Andrew – Page 34 – Frugal Living

Freebie Tech Tool: Adblock Plus

October 22, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Yesterday (Oct 21, 2015) was the future, at least if you are into cheesy 80 movies. So while we may not have hover boards we do have some other neat things that they didn’t see coming, such as the world wide web. Along with the internet, we also have a bazillion new advertisements competing for our attention each day in the form of banner ads, popups, and video preroll that we must sit through before watching the content we want. Thankfully, there is a simple solution to reducing the amount of advertising that ends up on our digital screens and that is an Ad Blocker.

Adblock Plus

I personally use Adblock Plus. It is free, unobtrusive, and supports every major browser out there. It works a lot like caller ID.

A website, let’s say Example.com, has ads in it. Those ads are fetched from some other server when you load the webpage. ABP, looks at the addresses that the website is trying to load additional content from and determines if it is an ad server or not. If additional content is trying to load from say, http://ads.moreads.ads, then it will stop that. Yay!

In Safari for Mac, my browser of choice, ABP shows as a little icon in the top toolbar.

If you click on the icon, you can manually disable ABP for the webpage that you are on.

Everyone should be running an Ad Blocker. If there is a particular ad supported website that you want to continue supporting (by seeing and clicking on ads) then you can whitelist (disable the ad blocker) for just that website.

Webpages will load faster with an Ad Blocker because you are loading less material.

Content + Ads = Total Webpage

Welcome to the future. It is full of ads, but at least you can turn them off.

Mending in a Throwaway Society

October 12, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

It is no secret that we live in a throwaway society. Companies spend millions of dollars in advertising to ingrain the habit of discarding old and broken merchandise in favor of new replacements.

Even though our ad consumption is way down (cutting cable TV will have that effect) I still have to consciously consider what to do when something breaks in our household. This is not a new topic for this blog as I previously wrote about it here (Squeezing Every Penny).

Last week I caught myself again in the consumerist mentality when the bicycle pump broke. The pump is probably 6-7 years old and is used mostly for inflating car and jogging stroller tires.

The rubber hosing had fatigued and snapped off by the chuck. My first thought was to toss the whole thing and go to the store for a new one, but like the mower last year, I realized that was stupid and it was indeed a simple fix.

By unthreading the collar and cutting off the bad section of tubing, I was able to reconnect the hose to the chuck.

It is good as new and I saved $10-20 in the process.

You may be thinking to yourself, what’s the big deal about a $10 bicycle pump, it isn’t that much money. The important takeaway from this is the mentality. If you regularly repair and extend the useful lifespan of simple everyday objects then you are more likely to do the same for expensive items as well.

Case in point, I just spent this morning upgrading my work computer to the latest operating system. The computer hardware is not officially supported. I could have taken the consumerist attitude and spent $2,000 to buy new supported hardware that met my business requirements or I could take the frugal mindset and extend the life of perfectly capable hardware for a total of $0 (plus an evening and morning of tinkering around).

Father and Son Adventure

October 9, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Frugal Boy and I had to drive to Peoria, IL this past week for an appointment (that went very well). I didn’t want to do all of that driving for just one thing, so we made a day out of it and after the appointment we went to the Wildlife Prairie Park. The former state park is north west of Peoria and is a cross between a zoo and a nature preserve.

There are a number of exotic animals housed at the park, but the enclosures are large and offer many hiding places for the inhabitants. I saw a red fox, two cougars, and some larger birds.

There are many miles of trails, along with cottages and even railroad cars you can lodge in. We stuck to a simple trail that just so happened to have a playground in route.

Our admission included tickets to ride the train. It was the middle of a school day, so we had the park to ourselves. The volunteer engineer was a retired school teacher and a good sport with Frugal Boy.

This particular train engine was purchased from the St Louis zoo after it had caught on fire. Volunteers restored it back to running order. We went on the short loop ride and even sat up front with the conductor. Frugal Boy wanted to press all the buttons and once he found the whistle became very restless. A short while later, and many tears when we did not let him have his way with the whistle, we arrived back at the train depot.

