Blog Title: One Money Dummy Getting Smarter

Signs of the Times

Sign of tough personal finance times: When you start thinking about donating plasma in order to buy your kids new clothes.

Sign of tough economic times: When so many other people are doing the same thing that there’s actually a waiting list to donate plasma.

And . . . blargle.

All Couponers Are Not Created Equal

The other day I was talking to one of my best friends–a callow traitor who took herself and her son and moved far, far away so that it takes a forty-five minute drive to go see them–and she said that she was getting frustrated because as hard as she tries to coupon, she just can’t get consistently get the colossal savings she reads about online. I started to laugh and laugh and laugh, and then I told her why she shouldn’t be comparing herself to the gals she reads about on the Internet. Here are some of the reasons:

1. Not every area gets the same coupons or the same coupon values. Our region happens to be one of those that gets among the fewest coupons, and our coupon values tend to be lower. So if our neighbors in Utah get a coupon for 1.00 off, there’s a very good chance that ours is for sixty cents. Don’t even think about comparing our savings to those that are delivered back east or in the Midwest, because their coupons are way better.
2. No stores around here double or triple coupons. The ladies you read about online are often using double or triple coupons to get their massive savings. Let me explain what it’s like out here: when I was a new couponer, I went around to stores asking if any of them ever doubled or tripled coupons. At the first two stores, no one even understood the question. At the third store, the manager started laughing at the suggestion. It just doesn’t happen here.
3. We live in a couponer-saturated area. There are tons of couponers are here and most of them are very good at what they do. Snapping up clearance items for free with coupons or getting your fill of a great catalina deal is a lot more difficult out here because chances are, someone else spotted the deal and cleaned it out. This doesn’t make them scum, it just makes them fast. C’est la vie. The ladies you read about online are likely the only act in town, which gives them a serious edge.
4. Finally, the stores around here just function differently. Many people talk about buying their meat and produce after it’s been marked down. The stores around here don’t mark their food down often (again, I called several stores and a lot of them told me that rather than marking their food down, they donate it to schools and homeless shelters for the tax deduction), and when they do, it’s just not that competitive.

All of this isn’t to whine or complain; it’s to explain to all you budding couponers out there that you shouldn’t get discourage if you can’t ever get the savings you read about online or see on Oprah. It’s not you, you’re not doing anything wrong. Chalk it up to environmental causes and then go look at the mountains. It’s the one thing we’ve got that those Midwest coupon mavens don’t.

What do you do when you buy a house one month, and lose your job the next?

Because that’s what just happened to me. I knew that funding was getting tighter around the university, but with students flooding the school and my classes becoming so large that they eventually just entirely removed the cap size on my course, I didn’t think that they were going to cut out those classes.

Yet cut they did. Not mine in particular, mind you, but every class by every part-time lecturer or adjunct faculty member in the entire department. All of us had our classes closed. They say that a few of us may get them back, but they mentioned specifically the lecturers, which I am not. Eeeks!

We can keep things going around here on Mr. MD’s salary, but it’s going to be mighty tight, and we won’t be getting any closer to our savings goals, or our goal to pay cash for a second used car or to be able to pay the 3K that having another baby would cost. (Our insurance plan has low premiums, but very high deductibles.)

I’m not sure what the future will hold. Right now I’m just focusing on envisioning a Christmas where I’m not thinking about syllabi or reviewing the assignments for the new semester, and an Easter weekend where I don’t say, “You guys go ahead without me. I’m just finishing up a few papers here.” I’m trying not to think about what would happen if someone became seriously ill, or Mr. MD lost his job. (No danger of that, thank heavens. Since the bank he works at didn’t make any of these crazy loans, they’re actually sitting there smugly with hardly a care in the world.)

The next few months will be intriguing. They say that wherever God closes a door, he opens a window. I’m excited to crawl through and see what’s inside.

Google Versus the Pediatrician (Also, how generic diapers saved my son’s skin.)

I love our family doctor. His office is kid-friendly, his wait times are practically non-existent, and he has great toys in his patient rooms. That said, I was starting to get frustrated after my son had been treated for a year-long diaper rash with yeast infection ointments, hydrocortizone, diaper rash ointment and I think steroid creams with no result. I timidly asked the doctor if it was possible that my son was allergic to his diapers, and he reassured me that this was rare and extremely unlikely. He said that I would just have to keep him as comfortable as possible until he became potty-trained, and that he would probably always have the rash.

Bah! Easy for him to say! He wasn’t hearing his kid scream in pain at every diaper change, or seeing the rash turn into open sores, which healed under diaper rash ointment, only to blossom again two days later.

Finally in exasperation I googled the phrase “allergic to Pampers Cruisers,” just to see if there was a chance that that could be the problem. I got so many hits that I immediately rushed to the store to buy a package of Huggies (I was still addicted to the idea that brand name diapers were sturdier and would last longer than store brand diapers would).

12 hours. That’s how long it took for the rash to begin to clear up. After a year of fretting and worrying and ointments and tears, it took one google search and twelve hours to fix the problem. Huggies were an improvement, but the Walgreen’s brand diapers were even better. A brand called Aloft finally beat out Walgreens in the zero-redness department, and when the store that sold them switched to a new brand, I tried Wal-Marts’ Parents’ Choice.

Bingo. Major, double, whoop-it-up Bingo!

My red-bottomed baby whose sores were so long-lasting, thick, and large that I thought they would leave scars, now has a perfectly beautiful, flawless, white little baby bum!

This is what I learned: never just take an expert’s word for it. Google. Just in case.

Craigslist is a Little Slow

Well, out of the eight or nine things I’ve listed on Craigslist, only two have received any response at all, and only one has sold. I’ve included photos, and I know the listings are well-written, so maybe my prices are too high. On the other hand, I also haven’t received many responses to any of the “wanteds” I’ve posted either, so maybe there’s just not a lot of Craigslist commerce going on in my particular town. I’ll have to revisit my listings and see if I want to tweak the prices on them at all.

The good news is that the one item I sold, I sold for full price, and the other items are neatly stored out of the way so I can hold onto them and keep re-posting the ads (within guidelines of course) for as long as I need to.

One woman did respond to my request to buy 4T clothing on Craigslist, so hopefully I’ll be able to acquire some good clothes for the Crazy Kook sometime soon. He’s starting to look a little ragged, and with all the competition for the truly hot online sales these days, I haven’t had any luck scoring cheap clothing for him lately. Fortunately, Christmas is coming and he always gets some clothing then.