Savvy Saving Bytes

I’m not keen on celebrating New Year’s Eve in public places with raucous crowds, revelers determined to have a BIG night, dining room prices jacked up to the ceiling and food poorly prepared thanks to over-worked, over-steamed chefs. To this, add wobbly merrymakers weaving through the city on their way to getting blotto and it’s definitely not my idea of a fun way to start the New Year.

As for the New Year’s Resolution Bandwagon, I’ll give it a pass. I’m less than thrilled at being informed NOW is the time to sum up the past year. NOW is the time to set goals for the New Year. Who says? To me New Years Day and the next day are interchangeable. As are Valentine’s Day and Halloween and Ground Hog Day. The only difference between them is a date written on a calendar. So why make resolutions at the exact same time every year just because the community at large and a bunch of articles are saying it’s the time to do so. Why can’t resolutions be made any old time of the year?  If you’re living and thinking at your fullest every day, you’re probably making resolutions and setting goals left and right all along. Ideally I am.

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When I first moved to New York City I had a job at Harper’s Bazaar that paid a salary in the pitiful peanut range.  But thanks to miniscule living expenses, I had plenty of cash to splash around on eating out, weekend trips and all around fun stuff. I shared the rent on a two room, kitchen-in-the-living-room, fourth floor walk-up apartment with two, sometimes three, roommates in Greenwich Village.

So stoked was I about landing a plum job and finally moving to the big city that I slept every night without complaint on a rickety cot beneath a window with a wide open shade.  With the torpid heat that summer, we only pulled down the bedroom window shade when dressing.  We had no air conditioner and the coolest spots in the apartment were at the windows.  But sitting in a window seat facing the street had turned into a tricky proposition.  Directly across the street from us lived a pale, shadowy, hard-to-guess-age-guy who rarely left his small one room. Dressed in frowsy, shapeless old shorts, he always seemed to be fluttering around his windows so I thought of him as Moth-man. He had taken an acute interest in our apartment to the tune of flashing one of my roommates when she had been home alone. Not wanting a repeat performance in my memory bank, I rarely looked in his sleazy direction.

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When I was a fashion illustrator, one of my models, looking as usual like a million bucks, told me that she usually shopped for clothes in thrift shops. With that knockout recommendation, I finally ventured into a Goodwill thrift store in my neighborhood, plucked a navy blue Christian Dior blazer with a $6.00 price tag off a jam packed clothes rack and silently yelled “WOW”!

Shown here are some of the goodies I have unearthed in thrift shops over the years — some brand new, some barely used:

• Bracelets fashioned of vary-colored twisted metals – more refined versions of bracelets I saw in African markets. $2.00 each.
• One of three different Portuguese hand painted dishes that hang on my kitchen wall. $3.00.
• White cotton shower curtain sprinkled with multi-colored flowers in original package. $4.00.
• A box of coasters From the Museum of Metropolitan Art – a steal at a tiny fraction of their original cost.

At neighborhood thrift shops I have also been lucky to find:

• A blazing red Bognor ski jacket that kept me toasty warm against the iciest winds on walks around the reservoir. $8.00.
• Glass candlesticks embedded with hand blown teardrops: $6.00 each.
• A lush, black cashmere tunic cardigan $8.00.
• A weightless Natori caftan, perfect for travel. $6.00.
• Designer silk scarves for a fraction of their original cost.
• A Kenneth J. Lane gold and enamel bracelet for a few dollars.
• And most recently an Armani jacket for a big splurge of $25.
• Plus a zillion books and music CD’s and movie cassettes. Each costing a greenback or two.

Also a fan of thrifts, my sister made a great catch recently. Spotting a dull, blackened bracelet in a pile of costume jewelry, she looked on the inside and found the silver mark, “72.5” that she suspected might be there. It meant the bracelet contained 72.5% of silver. Once the ancient tarnish was removed, she had a glowing silver bracelet for the princely sum of $1.00.

