¢ Brie's

Last week, Heather from Wanting What You Have posted a video interview with Amy Dacyczyn, author of The Complete Tightwad Gazette. If you’re unfamiliar with the book, it’s a compilation of newsletters by the same that Amy sent out over six years in the 1990s, detailing her family’s money-saving habits. It’s considered by in the frugal community to be a must-read. I’ve never read it, but I may one day after watching the interview.

The interview appears to be from the 1990s, but the things Amy says are as true today as they were then. I especially like when she says, “We always do think frugality in bad times and I just wish people would do it in the good times, because if we would do it in the good times, the bad times wouldn’t be bad. We’d be able to ride it out.” That’s the basis of why I like saving money: it’s not that I can’t afford to spend now, but that I may not be able to spend later and I want to insure us against that. Overall, I was surprised by how down-to-earth the author seems, given how many reviews I’ve read calling The Tightwad Gazette over-the-top. (I was also glad to learn, with almost complete certainty, how to pronounce her last name. )

Here’s the interview.

P.S. The link to The Tightwad Gazette in this post is an affiliate link. I’ll be compensated if you buy something from Amazon while you’re there.

My "chocolate chips"

Yesterday I wanted to surprise Jack with chocolate chip cookies. I don’t know about you, but I don’t know who wouldn’t love coming home to warm, moist cookies and dough set aside specifically for them to eat. The only problem was that we didn’t have chocolate chips in the pantry. Greeeeat.

What we did have was Whoppers. We had gone on a $10 junk food “spree” the night before and bought some candy that was on sale at the grocery store. I couldn’t think of anything more chocolate chip-like than crushed Whoppers so I put them in a plastic baggie and smashed them with a mallet. Here’s where I messed up: We almost always put less sugar in our food than what recipes call for. I knew from experience that chocolate chip cookies need the right amount of “stuff” to keep them from melting into crisp butter discs, so I substituted an equal amount of flour for the sugar I left out. I realized my mistake almost as soon as I added the flour.

The cookies aren’t bad. I think maybe I should put a little less flour, though, and a bit more butter, vanilla or both for more flavor. I’ll post the recipe to the site when I get them right!

I also plan to post a weight loss article to the website later today. With so many people trying to slim down for summer, I want to share some simple tips that help me lose and maintain my weight. It seems that people make it much more complicated than it needs to be. Check back later for a link to the article. [Update: "The 5 Biggest Weight-Loss Mistakes"]

The dining table centerpiece

What kind of flowers do these look like to you?

Give up? They’re fake flowers.

This seems pretty obvious to me when I’m sitting in front of them at our dining room table, but surprisingly, we’ve had at least two guests react in surprise when we told them that the flowers were fake. I guess that means we did a good job choosing them at the dollar store!

When we were first decorating our home, Jack and I decided on a new theme for the dining room. As you can see, the we chose blue, white, black and yellow as the main colors. (Our napkins are black but they were in the laundry when I took the picture. ) For the yellow, we went with an, um, everlasting bouquet as the centerpiece. I was concerned about the flowers looking terrible on our table, but fortunately Jack has an eye for what looks good. We settled on the flowers there in the picture and trimmed them down to the right length to fit in the small glass vase we had on hand from my old office desk. The vase was probably less than $2 at a crafts store, so this “everlasting centerpiece” cost about $3 total.

Maybe I do more than I realized to convince guests that the flowers are not fake (not that they’re real, just… not fake). I had essential oils on hand and chose a honey almond scent to drop onto the flower petals. So, this fake bouquet has a real scent. Granted, I’ve never smelled a flower that reminded me of honey and almonds, but really I don’t think people expect any scent to come from flowers unless they’re real. The essential oil probably cost between $3 and $8, so the surprisingly convincing bouquet costs less than $12 and will last indefinitely. To me, that beats having real flowers on display that I have to change every few days.

Do you use fake flowers to decorate in your home?

Our Ooma Telo

Last week we finished porting our home number from our old phone service provider to Ooma. Ooma recommends you wait a day before calling your phone company to cancel service, so though we bought the Ooma Telo a few weeks ago, we’ve only used Ooma by itself this week.

If you don’t know what Ooma is, here’s a quote from their website:

Ooma is a revolutionary device that allows you to call anywhere in the U.S. for free. You pay only applicable taxes and fees. You can also make international calls for next to nothing. You don’t need a PC. Simply connect the device to your high-speed Internet and your existing phone, and that’s it. You’re ready to start calling and experience Ooma’s great voice quality.

We found out about it a few months ago while looking for an alternative to our home phone that didn’t involve using VOIP. (VOIP requires you to keep your computer turned on to make and receive calls, which makes your phone dependent on your internet speed and connection.) We’ve been paying about $40 a month for phone, in addition to our internet from the same company. The price for that package has crept up about $20 over the past year, due to strange little fees that Jack says don’t mean much except that the company is charging us for the cost of charging us.

So far, we like Ooma. The Multi-Ring feature allows to you decide which phones ring when someone calls. You can make your cell phone ring when someone calls your home, or have both phones ring. It comes with call log, voicemail and other features I won’t mention that allow you a bit of leeway concerning the calls you receive. We’ll save close to $500 on our phone service over the next 12 months alone, and even more money over time. If you don’t use Ooma, it would be worth your while to look into it.

Hi, everyone!

Since I just started this blog, I thought I would take the first post to introduce myself. Of course, you can read a little about me on the about page, but that’s more about the blog than me myself. So, here’s a list of 10 things about me that you may notice as you follow my blog:

1. People often mistake me for Camembert. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…
2. My husband Jack and I cook almost entirely from scratch. We find that raw ingredients are cheaper, healthier and taste better than pre-made things.
3. Jack is my best friend.
4. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in linguistics. For the record: everyone has an accent, Standard English doesn’t exist, and I’ve only studied six languages in-depth.
5. I’m a freelance writer – hire me!
6. I love the way women dressed in the ’60s. I mean suburbanites, not hippies.
7. I write the code for NaturalFrugality.com, excluding the forum, store and blog (which I installed).
8. I believe that eating three meals a day, single servings and without snacks, does a lot to help manage a person’s weight and money.
9. I use heat on my hair just a few times a year.
10. I wear makeup just about as often as I use heat on my hair.

That list was surprisingly difficult to come up with! Please say hi in the comments and tell me at least one interesting thing about yourself to reward me for my hard work.