Random bits

It's catalog time again.  I don't know how it happened, but I've been added to mailing lists for catalogs I would never even bother opening, let alone order anything from.  Also, my husband and I both ended up on Johnny's Seeds mailing list.  We don't need two copies.  So I'll be spending some time today on the phone taking us off those lists.  I remember hearing about a family that lived in a large apartment building.  In December they put out a box and sign near the mailboxes, inviting anyone in the building to leave catalogs in the box whose mailing list they wished to be removed from.  I thought it was a fabulous idea.  It almost makes me wish I lived in an apartment building.  So much material saved from the landfill.  I've put a similar offer out to relatives and a few more consumerist friends, but so far no one has taken me up on it.

Since buying a shotgun I've started reading a couple of hunting blogs.  NorCal Cazadora is good, as is A Mindful Carnivore.  No doubt there are others as well.  I'm so new to hunting and guns that I don't even know enough to ask the stupid questions.  So it's nice to have access to the worlds of thoughtful and experienced hunters.

I had another one of those funny moments when my brain slips back into pre-homestead, pre-frugalite channels.  We have an air rifle, and a supply of lead pellets the rifle uses.  I had thought to do a little target practice.  I know an air rifle shooting pellets is nothing like a shotgun with shotgun shells.  But I feel that any familiarity with any sort of gun can only be a step in the right direction.  For some reason I put it off for about a week because I hadn't thought to pick up a couple of paper targets at the gun store.  When I came to, I couldn't believe the train of thought I'd gone through.  Paying for paper targets?  Perish the thought!  I set up the clever soda can target box my husband had cobbled together.  (Clementine crate lined with newspaper, and a can on a string attached to a screw at the top.)  Flipping the can over the top and out of the way, I put a junk mail envelope in there with two small black marks made with a sharpie marker.  I already know I can hit the can at the distance I was shooting.  That's a pretty big target.  The small marks give me a much better sense of my accuracy.  I still can't believe I was thinking about paying for a piece of paper headed for the recycling bin.  Sheesh!

This coming weekend I'm hosting a cookie baking party.  It's a more social version of the holiday cookie exchange.  Instead of just passing out plates with cookies to friends, I bring the friends and their doughs together for the baking.  Then we divvy up the cookies at the end.  It's always fun to see what kinds of cookies people bring.  I used to ask folks to bring copies of their recipe too.  But now that everyone has email, it's trivially easy for those as want the recipes to get them.  I host get-togethers so rarely these days.  I'd like to do it more often, but it seems I only find the time for such things when the garden is not in full swing. 

I made my first ever batch of duck confit, with duck raised on grass locally.  I'm not sure if the birds were in rigor mortis, or if duck is just a lot more tightly put together than chicken.  The ducks were slaughtered the day before I brought them home and cut them up.  It took quite some doing; almost an hour to break down two birds.  I know my butchery skills are rusty, but it doesn't take me that long with two chickens.  Anyway, the legs were cured for two days, then poached in duck fat, and stored in a wide-mouth quart canning jar covered completely by their own fat.  The confit is supposed to sit for two weeks before sampling.  I'm hoping I can wait that long.  What I really want now is a baguette worthy of the name to smear the confit over, to see if I can reproduce a simple, unctuous, perfect appetizer I once enjoyed in Europe.  I made just a modest quart of stock from the roasted carcasses, and put the breasts into the freezer.  At some point we'll have a feast of duck breast.

As of the end of November we've exceeded our harvest tally from last year by about 145 pounds.  And there are still hardy leeks and a few cabbages out there to harvest, plus a trickle of lettuce and spinach coming from the cold frame.  I'm curious too about the gobo still in the ground.  I wonder how it behaves over the winter.  Does it become sweeter, as many other roots do?  Will it hold until spring?  I don't know.  Yes.  I'll definitely need to dig up a couple at some point to see what I find.  Probably better to do that sooner rather than later, since the ground is going to be frozen pretty soon.  Daytime temperatures are still peaking just above freezing, but the nights are all frozen now.

