some lunch back at the house and then moseyed down to the Monteverde Coop. The Coop is a group of café (coffee in Spanish) farmers who are trying to grow and sell organic coffee.

There are a bunch of different coffee tours in the area, but this was the one recommended by our host so we went for it.

After riding a shuttle out to the farm, we met our tour guide who gave us a brief history of coffee, how it relates to Costa Rica, and how plantations affect the rain forest.

I had never seen a coffee plant before. They look like this:

and the coffee beans grow on them like this:

About 20 years ago, the Costa Rican government mandated that all coffee plantations switch over to an Arabica variety. Arabica is associated with premium coffee, but it also has different growing requirements.

The farm was growing several different varieties of arabica coffee. Every 7 years, the plants get too large to easily pick, so they chop them down to the ground and the root system sends up a new trunk. There can be coffee bushes that are twenty or thirty years old with 5 or 6 trunks.

Different varieties are susceptible to different diseases and fungi. The farm continually grows replacements onsite.

Our tour guide talked about the evil cattle ranchers who were cutting down the rain forest, but didn’t seem to be bothered by other coffee farmers who cleared land for their crops. The farm also was touting how environmentally savvy they were for switching over to manure based fertilizer to replace the chemicals. They didn’t explain why chemicals were bad, it was just a dirty word. Instead, the tons of manure required to fertilize the farm necessitated that Nicaraguans be bussed in and housed in small dormitories to provide the labor needed to ‘go organic’. Obviously, you can tell that I am skeptical of the personal and environmental benefits of ‘organically grown’.

Moving on, we just finished walking through a field when we arrived at the roasting/tasting/gift shop building. It was fortunate timing as well, because it had just started to rain. Inside, a new guide explained the different drying processes for the picked beans.

On the right hand side is the entire coffee cherry picked and dried. To the left of that is the coffee bean with the outer husk removed. Left of that is the same thing, except washed, and finally the left most box is the fully peeled coffee bean. So each whole coffee cherry contains multiple beans inside and then there is a husk that can be removed and a pulp. Think of it like peanuts.

The top row are the raw un-roasted beans and cherries in their respective drying strategies. The bottom row is just the corresponding beans after they are roasted.

Now that you are as confused as I was, it was ready for the taste test challenge. Could we correctly identify light, medium, and dark roast? Could we identify whole dried versus washed dried?

I’ll prefix this with a, I am not a coffee drinker and probably never will be. To me, it tasted like this:

Ugh

blah

meh

Ugh

meh

It turns out that I am not a light roast fan. We learned that there is only a minute difference between light and dark roast coffee.

Of course at the end of the tour you could buy ground or whole bean coffee from their little shop. We saw the exact same bags back at the Coop ticket booth for $4 less. The best place to buy your coffee is where the Ticos buy theirs, the supermarket! By the end of the trip, we had purchased 2.25 kg of genuine Costa Rican ground coffee to give to friends and family for a fraction of the cost.

Cafe Britt is probably the best known coffee to Americans, but we chose to buy what the abuelas were snatching up in great big sacks. Chances are good that it all comes from the same conglomerate of farms anyway!

Frugal Boy really wanted to drink some coffee. He settled for some dregs and fruit snacks.

With our shuttle waiting to whisk us back we donned our rain gear and left the coffee plantation behind.

That night we followed our other Host’s recommended eatery. An upscale Argentinian place (Cabure) that was right next door. I had a wonderful sea bass with almond topping for 8500 CRC. It was a splurge, but it was also my favorite meal from the trip.

Continue reading part 3 here.

Our $100 Vacation to Costa Rica – Part 1

June 7, 2016 by Andrew 4 Comments

* Auntie paid some of her share of the trip and that isn’t included in our Out of Pocket total.

