minimum wage

Dull Razor Blades: Day 27

January 29, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 4 Comments

One of the risks which comes along with traveling from house to house to house is that sometimes I forget things. I have plenty of razors (TIP: I get them for free from drug stores — every time a razor company comes out with a new model razor, you can almost always get them for free. Since the company makes their money on the razor blades, they want to get as many people using the razor as possible, thus give them away at greatly discounted prices which end up being free when you add a coupon. Keep an eye open for a new razor launch and you can easily get enough to last you a year) and make an attempt to extend their life as much as possible, but I forgot to put in a new one in my bag and ended up coming on this house sitting job with an older razor that was getting dull. I had a few choices:

1. I could go out and buy a cheap disposable razor.

2. I could suffer through with the dull razor blade for a week.

3. I could go without shaving for a week.

4. I could find another solution to the problem.

Since it was a stupid mistake on my part, and even though the disposables are fairly cheap, I didn’t want to waste money on buying one with this minimum wage challenge going on. I would rather not shave or shave with the dull blade since it’s only a week. The problem was that the blade was dull enough that it was nicking me and not shaving very close and while I could go a week without shaving, I really don’t look very good when not shaving (and I certainly wouldn’t be able to get another date looking that way). I decided to opt for the fourth option.

I had heard that you could extend the life of disposable razor blades from week(s) to month(s) by simply running them across the your jeans when they started to get dull. I’m not sure why I have never given it a try up to this point (I think because I always had an abundance of razors, it was never an issue, but I really should know better than create more waste than needed and I’m ashamed of that). This gave me the perfect opportunity to try it out (here’s a video on how to do it)

It worked surprisingly well, and now I’m even more ashamed that I hadn’t gone ahead and tried it sooner. I think that if I hadn’t let the blade get quite as dull as it had, it would have worked even better. Even so, I won’t have any problem making it last the rest of the week now and this is something that I will turn into a habit. If you don’t do this already, give it a try. I think you will be surprised and if you only have to replace blades monthly instead of weekly, you can save quite a bit of money if you do buy your razor blades.

Today I couldn’t get outside because the owners had someone coming by to repair a table and I needed to let the worker in. Apparently, a glass lamp shade had fallen from the second story onto a beautiful dining room table scratching and denting it all up. It had already been taken to the shop to get repaired, but it needed to be buffed and polished. The worker ended up spending 4 hours doing it (I never knew how much time and effort it took to do that). I don’t know how much it cost to get the table repaired, but it couldn’t have been cheap. It made me realize that is another expense I avoid not having my own place (no need to repair or replace broken furniture).

Since I stayed in the entire day, I was able to get a decent amount of work and writing done. With finding a solution to the dull razor problem without buying a new one, I had another no spend day. The plan is to get out to do a little exploring tomorrow.

Today’s Spending

Food: $0.00
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $0.00

Total: $0.00

Total Spending

Food: $18.52
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $19.00

Total: $37.52

Next article: Day 28: Not My Best Day

(Photo courtesy of Mr. T in DC)

Car Repair Failure & Golden Gate Bridge: Day 25 & 26

January 28, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 3 Comments

Why is it that when there is something wrong with a car, whatever seems to be wrong with it miraculously resolves itself the minute that you bring the car in to get repaired? Today was the last day I had before I needed to head back up north to house sit, so I thought I better find out what the clutch clicking noise was, as well as get the oil changed and tires rotated. Of course, when I brought it in, the clicking noise was nowhere to be heard. I spent 30 minutes trying to get the car to make the clicking noise in the clutch, but to no avail. I’m sure that the mechanic thought I was nuts yelling at my car to make a noise that it’s not supposed to make and I shouldn’t want to hear.

My gut tells me that it’s not the last I will hear of the clicking (although I’ll be perfectly happy if I’m wrong) so I decided to pass on the oil change and tire rotation as well. I’ll see if it comes back as I’m planning a couple of drives while house sitting, plus I have the drive up there. Either way, I’ll need to take the car in for an oil change and a tire rotation after this trip and I can make another attempt to figure out the issue if the clicking does come back by then.

After the car fixing failure, I decided I needed to work outside the house, but I wanted to test one of the other alternatives to the coffee shop. I opted for the library which worked out better than I thought it would. The hours are a bit short (it closes at 6:00 pm most evenings) and the most difficult adjustment was that it was too quite. I like background noise when I’m working and there just isn’t a lot of that in the library. These aren’t deal breakers and I think I can still work effectively there, so I think I’ll make that my first default choice when going outside to work from now on when visiting my mom.

