Hope you like this podcast recap of our month of no new spending.

No New Spending Recap

As you know my husband and I declared March to be our month of no new spending. With the month over tomorrow, I’ve been spending the past few days working on a wrap-up and recap of exactly how the month worked out for us. Doing so has taken a bit longer than expected, so stay tuned for tomorrow’s post for how everything went. I realize that I’ll be posting on the last day of the month–and I suppose something earth-shattering could occur on that last day–and perhaps I should be posting on the first of April instead. But, oh, well. I’m ready to move on and share the highs and lows of our no-new-spending month. Also, I’m hoping to share this wrap-up in recap in an entirely new format–a podcast. Keep your fingers crossed that it actually works out.

Believe it or not, my Suddenly Frugal book will be at the publisher next week, and on the road towards bookstores for the fall. As I spend this last week before my deadline finishing my proofing and editing of the manuscript, I’m also putting together the “back matter” of the book. In this instance that would be the two Appendices for the book. One is a frugal glossary; the other is frugal resources for readers to use.

As far as the glossary goes, this is where I’m going to list various words that are a part of the frugal lexicon, and which I think will be entertaining for the reader to learn about. I haven’t attempted a glossary related to my blog topic since the first year I wrote this blog–and at that time, I wrote a green glossary, since my focus then was on green and frugal living.

I’d like to make the glossary Appendix as useful as possible, and so far here are the words I’ve come up with (in no particular order):

• frugal (natch)
• miser
• cheapskate
• spendthrift
• tightwad
• staycation
• thrift or thrifty
• lifetime guarantee
• warranty
• Freecycler
• Yankee

What additional words would you suggest I include?

***UPDATE***I posted something about this frugal lexicon on Twitter. Already someone suggested I add these words:

• freegan
• frugalista/recessionista

I love the first day of spring. Winter is officially over (though we’ve had many a snowstorm in April here in the Northeast), and signs of warm weather are popping up all over. In the garden there are the blooming crocuses and daffodils, on the streets are people finally shedding their winter layer of coats, and at the local Rita’s Water Ice location, they’re finally opening for business again.

As is the tradition for the past 17 years, Rita’s is giving away free water ice (we called it Italian ice where I grew up) to celebrate spring. According to Rita’s, more than one million people are expected to “scoop up” this offer

A Philadelphia-born springtime tradition, the annual Rita’s giveaway is held from noon to 10 p.m. at more than 500 Rita’s locations in 17 states. Guests who visit their neighborhood Rita’s will receive one free, regular-sized, 10 oz. cup of Italian Ice to commemorate the beginning of spring.

In addition to giving away one free Italian ice today, you can enter for a chance to receive free water ice for a year. All you need to do is sample the new, secret-flavored Italian Ice, submit your suggested name for the Mystery Flavor and vote for your favorite name submission on the Rita’s website. The winner of the Mystery Ice Flavor Naming Contest will receive FREE Rita’s Italian Ice for one year. The contest begins on March 20 and ends on April 17, with the winner being announced on April 27 on the web.

Here’s the best part about today–my kids are off from school (it’s an in-service day for the teachers). That means we don’t have to wait until after school to walk downtown to Rita’s. We can go right after lunch.

My favorite Italian ice flavor is chocolate. What about you?

Here’s a stat I find hard to believe: according to a recent survey of ShopSmart readers (that’s a Consumer Reports magazine), only 7% of women dislike cleaning their house.

What?

I don’t know about you, but I always feel like I’ve got the guilt of not having time to clean my house hanging over my head. I’m usually pretty good about tidying up here and there. But a top-to-bottom clean house? Hasn’t happened in years. Well, at least not since we fired our cleaning lady when we went frugal.

Having a cleaning lady was one luxury I couldn’t continue to justify, especially when we were selling our old house. Ever day it was my job to straighten the place up so it was “show ready,” meaning that the floors were always swept, the bathrooms always spotless, and the rugs always vacuumed.

If it weren’t so unreasonably time consuming, I’d love to still be able to live like that. But with my looming book deadline and all of the other time constraints in my life, I’m lucky if the dishwasher gets loaded and unloaded in a day.