I'm planning to experiment with repurposing an old wool sweater into felted mittens.  We have a few old sweaters with holes in them, and I'm hoping to get at least a couple pairs out of the first sweater I felt.  This video shows how to do it, and makes it look pretty easy.  I'm no great shakes at all as a seamstress, but that project looks manageable.  It would be nice to revive the old skill of making something so useful from worn out sweaters.  I'll skip the decorative buttons though.

Two and a half weeks to go, at most, for the turkey.  We plan to have her for New Year's Eve dinner, unless we can't get a grass-fed prime rib for Christmas.  I feel very lucky to know of three local-ish farms that raise beef entirely on grass.  None of them are in my county, but there's one each in two adjacent counties, and another at the near end of Lancaster County.  Our chances of obtaining the cut we want from one of them are good.  Prime rib is such a luxurious thing.  Most of the meat we buy all the rest of the year is either whole birds or ground meat - essentially the cheapest kinds of meat, albeit from local grass-based farmers.  So, we content ourselves with the cheapest (not cheap) of the best kind of meat all year, except for this one winter feast.  Feast days are very important to me.  I love the traditional dishes that make up our very different Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.  Though I deeply enjoy prime rib and Yorkshire pudding, I wouldn't want to rob this singular day of its significance by indulging in them at other times of year, even if we could afford to do so.  The rarity is what makes me appreciate them, treasure them, and celebrate them.  I'm really looking forward to it!

What Would You Do If You Lost Your Job Today?

The economy is a scary thing right now. Many people are losing their jobs. Most of the rest of us are nervous about job security. I've been giving some thought to what would happen if my husband lost his job, which is the largest and most stable income stream we have right now. There are a number of things we could do, if we had to, that we're not doing right now. I've run through them a number of times in my mind, just to make sure I'm considering all possibilities.

What would you do if you, or the breadwinner of your family, lost their job? What immediate steps could you take to cut your costs or replace some of that income in other ways? Here's a list of actions I consider to be "emergency response."

1. Recast our mortgage. We've been paying ahead on our mortgage, which means we've built in the possibility of reducing the amount we're obligated to pay each month. Recasting costs much less than a refinancing, and leaves both the original term of your loan and the interest rate unchanged. This is something I would do immediately upon learning our financial situation had changed. Better to do this as early as possible, rather than wait until a few months' worth of savings has been eaten up. As of right now, our early repayment would let us reduce our monthly mortgage payment by a little over $250.

2. Sell a car. Right now we own two cars we paid cash for, and we don't really need both of them. Selling one car would give us cash in hand, and also reduce our auto insurance rates. I actually wouldn't mind doing it now, but my husband has half convinced me it's the worst time to sell.

3. Get a roommate. We love our privacy, but if our main income stream were cut off, we'd find a way to live with someone else in our own home. We've got a nice place to live and we've got the room. An extra $400+ per month would mean our savings would stretch considerably farther.

4. Look for a straight job. If my husband lost his job, I would look for steady work. It would likely be for low pay, and given the economy, any job at all would likely be hard to come by. So I would make sure I'd settled the first three items on this list first, since those would be fairly easy to accomplish. He would make his own job search a 9-5 chore every day.

5. Increase the hustle. There are a number of things that I do that bring in a small income, such as some paid writing, and teaching cooking classes. I'd do a lot more of them, and also work on bartering even more than I already planned to this year.

6. Expand the garden and work it more intensively. Last year was the first year I gardened seriously enough to supply a lot of our own food. If things got bad for us this year, I would ratchet it up even more by clearing as much new ground as I could find, though there really isn't a whole lot left to clear that would produce a good crop. But spending more time out there tending it would give us better yields. Building cold frames to extend our growing season would become a bigger priority.