A Primer of Costa Rica

Costa Rica is located in Central America, just north of Panama and south of Nicaragua. The capitol is San José and there is a second international airport located just west of the city of Liberia in the northwestern province of Guanacaste. An established republic, like the United States, Costa Rica is sparsely inhabited and has no standing army. Ticos, a colloquial term used to describe the citizens, have their own currency called colones. The USD -> CRC exchange rate was about 1:530. So one US dollar would get you about 530 Costa Rican colones. The official language is Spanish, although many Ticos have at least a transactional level of English proficiency. The country has a thriving ecotourism industry, exports about 1% of the total coffee production in the world market, and is an attractive place for international companies to set up shop.

Now that you have a working knowledge of Costa Rica, let’s go! Or as the Ticos would say, ¡Vamos!

Day 1 – Getting There

We chose to fly into Liberia airport, not the capitol, because it was closer to the activities that we wanted to do and it was slightly cheaper. Even so, flying from Chicago required about 7 hours of sitting on a plane. We had a layover in Houston that added some more time to our travel day. All-in-all, you can count on sacrificing an entire day just to getting there. Expense wise, tickets were about $500 per person round trip. Frugal Boy is over the cut off for ‘lap child’ so we had to pay for his very own seat.

He enjoyed watching Finding Nemo on the first flight, even without any sound.

Other large expenses that we budgeted for included a meal at the airport, approximately $45, parking for a week ($82), and checking one piece of luggage roundtrip ($50). We saved money by bringing our own snacks from home, packing as lightly as possible to avoid more baggage fees, and booking our airfare well in advance.

An unexpected expense on day 1 was a $10 taxi fare from the airport to our hotel upon arrival. We were expecting a complimentary shuttle to be available, but couldn’t find it and I was feeling extremely unwell at the time and didn’t want to deal with one more thing.

Day 2 – Hitting the Road of Adventure

The first goal of the day was to use the ATM in the lobby to get native colones. Our primary bank refunds ATM fees, and you usually get the best exchange rate by using an ATM instead of a money exchange. Shae withdrew 250,000 colones ($470.06). The second goal of the day was to pickup our rental car. I chose Dollar Rentals because they had some of the best pricing, were off airport (not subject to extra taxes), and had the most transparency about insurance and coverage on their website. The morning’s challenge however was in getting over to their rental office which was about 2 miles away. Both Auntie and I needed to go because we were both going to be drivers. I asked for a ride from the hotel shuttle, and they said they only went to the airport. I tried calling the rental office and no one picked up. Thankfully, I saw a Hertz representative and he agreed to drop us off because their offices were right next door to one another. Yay Hertz!

Once we got there, it was a very easy checkout process. I don’t think I’ve had a checkout be so easy before. I did have a moment of weakness and switched from bare insurance coverage to full coverage. It was $90 more for the week, but after spending a night curled up to the porcelain throne, I wasn’t ready to take any more risks on this trip. For $414.15 we had a 4 wheel drive SUV that comfortably seated all of us and our stuff.

Back at the hotel, we loaded up all of said stuff and remaining passengers and hit the road for the city of Liberia to the East. We made a quick stop to load up on groceries before traveling south on the Pan American highway #1.

I had read about a local swimming hole that was just off the highway called Catarata Llanos de Cortes.

It proved to be a wonderful stop and Frugal Boy was very excited to play in the water.

It was 2000 CRC to park, and we made a donation of another 1000 CRC to two nice abuelas at the entrance who were collecting money for something or another. Finding the local spots is a great way to see the country and save money. We visited several other waterfalls during this trip and they were aimed more at the tourists and our wallets felt that in a big way.

After we had our fill of swimming, we decided to try and find a place to eat lunch in the nearby town of Bagaces. Bagaces was not a tourist town, but I was on the hunt for a local eatery. As Auntie drove farther into town and clutched the steering wheel harder, I spotted the Bar Renur Restaurant with several people inside (always a good sign).

