frugal underground

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The Frugal Duchess says of herself, “I’m another spoiled writer, with fine tastes and a small budget.” Sounds like my kind of girl! The Duchess’ real name is Sharon Harvey Rosenberg, and her website, found at sharonhr.blogspot.com, is one of the blogs on the ‘net if you’re interested in money-saving tips. The tagline? “A fun, frugal & fashionable way to save money & live well.” After checking out her site, I think that this tagline is extremely fitting.

One of the best things about the Frugal Duchess and her blog is her ability to make a boring subject interesting. For example, when writing a post on money management, she cites her kids’ lemonade stand and talks about the need to love what you do, plan for the rough times, and market yourself.

Her posts are also easy to read, because she organizes them in quick-to-scan bullet points. For example, in her post about Converting Clutter into Space, Tim & Money, Sharon takes six tips and teaches readers to cut clutter using resource links and step-by-step instructions.

If I had to say anything bad about the Frugal Duchess and her blog, I’d be hard pressed to give my critical comments. She does repeat the information about her different shops and books at the end of each post, which gets a little repetitive when you’re scrolling through the great content, so these things would better serve as a sidebar. However, I’m willing to overlook this because the posts she makes are thought provoking and original.

I’d recommend Sharon’s blog to anyone who lives the frugal lifestyle! I can’t wait to see the next piece of advice she has for those of us concerned with saving money.

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Today’s featured blog is not specifically about financial frugality, but I think you’ll enjoy it. Neat Living is Ariane Benefit’s contribution to a simpler home and lifestyle. Here’s how she describes her blog:

Neat Living is about simplifying, letting go of clutter, organizing, “ThinkBuying,” resisting consumerism, getting healthy, working with passion, charity, ethics, and having time to enjoy your life.

The great thing for you and me is that she provides a ton of great information on her blog that can save your money and your sanity. Like I said, it’s not always about financial frugality, but there’s definitely an element of that (particularly when it comes to over-consumption and clutter).

The bigger picture here is of frugality as a way of life. When applied to the kitchen, it might mean clearing out the gadgets you don’t use anymore and donating them to someone who will love them. When applied to exercise, it might mean finding something you can do simply and close-to-home rather than spending a ton of money on a gym membership you won’t use. When applied to gift giving, it might mean giving a gift of time or an experience rather than a trinket which will add to the clutter.

Ariane has loads of good ideas, and posts fairly regularly (more regularly than me lately!), so check her site out and see if it’s something you’d like to subscribe to.

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I am part of a group called LinkedIn Bloggers, which is, not surprisingly, made up of bloggers who are members of LinkedIn. It’s a great discussion group and I’ve made some good contacts and learned some very useful things through it.

One of the more recent developments within the group is a weekly “blog boost.” The idea is that each week, one members’ blog is randomly chosen, and other members are encouraged to write a post about it. There are several benefits: first, we get to know other members of the group better; second, we (and our readers) are exposed to a blog we might not otherwise find; and third, it increases the profile of the individual blogger and the whole group. I think it’s a great idea. However, this will only be my second time participating.

Why? Well, I believe very firmly in the idea of staying on-topic. I don’t have a lot of time to read blogs, so when I go to one that I know I want to spend time reading, I am disappointed if that time is essentially wasted on a topic that doesn’t interest me. I assume most people feel that way. As brilliant as I think the “blog boost” is, the real question (for me, as an individual blogger) is whether it serves the purpose of my blog and my readers. Most of the randomly selected blogs, thus far, have not had much relevance to my blog topics. Given that fact, I was pretty excited when, this week, the random blog is a personal finance blog.

Let me introduce you to “Personal Money Tips“. This was the first time I’ve come across this blog, but I won’t be surprised if I see it mentioned frequently in the next few months. Why? Well, it’s all about the content. This blog is focused on providing useful, and usable, information to the average person.

Personal finance blogs are an interesting combination of “personal” and “finance”, and each one finds a different balance between the two; some are mostly personal, with stories and “what I learned” lessons; some are mostly finance, with the focus on numbers, concepts, and news. Personal Money Tips falls right smack in the middle. The current “series” is devoted to defining financial terms that will be useful to average people. However, the author also talks about his personal perspective on choices such as tithing.

