Frugal Feats, Flops, and Funnies- Owl Edition

Both my husband and I grew up with frugal parents, so we come into frugality naturally and it has served us well. Carefully and intentionally minimizing expenses was a huge part of how we were able to pay off six figures of student loan debt in three years.

I love helping people learn to be more frugal. If it doesn’t come naturally to you, don’t worry! You can learn to be frugal!

Since my last Frugal Feats Flops and Funnies post, we’ve had some more frugal adventures to share!

Sometimes our normal money-saving endeavors go off without a hitch. I get excited about our savings and how they will contribute to whatever financial goal we’re currently working toward. These are our “frugal feats!”

Other times, life doesn’t go as planned and what we thought was going to be frugal isn’t. Sometimes we’re hit with something out of left field that derails our normal frugal nature. Money can be frustrating sometimes, so we like to keep it real. I call these situations our “frugal flops.”

I have found that having a relaxed, easy-going attitude helps us handle when things don’t go as planned. Laughter is the best medicine, so we try to see humor in the things that might otherwise just be frustrating. It also helps to be able to laugh at ourselves. We have done some crazy things in the name of frugality. And sometimes life just turns out funny. This is where I share “frugal funnies.”

Feats

Road Trip Food

For our recent road trip to Utah (which included two other adults who we’ve never traveled with) I handled all of the food in my normal frugal way. Planning food for road trips is kind of my jam. I love preparing snack bags for each person so they can self-snack for the whole trip (which makes life so much easier for the co-pilot). I bring most of our food along for meals so we don’t have to rely on fast food which gets really expensive for a big family.

For our breakfasts on this trip we had bagels with cream cheese, yogurt, granola, and lots of fresh fruit. For lunch we brought the makings for sandwiches, string cheese, carrots, and apples. On of our easy and cheap dinners on road trips is getting pizza at Sam’s Club ($8 for a large pizza), but we also often have sandwiches for dinner too. Here are more road trip savings tips (both for food and other aspects). Being able to save money on road trip food was definitely a success this month!

Vacation Savings

If you didn’t see my post about saving for a vacation without using our own money, check it out. Until I wrote that post, I hadn’t added up the total of all of the little (and big) contributions that points, rewards, and bonuses have made to our vacation fund over the past 11 months. It definitely adds up to something significant! Even though half of what we saved was free money, we wouldn’t have been motivated to “earn” it without the specific goal of saving for a trip. And the vacation savings from our earned income could have easily gotten lost in our budget and not made an impact anywhere.

Flops

Big Van Drama

About two months ago we got two new tires for our 15-passenger van. When I left the tire shop to drive home, the van felt weird. It felt very tippy, like it was fish-tailing. We needed the big van to go to my in-laws the next day, so I had Mike drive there to see how it felt to him. He agreed that the van was suddenly scary to drive.

We called the tire shop and took the van in again. They said there was no way that changing the tires could have caused this problem. They diagnosed it to be a front suspension issue and replaced the inner and outer tie rods, lower control arms, and idler and Pitman arms. It was a pretty penny ($2,553) to get it fixed, but we weren’t ready to give up on our big van, so we approved the work.

When we called, the next day about picking it up, the technician was out on a test drive. We figured that meant he was almost done, so we headed over to pick it up. The mechanic returned from the test drive dismayed. It turns out that expensive fix did absolutely nothing for the problem. The lead tech had looked at it and noticed the leaf spring bushings and the shackles in the back needed replacing too. He felt bad about the mis-diagnosis of one of his techs so he wouldn’t charge labor, but the parts still cost a whole lot. We drove it home and brought it back in a few days later when there was an opening. This cut the timing a little close for a trip to Utah that we had planned for the big van.

One of the parts came in the very day we were leaving and the shop worked their best to get the van done in time. We picked it up just after 5 on the evening that we were leaving on our trip. Mike drove it home and quickly decided that it wasn’t trip-worthy. Instead we drove two cars (Prius and Grand Caravan) on the trip, which actually saved money on gas, but required two people to always be driving and caused wear and tear on two vehicles.

After the trip we brought the big van back into the shop and insisted they change out the tires, since that was the only thing that changed just before the instability began. On their own and at their expense, they changed our the rear shocks and several other rear suspension parts, found it didn’t fix the problem, and finally put four new tires on. Please note that this was our initial observation and request from two months ago. Unsurprisingly, four new tires (at the shop’s expense) fixed the problem completely. The professionals denied that changing the tires could cause such a problem, so we spent $3,798  total at Big-O Tires to resolve a problem that was caused by defective tires they had installed. The shop also spent over a thousand dollars on parts and hours and hours of labor trying to right the wrong, not to mention a huge headache!

The silver lining on that dark cloud is that we now have four brand new tires and brand new front and back suspension on the big van.

Funnies

Owl Mirror

Lest you think I am a horrible person, let me start by saying the first part of this story isn’t funny. It’s sad. The funny part is at the end.

A few weeks ago, driving my sophomore to an early morning church class at dawn, an owl swooped down from a power pole and dive-bombed into the passenger side of the Prius with a huge thud (I was going 55 mph)! He took out both himself and the side mirror. My son was glad that he had his window up, otherwise the newly dead owl may have landed on his lap! (He’s a “tough guy” but will freak out if there’s a spider in his bedroom, so I’m sure a barely dead owl would have sent him through the roof with panic!)

We hadn’t had the Prius very long, and now, instead of a mirror, the passenger side had classy wires sticking out all over.

Not knowing if the mirror could be fixed (and not wanting to litter), I pulled over and (carefully) backed up to the scene of the crash. It was immediately clear that the mirror couldn’t be salvaged, but I took my souvenir anyway. I caught one final glance of the majestic creature and felt sorry for the circumstance of our meeting.

My handy husband Mike found us a replacement side mirror assembly on Amazon. Getting one that was white like the original would have cost three times as much as the basic black, so we stuck with black. Now, with one white mirror and on black mirror, our white Prius is easily identify from all of the others driving around town.

For some people, having mismatched mirrors might be a big deal, but “car cosmetics” isn’t one of our financial priorities so we didn’t event think twice about it. For me that’s exactly what frugality comes down to: cutting out (or simply reducing) spending on the things that don’t matter to you so that you can focus your funds on things that do!

It’s your turn!

Hey frugal friends! I know you’re out there living the frugal life too! Tell us about any frugal feats, flops, and funnies that you’ve had recently so we can celebrate, commiserate, or laugh together!,