Today's blog post is brought to you by the littlest FAmily member.  She'd like to tell you how we're saving $$ on utilities......

So when you turn on the lights and you forget to turn them off  it wastes power .   Your parents  would have to pay for it and its not your fault just  remember turn off  the lights . 

So when you brush  your  teeth or washing your hands  turn of the water same for the dishes and I do it all the time  I turn off the water when i brush my teeth or washing my hands .  So I take 5 minute showers  so I don't waste water .

Not spending a fortune on food isn't terribly difficult, it just requires planning.  Pre-Frugal August, dealing with dinner each night typically consisted of us coming home from work, saying, "what do we want to eat?" and then either making a grocery store run or ordering from Calz' up the street (my goodness their pizza is delicious!).  However, the result of this is that we'd frequently end up buying ingredients for one meal, buying many things on impulse on our frequent shopping trips, and generally not eating as healthily as we could.  Not only were we wasting $$$ on food we didn't eat in the form of leftover ingredients, but we were also spending an hour each night on grocery runs, not to mention the gas to get to the store.  

Lunch was equally dismal - Mr. FA frequented fast food joints, while Mrs. FA would hit the salad bar at the grocery store next to her work, which may be healthy but is quite pricey.  

The solution?  Shopping for a whole week of groceries at once.  Buying in bulk, buying things that are on sale and/or in season (we just got 10 ears of corn for $1.00 at Farm Fresh), and planning meals that share ingredients so that everything gets used up.

You'll see that we did splurge a little bit - vanilla ice cream and an A&W root beer.  The kid had never had a root beer float, and some things just can't be denied.  We also saved some pennies by bringing our own bags - Farm Fresh gives a $0.05 credit for each disposable bag you bring in.  

The FA family cumulatively owns a pickup truck, a jeep, two motorcycles, and an ungodly number of bicycles.  This sounds ridiculous, but we'd like to note we recently sold a second Jeep, so technically we're "downsizing."

According to our fancy schmancy spreadsheet, we spend an average of $270 per month on gasoline, which is about 3% of our monthly budget.  An interesting thing to note, however, is that Mr. FA drives a company truck to and from work, and does not pay for the gas for said vehicle.  Therefore, the majority of this $270 expenditure comes from MRS. FA's commute, trips around town, and vacation driving.  Are you ready for the ridiculous part?  Mr. and Mrs. FA's offices are less than a mile apart.  Mr. FA works in the field primarily, but he goes to the office first thing almost every morning, so what on earth is Mrs. FA doing driving her own pickup truck to work everyday?!  While there are plenty of answers to that question, most of them boil down to excuses to be lazy.  The truth of the matter is that Mrs. FA would rather hit the snooze button repeatedly until seven in lieu of getting up at the earliest rooster crow like Mr. FA, which kind of precludes carpooling.

Sooooooo, Mr. FA has committed to forcing an insufferably grumpy Mrs. FA out of bed each morning, and transporting said grumpy person and her bicycle to the office.  (He also locks it up for her so she doesn't get her pretty work clothes all mussed - what a guy!).  Mrs. FA gets a healthy bike ride home, and no $$$ gets spent on commuting.  On days when carpooling isn't feasible for one reason or another, Mrs. FA has committed to riding the motorcycle (58 mpg) in lieu of driving the truck (19 mpg).  Ol' Red gets put out to pasture, only to be used on the weekends and for errands that require cargo carrying.

Biking home takes some creative route planning.  Driving the truck to work is a 13-mile route which looks like the picture on the left below:

Unfortunately, you can see that the most direct routes are busy roads and interstates, and there are two major obstacles (the water and I-64) that must be crossed, safely, on bicycle.  When you're planning out a route for bicycling, things like clover-leaf interchanges and four-lane vehicle bridges scream "Death trap!"   Clover leafs are the worst - there really is no safe way to cross them - people are merging in both directions and they're typically far more worried about getting on or off of the interstate than they are about squishing some silly, slow bicycle rider wearing funny looking socks.

The route on the right above is the only route available that uses mainly secondary roads, requires no clover leaf interchange crossings, and has a dedicated pedestrian bridge across the water.  Total mileage: 17.9.  There used to be a pedestrian underpass under Rte. 168 that shortened this trip to 14.5 miles, but it is closed for construction until the summer of 2014 (way to go, City of Chesapeake). 

All told, what this screams is that we need to work on making our city more bicycle-friendly, so that cyclists don't have to add five miles to their trip just to commute safely.  That's a political rant for another day, though.  

While this may seem like a long bike ride, I can safely say that after having completed it three times this week, it's really an hour and a half opportunity to shed the stress of work, think uninterrupted, get in a good workout, and feel truly immersed in the city I live in.  People smile and wave to bicyclists, cars are friendlier than you think they'd be, and you notice things you never noticed before when you aren't zooming past them at sixty miles per hour.  Plus, when you stop in at CVS on the way home wearing bike shorts, a helmet and a Camelbak, you feel a little like a rock star.

