Depending on who you ask, the number of haircuts that a person gets in any given year can vary from none to once every two weeks (24/year). We average about 4 haircuts a year and when we pay for a haircut the total bill averages out to around $12. Growing up, my mom would cut my brothers and my hair. In college, I would wait until I went home to have my hair cut to save a few bucks. My folks probably saved around $200 a year by cutting hair themselves.
Shae and I cut each others hair on occasion. With Frugal Boy underfoot, it can be difficult to leave the house for an hour, especially when most of our free time is at night. The other night Shae asked me to cut her hair because it was getting long and resembled string to this playful kitten.
You’ll need some equipment to properly cut hair. A pair of sharp scissors designed for hair cutting. Don’t use them for anything else, you want them nice and sharp for cutting hair! A comb and clips are helpful for longer hair. Good lighting and a smooth floor make an ideal place to set up shop. I set down a chair in our kitchen so Shae could watch the aquarium while I worked (yes she trusts me with scissors).
A towel wrapped around your victim, err client, will make cleanup easier. If you are intimidated by the thought of it, do what I do and watch some youtube videos. The biggest challenge is just having the confidence to do it and know that hair grows back and it isn’t the end of the world if you make a mistake. It takes me a bit longer than a professional, but we save a little bit of money, have some time together, and can do it all from the comfort of our own home (within earshot of a sleeping baby).
Being a home owner is awesome. That awesomeness has a price stapled to it and when we became home owners for the first time last year, it became abundantly clear that we would need to acquire some more stuff. One of those things was a lawn mower and because we moved in at the beginning of the summer it wasn’t something that I could procrastinate on.
Who am I kidding, I bummed and borrowed neighbors mowers for the first month while I avoided spending any more money on house stuff (buying five new appliances, a water heater, mattress, and tons of other stuff will cure you of shopping).
Thankfully, my in-laws gifted us with their used corded electric mower. It had a tiny 18″ mowing deck, but our yard is tiny and most importantly the price was right, free! I bought a new blade for it and a really long extension cord and quit bothering our neighbors (probably to their relief). Over the course of the summer I learned the best way to cut the grass while being mindful of the energy supplying umbilical cord. It got the job done, even if I spent more time untangling cord than cutting grass.
This spring shopping fever was starting to take hold again. All of the home improvement stores had such nice displays of mowers. The memory of fighting extension cords was still fresh and motivating me to find something better. Gas mowers have been around a long time, don’t have cords to worry about, and are economical. I used to mow my parents lawn and some lawns around my hometown using a trusty gas mower, but given the fact that we have such a dainty yard and no other gas powered tools, it seemed inefficient to add a gas tool to our otherwise all electric collection. A corded electric mower was out of the running from the get go but maybe a battery powered one might be the answer. Battery powered mowers have come a long way in recent years thanks to the mass production of lithium ion batteries. These energy dense rechargeable batteries have taken the consumer electronics market by storm, but like any rechargeable battery, it will wear out over time. The prospect of spending $100 every three years is not very appealing to me. The only other way of mowing a yard is by human power. Reel mowers are a centerpiece fixture of my imagining of the 1950s. One of our neighbors has a reel mower and it is wonderfully quiet, especially when his neighbor brings out a gas monster. My wife, Shae, is all in favor of reel mowers, but she’s also mowed the yard once (ever in her whole life). So like any on-the-fence individual, I did nothing and slugged out another season with the long tailed red devil.
This past week while mowing the yard, the mower became very difficult to steer. Looking down I saw that one side of the handle had disconnected from the mower body. “AHA, the mower is broken, now I can justify a new one”, I thought, until the ridiculousness of that statement hit me a minute later.
Knowing what I had to do, I went to the hardware store and spent $1.31 for a new bolt and wing nut.
Two minutes later, the mower was fixed.
While this mower is a bit of a pain to use, it does do the job it is meant to do and until it properly dies, I’ll keep on using it. How often do we throw something out or buy something new just because we don’t have the best or shiniest. I bet I can get another year out of this mower, and at the end of next year, I will probably say the same thing.
Thanks in-laws for the functioning mower. It gets the job done and we’ve been able to put money towards things that really matter, like Frugal Boy’s education fund.
