Count Calories, Save Money

Every few months or so I reflect on my poor diet and lack of exercise and get serious for approximately one week where I'm super diligent about keeping track of what I eat.  Not unlike personal finance, to "do better" you have to first get a clear picture of what you're doing, whether it be calories you're inhaling or money you're spending.  Without that knowledge your brain isn't going to make the solid connection of "boy that's a lot of money on x" or "thanks to the burger king for lunch, I'm not allowed to eat the next three days".

There are a million different ways to diet and if you look at me you'll know any diet advice I hand out should be  mostly ignored, but I tend to go for the simple approach.  If I want to shed some pounds I'm going to ignore my fat/protein/carb split and just do some old fashion calorie counting.  To oversimplify and ignore some exceptions, if it's high in calories it's probably not that great for you.  It's probably sugary, processed, fatty, fried, or all of the above.

Where'd all them calories get to

Just like being frugal with your money, you're first going to need to know where you're "spending" your calories.  Once you're dreams of eating 3 bags of cheetos a day are shattered, you're going to get a good idea of what your problems areas are and what needs cut from your gluttonous routine.  This is going to be difficult if you don't have easy access to a computer/smart phone, but I track my food consumption/exercise with the website (and smartphone app) Fat Secret.

Make that food your bitch

Here is the part where you're going to need to start planning ahead, what meals are safe for your diet, and if you're like me, what will produce ample left-overs to take for lunches.  I will admit, I hate trying to plan ahead, but it does really take the guesswork out of "what's for lunch/dinner?"  Congratulations, you're now practicing portion control as well.  Popular diet plans (Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem) simplify the calorie counting and portion control for you, but it's accomplishing the same thing.

Sweet, sweet financial reward

Finally, saving some money up in hurr.  You're now eating less, and planning ahead to make sure you're going to stay within your limits.  When you go to the grocery store you'll avoid impulse/snack purchases, and the aforementioned planning will give you a smaller shopping list with much less waste.  That's all well and good, but the biggest saving of eating less and planning more is you're going to eat out less because it typically carries a heavy caloric cost and most daily diets has no room for junk/fast food.  Bam.  Money saved.  In the 3dollarbicycle household, most of the reason where we go out to eat is because we're too lazy to figure out what we want to have for dinner.

Simple, boring, ????, profit!

While extremely boring, I will eat the same breakfast every day during the work week.  I'm lazy enough that I'm fine with the lack of creativity for trade off of a filling, easy breakfast that I don't need to prepare ahead of time.  I take coffee in from home, have some instant oatmeal and a sweet and salty granola bar thing.  Coffee always fills me up pretty good and the two spread out "snacks" carry me to lunch without much dramatic grumbling from my stomach.  Some argue a large breakfast, but at least this leaves me with a bunch of carlories left for the day.

Caveats

I try and head-off arguments and flaws in my logic ahead of time.  I'm not saying "eating healthy" and "counting calories" are necessarily the same thing.  You can very easily spend a lot of money on fancy organic foods that I don't know how to pronounce and in the end not save any money.  What I try to do is  stick to what I would consider "normal food" for me and just eat less of it.

Random dieting tips not necessarily tied to financial benefit

While most of these are pretty common sense, I thought I'd throw these out there that I've found are true for me

• Drink water.  It's calorie free and good for you.  "What about those zero calorie sodas, etc?"  I have no idea, but I assume they're still not good for you.
• Don't starve yourself.  If you think you're going to drop 20 lbs in two weeks by eating 500 calories a day, you're doing it wrong.  I'm told you're body needs to keep it's metabolism going and if you're starving yourself your body will slow your metabolism down to conserve calories, yes even if you're a fatty fat fat.
• Avoid eating late at night.  This could be just me, or that I weigh myself in the mornings, but if I stop my eating hours before I fall asleep I think the food gets processed quicker.  Also I get indigestion fairly often and dieting and not eating close to bed time has all but eliminated my nightly feast of tums.
• Rome (your fat ass) was not built in a day.  It's actually kind of discouraging to learn that one bad day of eating isn't going to make or break your diet, it's consistently eating more calories than you need that makes you gain weight.
• Find a sort of exercise that you enjoy.  If you're exercising, you can eat more calories!  Beware  however, that the calories actually burnt are far less than it feels, so 5 Big Macs are not a reward for a 3 mile walk.  

Purchasing goods using craig and his list

I originally started this blog to share some helpful money saving tips, my thoughts on being a cheapskate and also write about my day to day personal stuff.  I've hit the personal stuff pretty hard recently so it's time to be Mr. Helpful and share some pro-tips for scoring on craigslist (HEYYYYOOOOOO - Perhaps the phrasing on that is a bit misleading, though the same principals may apply).

As great as craigslist is, it has it's drawbacks.  Any free site is going to attract scammers and spammers, so that is a given.  It also really limits your search radius to what it considers your other nearby craigslists, sometimes that's helpful and others it's not.  I live in an area that is lucky enough to have it's own specific craigslist site, but that doesn't mean the "market" is so large here that I never have to search other craigslist regions depending on what I'm looking for.