Interestingly, the author, James, is from Malaysia. He says, “I don’t claim to be an expert in money but am getting better and wiser along the way. As I’m always curious about how someone achieve something, I’m always on the look out on why some strategies work and why [they don't].” I think this natural curiosity is one of the blog’s biggest strengths; its weaknesses, in my opinion, are the sometimes-obtrusive ads and minor punctuation and grammar issues. However, I’ll gladly overlook those qualms in the interest of reading James’ useful articles.

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Yesterday I came across a relatively new (December ‘05) blog devoted to the art of frugality. I was looking at the Relevant book store and my eye was drawn (of course!) to “Cheap Ways to Tie the Knot” by Cara Davis (I should clarify: I’m not getting married, I’m just cheap). As I read through the description, I was delighted to find a web address (not linked, go figure) to Cara’s blog, Cheap Ways To …

This is good stuff, folks. Cara has a unique set of topics, and every one of her titles and exerpts made me want to read the whole post (so maybe this isn’t a great thing if you have stuff to get done right now). Every blogger has their own kind of posts, and Cara’s are interesting and practical. I found the post “Coupon Fraud” somewhat surprising, as I had no idea this was going on. I also appreciated Cara’s reflection on ethics. Frugality doesn’t exist in a vaccuum, so it’s good to see a holistic approach.

I’ve added Cara’s blog to my sidebar, and I encourage you all to check it out. I hope you enjoy it as much as I am.

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I’m trying a new toy. BlogExplosion, ever the innovators, have created a cool tool called “Rent my blog”. It’s kind of like some of the ad programs (Adbrite?), but it’s a person-to-person thing, and the whole point is to promote your site by helping others promote their sites. This takes the form of a cute little screenshot. You can see it on the right sidebar, probably on the second screen down.

I was kind of curious about how it all worked, so I set it all up and created an offer. I was pleased to receive a couple of bids relatively quickly, and actually all were good quality blogs so it was kind of hard to choose. After looking over them, though, I decide that The Global Perspective would probably be of the most interest to those of you who read this blog.

The Global Perspective is a site run by Daniel M. Harrison. He’s an MBA student in Oslo with some interesting experience in corporate finance. To give you a quick idea of what his site is about, his post categories are Academia, Current Affairs, Finance, Organizational Behaviour. In other words, a more corporate take on business and finance (as opposed to my mostly home-focus). Daniel writes very well and makes some excellent points in the posts I’ve read so far. Definitely worth the time to go and browse around a bit.

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You may remember that I wanted to participate in the Ten Dollar Challenge. I actually haven’t forgotten about it; I’ve been trying to come up with a brilliant idea. Of course, as Ramit points out eloquently, that’s not really a great plan. So I’ve decided to stop pondering and start acting.

Initially, I thought of doing a site I’ve had in mind for a while. It’s a review site of sorts, and I’m not going to go into too much detail since I’m still thinking to do it and you’ll be able to see it in action shortly. However, it isn’t well-suited by itself to the $10 project because it will cost me $10 to set the site up right (domain + hosting) which leaves me with $0 for buying the products to review (before people start sending them to me for free, you know, begging me to say nice things to my millions of readers…). So here’s the modified mediocre idea I’m going to work with.

I’ve recently started a new hobby (knitting) which is actually a fairly expensive hobby (of course I find ways to work around that). But the fact that there are many accessories and necessarily the need to frequently buy yarn makes it a great potential moneymaker for a blog (blogs that feature purchasable topics get ads that pay). The main thing is that it’s something I’m interested in and will enjoy writing, because without the writing, it’s dumb to even think of ads. So my $10 will go to set up that blog.

Phase 2 happens when I see ad revenue. With that ad revenue, I’ll set up the review site and fund the initial product purchases (well, at least that’s the idea). So I’ll let you know when I have the first site up and keep you updated on the progress. I’m curious about whether this is a viable plan. I guess we’ll see!

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