A couple of weekends ago in a small Wisconsin town hundreds of thousands of people came together to celebrate the 100th Annual Cheese Days Festivals. The town, Monroe, WI, hosts the biennial event and seeing as Frugal Boy or I have never been we decided to make a weekend of it.
On Friday night we drove up and celebrated Grandma’s birthday.
Since we were staying on a farm, it only seemed appropriate to dress Frugal Boy up as a farmer.
The next morning, before driving to the festival we tagged along with Grandpa to a farm auction. I had never been to a farm auction before and was interested in seeing the process. This particular farm was 125 acres and had a grass runway. As we pulled up, a plane landed.
The auctioneer did his best to drum up excitement from the 50 or so people that attended the auction. He had several cobs of corn from the field and stated “these must weigh 10 pounds each!” Suuurree.
The auction was split into 4 parts. The first part was for the house and surrounding five acres of land. The second and third part was for 40 and 80 acres respectively. The final part was with everything combined into one. The whole shebang.
As expected, there wasn’t much bidding. Most of the crowd was there to spectate. Grandpa explained that there are only a handful of auctions a year and other farmers often go to snoop, test the waters, and the like. The farmland ended up going for around 9200/acre. With grain prices as low as they are right now, it will take many years to break even on this purchase.
With the auction winding down we moved on to the main event of the day. Cheese Days! Most cheese that we eat comes from cows. Here is one happy cow.
The weather was fantastic all weekend and that along with it being the centennial celebration drew crushing crowds.
The best part for me was going through the cheese sample tent. Armed with tooth picks you fought your way through the masses to stab a cheese cube and try it. Of course I had to try the limburger cheese, made locally in Monroe. It is advertised as a stinky cheese. Honestly, I could neither smell nor taste it, but maybe that was because my palate had already experienced a dozen other cheeses. There was a Caşcaval soft cheese that made me make one of these faces.
Frugal Boy didn’t get any cheese (at least not directly). Instead he had to settle for some pureed peas.
The next day it had gotten decidedly chillier. Instead of fighting the crowds again to watch the parade we headed home. Along the way we stopped at an apple orchard to pick up some apple cider donuts (Auntie was having a craving).
Here is a random goat, just because.
Mmmm, still warm donuts.
The next Cheese Days festival will be in 2016. Frugal Boy added another state, Wisconsin, to his travel map. We’re starting to run out of easy states!
Yesterday we took in some culture in Champaign/Urbana. After picking up an Aunt we went to the Urbana farmers market. It was a sizable market and was well attended. Afterwards, we visited the Spurloch Musuem. The free University run museum showcases exhibits including Ancient Mesopotamia, Roman & Greek, Egyptian, Africa, East Asia, and Native American.
The Roman and Greek exhibit hall was filled with plaster replicas.
Some were quite eye catching!
Visitors were asked not to touch the exhibits, but you could get very close to them.
This Asian exhibit had some clothes you could try on.
If you aren’t interested in clothes, military history might be your thing.
I thought the mustache on this German suit of armor was entertaining.
Not all of the exhibits were about ancient history. Some of them explored modern propaganda and the importance of reassuring the audience that the enemy could be defeated.
Someone must have let a seagull into the museum!
After thoroughly exploring the museum it was time for lunch. We tried out a little Vietnamese place and even Frugal Boy got to experience some of the food.
Once our stomachs were full of tasty food we returned to campus to tour the Krannert Art Museum. As you enter the museum you are greeted with two rather savage statues. One depicts a Gorilla carrying off a cave woman, and the other shows a bear mauling a man.
On closer inspection though, your mind may change as to whom to pity. In Shae’s words, “They had it coming”. A nearby sign explains the artists vision.
Inside Krannert are multiple galleries. We enjoyed the historic wing the best (pictured below).
Many of the paintings tell a story or have a story attached to them. What may appear at first glance to be uninteresting suddenly becomes very interesting when you start seeing the nuances depicted in the painting. Symbols played a huge role in these older painting. Here is a painting depicting Saint George slaying a dragon.
The other galleries are worth viewing, but in my opinion weren’t as interesting as the first one. Call me unenlightened but taking five photos with rocks shoved into your mouth isn’t art to me.
Outside there are a couple of other sculptures. I couldn’t quite figure out why one of these policeman had a penis hanging out while he scooped up pennies. If you understand why, or why they are scooping up pennies leave a comment!