And, you get to stop at the top of the Berkeley Bridge, all sweaty and out of breath, and take in this gorgeous view:

It's the very first day of Frugal August!  

Today's focus:  clothes dryers.  Sounds boring, I know.  But it's the middle of summer, it's freakin' HOT outside, and yet I'm spending hard-earned cashola to HEAT AIR.  What's wrong with this picture?

To back this gut feeling that that clothes dryer really was using up more than a negligible amount of energy, I took a stroll over to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (okay, fine, I just Googled "clothes dryer energy use," but taking a stroll sounds so much more delightful).  According to their 2011 statistics, clothes dryers account for 4% of U.S. residential electricity consumption.  That's 57 BILLION kilowatthours (kWh).  Just to put that in perspective, the same site has information on the average U.S. nuclear power plant production which says the average nuke plant generates about 12.2 billion kWh.  Do the math - we're running the equivalent of almost FIVE NUCLEAR REACTORS just to DRY CLOTHES in this country.  And that's only considering residential dryer usage.  What about laundromats or institutions drying clothes?  What about all the people using gas dryers?  Holy cow - that's a bunch of energy to do something the sun does for FREE!!!

Alrighty, with frugality first and foremost in my mind, I took a trip to Lowe's.  First find: retractable clothes line, maximum of 49', priced at $14.98.  Seemingly makes a bit of sense, except I'd really planned on using our newly-constructed pergola as my clothes line support structure, which would mean I'd need two of these to put one on each side of the pergola, and that would be $30, which is probably most of my electricity cost for the year to run the darn dryer.  Not terribly frugal.

Total for two separate lines, feasibly up to 50' in length each (though I don't have room for that): $15.32.  Half of what I would have spent for the fancy retractable ones.  I should note that I could easily have not bought the carabiners and just tied the line to the lag bolts, but I want to be able to take this down when company comes over.  I'd also like to note that Lowe's doesn't sell clothespins.  I find that odd, but Target had a pack of 50 for $1.79, and it was on the way home so I don't feel like I had to burn any extra dinosaurs to get them.

Took about 8 minutes to drill the pilot holes for the lag bolts, put in the lag bolts, and tie some clothesline to some carabiners.  I still have about 75' of line left, and may do the other two sides of the pergola later.   

Took about five minutes to hang everything from a wet load of laundry up.  It also felt pretty pleasant, standing outside, hanging up clothes, enjoying the sun.  Besides, I'm banned from TV for the month, so what else was I supposed to do tonight?  

See above for a typical evening in our household - pre-Frugal August.  

Alrighty - in order to use fewer resources (AKA...money), we had to know where most of them were going to begin with.   After dinner one evening, we printed out every payslip, bank statement and credit card statement, and made a nifty Excel file that categorized all of our expenses.  The top ten are shown at right.  In case you were wondering, the categories not shown included hobbies, pets, restaurants, gym fees, entertainment, and fast food.  Even though these categories didn't make it into our top ten expenditures, we're still going to work to cut costs in them.

There are some interesting things we found as we created this chart.  The first is that we're actually doing pretty darn well.  The only debt we have is our mortgage (thanks to a couple years of bonuses and some inheritance stuff), and we're saving at a healthy 10% rate.  However, one of the goals of Frugal August is to figure out if we can increase our savings enough through simpler living to start living REAL simple (AKA, retire) a little earlier.  This means that we want that green pie slice in the chart above to get a little bigger this month.

So, what are we going to do to get that green slice bigger?  Why, make some other slices smaller of course!  How we're going to accomplish that we'll share with you day by day in August.  However, just to get us jump started, I've already done the following:

1. Reduced our internet speed from "Premier" to "Preferred" - That's Cox Cable speak for 50Mbps to 15Mbps.  We'll let you know if we can see any difference.  - Savings: $11 / month.
   
2. Upped the 401K deposits from 7% to 10%.  This means we're not paying taxes on those dollars, and we just made the green slice a little bit bigger and the blue slice a little smaller - go us! - Savings: $36 / month.
   
3. Called the car insurance folks and reduced the coverage on Mr. FA's personal vehicle.  We don't owe anything on it, and we have enough in savings to replace it if the worst happened.  Hell, between his work truck, my truck, the motorcycle and bicycles, we don't really need that vehicle anyway.  - Savings: $12 / month.
   

I'm going to now go spend an hour knocking on wood that publishing #3 above doesn't mean the Jeep will get struck by lightening tomorrow.  Have a great night!

<3, 

Mr. and Mrs. FA