Ask any of my friends to describe me in a few words. Well, you probably don’t know any of my friends, so I’ll tell you what they’d say after they were done talking about how I’m so good looking, intelligent and humble. I’m cheap. I’m a miser. Penny pincher. Tightwad. You get the point.
I usually take these adjectives as a compliment. Saving money is awesome; especially when I’m saving to put it towards my retirement or something new and fancy from Best Buy. The only problem is, sometimes I get so obsessed over saving money that I do things that would immediately qualify me for a non-stop ticket to the mental hospital. I have spent absurd amounts of time doing something that will literally only save me a few pennies.
For example, I bought cinnamon scented candles from the Yankee Candle Company because I wanted to cover up the smell of “25 year old boy”. I bought one of the big ones where the wax on the edges of the candle is so far from the flame that it doesn’t even melt. I probably should have known better but I don’t know crap about candles. Well, when the wick had burned down to the bottom of the candle, but there was still a ton of wax on the sides.
When I looked at that side wax, I didn’t see Yankee Candle wax. I saw my hard earned money literally NOT melting away because I couldn’t burn that wax!
This was a travesty and I wouldn’t stand for it! Luckily, I had another smaller candle where all the wax was close enough to the wick that it would burn. Here are the next steps I took.
- I used a fork and knife to shave wax out of the old useless candle
- I dumped the shavings and small chunks from the old one into the new candle
- I held a lighter to the shavings to melt them down so they can bond with the existing wax and become one (similar to a heated love affair)
- I added just enough shavings to ensure the wick was still poking out over the top (about 1 centimeter)
Estimated time spent: 45 minutes
Estimated money saved: $0.72
I didn’t realize the absurdity of this until I had some friends come over and they saw a knife and fork sticking out of a candle (I left them there to get more shavings when the wax burned down again!). If your friends are anything like my friends, I’m sure you can only imagine the crap I took for such a stunt.
I can’t help myself sometimes. I guess I really am a tightwad. Now let’s hear your story. Have you ever done something to save money that you thought was really smart at the time, but turned out to be ridiculous?
*This post was ranked #2 in the Best of Money Carnival out of over 60 blog posts! Plus it was an NFL Power Ranking theme and I got the Steelers. Only the Colts were ranked ahead of me and they lost this week. Sounds like I’m number one!
Kevin McKee is an entrepreneur, IT guru, and personal finance leader. In addition to his writing, Kevin is the head of IT atย Buildingstars, Co-Founder of Padmission, and organizer ofย Laravel STL. He is also the creator of www.contributetoopensource.com. When heโs not working, Kevin enjoys podcasting about movies and spending time with his wife and four children.
Nothing wrong with being frugal. Definitely something weird about being miserly, however. Come on man, there had to be something else you could have done with 45 minutes of your time that is worth much more than $0.72! If not, I’ll hire you to write for my blog at a solid $1.50 an hour! Whadya say?
I’m trying to get better. After realizing how dumb it was to scrape wax shavings, I actually threw away the old candle. YAY ME!
And I’ll write on your blog free if you make it a guest post and link it back to my site. ๐
That’s why you have to shave down the candle edges as the middle burns down. Replace the center wax with the edge wax, if you will. Duh.
That’s why you’re so much smarter than me Dione. I’ve decided candles should come with instructions for boys. ๐
Be glad you have your good looks and intelligence or else you would have difficult time getting a gf with your miserly behavior ๐
The key is hiding the miserly behavior from girls for long enough that I can win them over with gratuitous amounts of charm. Then when she finds out about this stuff, hopefully she shrugs it off.
I would’ve (and HAVE) done the same thing. It’s kind of annoying to see all this extra wax you’ve paid for not burn away.
I’m not alone! The nice thing is that with the two candles combined, it’s been well over a year since I’ve had to buy a new one. I may not be saving a lot of money, but saving a trip to the store is nice too.
I have a coffee warmer that I use for candles that won’t burn.
Worth the $2.99 i spent on it
See, this is why I blog. Great advice, I’ll have to look for one next time I’m at Target.
Lol. That sounds like it would be a hot mess. I have a love hate with the Yankee Candles myself. They have candle warmers at Michaels and you can always use their 40% off coupon. Good luck with covering up the 25 yr old boy smell.
A hot mess!? That’s awesome. I wish I was clever enough to come up with that! I’ll have to look into these coffee/candle warmer things. I had no idea they existed.
If you heat a pan of water and put the burned down glass jar in it….you can melt down the wax pretty quickly and just pour it over a new wick. However I have noticed that the scent isn’t as strong on the 2nd burning and sometimes I add a few drops of essential oil if I have a complimentary one around.
Just wanted to say you aren’t alone! ๐
Like a few other commenters, I’d also recommend those hot plates/candlewarmers. I know some people that just use that instead of actually burning the candles.
Thanks for bringing this up Kevin. It is often easy to forgot that simple saying, “Time is Money”.
Sometimes I find myself in situations just like the one you mentioned, usually with items that I feel are overpriced. Let me give you a recent example:
I needed to ship something the other day, so I went to staples to purchase some bubble-wrap. The bubble-wrap cost $6.95! That’s outragous for a small piece of plastic. So I decided to fashion my own shipping peanuts from spare materials I had at the house. To be more specific, I started crumbling up paper to provide the necessary cushion.
About 100 pages and 20 minutes in, I realized the absurdity of it all. Take the cost of the ream of paper, plus 20 minutes at minimum wage, and the bubble-wrap now looks like a steal.
Those big candles frustrate the hell out of me. I’ll admit to just putting the glass jar on a low burner to melt the whole dang things and putting in a new wick. It’s cheap from the craft store. Plus, we’re being green. Right?
One stupid time-consuming thing I did to save a ridiculously small amount of money was when I was in university.
I used cheap pens (bic I think) and had bought a large pack of identical ones (the ones with the clear tube so you could see the ink). I think they came out to 10-20 cents each. They were cheap pens, so they often stopped working before the ink was used up. I got the bright idea that when a pen stopped working I would save it, so when I used up the ink in one, I would just transfer the ink tube from the non working one to the empty one and voila, new pen for free.
The thing is, how many cheap pens do you actually use all the ink in? You usually lose them or they stop working long before the ink is all gone. I think in my 5 years of university, I managed (because it became a goal after awhile) to use up the ink in two whole pens. One of those, when I put the new ink in, wouldn’t work again (air bubbles or something, God laughing at me for all the effort I was putting into such a silly endeavor, I don’t know). So my 5 years of this enterprise, I saved one cheap pen, 10-20 cents saved.
The Cost
– Don’t know how much time, maybe a couple of hours overall.
– Several ink smudged hands, notes, an jeans – because I wouldn’t declare a pen dead until I had taken it apart and tried everything I could to get it working again.
– The frustration of having several non working pens around at all times. And these would always be the ones I would grab when I needed to write something lately
The Savings
– 10-20 cents