The three women behind the bar greeted us with typical Tico hospitality. They especially loved Frugal Boy and even turned on some cartoons for him to watch while we ate. They didn’t speak any English, but our Spanish has improved a bit from our January Mexico trip, so we were able to interact just fine. Auntie and Shae both ordered lunch, I was still feeling a bit nauseous from the previous day so I just snacked on a banana. The lunch bill was a very affordable 5800 CRC (about $5.50 a person). One thing that surprised Shae and myself were the Costa Rican prices. We had heard beforehand that Costa Rica was an expensive country to travel, but as we later learned first hand it really is on par with USA prices. Really getting off the tourist path and eating like a local was still a pricey meal in comparison to our Mexico trip. Costa Rica would not have much of a geographic arbitrage advantage for retirement purposes.

From lunch, we continued down highway 1 until our turnoff at Las Juntas so we could get to Monteverde in the mountains.

On the drive up into the mountains there was a pull off that had a great view of where we had come from. You can easily see the Nicoya gulf that connects up to the Pacific ocean.

Finally, the winding, bumpy mountain roads delivered us to Monteverde, our first destination of our week long trip.

Monteverde is world famous for being a cloud forest. The elevation was around 5200 ft, making it pleasantly cool, and true to its name, enveloped in clouds more often than not. The last bit of driving was up a very steep and rocky road.

And then we were at our first Airbnb rental house!

For $246 we had a two bedroom house all to ourselves for two nights just minutes away from some of the best attractions in the area. I have yet to have a bad experience with Airbnb. The hosts lived in a house on the same land and they had two energetic little boys that made Frugal Boy light up.

I knew beforehand that the woman host was an ex-pat from the Boston area, so we brought a jar of pure maple syrup as a gift. Of course we bought it at Aldi for $6.50. She was ecstatic to get it and told us that pure maple syrup cost around $40 locally for a similar sized container. We also found out that peanut butter was around $6.60 a pound in Costa Rica.

If you were planning on eating peanut butter in Costa Rica, you might want to bring it from home!

Here is one more photo of our rental house in Monteverde.

After settling in, our host helped us make a reservation for a guided night walk to try and see some of the wildlife. The major tourist draw of this area is the biodiversity.

Standing in the parking lot of the Curi Cancha biological reserve, Shae told Frugal Boy to take a picture. He happily obliged, camera need not apply.

I don’t have any good photos from our night walk. It was about 2 hours long and our guide Adrian tried to spot critters for us. We heard plenty of birds, frogs, and bugs. Highlights included seeing a giant tarantula, nectar drinking bats, a phosphorescent scorpion that shone under a black light, and a Keel-billed Toucan. The latter of which, I learned is an omnivore instead of a herbivore and is not very popular with other animals because it will eat their young.

It’s worth noting that because Costa Rica is so close to the equator, they have 12 hour days year around. That means that it is dark by 6pm. This combined with the switch to mountain time, really screwed up our internal clocks. Shae and I both learned that living near the equator, probably wasn’t for either of us. We like having sunlight in the evening (at least until 8).

With the tour concluded, we were hungry (even me!) and decided to follow the recommendation of our host for an Italian place (Tramonti’s) just down the driveway. We ordered a pizza (5000 CRC) para llevar and enjoyed it back at the house.

Continue reading part 2 here.

3 Free Web Series To Start Watching

May 4, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Shae and I have never paid for cable tv. We are part of the growing segment of cord cutters who forgo the pricey cable/dish bills, endless ads, and channel flicking for entertainment.

If you haven’t cut the cord yet and moved on to Netflix, OTA (Over the Air), Youtube, Hulu, or any of the bazillion other cheap/free services, here are three shows you can watch right now for free on the internet.

Video Game High School (VGHS)

While this made for Youtube series can be found on Netflix, it is still available on Youtube (link here).

The show centers around Brian D. an average teenager who through a near miraculous coincidence becomes enrolled at the prestigious Video Game High School. Set in the not too distant future where video game players are reveled as celebrities, Brian’s luck and resulting pressure to perform are ginormous.

Over the course of the 3 seasons, the writers poke fun at games like FarmVille, Tamagotchi, Mario Kart, Tetris, Call of Duty (er “Field of Fire”) and many more. If you have ever picked up a game, you will probably get at least some of the references made.