The next morning I needed to head up north for the house sitting job. It was overcast and drizzling when I left, so the plan was to drive directly to the house without stopping, but as I drove north, the weather began to improve (a bit strange since the opposite usually happens). By the time I hit the Golden Gate Bridge the sky was blue and no matter how many times I cross that bridge, I have to stop when the sun is out. It had been quite some time since I had actually walked the bridge, so I decided to do that:

For those that have never walked the Golden Gate Bridge, when you reach the center part of the span, there are a number of suicide prevention help signs (with emergency phones below) to discourage people from jumping. It’s a jarring reminder with all the amazingly beautiful scenery from the bridge:

The two days were good to my finances as both were no spend days since I ended up skipping the car upkeep until I get back again. This puts me in a great position to get through the first month spending less than $50 which will give me a much needed emergency fund cushion going forward. I certainly have no complaints about how this minimum wage challenge has been going thus far…

Yesterday’s & Today’s Spending

Food: $0.00
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $0.00

Total: $0.00

Total Spending

Food: $18.52
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $19.00

Total: $37.52

Next article: Day 27: Dull Razor Blades

TV Panic: Day 23 & 24

January 27, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 3 Comments

With the end of the current house sitting job, I have three days before the next one begins. Since I’ve managed to not have to pay anything for lodging so far this month, I figured that I should try to make that the case for the entire month. The plan was to go to visit my sister (just to rub in how well I am doing on the minimum wage challenge thus far a little), but that was quickly changed when I got a message from my mom telling me that her TV wasn’t working.

I stopped watching TV awhile ago and anyone can as stop watching TV well if they want. The key phrase there being that they need to want to stop. I think that people would be a lot better off in most cases if they simply trashed their TV and found other ways to entertain themselves, but I also know that there are some people out there that absolutely love their TV. My mom is one of those people.

I spend a good portion of the morning trying to fix the TV to no avail. When it became apparent that I didn’t think I could fix it, I asked her how long she was willing to live without a TV. She looked at me like I was sentencing her to solitary confinement. (Sidenote: a good way to determine if something is a priority is to start listing the other things that you pay for that you would be willing to give up for whatever it is you are discussing. If you know that you would give up most everything else, you can be fairly certain it’s a priority in your life. This is how I know TV is a priority to my mom). We needed to get a TV and fairly quickly.

The problem, of course, is when things need to be done in a hurry, it’s difficult to get a good price. There isn’t time to look for deals going on or to look into used options. I explained that if we could wait a week, we could get a much better deal, but that also wasn’t an option. So I started to look online and for what deals were available at close-by stores. I was about to go out and make a purchase when I had one final idea come to me.

The problem was that we couldn’t get the TV to turn on. The remote didn’t work. I changed the batteries, it still didn’t work. I tried the on/off switch on the TV and nothing happened. I tried a bunch of other buttons, but they didn’t work either. The thing was that I knew the TV was getting power because the red light indicating that it was turned off could be seen. I wondered if I simply unplugged the TV it might reset (much like turning off a computer when it freezes). I did and thankfully, it worked. The TV now seems to be working fine.

While I did spend almost the entire day fooling around with the TV and then looking for the best price for a quick purchase, in the end I ended up saving my mom a couple hundred dollars. I wish I would have thought of that solution sooner, but it was better late than never. We’ll see if the TV has any more problems, but it seems to be working fine at the moment…

After the entire TV ordeal, I decided that I would go for a hike on the 24th. I headed to Big Basin which is one of my favorite places to hike fairly close to where my mom lives. It’s a wonderful area with large redwood trees and a nice waterfall hike:

In the afternoon, I did head to the coffee shop as I needed to meet with a person who is building an iPhone app for one of our sites. I ended up using my coffee card to pay for the drink (I still have enough on it to do a few more times) although I do need to begin thinking about the alternatives to save money when the card runs out. An interesting thought was that if the main purpose of going is to meet with someone about the blogs (as was the case here), then I could deduct the cost as a business expense and still spend time working there even after the meeting was over. I’m not sure how often that opportunity would come up, but it is another creative way to keep my spending lower that i might be able to leverage.

For the two days I had a total of $1.50 in spending for postcards for the girls. I will need to go to the post office to buy stamps for the increase in postage for postcards so I can use the rest of the stamps I still have. The car miles were all deductible since it was a state park and part of the national parks blog I write. I feel pretty confident that I will end the month of January in a really good financial position (knock on wood) unless there is a major repair that needs to be done with the clicking clutch on the car.

