Gearing Down, part 7 -- Personal Care

Personal care expenditures are one of those things where it may be easy or difficult to reduce when confronted with a sudden financial reverse. Obviously, if you are one of those people who routinely spends hundreds of dollars on hair styling, manicures, pedicures, facials, high-end makeup and the like, it may be painful to give them up, but it is possible to realize substantial savings by making the sacrifice. However, if you're already in the habit of using off-brand soap and shampoo from the dollar store and trim your own hair when it starts showing too many split ends, it's going to be difficult to squeeze much savings out of this area, for the simple reason that you don't want to fall into the trap of false economy.

Personal hygiene is an important part of physical health, and especially when you're in bad financial straits, you really don't want to become ill with preventable problems. So essentials such as soap, shampoo and toothpaste, things that enable you to maintain basic cleanliness, need to stay on the shopping list somehow.

It may be possible to make things last longer by changing your habits of use. For instance, do you usually run a bead of toothpaste the entire length of your toothbrush? Although advertisements usually show toothpaste being applied in this way, since it is more aesthetically pleasing (and helps sell more toothpaste), you generally can get an effective cleaning and decay protection with a lump about the size of a pea or kidney bean.

Also, it may be possible to get free samples here and there that will help you stretch your own supply. For instance, our dentist generally gives out free toothpaste, toothpaste and dental floss with every visit. If a family member regularly travels on business and stays in hotels, they may be able to bring you spare bars of hotel soap and bottles of hotel shampoo. (One trick if you're staying multiple nights at the same hotel is to hide the used soap and shampoo before leaving in the morning. The maids won't throw it away, so you can use the rest for your second or third stay, and will put out fresh soap and shampoo, which you can save and take with you at the end of your stay).

If things get really desperate, some food pantries and other charitable organizations also give away personal hygiene items. So there is never any reason that you should have to go without the fundamental basics of personal hygiene, even if you have to give up some of the creature comforts of personal care that you've been accustomed to. It may mean needing to know where and how to ask and require the humility to be willing to ask, but there is always a way to make sure that you are clean and presentable.

Gearing Down, pt 2: Clothing

Coping with a sudden reduction in one's financial circumstances is not easy. We speak of buying habits because they're just that, habits. Things we do automatically. We go into the same stores and buy the same familiar brands. Having to change to make less money stretch further requires conscious thought, not just automatic responses.

Fortunately, clothing may be one of the easier things to change our habits on. Unlike food, we generally don't buy clothing on such a regular basis. Unless we're in a line of work in which we wear through clothes on a regular basis (construction and other manual labor positions) or are required to keep up with the latest fashions (media jobs are notorious for this), clothing purchases often can last a year or more. Seldom-worn special outfits like a good interviewing suit may well last a lifetime.

Still, clothes will not last forever, especially garments we wear on a regular basis. So when faced with a financial downturn that looks to last for months or years, we need to have a strategy for maintaining our wardrobe at a minimally acceptable level.

One important technique for keeping clothing costs low is to buy second-hand. Thrift stores such as Goodwill and the Salvation Army often will have garments that are practically new. Some of them may even be so new they still have the original tags from the high-end stores where they're purchased, although this sort of happy find is most likely at a store that's near a wealthy area where stores will dump unsold merchandise at the end of the season and take the tax deduction rather than store it and risk that it is no longer in fashion the following year.

Of course there are some things that should never be bought second-hand. Personal protection and safety equipment should always be bought new, since you have no idea what used equipment may have been exposed to that may have compromised its ability to protect you. Shoes are another thing that should always be bought new, and not just because of the possibility of transmitting diseases such as athlete's foot and toenail fungus. As we wear our shoes, they mold to the shape of our feet, and will no longer fit anyone else's properly.

The second important thing to stretch one's clothing dollars is to maintain the clothes you have in order to make them last as long as possible. When you have the money to casually replace worn or damaged articles, you don't have to worry about things like care labels or proper storage. Now that you need to avoid unnecessary purchases, you  need to pay attention to things like the temperature of water in which to wash your clothes. Also, consider how to store clothes so that they do not become stretched or distorted, or pick up stains or odors from a drawer.

Finally, even when clothes become worn, you may be able to repair or repurpose them. This may not be possible for all clothes. For instance, if maintaining a professional appearance means having clothes that look new, it may not be possible to wear clothes that have visible patches or other repairs. However, for everyday clothes or for things such as undergarments and socks which are not in the public view, being able to make some judicious repairs can be a good way to get another week or month of life out of a garment.

Too Convenient

One way to save is to avoid making purchases in the convenience stores attached to gas stations. The merchandise in them are often grossly overpriced compared to the same items sold at mass-merchandisers such as K-mart or Wal-Mart. For instance, the two-pound bag of sugar at the local convenience store may well cost as much as a five pound bag in the grocery store. They count on making their money on people who don't plan ahead and find themselves short of some necessity without the time to get to the grocery store.

If you find it excessively tempting to buy a bag of chips or a candy bar as you pass by the convenience store shelves to pay for your gas, use pay-at-the-pump whenever possible. Then all you will be buying is the gas you actually need.

List-ease

Making a list beforehand and sticking to it while in the store is an excellent way to control impulse spending on shopping trips. However, there's no need to buy expensive pads of list paper. You can make your own list paper simply and easily.

Simply take a sheet of scratch paper that has one side still blank. Fold it in half. Fold it in half again, then fold the resultant rectangle in half. Cut along the creases, and you will have eight small, narrow sheets of just the right size to make a shopping list.

An Eagle Eye Saves Money

When you go to the store, do you regularly watch to make sure that specials actually ring up at the advertised price? If you don't, you may be losing money.

This weekend I saw a bargain on salmon listed in one of our local grocery store fliers. However, when I actually bought the item in question, it rang up as $3.99 per package, rather than per pound as listed in the flier. If I hadn't been watching and complained, I would've ended up paying four times what I had planned.

Sometimes these discrepancies are honest misprints and miscommunications (for instance, the people in the meat department may not have been told correctly what item the ad refers to), but it is not unknown for less scrupulous stores to deliberately misprogram the computer for one or more items' prices, thus being able to bring in some extra money. So keep a close eye on those prices, and don't be afraid to hand something back if it rings up higher than it was marked. Merely having put something in your cart and brought it to the checkout counter does not obligate you to complete the purchase.