I bought some gas early this week so I could truck my butt out to the boonies for a corporate conference in the countryside. It was actually pretty great as I got some excellent training for my resume that directly impacts my project. All meals were paid for out there and I was covered for mileage and tolls. I’m about to get back $107 in reimbursement.

Yesterday, I spent $5 on coffee, a bag of chips and a lottery ticket for kicks. ($132 million jackpot. Why not?) My co-worker bought me a hotdog and a Diet Coke as a treat for lunch from Costco. (There’s a running joke in the office about buying one another lunches for losing bets. She was buying someone a hotdog so she said she’d get one for me too. She’s very nice.)

Today, I’ll be buying lunch on my way into the office. Then tonight, I’ll be buying groceries for a camping trip this weekend. If I am lucky, I will spend less than $50 total this week. Maybe beer will make it a few dollars more.

Not too bad this week. I was able to also kick over another $200 to my credit cards. That will be $1050 I threw at them for August.

Time to try something different with spending. Now that I’ve moved to mostly debit and cash for my daily spending on lunch, gas and whatnots, I’m having a hard time tracking spending again. I am going to have to write stuff down once more.

I can tell that most of what I’m buying is lunches out. But I’m not disciplining myself on it. Usually I can eat lunch for less than $6.00, but lately I’ve been lax in my oversight. I’ve had lunch for $9 one day and $7 another.

Part of the problem is dining out with other people and getting what they want to eat. The plethora of options out there is making sort of crazy. I thought I’d have nothing to eat around the industrial park I’m in, but slowly I’ve realized that there are lots of options, but many of them are much more expensive than I’d like. I can’t eat a $6 club sandwich or reuben every day from the delis around the office. Sometimes it’s so little that I end up with a bag of chips, which ends up being a dollar or more extra.

If you haven’t tried writing down what you’re spending, give it a try. I go through this exercise periodically when I’m wondering where the money’s going. It’s worth doing, even if it’s only a week.

I’m sorry I didn’t post earlier today, I’ve been in training camp for work and without email access during the day. I’ll probably be spotty on the posts for the next few days for that reason. I’ll be lucky if I get to post at night.

The upside? I’ll have three No Spend Days. (Well, almost. I did fill up on gas on Monday night, but arguably that is mileage expense reimbursable this week, same for the tolls I spent.) One of the great things about training events are that meals are provided.

The other upside is that I got an iPod shuffle for free. It’s too bad since I hardly ever use the Nano I won as a blog prize a few years ago. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl and see if this suits my lifestyle any better than the Nano. I like that it clips to my clothes while I’m running.

Now, to respond to Deepali’s comment:

My problem is getting to the actual cleaning. I always find something else to do. How do you get ruthless about doing it?

I use a trick I learned from Stephanie Winston’s old book Getting Organized. I’m surprised it’s still in print, but I read it in high school many years ago and I still use this one trick all the time. I highly recommend this book for anyone who needs help getting organized.

She says to set an egg timer for 15 minutes. Clean hard for the full 15. If you want to stop when the timer goes off, then stop. If you want to keep on going, then keep going. I find that I can kick off a good solid 30 minutes of cleaning this way, if not a whole 60 minutes. It works for me because I can do the 15 minutes and stop guilt free, or keep going once I’m started. I used this religiously when I was an admin assistant because I hated filing. I would file in 15 minute increments once or twice a day and usually, that got it done. I even told my boss to try it since I wasn’t going to file his stuff for him. And it worked for him too.

DC’s District Sample Sale. It’s Tuesday, September 9th.

The District Sample Sale is Washington’s biggest and best high-end bargain shopping event. The evening features 20 of Washington’s best designer clothing and shoe boutiques selling their end-of-season wares at liquidation-level prices, with many previewing their upcoming season looks at exclusive event prices. The DSS also features cocktails, hors d’oeuvres from our participating restaurants, a fashion-focused silent auction, raffle, goodie bag (with VIP tickets) and more.

We’re an all-volunteer organization with 100% of our profits donated to our chosen charity each season.

This fall it’s the DC Rape Crisis Center, but past charities have been Martha’s Table, Suited for Change, and Miriam’s House. The sale’s organizers are committed to helping past recipients as well as the current selection. I think it’s great that they’re making a long-term commitment to support these charities.