I usually come up with my biggest hauls on Thursday and Friday nights, before the weekend hoards gallop in. And gallop in they do. These are the no-fooling-around Saturday-day-off-from-work shoppers determined to wrestle fashionable wardrobe bargains from their working sisters.

If you’re furnishing your first home or apartment on a budget, be sure to check out the thrifts before dropping your cash at full price stores. You may hit the jackpot with needed kitchenware, furniture, rugs, prints and posters and small appliances.

Keep in mind that not all visits will be successful. Sometimes you’ll walk away with a basket full of bargain goodies and sometimes you may not spot a single thing of interest. Thrifts feature an enormous variety of stuff to zip through, with quality ranging from dreary to dreamy. You need a speedy search technique to cover everything. Not places to linger, thrifts are places to zip in and zip out, hopefully carrying away some exciting gems found hidden in the jumble.

Let’s say your wallet contains a meager collection of moola. And you live in a smallish apartment or house that others call “cozy”. Or you have limited storage space—as in zero. And you need to store some items that absolutely cannot be squeezed into already jam packed cabinets, shelves, closets, under-bed-spaces and every other possible nook and cranny. Forget storage containers. Not enough floor space. Forget additional shelves. Not enough wall space. Forget cartons. Too depressing–plus too Collyer brothers (if you don’t know who they are and you’re a bona fide member of the pack-rat kingdom, better read up on them before it’s too late).

Enter king size bags…Not the gray plastic, bursting at the seams variety rolled around in shopping carts by the homeless. And not the big brown kind toted home with groceries. No, I’m talking about large, king size gift bags–bags constructed of strong, heavy weight paper in graphic patterns and fresh colors.

The large gift bag I have in my bathroom contains bottles, extra combs, toothbrushes, toiletry travel containers, surplus cosmetics and items I’m not too thrilled to have on display. It fits perfectly into a narrow little corner floor space that could have been designed for it. With its clean, upbeat design, it visually lights up that area. For practicality and a neat look, I snipped off the carrying cords and closed the bag top with clips.

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Before exploring the country’s lowest sales taxes, I always assumed New York was the primary sales tax monster, hitting us up for 8.875% sales tax* every time we New Yawkas made a purchase. But lo and behold, another state turns out to be an even bigger tax biter: the gentle state of Tennessee charges its southern citizens a whopping 9.41% combined state and local sales tax, the highest in the country.

Of the 20 lowest sales taxes in the U.S., the residents of five states are fortunate enough to be charged zero state sales tax. But of those five states, two charge local sales tax which leaves only three, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon, with a combined state and local sales tax of absolutely zero. If you live in any of these three states and decide to purchase some new furniture for $3,000 bucks you will not have to tack on a penny for sales tax. But if you buy that same furniture in pricey Tennessee, you’ll have to cough up a whopping $282.30 to cover the sales tax bill. Quite a difference, especially if you’re on a super-tight budget, retired or thinking of furnishing an entire new home.

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A while back I wrote about the presence of hair, beetles and beaver anal glands in the foods we eat. Of the three, beaver anal glands, a whiffy combo of glands and urine that beavers use to mark their territory, captured by far the biggest share of people’s attention. Since then numerous search queries have hit my blog seeking a list of specific foods containing these glands, which are ground up into a product known as castoreum used in raspberry, strawberry and, most often, in vanilla flavoring.

As it happens no up to date consumer list of specific foods containing castoreum exists anywhere. Why? Well to start out, would you buy a food product if you knew it contained beaver anal glands? These glands are not exactly anyone’s idea of a heavenly nosh. Anticipating this, the food industry managed to get castoreum added to foods under that innocuous, legal and sometimes not so innocent label: “natural flavoring”. So even if castoreum IS present in foods and beverages like ice cream, yogurt and soda, you and I will never know it. Nor will any food manufacture divulge this info if you contact them(why nix sales?). They will inform you that THEY never add castoreum to their foods and beverages. If pressed, they will probably add they can’t of course speak for their vendors, who supply them with flavorings containing ingredients that are proprietary information.

