Frugal Win of the Week: One Man’s Trash, Another’s Treasure

Welcome to the “frugal win of the week” A fun way my future wife and I have made our path to Financial Independence, fun. Here is how the game works,

1. We find an item that we would “like” (we almost never “need” it).
2. We find a way to get that item for free or as cheap as possible.
3. We find out the full retail cost of the item.
4. We invest the difference between the retail price and what we paid to get it.

We FINALLY came out of a very brutal winter here in Ontario and we have been waiting to get into our backyard for weeks. So we have been on the lookout for some new backyard/patio furniture. It just so happened that our considerably less frugal neighbors were throwing out a perfectly fine set of “Muskoka” chairs. Admittedly, these chairs needed a little TLC, here is what they looked like when we got them from our neighbors trash heap.

You can see why some people might throw these chairs out, at first glance they are pretty nasty looking. Also some people, such as my Fiance, might have an issue with grabbing stuff from your neighbors trash. Some people are worried about what people will think of them or “how it looks”. I’m much more worried about reaching financial independence as soon as humanly possible than I am “how things look”. In the end, I promised my fiance that if I could not get these things looking presentable we would trash them ourselves.

Luckily, all this took was a bucket of hot water, some bleach, gloves and a sponge. Within 1 hour I had these chairs looking as “good as new” (or at least as good as lightly used).

So we got the item we were wanted, for free! Next step was the really fun part; finding out the retail value of these 4 chairs. After a quick search on Amazon, we found similar chairs retailing for over $180 per chair.

Since we got them for free, our savings was $720($180*4)-$0=$720! This does not even include any shipping costs or sales tax (in Ontario is 13%). We took that $720 and invested directly into our Vanguard Index Fund portfolio.

I love this kind of stuff because it is a prime example that being “frugal” does NOT mean you can’t get what you want. To me, being frugal is about getting what you want in a much more cost effective manner then the average person does.

Have you had any “frugal wins” recently? Let me know in the comments below.