I’m not really in the mood to buy high-end clothing right now, but a little mix and mingling might be good for my soul at the moment. Plus I really need to get out of the house for a sophisticated evening. There’s only so much grungy hipster a person can take. Factoring in food and drink, $40 doesn’t sound so bad. The opera always costs more than that.

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A couple more tips:

1. If you have a junk mail email account, use it to sign up for free events with free food, drink, entertainment. I went to an art gallery party with free drinks, good music, decent art for the price of a subway ride to and fro. All I had to do was get marketing email from Toyota about their hipster cars. (Which I’m rapidly falling out of their demographic, but they don’t need to know that! Or maybe I’m already out of it…)

2. Get an old bike and ride it everywhere.

3. Give up your car. My best friend from college is a ‘professional bus rider’. During her post-college courtship, her husband called her this because she hadn’t had a car since she left high school. She walked, took the bus, got a ride or rented a car. With new car sharing programs like Zipcar, she didn’t get a car till she got married, i.e. shares her husband’s. My friend was very creative and went through the university’s program to certify drivers for student events. With that, she’d ferry people around on student activity events like dim sum in the local Chinatown district, trips to nearby cities, etc. The student activities budget of the university paid for the van, insurance and gas, so all we had to do was buy our own food on trips.

Greetings and welcome readers of The Frugal Duchess! Thanks for clicking through!

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I’m in the midst of a project today so I wasn’t going to post, but I couldn’t ignore The Frugal Duchess. I am a long time admirer of Sharon’s and had the wonderful opportunity to meet her in DC this summer while she was on book tour. I encourage everyone to go to a reading and meet her in person. She is wonderful and kind.

Sorry for the dry reports. I’ve got the summertime blahs when it comes to blogging.

I ended up with nothing in my wallet on Friday afternoon. I admit that I went to the supermarket to buy some groceries for lunch on Wednesday and used my debit card. But I also ended up skipping lunch on Thursday and just snacking on stuff I bought the day before. That will make money go further.

Thursday night:
Dinner at Austin Grill $15.

Friday:
Boyfriend bought dinner at Chevy’s for us. No idea what the check was.

Saturday:
Boyfriend bought me a bagel and cream cheese with ice tea for lunch
Dinner at home
Gas for $31 - Filled boyfriend’s car with a half tank since he drove us to an event in the burbs just for my friends and he picked up dinner the night before.
Evening - Metro $2.70 round-trip, free vodka drinks at event in exchange for marketing information

Sunday:
Lunch: Boyfriend bought us bagels and drinks and we ate in the park with the dog $14
Dinner - wasn’t very hungry, ate leftovers

The only bad thing was that Thursday night I was really car sick going to Austin Grill and never ate my dinner. I did a take out box and the food sat at home, uneaten for the rest of the weekend. I picked at it when I was feeling sick on Sunday night just to put something in my stomach. I think the rest of it will be edible on Monday night.

I’m learning how to be more ruthless throwing stuff away. I’ve watched my boyfriend clean up his house. He’s extremely tidy. He doesn’t keep paper around. He shreds it or throws it away immediately. He does not sweat the small stuff. I think the only receipts he saves are for taxes. If it’s not tax deductible, returnable or otherwise important, out it goes. It makes me wonder why I keep every single damned receipt I ever got.

While I’ve been happy in some instances to go back 4 years to dig up a receipt for something, I think I’ve only ever done that to research the original cost of an item for my blog. So why on earth do I keep it? I just don’t know and now that I know I don’t know, I can throw it out. (Or file it away so I can throw it out in 3 years?)

There are a great many things I’ve been looking at in my apartment, wondering why I have them or have so many. But that’s a revisit of some of my old hoarding posts.

Questions to ask when cleaning stuff up:
1. Are you going to need this within a month?
2. If you get rid of it, will you regret it? Why?
3. Can you replace it and will that cost you a lot?
4. What is the utility of this item? Has its usefulness expired?
5. Can you sell it or donate it?
6. Do you want to give it away on Freecycle or send it to the dumpster?
7. Are you really going to do something with it? If so, you have 30 days. Do not lie to yourself here and make up a future possible reason for something.
8. If I were moving cross-country, would I take this with me? (Done it twice and it does crystalize priorities.)

I find those seven questions to be useful when I’m feeling merciless about cleaning and throwing stuff away. What kinds of questions do you ask yourself when you are cleaning up?