Our last stop of the day was at a local mom and pop pet store. Frugal Boy takes after his parents and loves fishies. We didn’t come home with anything but it was fun to look!
Finally, we had to get in a short game of Peek-A-Boo at Auntie’s apartment and show off Frugal Boy’s new ‘words’.
How do you manage your budget, keep track of cash flow, and plan for future financial goals? We use Mint.
Mint is an online aggregator of all of your financial accounts. The website and accompanying apps are run by Intuit, the folks behind Turbo Tax. As with all free services and products it is important to ask a basic question. “Am I buying a product or am I the product?” The way Mint makes its money and can afford to offer the service for free is by showing you ads for financial products and services it thinks you would benefit from. So in this case you are the product.
With that said, we have been using Mint for over five years and have found it is worth far more than the minor annoyance of targeted ads. Once you have signed up and linked some accounts you will see a screen that looks something like this:
Scrolling down a bit more reveals more information.
There is a bit more budget items and some additional histograms showing net income farther down the page but you get the general idea. It looks like we went over our grocery budget this month. Oops!
If you haven’t guessed by now, we are a joint finance household. When we got married we ditched individual finances and threw everything into one big pot. Mint makes that even easier because even though we went from two Mint accounts down to one, all of the transactions and history popped up in the super mega account once the bank/investment/loan/etc details were entered in.
Speaking of transactions, here is what the Transactions page looks like on Mint.
We can account for every penny earned and spent for as long as we have been using Mint. Pretty neat eh? There are some cool things that you can do with that information that I will talk about later.
The next page is the Budgets. You can create as many weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, etc line items that you want. If you aren’t budgeting, shame on you. A budget is often thought of as restrictive but in reality it can help you ‘pay yourself first’. We have many of the standard budget items, but because we know where every dollar is going we also know how much is left over each month. Some of our budget items are for fun things (aka not bills) and by saying we have X dollars to spend a month on hobby A or B makes it much more enjoyable. Oh geez, I ‘have’ to spend money on my hobby. 🙂
Mint’s budgeting is far from perfect, especially for irregular items such as Auto Insurance. It takes a bit of finagling to get it to look right and at some point you decide just to live with the occasional red bar of overspending dishonor.
Going along with budgets, you can also setup Goals. These can be long term goals like retirement, or short term ones like paying off a loan.
The last page that I’m going to talk about is the Trends page. I don’t think that Mint offers much insight into Investments so I’m going to skip that weak page.
Remember when I said you could track every penny spent. Well, you can also visualize all of that data. For example, here is a pie chart of all of our spending for the year to date.
“Home” would be mortgage payments, improvements, etc. Taxes would include federal and state income taxes as well as estimated tax payments made for my business. It also includes property taxes. You can see that Frugal Boy has carved out a nice wedge for himself this year. That wedge will likely grow larger over the next 18 years.
How about spending for “all time” (aka as far back as the financial data goes, ~4-5 years).
You might be surprised at how much you’ve spent (and earned) over the years. For example, I was a bit dismayed to learn that we have spent $4,759 on Gas & Fuel since May of 2010. I guess the daily commutes and road trips add up over time.
The “Mobile Phone” category spending over time is a good example of how a monthly expense can be reduced.
We’ve spent a total of $3100 on cell phones since November of 2011. You can see the first spike where we bought the phones. Then we piddled money for 8 months on a post pay contract (what the majority of Americans do). In September of 2012 there is another spike where we paid the ETF, early termination fee, to get out of the contract. Then we spent approximately 10 months with GoPhone, a prepay no contract. Finally we wised up even more and reduced our cell phone bills even further by switching to Airvoice Wireless. I have to say that I really like the trend shown on this chart!
For you techno savvy individuals, Mint also makes mobile apps and even a Mac desktop app that sits in your menubar. I like to check it once a day just to keep an eye out for any fraudulent activity.
Conclusion
I would highly recommend Mint to anyone wanting to get a better grip on their finances. We have around 25 different accounts linked to Mint (a good chunk of those are paid and closed student loans!). Still, I couldn’t imagine logging into each individual account on even a weekly basis to keep abreast of what is going on. The need to balance the checkbook is gone with Mint. It is a far superior ledger. The ads are pretty ignorable because they are all curated and formatted by the Mint team so you won’t be seeing crazy animated flash banners. Even the bombardment of Turbo Tax ads in the Spring is negligible.