Yesterday’s & Today’s Spending

Food: $0.00
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $1.50

Total: $1.50

Total Spending

Food: $18.52
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $19.00

Total: $37.52

Next article: Day 25 & 26: Car Repair Failure & Golden Gate Bridge

(Photo courtesy of tvanhoosear)

Doing More Than Is Expected: Day 22

January 23, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 2 Comments

This might sound a little strange, but I’m finding that if I want to save money and reduce my costs as part of this minimum wage challenge, one of the best ways to do that is to do more than people expect (it’s also a great way to get more business and earn more money). The thing is, even a little extra effort can pay of handsomely.

Today was the last day of the current house sitting gig. I normally clean the house because even after a few days, pet hair gets everywhere. The problem was that this time there were no pets and the place was extremely well maintained (this photo is before I did any cleaning).

There really wasn’t a lot that I could do to clean up the place since it was already clean. At this point, I had two choices. I could leave it as basically as it was with a light cleaning, or I could find something to clean (don’t get me wrong, I hate cleaning as much as the next person, but I also have a personal policy to try to leave places in better shape than when I arrived) I decided that since most people aren’t fond of cleaning showers, I would go ahead and clean that (it really wasn’t that dirty to start with, but I wanted to do something). Apparently, the effort made a good impression. This showed up on her Facebook feed.

My house-sitter got my shower cleaner than I’ve ever seen it before. Wow! That was one of the best welcome home gifts I could have ever received!

I also immediately received an email from her asking if I could house sit again in late May for about 5 days. I could have easily done nothing extra and I think that the owner still would have been pleased with the job that I’d done, but by doing an hour of extra work, I will likely save several hundred dollars in lodging fees with the extra opportunity to house sit. My guess is that if anyone else is ever looking for someone to house sit, she will recommend me which could potentially enable me to land even more house sitting jobs, and save even more money. I think my willingness to do a bit more than is expected will end up saving me a lot in the long run. I also think that house sitting is a great earning opportunity for a lot of people which they too easily dismiss.

Does doing the extra work pay off every time? No. There have been plenty of times when I have done extra work and it probably wasn’t even noticed by the owners (I don’t tell the owners what I have done, I just do it. Some people notice while others never do). I don’t do it because I expect anything from it, but simply because I know that when people return from a trip, the last thing they want to do is have someone else’s mess to clean up. That being said, I think my willingness to clean up and do a bit extra is why I do get a lot of referrals for house sitting jobs.

I usually also buy a bit of fruit and basics when I leave a house sitting job so that the owner doesn’t have to go grocery shopping when they get back if they don’t want to. I wasn’t able to do this as well. The owner has a pretty strict diet that she must follow and my guess is that anything I bought she probably couldn’t eat. I felt a bit bad about this, but it would have been stupid to buy food that she couldn’t eat. On the bright side, it meant that I had another no spend day.

Today’s Spending

Food: $0.00
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $0.00

Total: $0.00

Total Spending

Food: $18.52
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $17.50

Total: $36.02

Next article: Day 23 & 24: TV Panic

$5 Down The Drain: Day 20

January 21, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 16 Comments

Despite my sister insisting that going out for coffee isn’t a real date, I had plans to meet a friend of a friend who was supposedly “perfect” for me at a local coffee shop. I had a few reservations about this, but decided that there was no harm in trying to prove my sister wrong while having a good time on this minimum wage challenge.

We decided to meet at a coffee shop in the general area where she lived. I arrived about 15 minutes early (I have always been one of those on time type of people), ordered a cup of iced tea ($2.25) and found a table to sit at. I didn’t bring my computer since I figured that wouldn’t make the best impression, so I just people watched for those fifteen minutes. As the meeting time approached, I started to make eye contact with every woman who entered the door with a smile (which really sounds kind of creepy as I write this, but it wasn’t meant that way) in case it was her. The time of the date arrives, but she still hasn’t. Not a bit deal since a lot of people run late.

Half an hour after the time we are supposed to meet arrives and still no sign of her. I start second guessing myself. “Did I go to the right coffee shop? Did I have the time right?” An hour passes with still no sign, and I begin to wonder if something bad has happened to her on the way here — a car accident? I don’t have my computer (and I don’t own a phone) so there is no way to check. Do I stay in case she still makes it, or do I go back to get my computer to try to find out what has happened? I decide to give it a little more time.

