Suddenly Frugal founder Leah Ingram

What does it mean to be suddenly frugal? It’s when a family realizes that everything they understood to be financially sound turns out not to be so and they have to reinvent how they spend money–and reconsider the financial lessons they are passing down to their kids. This was the epiphany I had in 2007 when I started my Suddenly Frugal blog.

Through daily blogging I could hold our family accountable for the financial changes we were making in our lives. For the first time ever, I took an interest in our finances–previously, my husband had handled all the bills and I had stayed happily in the dark–and we worked actively to decrease spending. We started using online bill paying so that we’d never pay a late fee again, and we drastically altered how we fed our family.

Along the way life threw us a couple of curve balls, such as when our car died three months into our frugal lifestyle. We had to take out a loan to buy a new car and that felt like instant failure. But thanks to the frugal habits we’d already put in place, we were able to save enough to pay off that three-year car loan in 12 months. Then the economy tanked and I saw my income drop 50%. Once again our frugal habits helped us know how to tweak our spending so that this difficult time became a little less painful. While things are still tight around here, we’re in a pretty good place psychologically.

Good things happened along the way, too. My fashionista daughter developed a sense of buyer’s remorse, and both of my daughters learned to budget their money. I embraced the challenge of cooking dinner at home every night, which helped to cut spending (natch) but it also brought us closer as a family. Because being able to sit down together for a meal provides benefits way beyond saving money.

In addition, I was able to attract a literary agent and get a book deal based on my blog: Suddenly Frugal: How to Live Happier and Healthier for Less. Then I got a second book deal: Toss, Keep, Sell: The Suddenly Frugal Guide to Clearing Out Clutter and Cashing In.

Truth is we’re not out of the red completely yet. My oldest daughter is a sophomore in high school. My younger daughter is two years behind her. So in the very near future, we’re going to have to find a way to pay for college, and I’m not quite sure how we’re going to do that. This would freak out most people. I’m excited about the challenge. I’m confident that having developed a frugal point of view, we’ll figure out creative ways to find cash for college–and you can be sure I’ll be blogging about it as we go along.

This blog post is part of the submission/audition process for a new reality TV show about mom bloggers.

Bill decided that he wanted to try to stock up on more items this week, based on what was on sale at Stop & Shop. So I went to this week’s Grocery Game link for the store and made sure I didn’t forget to get the GG (or Grocery Game-specific) coupons associated with this week’s sales.

Except I discovered two things I didn’t expect.

1. GG coupons actually link to external coupon sites, such as the ones I already use–Coupons.com being one of them.
2. GG-linked coupons or rather the microsite that they link to don’t seem to work with a printer affiliated with an Apple computer. Because when I clicked on all the coupons I wanted, at the Coupons.com and SmartSource.com site that GG brought me to, I couldn’t print them out. I expected that the Coupons.com site would. But it didn’t. So I went back and tried again and I got an error message telling me that my “print limit reached.” That had never happened to me before. So I tried logging into my account at the Coupons.com site, and it still wouldn’t let me print out the coupons I was looking for–even though they never actually printed. (Eventually, I got them to print but I was still locked out of my account.)

What this means is this: I don’t need the Grocery Game-specific coupons in order to take advantage of the deals I find, as long as I go to Coupons.com or another site on my own. That’s OK, since I’d hoped that the Grocery Game-specific coupons would have somehow been linked up to that week’s outlined specials, but they weren’t. Once I got to the site, I still had to search for them, then click on them, and then print them out. Well, assuming I could print them out, which in yesterday’s instance, I couldn’t.

Another lesson learned.

A couple of years ago, I tried making money on eBay by buying clothing in bulk at cheap prices and then “flipping” that clothing on eBay. I probably made a couple hundred dollars this way, and then I got too busy to pursue it anymore.

One of the bathing suits I'm selling on eBay

Recently, though, we had the opportunity to buy a box of bathing suits at a wholesale price, which we figured we could recoup by selling on eBay. (We were also able to dress our daughters in brand-new bathing suits, which was a real cost saver right then and there. For the amount we would have spent for almost two bathing suits at retail, they got two new bathing suits each.) In addition, my daughters recently cleaned out their closets and provided some tween-friendly clothing worth selling on eBay.

