An exciting feature of our new house is in the basement. The previous owners left an unfinished workshop, laundry, and boiler spaces around the perimeter of the basement. But in the center of it, they built out a finished room, complete with heat for the colder months. The stairs divide the finished area in two. One side is a hang out area that Marisa has already claimed as a crafting and puzzle zone. The other…
My dad and I ripped the last wood paneling off the walls of our new house’s master bedroom. Each sheet that came down revealed the wallpaper underneath- blue, with white and gold leaves. As I hauled the last panel into the backyard, Marisa smiled and excitedly said “our house is coming together!” I thought about all the paneling that still needed to come down and replied “it’s not coming together- it’s coming apart.” Glue from…
The single most important thing that we did in order to afford a house was to live below our means. Owning a house was always a goal that my wife and I shared. And about a year ago, I realized that we needed to start diligently saving for one. For a while, saving for a house wasn’t the top priority. We put our tax returns in a house fund, but we were primarily focused on…
There’s a notoriously low bridge on Storrow Drive in Boston. The clearance is only 10 ft. There are warning signs for trucks leading up to the bridge, but some drivers ignore them. And then, they get Storrowed. The lucky ones stop in time and have to back up or get wedged under the bridge. The unlucky ones have their roofs ripped off. The obvious lesson is to pay attention to road signs that warn of…
After years of bribery, I mean lobbying, a bunch of states legalized sports gambling. That includes my home state of Massachusetts, where sports gambling apps recently launched. Now wherever I go, I’m inundated with gambling ads. They play every other ad on sports radio. I see them on TV and on websites. There’s even a sports gambling billboard that I see on the way home from work. These aren’t plain ads either- A list celebrities…
My dad is good at relaying some of the harder truths of life. He gradually shared these things as we kids were old enough to face them. When I was a junior/senior of high school, he hit me with this one: you can’t have it all. That’s not the message that an idealistic high schooler wants to hear when he’s on the precipice of adult life. I wanted to hear that the world is beckoning…
The sun was about to set as my dad and I pulled into the parking lot. A dozen or so fishermen were standing on the rocks, casting plugs into the water- a good sign. This was my fourth trip to the Cape Cod Canal and hopefully, my first fruitful one. As we tired out lures onto the lines, I noticed the quiet. Looking down the shoreline, I saw that all the fishermen had left. Definitely…
We just wrapped up two years of Frugal Jon. And I’m confident that year three is going to be the best yet. I have good plans of what I want to write about. More on that later. Right now I want to step through how year two went, compared to year one. There were certain points this year when I felt like a real writer and the blog had some wins. But there’s plenty of…
I have a special Halloween edition of Frugal Jon. This is part 1 of a four part story that I wrote for the UNH Main Street magazine while I was in grad school. I’ve edited it slightly for style, but otherwise it is the same as it was when it was published. The woods of New England are no stranger to the bizarre. Early English colonists recognized the true terrors that lurked in the thick…
When I went to undergrad, I reluctantly avoided student loans. I was ready trod the well worn path of taking out loans to go away to school. My dream school was Worcester Polytech. It was the only school that I toured before applying. I knew it was expensive and at when I was applying, I didn’t really care. As an 18 year old, I wanted the “college experience.” Besides, I was going for engineering, so…