I've come to the decision that I would like to write a series of postings called A Single Woman: with subtitles that follow, the one here on tips for saving money. A large part of this upcoming series is going to be on travel as I've traveled a lot in my life and nearly always alone, though not always, and I've thought for years that I would like to be a guide for just a few women my age, to places I know very well like Paris. I daydream that I would start these few select women months ahead, getting them walking in good shoes, getting them to eat the portion sizes of the French, teaching them basic French sentences for getting around. And when they had become strong from walking and their stomachs had shrunk significantly and they could say without laughing or flubbing it up, little phrases that began with such things as, "Je voudrais...", I would take them off to Paris to show them the kinds of things a woman years ago said to me "that deliver", meaning what a woman who has one chance in her life to go to Paris would like to see and experience that fit her dream of what Paris is like. The woman who said that told me there are two places in her opinion that deliver, Paris and Venice. I knew Paris well (in fact it was in Paris where she told me that) but had never been to Venice but I knew she was right about Paris so the first chance I got I went to Venice and man oh man was she right. And how.
But these thoughts are for another posting. This one is just about ways I myself save money, which is a subject I care a lot about, being actually quite poor although I rarely feel like it (because of how I live). My grandmother, Peppi (photo in right margin somewhere) once replied when I said that I was "poor" that I was not poor, I was broke and that there was a great difference between the two words (and their meanings, of course). She said to be poor is to feel hopeless or to be poor in spirit, a.k.a. mean-spirited, jealous, revengeful, hateful or to be anti-intellectual, as loving and appreciating culture, which is the richest thing we have, makes one satisfied and full and wealthy of mind and heart even when one's shoes are worn and one's belly quite shrunken from lack of copious amounts of unnecessary food. For my grandmother there was really no other food anyhow than good coffee and Key Lime Pie except during formal dinner parties, of course, when one went completely baroque with onion soup, mushroom omelettes, coquilles St. Jacques, etc. I thought at the time that her thoughts on poor vs. broke were brilliant as I still do and ever since, though I'm usually broke, I rarely feel poor and that's only when some hateful person is attempting to make me feel that way (and when that happens it's best to shake off their sabotage like a kitty shimmies when she gets even the slightest bit wet).
So, these tips are things I regularly do personally to save money and maybe you know them all already but I thought, well, I read these kinds of tips whenever I come across them and I do many things all the time to save money, so I may as well give my list, too. The keys to how I see saving money are three things: 1. figuring out what your actual personal choices and preferences are, 2. happiness lies in simplicity, and 3. ignoring what you're "supposed" to be like via relatives, friends, media, lovers, etc.; in other words, those who may or may not mean you well but who screw you up and confuse you more often than not. So, here they are:
Transportation
I don't own a car. The reasons are that I have lived in a lot of cities and foreign places where a car isn't necessary or is a real drag to have and because my car died in Utah last year though I hadn't driven it for a year before that for reasons I won't go into here and because I'm too poor....uh oh, I mean broke, to buy one, even a beat-up lemon. Often this is a problem but the more I live without one the more I think it isn't as much of a problem as it seems and by "seems" I want to point out something I'm going to refer to over and again and that's #3 above, that one is "supposed" to have a car or there's something wrong. But, not having a car is probably the biggest savings one can possibly achieve in one decision, as it immediately ends, prevents, avoids buying gas (and you know how much money you save not having to buy any gas at all) and oil, paying for lubes, repairs, tires, not to mention a car payment, not to mention insurance, not to mention bridge and expressway tolls, meters, parking lot fees and re-tagging each year. And all of that is more or less what is spent by everybody who owns a car, as you probably know, and that's not cheap. You know that. Let me say that again: that's NOT CHEAP. It's extremely expensive and puts you at the stressful mercy of OPEC and bad decisions by our presidents, not to mention that, hybrid or not, it pollutes the environment because even if it's not throwing crap into the air and no matter the model or shape or year, it's a bulky eyesore and there are so many and usually there's the noise pollution if not from the engine than from that irritating beep when smart keys are pushed to lock the car as one is walking away and the inevitable car alarm in the middle of the night, etc.