Which is why I decided to dedicate today’s blog posting to tips I’ve found to be helpful for making the most money when selling on eBay.

1. Always search completed transactions before posting anything. You can do this kind of search using the “advanced search” tool. Not only does this allow you to see what similar items actually sold for, but also it gives you a good sense of where to start your bidding and in which category to post your item so shoppers will actually find it.
2. Make sure that if you’re selling used clothing, they are freshly laundered. No one wants a foul-smelling bargain, even if it is at a good price. If you expect people to bid on your used clothes, note that they’ve just been washed. It can’t hurt. Also, when you end up shipping the goods, you know you won’t get negative feedback because the clothes smelled dirty.
3. Be as descriptive as possible in your listing. I talk about sizes, brands, colors, any sayings on shirts, if a bathing suit has padded cups or lined bottoms or whatever it takes so that a potential bidder feels that he or she is well informed about my item.
4. Pictures really are worth 1,000 words. On eBay they are a must. Bidders tend to pass by any listings without pictures. Just as the descriptions above will inform someone about your item, the pictures will let that person actually see it, too. And that’s important in an auction scenario.
5. Give yourself some wiggle room with shipping. I don’t believe in over charging for shipping but don’t rip yourself off either. Too many times I’ve miscalculated the shipping weight on an item I was selling, and then any profit I may have pocketed on the sale I ended up spending on shipping because of my mistake.

Do you have additional tips for successfully selling on eBay?

When I drove by the local bank’s digital temperature display a little while ago, it blinked 103 degrees. Wow, yeah, we’re in a heat wave. While I don’t enjoy being warm, I hate paying to stay cool even more. Which is why I’m employing the following 7 tactics to keep my family and me cool–and my bills down at the same time.

1. Raise the thermostat. You may be responding to that statement with a “Whatcha talking about, Willis?” look, but think about it this way–72 degrees or 78 degrees, both still feel way cooler than the 103 degrees outside. So I’ve got my air conditioning set at 78 degrees–much warmer than I normally keep it–but we’re still crisp and cool indoors.
2. Keep shades closed. We are lucky enough to live on a shaded lot, meaning the trees provide a lot of protection from the sun during the hot day. But we keep the inside even cooler by not letting any sun shine in during the hot daylight hours by keeping our shades, curtains and shutters closed.
3. Turn on the ceiling fans. Ceiling fans use very little energy but give your body the “illusion” of keeping you cool by running cool air over your skin. So if you got them, keep them spinning on hot days like today.
4. Avoid running hot appliances. You won’t catch me running the dishwasher or throwing a load of sheets in the dryer today. Why would I add ambient heat to my home–via steam from the dishwasher or the hot air in the dryer–to the house that I’m already working hard to keep cool?
5. Drink lots of cold refreshments (the non-alcoholic kind). I’m keeping myself cool by sipping on ice water all day long. I don’t know if the cold water lowers my core temperature but sure does make me feel refreshed. Just don’t try to cool down with ice-cold beer or something else alcoholic–it can leave you flushed and feeling hotter than before you started trying to cool down.
6. Keep the lights off. Unless every single light bulb in your house are compact fluorescent bulbs, which do not emit any heat, you’d be better off on a hot day like today keeping the lights in your house off as much as possible. Same goes with any other electronic that emits heat by being on–kind of like point #4 with the appliances.
7. Go for a dip in the pool–or at least stick your head under the hose. Nothing brings your body temperature down like having your head soaking wet. So if you can’t jump in a pool, why not set up a sprinkler in your backyard or turn on the hose to cool yourself down. In fact, once I’m done with this post, I’m getting my bathing suit on so I can cool down in the water.

What are some of your keep-cool tricks that don’t raise your bills?

I have a story in the July issue of Good Housekeeping on 9 ways to save $4,500 or more this summer–on household spending and back-to-school shopping. I thought you’d enjoy reading some of my “professional” work in a national, newsstand magazine. I’m hoping I’ll get to write more money-saving stories for the magazine in the near future. I’ll keep you posted.