Surprisingly, when I considered what small economies I could make in our day-to-day routine, there really wasn't all that much we would change. We already live very frugally in terms of how we spend and conserve money. I suppose we'd not buy any more alcohol when we ran through the beer and cheap wine we have in the basement, and we might eat a little less meat. Other than that, there aren't many places to trim our monthly budget.

It's also a little surprising to me that bartering and cold frames showed up on my list of goals for 2009, as well as on this emergency list. So it looks like I'll be slightly better prepared for any financial emergency by the end of this year if I achieve my goals.

If you assemble your own list of crisis management steps you'd take in a financial pinch, it's worth asking yourself why you haven't taken those steps already. I admit that all of the things on my list (other than recasting the mortgage) are things that I "should" be doing already, if I were really serious about frugality. Mostly it boils down to issues of our quality of life. We could and would do things differently if we had to, but not without sacrificing something significant. The truth is, none of the hundreds of little things we currently do to save money feel like real sacrifices. That's the real beauty of a frugal and self-sufficient mindset.

When I run through a what-if scenario such as this one, I can't begin to express how much difference it makes to know that we carry no debt other than our mortgage, and that we have cash saved for a full six months of expenses. Of course the prospect of our main income stream being cut off makes me nervous. But it doesn't make me panic; it's not unthinkable. Living the frugal life affords me the confidence to say we'd get through it, and know that we really would. I feel there are plenty of rewards for living the way we do, but peace of mind ranks really, really high on that list of rewards.

So what steps would you take if you lost your job? Any reason you haven't taken those steps already?

Rethinking the Non-Negotiable

I've written before on frugality creep, and the incremental changes that happen when saving money becomes a mindset, a way of life. It's very difficult - and very uncomfortable - to shift too quickly from an average endebted, consumeristic lifestyle to severe pennypinching. In our lives the shift from spending to saving has been gradual and is ongoing.

For me there were certain big changes that happened early on, mostly the obvious ones: keeping and using a price comparison book, switching to CF light bulbs, hanging all my laundry up to dry, eating out less and less, learning to bake bread, selling off extra vehicles. But even as I enthusiastically set aside old habits and took up new ones, there were certain exemptions to my spending habits that I wasn't even willing to consider giving up. I think that's normal, and if you're new to frugality I think it's okay to devote your energies to learning new habits and skills for the time being. But when the new habits and skills have become routine, and the frugality bug has still got you bad, there comes a time when those exemptions start looking more and more profligate. Then it's time to reconsider them.

Confession time: I'm vain about my appearance in one particular way. I always wear foundation makeup when I'm out in public. I don't wear lipstick or eye makeup more than a few times per year, and most of the time I couldn't care less what clothes I'm wearing (so long as they're clean and warm enough). But for many long years I've spent good money on a cosmetics counter brand of foundation. I go through about two and a half bottles per year. That probably adds up to about $100 per year.

This was something I just wasn't willing to consider cutting out of my budget for quite a while. It quietly held non-negotiable status, and was paid for out of my mad money budget. Now you may argue that $100 per year isn't very much money, and that's the exact argument I made to myself. But $100 is $100, and there are lots of efforts I make to save us even smaller amounts per year. Why turn around and blow that much on a non-necessity? So recently I decided that I needed to at least consider some alternatives. If I couldn't simply give it up and let the world see my splotchy skin and the occasional zit, then I would at least try a cheaper brand. Off I went to visit the drugstore cosmetics aisle, a trip I hadn't made since high school.

You know what? On my very first try I found a product that matches my skin tone, has a good SPF rating, and works just about as well as the high end stuff I've been buying for years. It's a little bit thinner than my usual brand, so I may use a little more each day. But it costs less than a third as much for the same size bottle of the expensive stuff I've used for so long. I feel pretty foolish for having let a mental prejudice get in the way of saving money for all these years. And I feel silly for still refusing to be seen without foundation. But I do feel good about finding a cheaper alternative that works. Now I have no reason to go to the mall, ever.

