About

Hi, I'm Chellie.  I'm the Angry Cheapskate.

I am indeed a cheapskate and I'm somewhere between "mildly irritated" and "angry" on a pretty regular basis.  I'm okay with all that.

It's kind of hard being a cheapskate when you like stuff.  I like stuff.  And things.  Stuff and things cost money, though, and I'm trying to part with as little of that as possible.  My big goal in 2010 was to learn how to be even more of a cheapskate than usual.

I started by moving to an area with a lower cost of living and reducing household bills.

As much as I like stuff and things, a smaller apartment is cheaper, so many things were sorted through and lots of stuff was donated or discarded because there was no longer enough room to keep everything.  I live with Andy, my other half, and the two of us do fine in a 500sq.ft., one bedroom apartment with our cat Chairman Meow.
We watch very little television, so no cable.  I don't say that to sound like one of those sanctimonious jackasses who spout off about TV sucking; we really don't watch much and what we do watch is available online via Hulu, network websites, and so on.  The TV isn't even plugged in.  It makes a nice shelf to put things on.
When it's cold, we put on sweatshirts.  When it's hot, we open windows and turn on the ceiling fans.  The thermostat stays at 65-ish.
We let the sun light the apartment during the day, and at night we use a single-bulb fixture with energy efficient light bulbs in whichever room we're in at the time; when we leave the room, we turn the light off.
We went out to eat way too much, so we've cut that down to once a week tops.  Our once a week meal out is usually somewhere we have a coupon.  I cook the rest of our meals.
I make our bread.  I also make pastries, cakes, cookies, and other baked goods.

In Spring 2010 I started a very small indoor garden.  I'd never grown fully indoors and as we have no balcony or patio, I started as small as possible: 3 pepper plants.  It took some fiddling, but I've figured out where to put the plants so they get the right amount of sun.  Next spring I hope to expand our little indoor garden further with some kitchen herbs, more peppers, and tomatoes.  I'm also looking into a low-energy fluorescent grow light setup so we can really expand those pepper plants.  We love us some habaneros!

The next big step started only recently.  I've become a couponer.  I'm better than average already but not quite at "those people" levels.  I don't swipe sales inserts from the stack of Sunday papers at the gas station, but I do have my family set aside their unused coupons for me to pick over.  I have yet to figure out how some folks manage to walk out of CVS with $60 worth of toilet paper for a quarter, but I do carry  an old-lady accordion coupon file to the grocery store.

This is my ongoing journey as I try to save money, eat and live well, and just navigate the day to day with as few bruises and scrapes as possible.

You can contact me at angrycheapskate@gmail.com