That’s why I was almost giddy when I read about the “Nobody Beats the Maids Instant Win Sweepstakes.” The grand prize? A year’s (or $2,500) worth of cleaning services from The Maids.

From March 16 through June 14, 2009, all you have to do to enter is visit The Maids website and plug in your information. While the year’s worth of a cleaning lady is a pretty sweet prize, the other prizes aren’t too shabby either–you could win a vacation for four at Beaches Resorts in Turks & Caicos or Jamaica, or fresh flowers for a year from 1-800-FLOWERS.COM.

I don’t know about you but I’m toggling over to Maids.com to enter. I would love to hand over my feather duster, broom, and vacuum cleaner to someone else for the next 12 months.

So I’m completely in the home stretch of writing Suddenly Frugal, the book. My contract asks for a 60,000 word book, and as of about 30 minutes ago, I’d written just over 53,000 words.

I have three chapters left to write on the following topics:

• Gardening, yard, and landscaping
• Renovations and interior decorating
• Vacations and getaways

I’m putting out feelers left and right across the Internet for more information on these areas so I can include it in my book. If you have suggestions to share–or know of websites I should check out to research these topics–will you let me know? Thanks.

Early on down the road to frugal living, I figured out that a great way to save money when I shopped was to check out store brands of nearly any product I wanted to buy. While I have professed my brand loyalty to certain products–and continue to feel that way about particular items–I would be crazy (and poor) if I didn’t make store brands or generics a part of my frugal equation. Just today I refilled the soap dispenser in my bathroom with store-brand liquid soap, served store-brand cranberry-apple juice with dinner, and cleaned some pots after dinner using a store-brand scrubber sponge.

If you haven’t yet converted your shopping thought process to include store brands, here are 5 reasons why you should:

1. An American family of four spends nearly $10,000 a year on food, housekeeping supplies and personal-care products and services. If you choose to buy store brands on a third of those items, you’d be saving a ton.
2. When in doubt, give store brands a try when you’re in the market for personal-care items, paper products, and household cleaners. I know, for example, that my blue window cleaner shines my glass just as well regardless of the name on the label.
3. You can expect to save, on average $.75 an item when you choose a store brand over the brand name. That doesn’t sound like much, but if you buy about four of those kinds of items a week, all of a sudden, you’re talking an annual savings of $156 a year on a single item. Do that for just a dozen purchases and your savings grow to nearly $1,900 a year. In fact, according to CVS, its customers save $250 million annually by purchasing CVS/pharmacy brand products instead of national brand products.
4. Today’s store brands might as well be the brand name product. Also called private labels, they are just as good or better than national brands–often containing the exact same active ingredients as the national brands. (There’s a reason I buy generic ibuprofen in bulk at BJs versus the brand-name stuff. I know I’m getting the medicine I want and need, and it costs a heck of a lot less.)
5. Store-brand products are just as safe as the brand name items. That’s because the FDA holds all store brands to the same guidelines as brand-name products.

Many of these statistics are courtesy of CVS, which, I just found out, has so many stores in the United States that the majority of the US population lives within 2 miles of a CVS/pharmacy. That is true–my local CVS is less than a mile away, and when I need to run an errand there–or my daughters want to get new makeup, which they have to use their own money to buy–we usually walk rather than drive. So in going on foot, we’re doing something good for our pocketbooks and our general health, too.

What about you guys? Are you fans of store brands, too?

I just discovered that Amazon.com has Suddenly Frugal the book available for pre-order. I hope that folks here will take advantage of this pre-order option.

I wasn’t expecting to see the book up on Amazon yet, especially since I haven’t actually finished writing the book yet (about 10,000 words to go). But I loved getting a chance to preview the book’s subtitle: “A Quick Start Plan to Living Happier and Healthier with Less.” Sounds like the kind of book I’d want to read, even if I hadn’t written it.

Even though it’s been three months since I moved the Suddenly Frugal blog from Blogger over here to Word Press, I’ve just now figured out how to add the Blog Roll to my sidebar. Slowly, I’m trying to beef up the names and links to the blogs I enjoy reading–and which I think the readers of Suddenly Frugal will enjoy. So if you have any blog recommendations, please post a comment with a link, and I’ll check it out. Thanks.