Season 2’s production value and storyline improves immensely as the success of the first season pays off.

S.O.S (Save Our Skins)

Another “Made for the Internet” show, SOS episodes (link here) are only 5 minutes long, but boy do they leave you scrambling to click on the next episode link.

Two rather moronic British men on Holiday, find that they are all alone in NYC after waking up from a jet lagged evening. Was it zombies, aliens, or gryphons that made everyone vanish. Watch it to the end to discover if these two blokes are all that remain of humanity.

H+

I haven’t watched this series yet, but it comes highly reviewed and had a much larger budget than the previous two. Set in the not too distant future, 1/3 of humanity has a computer implanted in their brain.

Things start to get dicey when an epidemic breaks out. A computer virus epidemic. Watch it on Youtube (link here).

What web series do you like? Leave a comment so we can check it out!

Sammy Squirrel and the Acorns

April 28, 2016 by Andrew Leave a Comment

In the peaceful forest of Tuckville there was a mighty oak tree. Each year, all of the squirrels in the forest would work together to collect all of the acorns from the tree.

The youngest and smallest squirrels would gather acorns from the very top of the tree. The branches were itsy bitsy, but that did not scare Sammy.

Sammy ran along the branches to the very tippy end and would pick an acorn before racing back to the ground and adding it to the big pile of acorns.

When all of the acorns were harvested, the oldest squirrel would give each squirrel a share of the pile. The oldest and biggest squirrels who collected the most acorns, would get more, and the younger smaller squirrels like Sammy would get less.

Most of Sammy’s friends would eat their acorns right away. Some of them would trade their acorns for a car.

Sammy thought about what he wanted to do with his acorns and he got an idea. He took them down by the creek in a nice sunny area and he buried all of his acorns.

For the rest of the Fall, he watched as his friends raced around in their cars.

The next Spring, Sammy went back to the creek and saw dozens of little oak trees were he had buried his acorns.

10 years went by, and Sammy was no longer a little squirrel. He was a big adult squirrel. Back by the creek, it was no longer sunny. There were big oak trees there now, and they had huge amounts of acorns!

His friend’s cars had long since broken down. They had nothing left to show from their long days of picking acorns from the mighty oak tree, but Sammy had an entire grove of oak trees all to himself.

He picked all of the acorns from the trees that he had planted so long ago and traded those acorns for a nice house where he could raise his own family.

The End

So ends, my little parable. Isn’t it nice and cliche? Would you believe me if I said it was based on a true story? My story to be exact.

When I was in high school, I worked as a dish washer for the local college. Looking at my social security earning reports on SSA.gov, I made $1350, $1046, and $733 for the three years that I worked there. I remember that my wage was $5.35/hr and my sophomore year of high school, I worked during the school year as well as the summer.

Most of my friends also worked during high school, and some of them worked to drive. “I need the job, to afford the car, to get me to the job.” I rode a bike, and was fairly unpopular. Having a car is a big status symbol here in the Midwest. It is something of a rite of passage for teenagers. The sweet 16th birthday. Of course, $3k doesn’t buy a whole lot of car.

It did however buy around 50 shares of AAPL stock. A decade later, when I ‘harvested’ that initial investment, it had grown to the tune of around $30k.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was the best paid dishwasher in that cafeteria making an adjusted $53 an hour. Perhaps if I had known, I might have been more tolerant of the infantile college students behavior of making toddler sized messes of their food trays.

So what happened to that windfall investment? Well, most of it went towards clearing up student loan debts from college, but the remainder became part of our down payment on our house. Who knew that cleaning dishes would be so enabling?

Obviously, there was a lot of luck involved with putting all of my acorns in one basket. What wasn’t lucky, was my decision to take the path less traveled and forego my teenage desires for mobility, freedom, and instant gratification.

I eventually did buy a car and a cellphone. It only took until I was a junior in college.

Frugal Living

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