Life in Colorado October 6, 2008

I haven’t written since we were busy preparing for our drive from Alaska to Colorado and what a drive it was!  It will test your marriage and your sanity.  The toy treasure chest worked out beautifully, we didn’t even get to everything I stuffed inside.  We did use the DVD player a lot towards the last half of the trip.  Mia was done by day three.  We drove for six days, so three days of DVD’s really isn’t so bad!

We have a decent Freecycle network here, but there are a lot of “wanted” ads that far outnumber the offered/recieved.  I don’t know if there are just more people, or if there are just more greedy people.  We did manage several pairs of shoes in Mia’s new size that are in stellar shape. I don’t have to buy a pair of sneaker that will be destroyed at preschool!

There is so much to do here and so much of it is either cheap or free.  We had a blast at the Colorado Balloon Classic last month.  Hundreds of hot air balloons lift off en masse at a local park at a festival.  It was unique and free and offered an opportunity to get some amazing photos.

My neighbors and I went to a charity event at the Castle Rock outlets that required you to purchase a $20 ticket that donated to a charity of your choice.  With the ticket you received special discounts at stores as well as the opportunity to buy raffle tickets.  For twenty bucks I came out ahead!  With my own tickets I only won a $25 gift certificate to Fossil (I did badly need a watch!) and my neighbor who has two older boys gave me her $50 for Stride Rite and $25 for Hartstrings.  However I think I cancelled out the savings when I bought a Coach handbag.  Let me explain!  First, I never splurge on myself like that.  The deal was that it was an outlet store doing a 40% sale on a newer selection.  You can’t even get a good deal like that at the base PX!  The PX has things around 20% off which puts it around the normal outlet price.  So I got a $300 dollar handbag that I had been coveting for a third of that. Plus tax,but you know how that is.  Know what something is worth and know when to bite!

We decided to live on post since we still have the house up in AK.  We only just got renters in which means we were paying a mortgage on an empty house for the entire summer.  Yes, that punched the finances and jacked our credit card back up.  However, that lovely hush-money…er…PFD from being an AK resident helped tremendously.  Instead of going after a new TV or something that we really don’t need, we paid off the Subaru!  No more car payments!  We turned around and replaced it with a preschool payment, so really it’s all the same financial feeling right now, but it’s a good feeling to get out from under a debt that has interest to it.

Another perk of living on post is the bills.  I’m not saying I love bills, quite the opposite.  The housing company has a neat way of doing things.  Most utilities are covered as long as you stay within an average.  For each season they have calculated the average cost of a specific bill and as long as you stay within their calculations, you do not owe money.  If you go over, you owe the difference but if you come in under the average, they pay you  the difference.  It’s pretty neat, we get about $20 a month during the summer.  I think the biggest help is not using a clothes dryer.  We had to buy a new washer when we got here because the housing doesn’t come with a w/d, but opted out of buying a dryer because of the cost and the fact that the air is ridiculously dry.  We bought two extra drying racks and our clothes were usually dry in half a day or overnight.  I don’t know how well it will work during the winter but we’ll give it a shot.  They have a lot of windows in the house so I rarely use lights unless I’m in my closet or it’s evening.  We’re probably the most energy efficient family on post. 

I’ve also been back into the Ebay thing.  I loved Value Village in Anchorage.  There were always great deals on high end items.  Here, the ARC Thriftstore is the place to go! There are Goodwill stores too, but they seem to get the whatever items.  In Denver there is an ARC store near the hospital that we frequent and I found two Diane Von Furstenberg dresses and a few Hanna Andersson dresses that I put on ebay.  I made my money back over and over.  On craigslist,  a woman put an ad up for “three pair of european shoes”.  I wondered if they were Dansko and sure enough they were…and she was only asking $15 for all three pairs!  They were brand new.  I made my money back and then some!  People don’t buy a lot off of craigslist though.  I blame the economy.  It’s just too easy.  I did manage to sell some of Mia’s toys that she has outgrown, but it took a long time.

Catch a curveball February 22, 2008

All the preaching I do about saving money?  Handy stuff, that saved stash!  We were going on a snowshoe trip last week but woke up to a house that was 50*  I accused my husband of lowering the thermostat, but he went to the garage and found a dead furnace!  Fifty degrees isn’t so bad , say in Georgia, but we live in Alaska.  That just won’t do!

