Shelf Life & Expiry Dates

How long can you keep milk in the refrigerator? Is it still drinkable or do you have to throw out that milk carton? Can you save money by using products that are past their expiry dates? What do terms such as "sell by," "use by," "best by," really mean? What does a frugal person do with products that happen to be past the "used by," "best by," etc. dates?

Here is a roundup of useful resources to explain the confusing jargon that manufacturers use and the expiry dates of most products:

• Shelf Life Advice
  A very useful site to find out the shelf life of a particular product. Enter product in search box to find out its shelf life and storage information.
  
  
• Food Expiration Dates: What Do They Really Mean? (Yahoo Green)
  
  
• Expiration Dates (OrganizeYourLife.org).
  A near-exhaustive and very useful list of how long you can keep food, household, beauty and cosmetic products.
  


• Do Food Expiry Dates Really Matter? (WebMD.com)
  An informative discussion about the confusing mix of terms used by manufacturers on their products.
  


• The Secret Code of Beer Expiration Dates (Consumerist.com).
  How to decode the mysterious codes that breweries use on to indicate how old your beer is.

Useful Real Estate Resources

Roundup of useful real estate resources:

Searches:

• Neighborhood Scout (good place to start for researching neighborhoods. Limited free service. Crime stats, etc are only available in the premium service).
  
• Trulia.com (useful free site to search for listings, comps, etc)

Advice:

• Set the stage for a top-dollar sale (Kiplinger)
• 10 things your architect won't tell you (Smart Money)
• The other real estate boom: scams (Money Magazine)

See also my previous blog postings:

• Seven New Rules For The First Time House Buyers

Pottery Barn Unstuffed

As I was weeding my growing collection of old magazines over this Thanksgiving break, I came across an interesting article in the October 2006 issue of Smart Money: Pottery Barn Unstuffed by Smart Money's investigative reporter, Ann Kadet. (Thanks to the power of google search, I discovered that folks have helpfully scanned and uploaded this article online. See links below.)

This article reminds me why I have, and continue to resist buying furniture from Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware and Crate & Barrel. Are their products worth their high prices? Apparently not.

As Anne Kadet's article Pottery Barn Unstuffed reveals interesting discoveries. A $400 Pottery Barn coffee table has a very thin one-fortieth of an inch veneer. A $900 Crate & Barrel chair has hollow plastic legs, and a $1,200 Crate and Barrel bed has a heart of particle board and is held together by screws.

Links to the Smart Money article:

• Web version
• PDF version
  

Seven New Rules For The First Time House Buyer

Are you a first time buyer jumping into the housing market? Confused by the conflicting advice from realtors, mortgage brokers, bankers, as well as well-meaning friends and family members?

The New York Times columnist, Ron Lieber's latest column, Seven New Rules For The First Time House Buyer sets out to debunk a long-standing but underexamined maxim of real estate, "you should always stretch financially when buying your first home," which got many first time buyers into hot soup in the first place, straight into the clutches of realtors and lenders who were only too willing to lend them the extra needed to finance that extra stretch.

It's now back to the basics, since the myth that housing prices only go up and up has been shattered by the recent financial downturn. To summarize, here the seven new rules:

1. Get a fixed rate mortgage, put 20% down and borrow 80%, and aim to spend between 35%-45% of your pretax monthly income on your monthly mortgage payment.


2. The best case for people stretching their income are those in their 20s and 30s, who are starting out in their careers, rather than those in their 40s and 50s.


3. Before buying a house, do a realistic projection of future income flow, asking oneself: what if one spouse loses a job? what if there are children? etc.


4. Too many people forget to factor in the costs of maintaining a house into their calculations on affordability.


5. Buy either the cheapest or the best, but not in the middle. Why? If you can't afford the best, buy a cheap starter home and diligently save up for the best.


6. Consider stretching out the home over time (i.e., making renovations or expansions over time) rather than stretching up to buy an expensive home


7. The 8-hour rule: can you sleep soundly at night or will you stay up worrying about monthly payments? If it's the latter, than the house isn't for you.

As a homeowner who is still living in a house that I bought 6 years ago, here are the rules that guided my own home purchase:

1. I put 20% down and borrowed 80% on a 30-year fixed mortgage.


2. I budgeted for the home based on one income (mine) instead of the combined income of my spouse and I. This turned out to be prescient because my wife chose to leave the workforce to look after our kid, making me the sole breadwinner. Our monthly mortgage payment is comfortably within 40% of my monthly income. I'm glad that we fended off bankers, mortgage brokers and realtors who suggested that we used our combined income to buy a bigger home--no income stretching for us.