The bike, on the other hand, is a beautiful machine, so simple, so perfect, silently gliding along the pavement, taking little room, easy to maneuver, being able to cut across cemeteries, campuses, parking lots, running along the road or on an otherwise empty lovely sidewalk. With a good basket one can carry library books, great buys from thrift stores, groceries, you name it and if it won't hold all of it, your backpack can take up the rest. Instead of increasing your ever-settling fat ass it tones it. Your arms and legs get a tan. You feel the breeze and can screech to a halt and zip up to a tree or fence to leap off at a good garage sale. The repairs are $1 in quarters once in a while to fill the tires a little, that's if you or a friend of yours doesn't have a good pump. Maybe once in a blue moon you get a flat. Then you go to a store and get a very cheap repair kit and fix it yourself in the sink or the bathtub. The only real investment of money or concerted effort is for a good bike lock on a long strong bike chain so you can lock the main body, the front tire and the basket in one loop through some poll where you stop and there's always something you can lock it to. You zip past traffic jams to the front of the line, you can take alternative routes with sudden easy change of mind. And you get progressively more limber, stronger and thinner. And it costs: absolutely nothing. This is how I get around most of the time and the more I do the easier it is as I get progressively more limber, stronger and thinner. The only slightly unpleasant moments with it are when some sadly completely out-of-shape, morbidly obese woman (and they are growing, so to speak, in droves these days) glares at me from her expensive SUV as she races by with irritation over the traffic, getting there fast enough, whatever. I love the feel of the breeze as I ride along. I love going at such a pace that I can appreciate the architecture and trees that I glide past. I love that it costs me nothing. But, of course, some days it rains. Then I take the city bus.
Here, in the city where I live the city bus costs only 50 cents but it only comes once an hour and doesn't run on weekends. But once I got used to those two conditions by carrying a bus time schedule with me at all times to consult in case I feel like taking the bus and by organizing what I need to do to not have to do it on weekends or if it happens to rain. There are two bus lines, which makes going anywhere here pretty easy and convenient. They pick up at certain locations but will drop you off anywhere along the lines you want. So even with cumbersome bags from the supermarket, they'll drop me off right by where I live so it's fine. So in an entire day, if I take the bus, the total cost of transportation here is $1.
And then there's the most enjoyable mode of transportation and that's walking. It feels so good to walk for so many reasons: the spine loosens up and that's especially good if you do a lot of sitting at desks, which I do; if you make sure your backpack is light and that just means actually glancing through it quickly to make sure you don't have a bunch of unnecessary stuff in it. You don't go as far, of course, or you take much longer but you can greet people who are sitting on their porches or out walking, too or going by you on a bike and that's always very nice. It's so good for your health and creates a real appetite by the time you get home for real, nutritious food. You just don't want crap or fast food when you've walked a ways. Your body screams Salade Nicoise! Hot and Sour Soup! Shrimp Cocktail! Cold Chicken! You walk in the door directly to the kitchen absolutely ravenous and start to cook like mad. You throw it all together and sit down and start to devour your food and very soon you feel your body relaxing with satiation and you lean back against the back of your chair feeling just plain good.
Where To Live
It's very important to consider the 3 key things in this, the main important one is who are YOU? What kind of life do you personally want to experience each day and that has so much to do with choosing where you live. Recently, I was looking around to rent a place. I had a budget that would allow up to $425 for rent alone. Around here that would get me even up to a two-bedroom house. The typical American thing nowadays is to go for the top figure if not go over it and try to get the most square footage possible. I think this has been highly influenced by the corrupt real estate agent, the cliche one we all know about who shows you the houses you don't want at more than you said you could afford. We are supposed to always want more. But why? If you know yourself well, it's better to choose what you would actually prefer. So, I thought a lot about what I myself would actually like and what that was was to live very close, as close as possible, to the world of a university campus. I love that kind of setting with the enormous lawns and old trees, the great library, the flow of students walking with books, all of it. So I rode my bike around to look in that neighborhood. Now, of course, near the campus it's a bit more expensive. So I found, instead of a one or two bedroom, which actually I find annoying (I find it annoying to have to walk to different rooms to do different things), a tiny studio apartment with a nice deck right by campus for $350 including utilities except electricity. I was thrilled but not surprised to discover that the guy who lives in the place below me is a music student at the university who is planning on being a composer. He comes up to visit me. I