We still have some non-negotiables in our budget. I'm not thrilled about these, but unless and until the feces really hits the rotating oscillator, my husband isn't giving up his beer, and my dirty little canned soda habit will continue.

What are your non-negotiables? Have you managed to overcome any? Please share in the comments!

Refinancing vs. Recasting Your Mortgage

I've tried a few times over the last year to refinance our mortgage at a better interest rate than the one we've got. A few times it seemed like it was going to happen, but for a variety of reasons it hasn't, even though our credit rating is excellent and we've proved ourselves good risks on this mortgage.

My most recent conversation was with our wonderful bank, USAA. (If you're eligible for their services but not using them, you really need to look into doing so. You'd be nuts to pass up this much value and genuine customer service.) During the course of the conversation I had with the loan officer, he mentioned recasting a mortgage, which was something I'd never even heard of. It turns out that recasting a mortgage is a pretty standard practice, if not so well known or widely available as refinancing.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor or professional in any way. Speak to a qualified expert for more infomation rather than relying on what I'm about to say here.

Recasting can mean a few different things, but here's how it would most commonly work. Say you've had a mortgage for a few years, and during that time you've been a good little frugalite and have made extra principle payments each month. Or, you've taken a sizeable windfall in the form of a bonus, inheritance, or whatever, and applied it to your principle. In other words, you're ahead of schedule in repaying your loan. At some later point, either because of unemployment or some other financial difficulty, your budget changes and you want to reduce your required monthly mortgage payments. By recasting your mortgage with your current lender, the term of your mortgage and your interest rate will stay the same, but the loan is re-amortized to give you smaller monthly payments so that you will pay off the loan exactly according to the original term of the loan.

Got that? Let's say it again so that we're clear on the concept. You're five years into a 30-year mortgage, but you've been paying ahead. If you keep up the extra payments, you'll retire the mortgage 12 years ahead of schedule. But suddenly you can't make the regular payments very easily anymore, let alone pay extra. If you are able to recast your mortgage, your monthly payments go down. If you stick to that lower monthly payment, you'll pay off the mortgage exactly on the original 30-year schedule.

Why do lenders sometimes offer this? Because it works for both the lender and the borrower. Because you've paid off part of the mortgage ahead of schedule, either with those extra monthly principle payments or with one lump-sum paydown, you've shown yourself to be a pretty good risk, but a low return. Look at it a little more deeply from the lender's perspective. By lowering the monthly payment and keeping the original term of the loan, the lender stands to gain more over time, as opposed to having the borrower pay off the loan quickly and paying less interest in the bargain. More concerning to the lender is the issue that if you, as a borrower, are asking for a recast of the mortgage, you may now be in the market for a refinance from another lender. Worse yet, if the borrower's financial circumstances have changed, he or she may now be at risk of defaulting. Financial institutions don't like defaults on loans. As a lender, it makes sense to work something out that keeps the borrower paying, accepting smaller monthly payments, but making more money over the long run. It's a win-win situation if the borrower is in dire straits.

This is interesting to me as a mortgage holder who has been making substantial extra principle payments. The traditional argument against early repayment of a mortgage is that it's better to invest the money and earn a higher rate of return. (Well, I think we all know just how far out the window that idea has been tossed lately.) But the recasting of a mortgage looks to me like a sort of unofficial safety net for people who have their financial house in order and want to aggressively attack their debt. If you throw every extra dollar at your mortgage and make a significant dent in it, you're essentially putting yourself on a good footing to ask for a recast if your finances take a turn for the worse.

My understanding is that not all lenders offer recasting of mortgages. From what I've heard, if it is available to you, it should cost significantly less in fees than a refinance. Something in the hundreds of dollars range, rather than the thousands of dollars range.

I wouldn't recommend paying down mortgage principle instead of building up a cash savings emergency fund. But it's nice to know that our early repayment efforts give us a good chance at that latitude if need be. I'm not sure why I never heard of this before, but I'm glad I know about it now.