Wacky Wednesday . . . Be Wacky, Be Frugal

One of the definitions of wacky is being crazy or silly. Many people might say that being frugal takes some wacky tendencies. Sometimes being frugal requires that you be wacky or silly. It definitely requires that you be creative. Not being frugal is easy. You don’t watch where your money goes. You don’t look for sales. You just go out and buy what you want with little or no research into the price or product. But, really, what is the thrill in that?

If you have never read The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn you must check it out at your local library or buy it at Half Price books. Some of the information is outdated but some of it is still applicable to today and it has some seriously wacky, frugal ideas in it. You should also check out Clark Howard - he always has great ideas on how to save money and free downloads of his show as well.

I will have to share a frugal story for you that was definitely wacky.

When my husband and I were going through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University (highly recommend by the way), we just moved into a house (pre-Dave of course). Anyway, we needed a refrigerator badly. We could not afford to pay hardly anything so I looked everywhere. Finally, I found a $33.00 refrigerator on eBay. It was listed as “Garage Refrigerator” and it was. Well, could you believe it, we won the auction (I guess no one else needed a garage refrigerator). We went to pick up our appliance, and it did need some cleaning, but we cleaned it and we lived with that refrigerator until my dad gave us his old one – which was MUCH nicer than the one we had.

And our garage refrigerator is now, sitting in our garage.

I told that story to tell you this, sometimes you have to be wacky and creative to reach your goals. You can’t always have the newest, nicest side-by-side refrigerator (I’m still dreaming of that by the way). But you can always find something to fit your need.

So, what wacky things have you done in the name of frugality?

Picture from www.theartoftrent.com

-Gretchen