The tears dried quickly after a pudding snack and additional picture posing.

It was an interesting park, and we barely scratched the surface. Next time we’ll have to bring Shae along.

One Man’s Trash…

October 4, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

One of the perks of living in an upper middle class neighborhood is the quality of ‘curb alert’ deals. If you aren’t familiar with curb alerts, they work something like this. A person drags something (usually furniture) out to the curb and then they place a free sign on it and/or online. Someone like us comes along and picks it up and either uses it personally or resells it. Everybody wins. The original person gets rid of it, someone else gets something nice, and perhaps a middle man makes a little money on the side.

So it didn’t come as too big of a surprise when I got a phone call from Shae telling me that there was a nice queen sized bed frame for grabs a few blocks away. Naturally, I was quite excited since our current sleeping arrangement for the past three years has consisted of a box spring on the floor with a mattress on top (yup, we’ve been sleeping on the floor since we moved in).

The headboard wouldn’t fit into our car, but the footboard, side rails, and middle support all did. An hour later and it was assembled in our bedroom.

We easily saved a few hundred dollars and for that amount of moolah, I am willing to look past the scratches and dings.

The bed frame alone was quite the find, but it seems that good things come in threes because today on our morning run we came across two more finds. The first was a heavy duty mirror that the owner was discarding because the top was separating from the bottom.

Some wood glue and a clamp are all that it needed to be like new.

The third find was a heavy duty coffee table.

We have been meaning to add a bench near our backdoor so we can sit down and take off our shoes without tromping through the house. After we add a few coat hooks above it, we will have a place to put our coats instead of just throwing them on the floor like last winter.

A long time ago when I was in high school and living with my parents my Dad came home with an 8′ length of gutter. He was going to install it over the front steps to keep water from splashing down on them. Naturally I asked, “Where did you find that?” as an 8′ length of gutter seemed to be an unusual find. Slightly flustered and possibly offended he retorted “I bought it”. I wonder if Frugal Boy will grow up with the same mindset as I did?

Financial Goals Update – Fall 2015

September 25, 2015 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Happy Autumn! We have closed our windows and have started to bundle up at night as the temperatures drop into the 40s and 50s.

We are also making progress on our financial goals.

Mortgage

Our mortgage is 88.1% paid off, up from 61.9% in April. There have been many sacrifices along the way to make that progress but we’d do it again in a heartbeat. At our current pace we should own our home free and clear by the end of the year (well before our 30s). The standard critic’s response to our situation would be that we had rich parents who paid off the house for us. The thought is that there is no way that a couple could live below their means and aggressively save money instead of spending it.

One of the nice things about keeping detailed financial records is that I can go back and look at the numbers and say that 8% of the house was procured using inheritance/gift money. The other 92% was earned and saved by our own sweat and determination. Of that 8%, 0% was explicitly earmarked for house payments, meaning that when we received a lump of money we CHOSE to invest it into our house instead of spending it freely.

Retirement

Our retirement accounts haven’t changed much in value over the last 6 months thanks to a market correction in late August. Our equity heavy portfolio is more volatile than a bond portfolio, but we are not worried about the anemic pace this year. The market value of the portfolio has remained steady solely because we keep pumping money into retirement accounts each paycheck. The important metric is the number of shares owned and that has been growing steadily over the past half year.

Just yesterday, Caterpillar announced that they would be reducing their employee count by 10,000. A couple of months ago, another major employer in our area, Mitsubishi Motors North America, closed a factory with 1200 workers. My heart goes out to these families. For many, I suspect these layoffs will have devastating effects on their lives. The pink slips being handed out are not because they are bad at their jobs, they are the result of global economics, something that the affected worker has no control over. What we do have control over is how we manage and save the money that we have right now.

Frugal Living

Indulging in life, financially responsible

Author: Andrew