Category — bumblefucked wisdom

With the price of gas being almost literally arm and a leg I think that fuel consumption is likely to be on a lot of people’s minds. Tons of bloggers are giving tips on how to cut down your fuel costs. Apparently, the easiest way to do that is to slow down. An article on CNN stated that “every 10 miles per hour you drive over 60 is like the price of gasoline going up about 54 cents a gallon.” Yikes. As someone that regularly drives around 70mph or a bit more, that is, well, tragic news.

As the gas prices have been creeping up I have been slowing down. The speed limit on the interstate here is a disappointing 65mph. And you do not have to go too far before it changes to 55 mph. Guess who obeys the speed limit now? Me!

There are a lot of cops here with very sneaky hiding places. So, this slowing down things has likely saved me more than just gasoline. I have avoided speeding tickets and there have been times recently where I came up on a sneaky cop and knew I would have been toast if the gas prices were better.

So, that got me to thinking. If loads of other people out there are slowing down as well to save on gas, what are the cops doing? I suspect they are writing less tickets for speeding now. Wonder if they are bored?

Last Thursday I signed up for a free trial of Rhapsody. I only did so because it was a special offer I got in a MyPoints email and I am all about getting free stuff through MyPoints. If you are not already a member of MyPoints, what are you waiting for? Join MyPoints NOW! Seriously. You can get free gas cards from them, among other things. In fact, that Rhapsody free trial I did gave me half the number of points needed for one $10 gas card from MyPoints. But that is beside the point.

With Rhapsody you get a two week free trial. I decided to cancel it today while I was thinking about it. I did not want to forget and end up with a charge on my credit card - because you have to give a credit card for the free trial to start. And supposedly you get to use the account until the trial period is up.

Prior to signing up for Rhapsody I had done a free trial of Napster’s online music service. I preferred Napster when it was a file sharing site When I was using Napster I noticed that a lot of the things that I was looking for just plain were not available. I wanted to hear the Andrea Corr solo album - not there. I wanted to hear the latest Beth Hart album - not there. I wanted to hear the latest Aly & AJ album - it was there! But wait - only 3 of the songs were available for full listening. The remainder of the album just offered 30-second clips and you had to pay $0.99 per song for the entire song. Balls to that.

With Rhapsody I was able to find the things that I could not find on Napster. So, score for Rhapsody!

Both sites offered downloadable software as well as allowing you to play the music from their site. I tried out both options with each service. Napster would sometimes get a bit sluggish when searching for what I wanted. I did not have that problem with Rhapsody. However, with Rhapsody I did have the problem of the audio buffering, only it was more like skipping. That was a real problem. Of course, that could have been contributed to the memory hogging programs I was using at the time.

When it came time to cancel, Napster was a piece of cake. If you are still in your free trial period, you can cancel without needing to call anyone. That is a real bonus. I was not so fortunate with Rhapsody. Not only do you have to call Rhapsody to cancel, but actually finding the number was quite a chore. So, if you need to cancel Rhapsody, you just call 1-866-597-5465. Be warned though that their customer service is clearly farmed out to India, which was a little frustrating. However, I was pleased with how quickly I was able to cancel.

Both services state that even if you cancel before the trial period is up that you can still access the service. With Napster, this was totally true. With Rhapsody, not so much. My trial period with Rhapsody does not end until May 9th but my access is already disabled.

While both Rhapsody and Napster had their positives and negatives, I think that Napster came out the winner in the end. But I would not pay for either service personally. Get a 14-Day Free Trial to Rhapsody if you are interested.

We eat a lot of salads in the Bumblefucked household. I am more of an iceberg person and Riley is more of a fancy pants lettuce person. So, she prefers to buy the triple washed lettuce packs that have fancy pants lettuce in them. I see why she prefers it - there is nothing worse than having a salad where all of your lettuce is holding water. So, I get it, I do.

Yesterday I was at Kroger and they had some of those triple washed lettuce packs marked down to $0.99 to move them out. We both needed lettuce and the iceberg looked horrible, and was more than $0.99, so I grabbed a couple of the triple washed lettuce packs.

When I got home I made a salad. The first piece of lettuce I pulled out had a nice dead spider in the fold. Yuck. I told Riley. She then told me how she never washes that lettuce because it is supposed to be triple washed.  Triple washed? I don’t think so. There is no way a spider of this size could have made it through three washings. It wasn’t huge, but it was about the size of a thumbtack.

I chalk it up to a fluke. Maybe it made it’s way inside after the washing? I expect a bug or two from iceberg, but not this.

