Hi, my name is Dave and I’m frugal
As the title of the post says, my name is Dave and I’ll be blogging for you today.
I’m a stay-at-home Dad and freelance writer. My partner works outside the home and I stay home and look after the kids; her two teens and our daughter who will be seven next week. It’s probably no surprise that no matter how much money comes in, somebody finds a need for it so we always try to make the most of our money.
That’s especially true when one of the teens had to to take his girlfriend to her junior prom last weekend and it’s his senior prom this weekend.
So today I want to talk about some things we did right, and some things we might have done better:
Before I go any further I should mention two factors that are very important to me: value for money and absolute price. While getting value for your money is always important, it’s the absolute price that always sets the final boundary. It’s not very frugal to save money on one thing but then have to spend extra money on something else later because you blew your budget today.
Anyway – after the cut – on to the prom.
We were lucky; we’re paying for a male.
When it comes to males at proms the big question is buy a suit or rent a tux. (If your teen already owns a tux then you probably don’t need to watch your money quite as closely as the rest of us.)
Since you can never have too much information, I went to the local tuxedo rental shop (which just happens to be very close to both a Payday Loan place and Comic Book store so as to give me lots of ammunition for future posts) to price things out.
I was quoted $126 .14 for a standard black tuxedo with jacket, pants, shoes, cufflinks, shirt, “cumberbun”[sic], and tie. (I think she meant cummerbund.) We would have to provide socks and underwear – and if he wanted to go with white or cream it was another forty dollars. By my math that means two proms = $252.28 just to clothe his skinny butt. And that’s 100% thrown away money too – we won’t see any of it again.
Ouch.
Still, that gave me a figure to work with – anything under $250 and we were saving money.
We were pretty sure we could get a suit for less than that so now we had a target – and being frugal I wanted to keep it under $200 rather than $250. This was going to be fun, seeing as we were dealing with a teen who rarely sees the value of saving anyone else’s money – particularly when it’s being spent on him. Luckily we were able to play on the “MINE” factor and get him on board with a suit by the simple expedient of reminding him he would get to keep the suit. Stage one accomplished.
So I pick up the teen after school and take him round the various suit places: first the men’s outfitter: Good news, all suits 60% off; bad news, they start at $220 after discount; worse news, it takes three weeks to get it back from the tailor and the prom is in three days. Survey says, thumbs down. So it’s off to the department store.
Luckily, they had a sale too: and best of all there was no waiting. $136 later we had a suit (at least the jacket and pants) worth $300. He had shoes and a belt already so all we really needed was the shirt and tie – which cost us $26. We did spend another $20 on socks and underwear – but that came out of his regular clothing budget because we would have needed to buy them anyway. But even if we do count the socks and underwear it still only comes to $182 which is comfortably under my $200 target.
Best of all, now he has a suit which he can wear to job interviews and weddings and other formal functions.
Looking back, there’s one thing I would have done differently if I could; and that’s start earlier. We were very lucky to catch the sales we did: the suit sale ended the next day.
I think that’s enough for my first post, and I should be back with more for you next Thursday.
If you’ve got any questions, comments, or even prom-related tips, please don’t hesitate to use the form at the end of the post: we’d love to hear from you.
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