I just ran some numbers. If I sold my condo and cleared a bit of cash, say $15K, even with my salary, I’d hardly be able to upgrade to a full one-bedroom in a nicer part of town. I worked up some numbers with the Kiplinger’s Real Estate calculators. I used the one to find out how much can I borrow and one to find out how much can I spend on housing.

The reasonable figure I came up with was buy a place for $279k, and put 5% down. With taxes, PMI and home insurance, that’s about $2030 a month for the mortgage payment. Factor in monthly maintenance cost/HOA fee, utilities, I’d barely be able to cover the cost of a home like this.

The reason is that with a full complement of saving in my 401k plan (capped at a theoretical $16k for 2009), plus some money in the company ESPP, an HSA (capped at $2400), and a little for a Roth 401k, there would be very little left for a mortgage payment. I am not sure I’d want to pay more than 50% of my take home pay on a mortgage. That seems like excessive saving, doesn’t it? But when you’re in your 30’s and undersaved for retirement like I am, I think supercharging my saving is a good idea.

I just don’t understand the DC housing market. How can people live here, save and have kids all at the same time? Unless you really are a K Street lobbyist raking in the dough, it’s nigh impossible to live here and raise children all at the same time. (But is my dream of San Francisco any better? Hardly.)

My other strategy is to stay put and ride things out, even though there are things going afoot at my condo that displease me and could end up being worse if I wait. (Action is sometimes better than inaction.) I could easily see thing going to hell in a handbasket and getting a special one-time assessment of $2-4k next year for major property repairs.

I could rent my apartment out and find an alternative place to live, but the rent I could collect is less than what I’d have to pay so it’s a negative cash flow situation.

The last strategy is to sell and move to an apartment with a roommate. However, with the way my mortgages and HOA fee work out, I’d be hard pressed to find a great living situation for rent and utilities for less than what I pay now. And great would have to mean a not crappy neighborhood where I wouldn’t have to struggle to park my car. Now that’s a joke in busy Arlington.

One of my girlfriends lives in a one-bedroom with all utilities for $950/mo, but she has no elevator, a walk up 2 flights of stairs after a 20′ flight of stairs just to reach her building from the parking lot, a crowded parking lot and crappy neighbors. Should I go in the opposite direction, I’d be paying the same amount as my current housing cost for one-bedroom rent with utilities included, and extra for limited parking. But the building would have package service and a bigger laundry facility with nicer views. And likely the rent would actually be about $200 more than my current housing cost since it’s not rent controlled and could easily balloon after 12 months.

So really I should shut up and put up with the mess that is my condo, keep my head down, pay off the credit cards and keep my savings plan intact.

Every once in a while, it’s nice to get a cold hard reality check, run the numbers, and say to yourself, “Well this glass is certainly half-fulll, but really, at least it’s not half-full of poison.”

I know I have to get out. This place is going to the birds. I ran into a neighbor of mine and frankly, there is a situation afoot which I do not like. I don’t mind so much the foreclosures and the low price being set on one of the condos in the building. If that was the only problem, no big deal, I could renovate and rent out.

What really concerns me are some other structural issues with the building I live in, and some of the machinations of the HOA president. (Telling another condo owner to whom she should rent.) He doesn’t like me anyway, but he really has no right whatsoever to tell someone they shouldn’t rent to a responsible tenant just because the guy complains (legitimately) about what needs fixing. (And often does it himself, for free.)

I got the skinny from this neighbor of mine and it worries me quite a lot. I need to find a way to renovate and sell quickly. My kitchen and the entire apartment needs to be done over, but I will barely cover my costs in this falling market. If I wait longer though, I will get screwed with a potential one-time assessment cost.

I love the concept of my apartment, but right now, I’m not loving my building, nor the HOA, and haven’t been in the last 2.5 years I’ve been here. This is all very great news as I celebrate 4 years in the place. (As of last weekend. Yay for me!)

I’ve been looking at home listings and I still think I can get about $150K for my apartment, but I would have to really spruce up the place first. I’d have to put it on credit cards, move out and pay for a sublet/rent and carry the mortgage. That kind of scares me since I liquidated all my savings in the first place for the bathroom repair. (I should stop calling it a renovation, because it was well and truly damaged.)

UGH. I’m so obsessed at the moment with paying down my credit cards that I’m not sure if I should stop all the savings I’m doing or not. (This kind of expense goes way beyond belt tightening and into needing $15K ASAP.)

Remember, Cash is freedom. Don’t forget that.