give him cappucino or sun tea and he tells me about his compositions, plans, theories and invites me down to hear fantastic music. My apartment is so tiny I decorate it thinking of it like it's a sailboat - you know, where every space has to have a little drawer or hook or shelf, just to contain the simplest of needs. The landlord paid for the paint when I offered to paint it myself and let me choose the color; the prettiest periwinkle blue. I can't afford to make the deck instantly perfect but so what! I'm enjoying the process of its evolution. So far I have one comfortable wicker chair, a side table, some Japanese lanterns and my clothes line, as one of the ways I save money is to do all my laundry with Woolite in my sink. Some people would hate doing that. I don't mind it at all. I bought a generic Woolite and a bag of clips at a dollar store for $2. That's the total cost of doing laundry for a long time for me. Of course, here where it's hot and humid, electricity can cost a lot so I just think about it a little before flipping on the AC button. My apartment faces east-west so in the morning I open the western window and curtain and keep the eastern curtains closed though the windows open for air. In the afternoon I reverse it. At around 3 p.m. is when it starts getting dripping hot never-the-less and only then I close the place all up and flip on the AC. I just got my first full month's electricity bill. It was $25. My furniture and things had to be super well planned when I moved in since the place is so small, so much so that I told everyone helping me move to unload everything on the street and deck and only when I spotted the first piece of furniture that was to go to the far end of the room did I let it be taken in and then only the next thing that went all the way across the room and so on until everything was in. So piece by piece we brought the furniture in according to a plan and it worked great. The musician below me says he really likes my place; that it's so cozy. It is that! I searched through lots of thrift stores, shops and garage sales for all the little boxes and hooks and baskets I needed in order to have a functional bathroom in my very tiny bathroom and now it's all done. Yesterday I calculated how much I spent entirely on making a perfect bathroom. It came to $7.50. Why? Because it's so tiny I don't need or can fit anything but the prettiest necessities and I buy them mostly at thrift stores and garage sales. It saves money to have a tiny place. And I walk out my door and I'm five minutes from campus and all the things that go with that, right by bus stops, near my friends' pool where I can swim often and two blocks from where good friends live. It's great and it's all because I really thought about who I am and what I really wanted instead of what I was supposed to want according to everyone else and then I just searched for it.
FOOD
I have a $200/month budget for food from the grocery store. If I want to go out to eat, that's more. There are three supermarkets, two far across town so to get to them I have to ride my bike very far or take the bus and then there's the supermarket that's very close. The one very close someone recently described for me as "the store on the rich side of town" meaning that it's much more expensive than the two across town. This is true as I've compared specifics that I myself often buy, like shrimp. Across town at the two stores a bag of shrimp costs $5. The same bag of shrimp at the one near me costs $7.29. That's one and a half again as much and that's a LOT more. However, naturally, the one near me, being targeted to the rich side of town, has much higher quality food, a lot more organic and unusual items and really really nice produce. It also has a nice coffee place with good AC, a good bottomless cup of coffee, super comfortable chairs and hardly any patrons, where I can hang out and read to my heart's content without ever being bothered. When I priced everything and found the close one was truly far more expensive, instead of a knee-jerk reaction of some sort, I thought about it and came to some decisions. The first was that the best thing to do was to make smaller portions when I do my cooking and the way I chose the size of the new smaller portion was to just consider the sizes of the pieces in my old china. I mean, have you ever really looked at the size of a bowl in a set of old china? Nowadays we'd use it for a condiment. But I use it for my entire breakfast now. I also decided to try (and this is the hard part) to give up sugar and salt. So I literally haven't bought anything with either. It saves a lot of money to give up salt and sugar as that includes a lot of prepackaged stuff and also anything with sugar is way more expensive. I make my own sun tea on my deck. I cook or prepare cold food just about every single day rather than eating out, I don't make side dishes hardly at all. If I want a chicken dish I just make that. I don't make anything else to go with it. But I make it with good olive oil, nice white wine, good herbs instead of salt so when it's done it's so savory that my body and mind are very happy and don't crave more. I don't make or eat or buy desserts. If I want dessert, I have a cappucino or slices of apple. I don't buy general bread - I buy good bagels or a nice baguette or tortillas that I dip in hot salsa, instead. Thoughtfulness is the key here. What actually tastes good to me. I don't add salt or sour cream to things, anything like that, once the food is on the table. I cook them well and tasty to begin with. They don't need anything more.
