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Retirement means new emphasis on thrift
My recent exit from the work force has caused me to become more creative about finances. With a fixed monthly income near zero, I’ve had to modify my spending-and-earning mindset as though I were altering clothes after a significant weight shift.
For starters, my husband, Fred, and I are seizing opportunities to poach free meals.
Last month during crappie season, we kept and cleaned two full stringers of fish that previously would have received catch-and-release reprieves. And while, in my earlier career as a reporter, I was never very good at digging up dirt, I’ve discovered a knack for unearthing bait worms, doubtless saving a bundle in minnow and cricket expenses.
A few weeks back, a free ticket and the prospect of some no-cost Neptune’s bounty enticed us to a local seafood shop where the backyard boasted newly erected tents, tables and live entertainment in the form of a keyboard vocalist and a woodcarver who’d brought an extensive display of his wares.
Simmering atop a big gas burner was a stockpot of fluid that resembled dishwater with floating diapers. I flashed on Mercer Mayer’s blue ocean of burbly goo but was told the cauldron actually contained packets of the proprietor/chef’s special crustacean boil against the shrimp feast I’d soon enjoy.
But he hadn’t shown up an hour after the appointed starting time, supposedly having made an unscheduled junket to a neighboring town to help a cousin with car trouble. He’d arrive any moment bearing vats of world-class gumbo, we were assured.
He was still a no-show 45 minutes later when a disgruntled ticket holder discovered an outdoor cooler with a case of oysters and began shucking them with his Swiss Army knife. Fred and I slurped down our allotted two-each oysters without such niceties as lemon squirts, much less napkins, and left.
As a further cost-reduction measure, he and I have switched shopping venues from malls and stores in favor of the yard-sale circuit.
Although we’ve netted such booty as a $2 crab net (with most of its mesh still intact!), Fred’s conscience has thwarted other bargains. Twice now, he’s told tag-sale cashiers that their sticker prices for certain sporting goods weren’t nearly high enough and has subsequently paid double the originally asked-for amounts — a marketing approach that would drive my other garage-sale companion absolutely nuts. Sue the Shrewd can always wrangle merchandise markdowns at yard emporiums and sometimes the harried entrepreneurs give her stuff without charge to get her to leave.
At first, Fred was skeptical about my scheme to earn extra income by capitalizing on the metals market spike. He grudgingly went along when I gathered up an array of earrings with lost mates and mismatched flatware and offered it to a local coin dealer, who was supposedly paying top dollar for scrap gold and silver.
It did feel sort of peculiar presenting the merchant with a sandwich bag that held a gold tooth I’d been given among my late aunt’s effects. But I got $15 for it, a payment that probably would have had Auntie M yanking it out herself, had gold been worth as much during her lucrative coupon-clipping career on Earth.
The scrap-metal windfall came right as we were doing some spring landscaping. Its timing couldn’t have been better since Fred, with a discerning eye to retirement scrimping, had just announced his plan to cut gardening costs by propagating new flowers from our existing plants.
Reminding me yet again why it’s more fun to spend time with him than to spend my former breadwinner money, he said, “I thought we’d start with ‘hydgraniums,’ Anybody can grow those.”
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