Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies: Goodbye Sleeping Bag, Hello Long Arm

Living frugally can be quite an adventure. As with anything in life, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. And sometimes you just have to laugh.

Years ago I regularly shared frugal feats, flops, and funnies posts to share with you some of the daily ins and outs of living the frugal life and hopefully to encourage you on your own financial journey.  But it has been a while since I shared one!

It’s a good exercise to think through our successes and failures to keep a good perspective. And I always appreciate a good laugh.

I would love to hear any of your own recent frugal feats, flops, and funnies in the comments!

Frugal Feats

When a long-arm quilting machine was offered for free to my quilt guild email list, I quickly showed it to my husband. I had been interested in one for a long time but it had never become a priority. I figured that he would point out the fact that we don’t have a good space for a big machine and frame like that, but instead he said, “Should we see if we can go look at it tonight?” He even made the phone call and arrangements for us to take a look.

We were the first to jump at this opportunity and came home with thousands of dollars worth of quilting machine and frame. But that wasn’t all. The couple had already moved cross country and had decided to sell their California house. They wanted to get rid of everything in the house so they could have it ready to sell by the end of the month. In addition to the quilting machine, they also gave us a brand new serger, regular sewing machine, iron, air purifier, magnetic ball and rod toy (like these), computer speakers, guitar, autoharp, some dolls for the toddler in our Ukrainian family, manual wheat grinder (which has already entertained our 6-year-old for hours), and all the food in their pantry.

Believe it or not, we turned down lots of great things too. We were also offered a large computer monitor, toaster oven, Instant Pot, towels and bedding, lots of furniture, and several lovely sets of china.

I didn’t think it could get better than a free long arm quilting machine and frame, but there was an entire van load by the time we left! And the family was so happy to see their things go to a good home so they could get closer to listing their beautiful home.

Sometimes free really is free, if you keep your eyes open.

Frugal Flops

My two older boys went on a snow campout with the boys from church. They had been looking forward to it for more than a year, as last year’s snow campout was cancelled due to lack of snow. I helped them gather all of their gear together, making sure to write our last name on everything. I can’t speak for all teenage boys, but mine have a bad habit of losing things. My freshman lost two jackets this year at school, each within a week of their purchase (that’s a frugal flop in itself!).

While the campout was a success, it turned out to be a flop in the finance department for us, for a few reasons. First, our oldest son had a sledding accident which ultimately landed him in the emergency room for a broken leg. The silver lining, I suppose, is that this being his third hospital visit in two months, he’s working his way through the individual maximum out of pocket amount from the health insurance company early in the year. That means future injuries or illness can be covered entirely by insurance. Maybe this should be a feat, but that would be weird.

Since our injured son left the campout early, some of the other boys gathered his things from his snow cave and put them into one of the cars. Unfortunately his sleeping bag and tarp are nowhere to be found. No one who went on the trip has seen them since they’ve been back. The only thing I can figure is that they blew out of the back of the truck on the drive down out of the mountains.

If it were any of our other sleeping bags, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Unfortunately, I sent our son with Mike’s sleeping bag. At 6’7″, normal sleeping bags don’t work for Mike, so he had a nice extra long and extra wide sleeping bag. We bought it years ago (when backpacking was literally our job) and really had to shop around to find the right one. The sleeping bag will cost $300-$400 to replace. The 8′ x 10′ heavy duty tarp, less than 24 hours old, cost $16.

Frugal Funny

The funny I’m going to share with you was not funny last week or for the last year! It was 100% a frugal frustration! But that all changed this week when Mike had time to work on one of our cars. Now that the issue is (hopefully) fixed, we can laugh about the ridiculousness of the situation.

Our 2007 Honda Odyssey has been quirksome and irksome since we bought it in 2019. Several years ago, one of the automatic sliding doors had some problems. Periodically a door would stop working, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Although we could always close the door manually, sometimes the latch did not pull it quite all the way shut, so the van thought the door was was still open. For a little while we would occasionally drive around with a loud, sustained beep because the car thought a door was open while we were driving. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The more aggravating part was that the latch, thinking the door was still open, would constantly pull electricity to try to close it, causing a drain that would make our battery die.

It was so frustrating! Since the door looked closed, we couldn’t tell when it was or was not draining the battery. We replaced the battery twice. We took the van in to two different mechanics. Of course, at this point we hadn’t discovered that the problem was the door latch, and they hadn’t either. They tried things that, on the surface, appeared to solve the problem, but then the latch would act up again and the battery would die again! We are both experts with jumper cables and can have a dead battery started before the kids even have their seat belts on.

When we got our last battery, we decided that we wanted it to last longer than a year, so we came up with a pretty ridiculous work-around. For the past 8 months or so, we would open the hood and unhook one of the connectors to the battery every time we got home. Then every time we leave, we pop the hood and rehook the connector onto the battery. Depending on the temperature and tightness of the connection, sometimes the car would start the first time, other times it would take several attempts, with jiggles and adjustments to the connection between each attempt. We kept toothpicks handy to wedge into the connector if we needed to tighten the connection.

Like I said, I wouldn’t have laughed about this situation a week ago, but over the last several months Mike did a lot of research and testing and is pretty confident that the door latch is the problem.  He ordered a new latch for $280 and on Saturday he replaced the old latch with the new one. No more connecting and disconnecting the battery! Though we did have to drive a screw in next to the battery contact to keep it tight, since so much on and off movement had shaved the soft terminal down a little. Hopefully the rest of the van behaves itself until we have saved up for a replacement!

Does anyone else deal with absurd car drama or is this taking frugality to the extreme?

Now it’s your turn!

• What were your frugal successes and failures this month?
• Any funny frugal moments?