This was also a Sunday morning, and if you haven’t needed a service on the weekend I’ll let you in on the double price not-so-secret.  We called around and everyone had a service fee of double what it was during the week.  Meanwhile, we had a very cozy fire in the fireplace and some space heaters set up, that brought our temp back up to about 68*, where we normally keep it anyhow.  We opted to wait until Monday.  Long story short, we shaved about $200 off our bill.

Speaking of shaving, I was experimenting with our electric bill last month.  I knocked $20 off by using the dryer only for towels.  That downstairs bathroom can handle more than I though.  My husband found one of those twist shower rods and hung it over the middle for an extra rack.  Even the jeans dry and they aren’t so bad on.  The stiffness was unnoticeable after a minute. I’m guessing I was using it about every 3-4 days.  Unfortunately ever since the furnace incident, it  hasn’t been heating very well.  It’s very old for a furnace and we may have to dip into that savings soon

Switch flipping penny pincher! February 2, 2008

There is always something we can do to save on the household bills.  Here are the ideas that have lowered our bills significantly:

• Turn the lights off. Duh, that one is a no brainer. It’s easier said than done!  I had to work hard to train myself to flip the switch as I walked out of a room.
• Adjust the thermostat.  At the very least, lower it when you leave the house.  Ours normally hangs out at 69* or so, we just wear sweaters and slippers.  It’s Alaska, we’re going to put on a sweater anyway!  When we go on our many zillions of appointments and errands, we knock it down to 65*.  We definitely saw a drop after we started doing that regularly. 
• Switch regular light-bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.  We took it a step further and switched our main dining/living room light fixture with an Energy Star rated one.  That sucker puts out mega light but uses a fraction of the kilowatt-hours that the run of the mill fixtures use.  The one that was there was also energy efficient, but too small so we moved it down to my sewing room and did away with the oldskool fixture down there.  We haven’t bought a lightbulb in ages!
• Wash dishes as you go. And don’t leave the water running as you do it.  Or, if you have enough dishes, just wait until the dishwasher is full before running a load.  I also opt out of the final heat drying cycle and choose the air dry cycle.  No matter what the appliance is, if it uses heat it’s eating your wallet.
• Don’t use the dryer. You’re laughing at me now.  The neat thing about our split level house is the bathroom downstairs that is ultimately unused.  It’s neat because it makes a great dryer.  In the winter I set up a couple of drying racks and hang anything I can on everything that will hold clothes.  When you close the door the heat from the vent turns it into a very large, very quiet dryer.  Clothes last longer, you’re not wasting heat on an unused room and you aren’t using a mega money eater.  I do put things like bath towels in the machine, and if I need a certain pair of jeans, they get a cycle.  But most clothes don’t really need a dryer.  Sure they are a bit stiff, but when you put the shirt on, your body heat softens it up.  It also saves wear and tear on the cloth diapers.
• Use the microwave more than the oven.  This was a fairly new discover for us.  I was reading The Green Book by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen and they pointed out that the oven uses a lot more energy than the microwave.  I’m not sure which healthier, but I know I like the taste better when it’s slowly roasted in the oven versus zapped dry in the microwave.  The dryness can be fixed by putting a little dish of water in with the thing you’re zapping.
• Figure out where you are losing heat, then seal it.  Our house was built in ‘83 and has the original windows and doors.  Yeah, they leak.  We are replacing the front door as soon as the temp gets above 20.  Right now you freeze as you walk by and we keep a towel stuffed around the bottom to keep some of the cold air from coming in.  The windows are not that great so we shrink wrapped the ones that we aren’t “using”.  If you go to any home improvement store, you’ll find window kits for adding insulation.  It’s a special tape that you apply to the frame, press the plastic to it and use a hair dryer to tighten it.  If the problem is higher, say in the roof, then you should probably consider the savings of adding some spray insulation to your attic, another tweak will hope to make soon.  I know the attic “door” itself was a nuisance.  It is located in our daughters closet and when the seal was broken, it turned the closet into a deep freezer, in turn keeping her room colder than the rest of the house.  Husband caulked the opening and we stuff a towel in front of the closet, making her room a little toastier.
• Don’t keep the seldom used plugged in.  For us, our TV is seldom used…until I get my hands on the second season of Desperate Housewives!  Sometimes days will go by before we turn it on again.  Apparently things suck energy just being on standby.  So we unplug things when they aren’t used and also switched our computer to energy save mode.  That was also in the afore mentioned book, but we beat them to it!