Welcome to March! And slightly longer days. Sunset is now almost 6pm, which is glorious. Finishing work days before it’s completely dark is just lovely.

For those of you who don’t live at latitudes closer to the poles, the difference between 4pm and 6pm sunsets is everything. I’ll handle the cold, wet days just fine, but the dark is hard.

PS if you thought it was time for me to stop tracking these weeks in COVID time… Our roommate just tested positive this week for the very first time. Keep your fingers crossed for us that we’ve had it recently enough to not get it from him (plus masking and isolation, of course).

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Friday’s Frugal Five

1. Longer days means that the chickens are laying more as well. We’ve gone from 0-1 eggs a day to 5-6 now. It also means they’re eating more, but I’ll take that for more eggs.

We still get leftover scraps from the neighbors, which also helps reduce feed costs, but I can definitely see why egg costs have gone up, beyond loss of birds from the avian flu. We now have enough surplus that the kiddo is selling eggs again, which makes him happy for an extra income stream as well.

2. I’ve finished 17 books so far this year. We did a book club with WPF Insiders last month, discussing Alyssa Davies’ book Financial First Aid. For folks just starting out or dealing with financial trauma, I’d highly recommend the book.

My other most recent reads were The Next Civil War and Mind Of My Mind. Both were copies checked out from the library, and both are books I would recommend (though neither are easy reads).

3. The kiddo’s school moved to their new location this week, which is a little bit farther than the old one, and not quite as close to my office. We’re carpooling most days with another school family who live about a mile from us, so this week was working out the kinks of the new schedule.

Once again, I’m reminded of how important community is – both virtual, and local. Bonus, the mom of this family is also a WPF Insider, which means a collision of both my in person and virtual worlds in the best way.

(PS – WPF Insiders spring cohort opens Monday for early access and Wednesday for the general public!)

4. I finally opened a new credit card. We’ve been talking about going back to Europe to visit our Italian friends again, either back to Italy or somewhere a bit closer in between, and airfare is so expensive right now. We also have a load of other expenses weighing on us right now, so if we’re going to be able to see them in the next year, we’re going to have to subsidize it quite a bit with credit card points.

My husband already has the Capital One Venture card, so we referred me to get my own, meaning that we also got an additional 20,000 miles for the referral to his card, on top of the sign up bonus we’ll get when we hit the minimum spend on mine (75,000 miles after spending $4,000 in the first 3 months).

**As always, credit card rewards can be an awesome thing, but only if you a) pay them off in full every month and b) don’t spend more than you would otherwise.**

5. So apparently I hit the six year mark on my clothes buying ban on Wednesday. But it didn’t even dawn on me until I sat down to write this post.

It’s pretty wild to look back and think about how hard those first 3 – 6 months were, but now, it’s just life. If you’re curious about the ban, my most recent update came in the form of a short video I shared in Woven, and later posted on YouTube.

When will I finally buy clothes again? I’m not sure. But it won’t be today.