So, today I get out the same lettuce pack. I take out a piece of the lettuce. Guess what? Two bugs! They were small gnats, but gnats none the less.

Next time I’ll stick to iceberg.

Here at Bumblefucked we have been fortunate enough to make it into a few carnivals. Thus far two of those carnivals have felt it necessary to censor the blog name. One made us known as “Bumble****ed” or something silly like that while the other simply called us “Bumble.”

I find the censorship more offensive than any profanity. (Never mind the fact that I would never call a site “bumble”, wtf?)

It is also quite absurd.

Profanity in a word does not make that work profanity by association. For instance, the word “embarrass” is never thought of as profanity, even though it clearly has the word “ass” in it.

In fact, choosing to clearly censor the word makes it more profanity than not as it makes it seem taboo or something.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled programming here at “Bumble”

It seems to me that in the quest to pay off debt and spend less than you earn, something important gets forgotten by a lot of people. In fact, it is something that I overlooked until a few months ago.

How much is your time worth?

This is something that is important to consider.  And it directly relates to paying down debt, being frugal and so on. You see, in the not too distant past we decided against renting a washer and dryer for our apartment. The cost when I had check on it was 30-something dollars plus tax each month. Then there was also the cost of using more water. After discussing it we decided that it would be cheaper to go every so often to the ‘wash and wait’ or try to do our laundry at family member’s homes for free. So, for the entire duration of that apartment lease that is exactly what we did.

We forgot to consider the cost of that decision. Sure, it saved $30-plus dollars a month on the rental fee as well as the higher water bill. Most months we did laundry only once a month and typically at the home of a family member that we were visiting. The months that we did not do our laundry for free, we spent an average of $15.00. There is no denying that we saved money on paper.

But what we saved on paper we lost in time. You see, those trips to the ‘wash and wait’ ended up being an average of about three hours each time.  That was three hours that could only be spent waiting in a dingy chair. Sure, it allowed us to catch up on some reading; but that was only when it was not incredibly loud in there or when someone did not try to engage you in conversation. And those times that we did laundry at the home of a family member - well, that meant less time spent with them and more time doing laundry.

When we moved into our new apartment a while back, we were presented with the option of renting a washer and dryer again. Like an idiot, I hesitated at first. Then I had the epiphany above and realized our time was definitely worth $30-something a month.

Just because you take a mini weekend vacation does not mean that you get to stop being frugal and whatnot. In fact, spending all of that money makes me want to be more frugal. Hence the photo below.

Yes, that is a roll of TP. You see, I heart Cottonelle TP, but there are cheap options. So, in the quest to pay down this debt I have been buying some cheaper TP. And it pains me (and my arse). But in the end it saves some cash which pays down the debt. Hooray!

Well, as you might have guessed, I got this roll of toilet paper, which I have since dubbed the “$40 roll of toilet paper,” from the hotel that we stayed at on a recent mini-trip. I am not going to lie, when I saw that it was Cottonelle my arse sang with glee and I knew it would be going into our travel bag for the trip home. I even considered taking some extras from the maid cart.

And when the hotel bill was slipped under the door and I saw that there were about $40 in “taxes” on the bill, I really wished I had swiped some more from the maid cart.

Here in the Bumblefucked household we have been trying to live on a budget for a few months. After tracking spending for a while I came up with the following categories and target max spend amounts for our monthly spending:

• eats = $300
• utilities = $300
• car = $400
• gas = $125
• household = $150
• rent = $625
• medical = $400
• debt min pymts =  $435

Student loans are currently in deferment, so they are not included. And we are in full debt annihilation mode, so debt payments will be more $435. There are also some variable categories that appear some months, like ‘gifts.’

So, we use a budget more as a guide instead of something that is written in stone. And I think that is a good idea as sometimes you have things happen and you need to be able to handle that. For instance, last month I happened on an amazing sale on meats at the grocery store, which put us over the food budget by about $10.

I think it is important to have some wiggle room in your budget too. Our freezer is still pretty well stocked with meat for at least a week’s worth of meals. And we have some food in the pantry, so our only need items from the grocery store this week are fresh fruits and salad stuff.

Today we used some of that wiggle room though in the food budget.

We were across town at a doctor’s appointment and drove by a Meijer (like a SuperTarget) that was going out of business. So, we stopped in and discovered that all of the grocery stuff was at least 10% off! So, we stocked up on the stuff that was a good price, even though we did not need it. Some of the stuff we got was even 30% off!

I don’t like to spend $100 on food on one week. And in the end it might make us go over the food budget for the month. But the savings we got will make having that wiggle room worth it in the end!