Ways to S T R E T C H that Dollar!

I know Rick's gonna blog this too, it was just one of those days and we talked about it all evening. All day today we jumped from one money-saving project to another and saved - and accomplished - a lot.

We don't usually know how we'll spend our Saturdays and today was no exception. I have a lot to do in my back yard to make it work for our "Big Event" coming up in a couple month (Rick says "Wedding! It's called a wedding!") and we were kind of intending to get to some of that. But I had people coming to look at the van around 9 so we got ready for that first. Once they left (said they'd let us know - that would be a "no") I cut Rick's hair, not a big savings but a savings nonetheless. Then Rick said he wanted to have his tires switched over to some new rims he bought about a month ago. I suggested a junkyard to do the work. So he called around, first some tire shops, they were anywhere from $60 to over $100 to do the job (that would be before tax), then he called a junkyard and found it would be $10 per tire. So he headed out to have that done. The first place he went was inundated with Mexicans waiting for the same good deal. Eventually, though, he got the job done for that $40 ("including" tax) by a woman at the neighboring junkyard.

In the meantime I was looking at rings. I went to a jewelry store to see what Rick was looking at yesterday. This was the third jeweler I've gone to. I was beginning to see what things were going for and that the yellow gold that I prefer is not easy to find in today's market. So I decided to check out the local pawn shops. When I got to the second one and had a sales girl there to help me I questioned how the whole thing worked. They have a staff jeweler that checks everything out and can give a fair description of what they have for sale. They have a 30 day money back guarantee so you can take your purchase to an independent jeweler for an appraisal. They had lots of yellow gold. And when I found a ring that was similar to the ring I was wearing I found it sold for a third of the price and then was half off that! I found a ring that matched the price of the original ring Rick bought and it was double the total diamond carat weight! That was it - we were shopping for a ring at Super Pawn!

When we got back together I told him of my discovery and we went shopping. We hit 2 different Super Pawns and I found a ring I liked at the second one. It ended up being a full carat and the seller kept dropping the price until it was the same as what we had just spent on a 1/5 carat (which was on sale as well, about 1/3 off it's original price) and is beautiful - I feel like a queen wearing it. Some of you will disagree but it suits me very well, it has everything I want and doesn't have what I don't want. We ended up spending about a third of what we were headed for and I like this far better than anything we could afford at the jeweler. Woohoo!

After Rick got back from the junkyard but before we went ring shopping his buddy Steve came over and brought an ethernet interface for his PDA, like a modem I believe, to be hardwired to the internet if necessary. He got 2 somehow so gave one to Rick. We went to Fred Meyer and Rick returned the rings he bought that I picked out a few days ago, then we decided to go to Taco Bell for dinner. We ended up back at Rick's watching a movie that Rick had copied off a library DVD or a friend's, free movie.

OK, to some people this would all be a lot of work or unnecessary searching. But it's one of the things we have in common. We're both frugal. We don't mind spending money, but not more than is necessary.

And now I got the *bling* baby!