Two hours pass and still nobody. I decide to get another drink (another $2.25) and give it one more hour. My reasoning (which isn’t always sound in situations like this) was that if I was super-late trying to get somewhere and I finally got there and the person had left, I would be disappointed (not surprised, but disappointed). I slowly sipped my drink and about 15 minutes before I had decided I’d leave, a woman walks up to me. She had been sitting for some time at a table across the room. She asks, “Are you waiting for someone? and when I nod, she says, “Honey, she isn’t going to show up” (it’s at this point I realize I probably waited to long).

So, I drive back and immediately get onto my computer to try to find out what happened. I’m surprised (and a little concerned) to see there are no email messages from her. I send an email explaining that I was sorry that I had missed her and that I hoped I hadn’t gone to the wrong place and that nothing terrible had happened. About a half hour later I received the following:

“I’m so sorry. I got invited to a 49ers party with some really good friends and I decided to go to that instead. I sent an email to you last night telling you. Didn’t you get it?”

I thought that maybe the email had gotten stuck in the spam folder, but did a search and there was never an email sent to me. What do you think? Did she think that she really sent me an email or was that just a polite excuse to let me know she had totally blown me off? I try to give people the benefit of the doubt when mistakes happen because I have made far more than my fair share of them, but I also try not to look like a complete sucker at the same time. I wrote back:

“I must have missed the email, but it’s not a problem. I’m just glad that it wasn’t something serious. I hope you had a wonderful time with your friends — it was a great game.”

And left it at that. I figure that if it really was a mistake and she wants to try to go out again, she’ll get back to me to set up a new time to meet. If not, then she has an easy way out without me asking and her having to make up an excuse why she can’t go.

The worst part was that I ended up wasting 4 hours of the day (when I include travel time) which I could have used to do some fun exploring outside, and I spent $4.50 that I really didn’t need to spend. I know it the scheme of things it really isn’t that costly, but under this challenge budget, it’s one day’s worth of food. Luckily, that was the only spending that I needed to do for the day.

For future reference if something like this happens again, how long is it appropriate to wait before it’s okay to leave when someone doesn’t show up? Let’s hope that this isn’t an indication of what dating on a budget is going to be like this year.

Today’s Spending

Food: $4.50
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $0.00

Total: $4.50

Total Spending

Food: $18.52
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $17.50

Total: $36.02

Next article: Day 21: Clicking Clutch and Ghost Redwoods

(Photo courtesy of TheeErin)

Cooking Injury: Day 17

January 19, 2013 By Jeffrey Strain 3 Comments

I really thought that I had graduated from cooking injuries now that I am doing a minimum wage challenge rather than a food challenge, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. I have two nice lumps on my head to prove it. You’re probably wondering “How the hell does someone get lumps on their head cooking?” which would seem to be impossible in most cases, but I assure you, I manage to find ways to defy the odds when it comes to things like this.

The house where I am house sitting has a fancier than normal kitchen and cooking area. Over the stove it has some contraption (I believe it’s an industrial-sized fan, but I could be wrong) which apparently makes it a better kitchen and some people may think looks really cool:

It seems, however, to have been built with someone who is 5′ 5″ tall in mind. Being 6′ 3″ this contraption is at my eye level:

I leaned over to look pasta sauce inside the pot I was stirring on a back burner, and when I went to stand up, slammed the back of my head into the underside of the fan contraption. The shock (and pain) instinctively had me reach for the back of my head to try to rub the pain away. This action brought my elbow down knocking over the boiling pasta pot on the front stove burner (while I did get a small burn from contact with the pot, the water and pasta luckily spilled in the other direction so I also didn’t end up with a burn from the boiling water). However, with the boiling water spilling, I instinctively jumped up and back, once again slamming my head into the fan contraption. After about 30 minutes of putting together rather creative word strings at the top of my lungs which could never be said on TV or the radio, I came to the conclusion that making pasta is much more dangerous than everybody lets on and settled on a sandwich instead.

After spending the last few days indoors in front of the computer, I really needed to get out. I decided to walk to Annadel CA State Park which ended up being about a 5 mile hike round trip. It was great to get out and the trees against the sky looked beautiful (and a reminder that I need to make sure that I get out often even when things are busy at the computer)

It ended up being another no spend day and it looks like being creative with the food allowed me to get through this house sitting without having to supplement as I originally thought I would have to do. I’ve managed to keep spending far below what I thought I would until this point, but I think that I will need the cushion since I don’t have any house sitting jobs lined up for February and that will give a much better indication of whether or not I will be able to continue to stay within my budget.

Today’s Spending

Food: $0.00
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $0.00

Total: $0.00

Total Spending

Food: $7.39
Car: $0.00
Housing: $0.00
Travel: $0.00
Misc: $16.15

Total: $23.54

Next article: Day 18: Near Money Disaster