Tightwad Gazette Tour | That’s one way to get fill dirt

Ready for another trip down a frugal memory lane with the Tightwad Gazette? Let’s go!

Cemetery dirt

A reader wrote in to tell Amy that when he needed some fill dirt, it occurred to him that cemeteries need to take dirt out but don’t want to put it back in.

(!!)

Sooo, he got free fill dirt.

This is creative, I’ll give him that!

On faux wallpaper

A reader sent in a tip to Amy about how to make a faux flowered wallpaper using paint, and Amy mentions that you can also use a sponge to create a textured wallpaper-ish finish.

This was the 90s, we have to remember, and wallpaper was quite popular!

Amy herself says she likes white walls, and I am similar in my thinking (although I do sometimes like a bit of color on a wall.)

I removed so much wallpaper from the last house I lived in, and it was sometimes several layers thick. That tedious experience was enough to make me never, ever want to put wallpaper up.

I like paint because it is easy to put on the wall (vs. wallpaper, which is rather fussy), it’s easy to touch up if it gets damaged, and it’s so simple to change if you get tired of it.

Also: paint is generally cheaper than wallpaper.

Annnnnd as someone who leans more minimalist, I like the quiet calm of solid-colored walls.

Mail-Order Companies

Since this was the pre-e-commerce time in history, Amy compiled a list of mail-order companies that offered good deals. Isn’t it wild how much easier it is now to find deals to be shipped to you??

I chuckled when I saw her recommending Christian Book Distributors because it reminded me that relatively recently, they changed their web address from cbd.com to christianbook.com, for obvious reasons.

I will say, they did have good prices on some homeschooling materials. But I’ll bet their cbd.com address brought them some customers who were not looking for grammar books. Ha.

Before Mapquest and Google Maps…

A sign of the times:

A reader wrote in to say she keeps a notebook in her car, and when friends and family give her directions to their homes, she adds the directions to the little notebook. That way she saves on her phone bill because she doesn’t have to call them for directions.

How times have changed! Not only do we have easy directions on our smartphones, we also do not generally have to pay by the minute for phone time.

And thank goodness that is true because my Hawaii girl and I would have racked up some insane bills by now.

The Pantry Principle

The pantry principle, taken to an extreme, is the idea that you should always keep a stock at your house of all the ingredients you use.

 

You can make any meal you want by simply pulling things from your pantry, so then all you ever do at the grocery store is restock your pantry (frugally, by shopping loss leaders and markdowns and doing bulk-buying).

I have never been quite as hardcore about this as Amy, but I have always been at least a partial pantry principle kinda girl.

I might need a random one-off ingredient here or there for a meal, but generally I shop to fill my pantry, fridge, and freezer with inexpensive staples and I make meals from those. So, I always have enough food here to make meals for a while even if I can’t get out to the grocery store.

This is convenient when a week gets busy or there’s bad weather (I never have to make emergency grocery runs before a snow storm).

I do differ from Amy when it comes to fresh produce; she mentions that she buys fresh produce at the beginning of the month, and then as the month goes on they switch to dried, frozen, and canned produce.

I know frozen produce is just fine nutritionally, but I’m not gonna lie: I would be a sad human if I did not have fresh produce in my house all the time.

So, I don’t really use the pantry principle for fresh fruits and veggies; I happily go to the store each week to replenish my supply! 

Go to court, save money

A reader went to court to explain that she had just forgotten to renew her license plates, and she got her fine reduced from $133 to $75.

($133 is kind of a steep fine for back then!)

I did this the one and only time I got a speeding ticket; Sonia was a baby at the time, and I took her with me to the courthouse. 

I stood before the judge, baby in arms, explaining that the speeding was completely an oversight from a tired mom of three, and that I had never so much as been pulled over before in my life.

Annnnnd he completely dismissed my ticket and the points.

We will never know if having a cute baby with me helped my cause or not. 😉 But I don’t think it hurt.

Test Tube Tightwaddery (or…try it and see!)

I love this article! If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know that I frequently recommend an experimental approach to frugality.

Not sure if you can freeze an item, substitute an ingredient, sell something, or repair something? Try it and see! You don’t always need to consult an expert; if you do some experimentation, you can be the expert!

It’s like the time I tried using Rit dye on a bleach-stained dress.

Amy acknowledges that sometimes there will be fails (she tried making cookies with a soy flour “egg” and applesauce in place of the oil and the cookies were a decided flop), but we tightwads know that since everything is data, even a fail is useful.

Had a fail? Well, now you know what doesn’t work!

And over time, I think we tend to have more successes than fails. 🙂

You know how this goes…share your thoughts on any of the tightwaddy topics we covered today.