I do all this because I'd rather buy my food at the close, quality store than stuff myself with large quantities of cheap, mindless food because I can buy more for cheaper at the far stores. That sounds obvious but most Americans do the latter. Most food available at a supermarket is so filled with additives that it's pretty much tasteless and the neurons don't recognize it as nutritious so your brain demands much more. It's pretty amazing, actually, how fast you feel full when you're eating a fresh, nicely and lightly cooked with good ingredients meal. The brain just registers yes, that's what I was hoping for! By doing this I've discovered that there are many entire aisles in the supermarket that are unnecessary to even walk down. It is really sad how much stuff sold at supermarkets is so bad for the body, practically poison. And for the few items I want, like shrimp, that cost too much more at the expensive store, I take the bus across town once in a while to buy them. That way my bags are not too heavy bringing it all home and I've saved money where it's clear I can pretty easily.
Sometimes, like everyone else, I feel like eating out and unless I've been asked out on a nice dinner date that means somewhere pretty cheap and that usually means fast food. So if I decide I want to do that, I ride over to the street that has a line of fast food choices and consider carefully cost vs. nutrition, which is something you actually can do. The other day I was choosing between the all-you-can-eat pizza place (salad and pizza) or a place that offered a nice tuna sub with lots of fresh veggies. The all-you-can-eat pizza place cost $5.99 plus drink plus tip plus tax. That would end up, what, about $8 or so when I actually got out of there. It was for a lot more food, of course, since it was all you can eat. I thought to save some money I could drink their horrible chlorinated iced tap water. The tuna sub was $3.75 plus if I paid for drink plus tax, no tip needed. Far more nutritious yet far less actual food since I'd only get one sub. So I considered it, there on the street on my bike, halfway between the two shops. Then I thought to myself, "Why on earth would I want to stuff myself with all I can eat?" Isn't this just the worst idea? How did we Americans come to think this was a good idea? It's a terrible idea. So I went to the sub place and could afford a nice, brewed sugarless ice tea with my very tasty tuna sub and it cost altogether a little over $5. I saved money and didn't add a bunch of fat on my body.
The other thing I do is I read little articles on the web on nutrition advice, new medical finds re: food, comparison between healthy vs. unhealthy food choices at the supermarket, between brands, etc., not obsessively, just when the articles happen to pop up, which they often do. There are so many good ideas, warnings, bits of food philosophy, new discoveries in them. It's worth the short bit of time to read them and they often have tips to save money on food at the same time increasing its health benefit.
ENTERTAINMENT
This is the one where it is important to really think about who you are and what you actually find entertaining. I think entertainment comes in three forms: pure entertainment vs. the relaxing vs. the restful. If you break it down into those three categories you can discover to your surprise what you considered entertaining is actually restful or what you thought was restful is actually relaxing, etc. It helps to define which is which because you feel best when you get a bit of all three and if you don't know which is which for you, you can load up on one and miss another entirely and you can blow a lot of money doing that because you don't feel rested enough or entertained enough or relaxed often enough and you don't know why.
For example, personally I know that I don't rest well when I sleep (because I always have a plethora of dreams and wake up between them) but I do rest well if I watch one movie without commercials. Movies aren't usually all that entertaining for me, unless there by accident happens to be a good one, but they are always restful. If I watch one movie I forget about all my troubles and lose myself in the world of the movie and two hours later I feel far more rested. So, I don't need to subscribe to Dish Network or cable because I don't want or need to watch random shows that use up too much of my time, which can end up causing me stress. The key for me here is to watch a movie to get a good rest. At first I subscribed to Netflix but then I put it on suspension for a while seeing if I could find other sources for movies. My friends said I could borrow whatever DVD's they had and I did that for awhile until I ran out of ones I wanted to see. Then I found a lot of good DVD's are at the public library and that's of course free, too. And today the public library told me that anyone who lives in this town can get a library card to the university library, which for me is pure heaven. Besides all the great books (as I raced to the university library and immediately applied for a library card), I now can check out their extensive collection of DVD's as well as use interlibrary loan for all the research I do. So I'm in bliss this afternoon over that. And it costs nothing. But see, that's just a personal thing for me. When I run out of those DVD's I'll use Netflix again but the point is just because Netflix is only $8.56/month, it still is $8.56 a month in real money. Why spend it if you don't have to with a little thought and planning and knowing who you are and what you actually find entertaining, or rather for me, restful?