3. I aim to accelerate the paydowm of the mortgage by making a 13th monthly payment.

Link: Seven New Rules For The First Time House Buyer (New York Times)
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Cleaning Your House The Frugal & Healthy Way

Tired of using strong chemical cleaners that not only make you nauseous but also take a bite out of your pocketbook? Looking for frugal, sensible, natural or homemade alternatives to keeping your house clean? Here are some resources to get you started:

• 7 Ways to Clean With Baking Soda
  


• Household Cleaning Hacks That Save You Money
  


• 30 Household Products Vinegar Can Replace


• Put Citrus Fruit to Work As Household Cleaners
  


• 27 Household Uses For Citrus Fruits
  


• How Baking Soda Took My Bathroom From "Yuck" to Yes!


• Multipurpose Uses for Old Coffee Grounds
  

Happy frugal cleaning!

Frugal Tip: Putting Citrus Fruits to work as Household Cleaners

One frugal habit I have is substituting commercial cleaners with their potent chemical formulations with traditional natural alternatives using lemon and other citrus fruits. Besides the obvious fact that using lemon and other citrus fruits as cleaners save money, they also do not have the potent chemical concoctions that cause headaches and leave behind toxic residues that pollute groundwater or damage the environment. If you would like to try but do not know how to get started, here are two links with lots of tips and ideas:

• Put Citrus to Work as Household Cleaners


• 27 Household Uses for Citrus Fruits

Frugal Living & Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs)

Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have been in the news lately. Columnist George F. Will wrote a recent op-ed piece on CFLs in the Washington Post (April 2, 2009). A week earlier, the New York Times discussed the challenges of using CFLs in an article, Do New Bulbs Save Money If They Don't Work? Depending on who you're talking to, CFLs are either praised or villified.

I have been using CFLs in my home since 2003 and haven't encountered the problems that are highlighted in the Washington Post and New York Times articles. Here's how I use CFLs in my house:

• CFLs are not meant to be used in areas that are exposed to the elements outside one's house. Neither would they work work in temperatures below freezing. Extreme moisture from the rain and cold weather would significantly degrade the built-in fragile electronic ballast that lights a typical CFL, thereby shortening its lifespan. Hence, I continue to use incadescent lamps outside my house.


• Standard CFLs do not work in dimmers. As I am too frugal to buy the more expensive CFLs that would work with a dimmer, I continue to use incadescent bulbs in fixtures with dimmers.


• I use CFLs in the kitchen, in table lamps and floor lamps in living areas, and in the bathroom. Notwithstanding the advice not to use CFLs in three-way floor lamps, I have not had any problems using CFLs in the three-way floor lamps that I bought from Target.
  


• I have been using GE CFLs exclusively (no, I don't work for GE). GE CFLs are typically more expensive than store-brand CFLs from Wal-Mart, Home Depot, etc. I buy GE CFLs when they are on sale at Target and using manufacturer coupons to lower the price. I stocked up on GE CFLs when I combined the then $2.00 off manufacturer coupons (no longer available now) with Target's sale on their buy two get one free pack of CFLs a few years ago. I bought enough CFLs then to last for a long, long time.


• The GE CFLs that I have been using last any where from 3 to 4 years. I never had any CFL failing before 3 years. So long as I do not use them in enclosed fixtures (where temperature in the electronic ballast could build up and shorten its lifespan) or in outdoor fixtures (where rain and extreme cold would likewise shorten the ballast's lifespan), I see no reason why CFLs wouldn't last their advertised lifespan.
  


• I think more could be done to educate people on how to use CFLs. CFLs are not always appropriate for all fixtures and locations. I am not sure whether labelling is the solution, since most folks don't read the fine print.


• As for the color, I haven't had any problems with color. Most complaints about the color stem from a misunderstanding about color temperature of CFLs. Here is how color temperature works. Color temperature is measured in Kelvins (K). The lower the number (2700K), the yellower the color. The higher the number (6000K), the bluer the color.
  

1. Standard incadescent "warm bright" color: 2700K-3000K


2. Cool white color: 3500K-4100K


3. Standard white fluorescent color: 5000-6500K
   

• I have CFLs that are 3000K-3500K. At 2500K, they almost replicate the warm bright color of incadescent bulbs. I think the problem lies in the fact that most CFLs do not come labelled with their color temperature. One has to do some sleuthing over the internet.
  


• As for the question of mercury, I have always recycled my used CFLs. For a while, I recycled my CFLs through my employer, which has a contract to recycle the fluorescent tubes used in the office. Although I haven't had the occasion to do so, I am happy that Ikea, Home Depot and WalMart have drop-off CFL recycling programs. I may take advantage of these opportunities.

FREE OFFER: Home Depot is offering a free CFL (available in-store only) on Sunday, April 19, 2009.

For more information:

• Tips for using Compact Flourescent Bulbs (via New York Times)
• Energy Star's CFL Buying Guide