Tips on Living in Poverty # 5 Haggling and showering

Haggle. On everything, everywhere. Okay, maybe this tip won't work at box-stores and corporate chains, but you can haggle anywhere that's locally owned and with a moderate chance of successfully lowering the price of your goods or services. Haggling is not like bidding on Ebay (although you can often find stuff cheaper there than at retail prices); haggling is an art. I haven't mastered it yet, only dabbled, but the place I started haggling most successfully is with my medical bills. Yes. I said that. Doesn't matter if you have insurance or not, or how large or small the bill is. If you flash cash money around, more often than not, your medical provider will take however much it is and zero your balance.

Here's why: every doctor's offices and hospital sends out 1,000,000 bills every year. About 320 of them get paid. Insurance companies do their thing, and then saddle you with the remainder of the invoice. But what they're not telling you is that they'll take as little as 25% of the invoice if you can fork over the cold, hard cash (or check. Possibly Krugerrands) up front. Have a $5,000 hospital bill? Offer $2,300 cash (no tips on how to legally obtain the $2,300, sorry). It's in the hospital's interest to snatch it up immediately, rather than set up a payment plan with you for $10 or $25 a month for the next twenty five hundred years. "YES WE'LL TAKE YOUR MONEY NOW rather than gamble that you'll ever be able to pay-in-full on that piss poor payment plan." Medical care is expensive shit, and yeah they're going to bill you for all they can, and rightly so - they got bills to pay too. But how many times have you just unthinkingly returned that little detachable slip with your credit card number written in the boxes for the five payments of $190? Once is too many.

Medical debt may affect your credit, but since it can never go into collections, medical providers can be screwed if you just never pay. (You should pay. Always pay something.)  So they're actually pretty stoked when you offer cash. My first was with a piddly bill; some of my outrageously enjoyable gynecological procedures this year weren't covered by my insurance. I got a bill for $160. I took them a $100 bill and said "can we call it even?" They never blinked an eye. Shit, I should have offered $60.

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Showering: change it up. Cold showers apparently save energy and make you prettier than hot showers. I guess saving energy is saving money. Also, you could try my method of going a couple days in between showering or hair-washing. Lately I'm wondering how time/energy/money saving that is, though. When I find myself tasked with cleaning my body after five days that spanned activities such as exercising, getting baby pee/vomit/poo/snot on me, volunteering at this awesome horse ranch,* and cooking,  I spend a hell of a lot more time scrubbing to make sure I'm squeaky clean, as opposed to when I shower everyday: then it's more of a half-assed soapy rinse. I guess before I promote this tip, I should experiment and compare the combined times of my showers across two weeks: one week of showering everyday, versus another week of showering twice, and see which method actually saves time. But that sounds like a hell of a lot of effort.
* beware super cheesy promo youtube link

The dubious validity of the showering conversation as viable tip on living well in poverty tells me it's about time to end this series.

Comic courtesy of  Jen Heller Meservey

Tips on Living in Poverty #4House hold items + merchandise

Today I'm sharing some of the good shit I learned about how to live in poverty growing up. Which I did. I was the kid in school from that povertous family who qualified for free/reduced lunch but were a little too proud to use it if it wasn't absolutely necessary. My mother came from money (quite a bit of it) and grew up a favored member of society in small town deep South, but married into my dad's true blue collar family and his unambitious career and has been somewhat heartbroken about our poverty ever since. Her family didn't approve of her po' boy choice, and with a combination of other factors, left us no money. So growing up we were poor. And my mother and father did an amazing job of making household things last, getting good quality at better prices, and teaching the payoffs of frugality and fiscal responsibility. Today's gems include:

• Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without. I can't tell you how many times I came to my mom as a kid with a lotion bottle saying it was empty, and she did some magic* and tada, I had 7 or 8 applications more. *Practical tips: cutting the top off lotion bottles (or in half) and scooping out all the juice until it's squeaky clean; or always taking complimentary travel size products from hotels, and then actually using them at home until they're entirely gone (see first tip above to maximize lotion usage); or saving ALL leftover foods, no matter what portion size, and eating them. All. (before they went bad, most of the time).
   
• Second-hand everything you can (not mattresses or car seats). Garage sales, resale shops, craigslist, whatever. Retail prices suck balls. Furniture and clothes last mostly forever and are pumped into the market at a deluging rate. Plus, then when you buy those awesome designer jeans for $35 you're not obligated to feel guilty about your direct purchase contributing to the shitty labor conditions in Bangladesh where people are literally dying, sandblasting your pair of jeans . You're capitalizing on someone else's contribution. Which I think is just good sense. Or, for even better sense, buy a non-designer pair of jeans for $10 and take the other $25 and invest in something worthwhile. Like dinner with your kid. Or planting a tree. Or world peace.
  
  
• Make the library your best friend: Libraries nowadays have books, TV shows and movies on blue-rays, DVDs, Educational materials, stuffed animals and story-times and reading nooks for kids, & internet access ALL for free as well as cheap printing rates. The cool libraries, like the one in Salt Lake City, have cafes, comic book shops, and writing centers that help with resumes and shit. The only thing that's missing is a bar. Although, as I type this, it maybe seems the cool libraries aren't as helpful for your budget if you're tempted to impulse buy at cafes and bars.Whatever. Maybe you can panhandle outside for a cup of coffee. Stuart recommends it.
  
  
• Compromise on your morals around responsible consumerism wherever you can live with it. Ok, I kid. Mostly. But seriously, when you're poor, you buy shit from WalMart, even when you know they're evil and killing the planet.*
  
  *No vouches for the reliability of information in this link. I didn't even read it. I simply thought, "Sure, Wikipedia probably has decently accurate crap on this subject." Mostly because I had friends who admitted that they read Wikipedia rather than text books and successfully graduated from medical school.
  
  

Thanks for the lifetime of advice on how to be kind to my pocketbook, mom & dad. It's gotten me this far in life.

Next time: Haggling. It's still a real thing.

All photos are linked to their originating web publication.