Mighty Bargain Hunter

Festival of Frugality #2

December 20th, 2005 | by mbhunter |

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Welcome to issue #2 of the Festival of Frugality! It’s been great fun reading everyone’s posts on penny pinching. Merry Christmas everyone!

Pets are members of many a family, but they are surprisingly expensive. Anthony from Uncle Tonoose chats about the WSJ article “Calculating the true cost of a pet” in Phideau’s True Cost. Be sure also to check out the comments for some amazing pet costs!

I’m a big fan of eBay and the raw deals that can be had there. Seattle Simplicity is a big fan as well — she scored a $59 pair of jeans for $12 shipped to her door!

Dawn of Frugal for Life, not too surprisingly, has some posts on frugality that she sent into the festival. Being true to form, she sent in two for the price of one! In addition to a nice discussion on whether to rent or buy, she throws in, absolutely free, a post on decidedly unfrugal black toilet paper*.

Need car repairs? If your mechanic will let you shop around for your own parts, you can save a couple hundred dollars like Jim of Blueprint for Financial Prosperity was able to do.

FMF of Free Money Finance discusses five surprise saving tips for the upcoming holiday season from the folks at Market Watch, and adds some of his own, again absolutely free of charge.

Jeffrey Strain of Personal Finance Advice (and a host of other great sites as well!) advocates safe charging by always using a credit card condom.

Frugal folks invest. Early Riser examines some investment options atop a pile of cash.

Being born and raised in upstate NY I know how cold it gets up in the New England area during winter, so I personally feel for Jane Dough of Boston Gal’s Open Wallet. She has her own tricks for frugally ordering in for one.

Jonathan at My Money Blog discusses self-insuring their spaniel by building up a savings account for his care.

Read a lot? Don’t want to pay for books that are in the public domain? Retire At 30 has found some websites that offer public domain books for free.

The fine print giveth, and the fine print taketh away. Especially with rental car coverage from a credit card, as Multiple Mentality found out the hard way. We’ll all look a little more carefully now. Thanks MM!

Some Christmas cards are works of art, so why throw them away when you can reuse them in crafts? Kim C of Life In A Shoe posts six crafty ways.

And one last one I ran across in the frugalsphere:

Too frugal for change-counting fees? Five Cent Nickel has a way to count his nickels (and dimes and quarters and pennies) for free with those ubiquitous ConStar … oops, COINstar machines!

That’s it for this issue of the Festival of Frugality! Thanks for stopping by, and thanks so much for sending me all of your posts. This was a lot of fun! Next week, Free Money Finance hosts the Festival!

*Maybe snowmen will find this stuff useful?

Rate this:

2.5