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At first I thought the $9.99 price for Maybelline Colorsensational Lipstick at CVS was a mistake. I hadn’t bought that lipstick in a coon’s age or two, so I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the price take a bit of a jump, but not THAT high of a jump. When I found out the cost was indeed correct, it added to my growing sense that CVS’s prices have steadily been rising a lot more steeply than other discount stores.

Sure enough, a few days later I hit my local Rite Aid and the price for that exact same Maybelline Colorsensational Lipstick was $7.19. That’s 39% cheaper. Which meant CVS was making $2.80 above and BEYOND a normal mark-up. And they were making that off ME. And I would be losing $2.80, the price of a nice juicy melon or box of berries, every time I would be dumb enough to pay that higher price for a tube of lip color.

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Last summer on my terrace, bugs murdered a lovely, overflowing plant of geraniums — don’t ask me how — only days after I brought it home. I suspect budworms were the culprits since they immediately attacked my next pot of geraniums, subjecting it to a much slower death. First they gobbled up all the tiny flower buds, stealthily destroying them from the inside out. Next they stuffed themselves silly decimating every single geranium blossom, while simultaneously chowing down on the plant leaves, leaving behind only a few pathetic, stripped leaf skeletons.

Surrounded by numerous tall apartment houses with MANY windows, I had no doubt numerous neighbors had witnessed my ineptitude in the plant kingdom. Not looking forward to being dubbed the neighborhood plant killer, I prepared a three pronged attack for dealing with the pests this summer.  Unfortunately my newest geranium purchase happened BEFORE my research, which informed me budworms had become such a raging scourge in the northeast, many gardeners have totally dispensed with growing the bug’s favorite targets — petunias and geraniums. Swell. Although the worms, which turn into large, fat green caterpillars, apparently also have the hots, though not so passionate, for plenty of other flower species too.

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You can’t wash your hands with anything cheaper than bar soap. But ick – that slimy soap scum floating in the soap dish. If you’re a clean freak and get some kind of kick out of removing that scum on a daily basis, then okay – stick with your bar soap. If, however, household cleaning of any sort is something you endeavor to do as little as possible, consider instead washing your hands with an inexpensive – and much neater – alternative. Shampoo!

In place of far more costly liquid hand soap, I’ve been washing my hands with shampoo for years now. And if you buy 15 or 16 ounces of shampoo on sale for less than a dollar, as I always do, you’ll be paying less than half the price of liquid hand soap.

The other plus along with saving money is the great selection of fragrances. Partial to coconut, I also like aloe and almond. I was surprised to discover that shampoo is easy on the skin too. Normally I buy a moisturizing shampoo, both for my scalp and mitts. This seems to contain just enough moisturizer to keep my hands from drying out, yet not so much it leaves them feeling sticky.

Shampoo also appears to cleanse hands every bit as thoroughly as soap. And, living in New York City with its’ over the top energy and who knows how many strains of world class germs and oddball bacteria lurking on every block, bus and subway, I wash my hands a lot. So far, nothing I have heard or read contradicts shampoo’s effectiveness at removing these big city germs.

To those who claim washing hands with anti-bacterial soap is superior for removing bacteria, I’ve heard Dr. Oz (an Oprah favorite) claim that isn’t so. Our bodies are covered, he said, with good and bad bacteria and the anti-bacterial soap unfortunately removes all the good bacteria with the bad. And we need that good bacteria to constantly battle the bad.

So spritz some nice smelling shampoo into your hands and give it a lather. Your nose, good bacteria and piggy bank will thank you.

If you neglected to read the fine print in your real estate contract or didn’t let a lawyer in on the deal, you may have kissed goodbye the mineral rights under your new home.

Now that fracking — horizontal drilling for shale oil and gas — is invading residential areas, land developers and builders are cashing in by grabbing up mineral rights below homes in developments they build in 25 states. Lance Astrella, a Denver Lawyer claims, “All the smart developers are doing it.” And they’re doing it with little or no disclosure to unsuspecting home buyers.

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