Carnival of Personal Finance/Festival of Frugality

The Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted at My Money Blog this week, has not only a ton of great posts but also an interesting discussion about the format of the Carnival itself. My two cents? I really appreciate it when the host picks out a relatively small number of posts to highlight, because it's definitely a "value added" service. But I also (both as a reader and a submitter) like having all the submitted posts included in some format, even if it's just a simple link.

The Festival of Frugality is at Canadian Capitalist this week. Go check it out!

Eating out for free

Recently I had a completely free meal at a place called Noodles & Company, thanks to their "Noodlegram" club. They have pasta/noodles in a variety of styles, from Italian to Asian to American (including the most delicious macaroni and cheese ever), at an ordinary price of about $5-8. After signing up for "Noodlegrams," you receive a free meal after you sign up, and another every year around your birthday.

I was glad to discover it, since I've been enjoying a nearly identical program at Flat Top Grill for over three years now. Flat Top is a really fun, creative, and tasty restaurant, where the idea is create-your-own, all-you-can-eat stirfry (priced at about $15). You just load up your noodles and rice with your choice of sauces, spices, vegetables, and/or meat and they'll cook it up for you and serve. (You can even have them make it for you in soup, salad, or mu shu forms.) They don't have as many locations-- mostly in the Chicago area, although there are a couple other locations in the midwest and one in Arlington, Virginia.

In both cases, I love the deals because: a) there are no strings attached, no "buy X, get X free," so your meal is genuinely free (except for tip, or if you choose drinks, dessert, etc) and you can go by yourself if you'd like; b) they give you at least a couple of weeks leeway so you can choose when to go; and c) you get a free dish at sign-up plus you'll find a coupon for another one every year on your birthday, so it's a free gift that keeps on giving! The only downside is the (rare) promotional e-mails, but they don't bother me. If you have these restaurants in your area, I recommend signing up!

Does anyone know of other good deals like this?

Related:

• I haven't tried it yet, thanks to plentiful dining coupons in my area, but I've heard good things about Restaurant.com-- a site where you can pay $10 for restaurant gift certificates worth $25 to tons of places. If you're interested, be sure to hunt around first, since there are often discount codes that'll bring that price down to $4-$5.
• The "Free Stuff" forum at FatWallet often has good deals (it's where I found out about Noodles & Company), although it can be a bother to wade through dozens of posts about things that may be free but probably aren't worth the hassle.
• Here's a post at Seattle Simplicity about getting free meals through mystery shopping... sounds like it's a result of finding a particularly good mystery shop company, though!
  

Gandhi on Budgeting

"As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, you should keep it. If you were to give it up in a mood of self-sacrifice or out of a stern sense of duty, you would continue to want it back, and that unsatisfied want would make trouble for you. Only give up a thing when you want some other condition so much that the thing no longer has any attraction for you, or when it seems to interfere with that which is more greatly desired."-- Mahatma Gandhi

I read this quote the other day, and it blew me away. In just a few simple but powerful sentences, Gandhi lays out a clear path to budgeting and consuming in a way that is fulfilling and satisfying.

• Don't force yourself to give up things just because you should, because it'll hurt more than it'll help. This is so true. When you deny yourself something and tell yourself it's because it's bad or wasteful of you to spend money on it, you feel deprived and unhappy, with the persistent feeling in the back of your mind that if you could only go ahead and buy whatever-it-is, you'd feel better. It's the perfect recipe for splurging on things you'll regret. It's just not a sustainable pattern. If you want to cut back, the real way to do it is to...
  
• Identify your priorities and goals, and use them to make decisions about what's worth spending on. Whether you want to retire early, get out of debt, buy a house, stay home with kids, take a more fulfilling but lower-paying job, travel the world, give more money away... whatever it is you really want, you can consciously match it up against the items in your budget, and figure out which is more important to you. That's how real changes occur-- when you get to the point where "the thing no longer has any attraction to you" because "you want some other condition so much." (Or if getting rid of "any attraction" is a little too much to ask, you just have to become conscious of how spending on X would "interfere with that which is more greatly desired.") But no matter how much you want to reach your goals for the future, you shouldn't give up everything in the present. You just need to find a balance and...
  
• Figure out what things genuinely bring you "inner help and comfort." I think the key to this is that you have to really think through what's truly important to you, because it's so easy to go on auto-pilot. There are a lot of things that we buy and do because they bring us a pleasure that's fleeting and superficial on a certain level, and we assume that they're making us happy-- but a closer examination reveals otherwise. (And when I say "we," that definitely includes me.) But if we do the soul-searching, we can keep the things that are most important to our happiness and fulfillment today while doing a better job of reaching our goals for the future.
  

That Gandhi fellow sure was wise, wasn't he?

Visit the Festival of Frugality

And we've also got this week's Festival of Frugality at fivecentnickel.com.
There's a bunch of great posts, including a story I really liked from Single Mom Extraordinaire. Also: lifestyle tradeoffs from The Bargain Queen.

The Carnival of Personal Finance is Up

Yes, indeed, the Carnival of Personal Finance is up at okdork.com, and I'm lucky enough to be in the "Top 8" for my post on the implications of financial independence/"retiring early." Check it out!

(I feel a little silly doing a post that just says "Visit the Carnival!" since I'm sure that most of you reading this either came to me through the carnival itself, or through pfblogs.org where you can see a half-dozen other posts telling you the same thing. But I appreciate the visits I get from the carnivals, and I want to send a little love back!)

Fun for Chicago-area Readers

Through April 9th, there's a really neat miniature golf course at Navy Pier. All the holes are Chicago-themed, and proceeds go to the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Chicago. They're designed by top architecture firms, and include a two-level Wacker Drive, Navy Pier, the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 (as featured in the book Devil in the White City) and even one in honor of the World Champion White Sox!

It's $7 a person ($5.50 for kids)... not too bad for an outing for a good cause. My boyfriend and I went yesterday, and although I spent almost as much time taking pictures of the holes as actually playing, it was a lot of fun. (I lost, if you're wondering!) 11th Annual Golf Around Chicago, through Sunday, April 9th. Good times!

Numbers, Numbers Everywhere...

Many times I've seen advice to keep track of all spending, and many times I've dismissed the idea. "I'm already frugal and responsible," I say, "so that's a lot of work for very little benefit. Why bother?"

But I'm starting to realize that it's a little disorienting not to know how I get from one point to another financially, and the fact that I put a healthy amount into savings every month doesn't change that. If I'm honest with myself, I must admit it's entirely possible that a closer scrutiny of my spending may reveal some changes I should make. And while I'm not ready to commit to following all the steps of Your Money or Your Life exactly, there are some really interesting ideas I'd like to try, and they require detailed tracking of spending.

So for April, at least, I'm going to do it. It may be a bit of a pain, but I think it'll be interesting. Any guesses on whether my standard "estimates" for budgeting are actually close to the mark?

In other numbers news, at the end of the month and the quarter, here's where I stand:

+$16,874.40 cash/savings (actually I have a little more right this moment, but I'm subtracting the credit card bill that will be paid in full on Monday)
+$10,960.19 retirement
-$17,645 debt
+$3,575 "accounts receivable," if I want to be a dork about the terminology (money owed to me by friends & family)

I fell short of my goal to have my non-retirement savings higher than my debt by 3/31, but I should manage that easily by the end of April. But on the plus side, my net worth is now over $10,000! I'm at $10,189 (not counting accounts receivable; it's $13,764 if I include what I'm owed).

Well, after this fascinating tour through my finances, we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...