Being awesome:  A case study
My leaf vacuum was a recent craigslist find, one of my best to date.  A leaf vacuum is somewhat specialized enough that you're going to have to cast a wide net to find what you're looking for.  I found this one a few hours away, corresponded with the seller over a period of time and in the end he even delivered it to me.

A few things that really worked to my benefit were:

• Motivated seller:  He no longer had any use for it after moving.
• There were some missing parts, I was able to quote the cost of replacement parts and whine about how it's not all there to negotiate a better deal.
• Early and often:  I started looking early enough so that timeline wasn't a problem.  If I had waited until now that the leaves were falling I'd have a lot more competition and would have paid a lot more.  
• Blind luck:  The seller travels a lot, and he just happens to head up my way on a weekly basis, give or take.

I ended up paying $400 for a machine that was used approximately 5 times and looked brand new, and while it was technically incomplete, $45 worth of parts was all I needed to make it, and me, whole again.  Retail on these bad boys is about $1200 and a comparable used ones, going by other craigslist ads, were in the $800+ range.  Awwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [muffins]!

Get by with a little help from your friends

In this wonderful technologically advanced age we live in, there are some tools to help a brotha out.  Personally I use Craigslist Search Helper (CSH), an extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari web browsers.  There are other options as well, but this one is my favorite so far.  It basically sits "on top" of craiglist, formats it a little differently, and adds a bunch of nice features to make navigating and searching craigslist much easier.

A lot of fish in the sea

You may need to broaden your horizons and leave your mom's basement and search a larger area.  CSH does exactly that, allowing you to put exactly how far you're willing to travel that's not limited to what craigslist considers your nearby regions.

Early bird gets the worm

CSH lets you set up search alerts to run every XX minutes/hours/days so that you can keep on top of whatever you're looking for.  Your browser needs to be open, and the alerts seem specific to the computer you have the extension installed on.  I may be missing an option to create an account and logon to that so it would work over multiple computers, but I haven't really looked for it, either.  When it finds new stuff you haven't looked at yet, it will pop up a little alert.

Zen and the art of helpful stuff

CSH makes the craigslist results more helpful by allowing you to mouseover the ads to read the text, view pictures, flag as spam, set a flag that you want to follow up with that, and even take notes all without even clicking into the ad.  

And I thought we were friends *harumpf*

The downside to all this is that CSH injects ads in it's layouts and overall it's "skin" for craiglist is not really that great to look at, but since we're all flawed in some way or other I've decided we're still going to go to prom together.

Bring forth into my RSS reader, peasant!

An alternative to CSH I've used in the past is the website crazedlist.org.  It's a bit clunky, you have to use Firefox (after making a change in the hidden browser settings), but one options is that you can save your search as a .OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader.  This was is pretty nice in that you can set it up in Google Reader, for instance and from any computer that has internet you can check to see if there are new ads.  

I find myself using the RSS method for long-term searches that I be creepin' on, and CSH on a daily basis to browse around craiglist and do my "Hmmmmm I wonder what kind of XYZs are for sale within 100 miles of her" type stuff.  

Dan's Frugal Shaving Tips

As I was shaving this morning I thought I'd share some of my frugal tips for saving money while carving your face up.  As a bit of disclaimer I don't have a very full beard so what works for me may not work for you.

1. Wet shave - I shave while I'm in the shower.  This might waste water, but at the very least I find it more convenient than to shave in front of the mirror and then having to clean up afterwards, anyway.
2. Use hair conditioner as shaving cream.  I have a big bottle of suave conditioner that I've been using for at least 4 years now.  Granted, I only shave a few times a week, but at about $3 this has got to be one of the cheapest ways to shave there is.  It's not as full as it once was but I'm pretty sure I can eek this out another year or so.
3. "Hone" your razor blades using your arm hair, as shown by the creepy old naked guy in the video below.  I know this sounds really weird but I've been doing this since I bought a new pack of razors and it honestly seems to have really helped.  I'm guessing that since hair is actually very tough (which is why razors don't last that long), stroking the blade against the tough hair hones the edge of the blade.  I suppose I should qualify that using your arm hair means running the razor down your arm in the opposite direction that you would to shave it.  Please don't yell at me when you shave your arm hair off.

There are other ways to shave cheaply (as in cost of the blades - but there does seem to be a bit of an up front cost), and some dudes really get into it and become these "shaving ritual fundamentalists", it just seems like way too much hassle for me.

Frugal Tip: 10% off at Lowes

As a newish homeowner, sometimes I feel like I'm spending more time at Lowes than at home (or as much money there as I do on my mortgage). Lowes will very helpfully send you a "congratulations on moving" 10% off coupon that you can request on their website here.

That's all well and good if you're actually moving, but what if you'd like to save a few bucks independent of your housing status? Head on over to the post office and pick up a change of address packet to find the same coupon inside. The coupons are only good for a few months so you may want to run and get some every so often.

10% off everything up to $5000 - not a bad deal.