I've talked about how one movie a day for me is more restful than it is what I'd personally call entertaining. When I thought about it, for me entertaining is actually reading and researching the subjects I love most. And I have a huge collection of my own books. I gave myself even permission to re-read books that I had very much enjoyed before but it's been awhile. I've re-read three of them now and enjoyed them immensely again and all three are on ancient history and I've found that I learned details that I had overlooked when I first read them, concentrating then on the bigger aspects. Another thing I've mentioned above that I find very entertaining is decorating my place and planning the evolution of my deck, which is inexpensive since I buy everything at thrift stores, which is more fun anyhow since it's always a treasure hunt and a discovery. And swimming. I love to swim and since I get to now pretty often, nearly daily, that entertains me to no end. And the last is petting and playing with my very beautiful but very arrogant cat, Arthur Pendragon. He's terrific fun.
Another great entertainment for me is good conversation. On the weekend I often call my brother who can pontificate to no end, having a photographic memory and an excellent analytical mind. We typically can talk from about 5 to 8 hours at one go so I call him on the weekends when I have unlimited minutes. We never chat, gossip or talk about the weather. It's real stuff, real subjects, politics, economics, history, philosophy, psychology, literature, music, art. I usually have to recharge my phone in the middle of the conversation! I subscribe to Skype, which is $2.99/month for unlimited U.S./Canada anytime. I rarely talk on the phone otherwise. So clearly, you see, this is a very personal choice and that's the whole point. This is what entertains me; it's not what is typical nor should it be as we are all individuals, whether or not we like to follow trends.
Another thing I've thought about doing for a long time that I recently put into action as great entertainment that costs very little: I've talked to several people here about having an old-fashioned conversational salon, as was done in old Paris and Vienna in Voltaire's day and then the days of the Impressionists, Fauves and Cubists, where people come together to a place, which would be my new place, to talk about real subjects of great interest. We all agreed this does not include arguing over politics in the typical American way of the polarity of Party-driven memorized scripts with nearly no actual knowledge or information save what one barely scrapes from Fox News or NPR, both extremely biased bottom-of-the-barrel reporting. We talk about what we actually know about and if the others don't know anything about the subject, they don't argue based on ignorance; they listen. A major part of this is enjoying listening to each other. Listening to someone tell about something they know a lot about and love is becoming a lost art. But not here. We are enthusiastically reviving it. So the other day I bought 6 margarita deck glasses at a garage sale for $1.25 and I have a large set of 1920's champagne glasses and I have a large sun tea maker and can make damn good appetizers if need be. One of us wants to be a micro brew master some day and he brings us bottles of great stout and India Pale Ale that he and his dad brew at his dad's house. So we drink a bit and talk a lot. Recently one of them taught me to play chess and I beat him first game! He's determined to whip me next try. He and his girlfriend held a mystery play party a couple of years back and at their new really terrific home they are planning another one. That ought to be great. They also love to play board games and have a lot of them. It's just so old-fashioned but then again, all of us are mad for the computer so we have nothing to be ashamed about playing board games or chess once in a while. And these entertainments cost nothing. The little soirees are for just a few people at a time, as that is all that can fit in my apartment so the alcohol or tea or treats for that comes to about $10 max.
The last thing under entertainment, subtheme: relaxation, is I love yoga. I bought a good yoga DVD online for a few dollars and practice it in the privacy of my tiny living room, which costs me nothing. The stretches feel sublime. Another form of relaxation that costs me nothing is I find that I feel really great all day at home if I wear one of my bathing suits. I mean I put on one of them in the morning, even if I'm not going swimming and I wear it all day long. I watch a movie in it, lying backwards on my ottoman with my legs across the top of the upolstered chair, my head on my favorite golden pillows. I cook in my bathing suit, I work on fixing up the deck in it and get a tan on my legs and back while doing it. I read in it, rocking in my good rocking chair. I pet my cat in it, hang out listening to music in it. All day long, every day mostly that I'm at home. Why? It just reminds me of summers when I was a kid, that's all, and it makes me feel so good. It feels like summer should feel, like it's fun and will last forever and there are no worries. And it's free. And often I zip over to my friends and actually swim in it. It's all good and it all costs nothing.
So, I've named here just a few things I do all the time that saves a lot of money and it all comes down to the three themes I mentioned: really personal choices, simplicity and ignoring what you're "supposed" to like and be like. I don't know if this is helpful, these little tips, for anyone or inspiring at all but I hope it is, a little, if only to communicate the simple message that it's all about knowing and the discovery of who you are yourself that leads to the joy of saving money. That is really the most important thing in everything one chooses to be and do, after all. Just like your body and mind feel full when you eat nutritious, fresh, nicely cooked food in small portions, your body and mind feel satisfied and happy when you figure out who you are and what simple things please you.
