MAKING LEMONADE OUT OF LEMONS

Darcy exemplifies resilience by finding freebies and silver linings

THERE’S A LITTLE PACKAGE of cocoa butter that’s long since dried out inside a $1 plastic container in Darcy Miller’s apartment. It’s frayed around the edges and the brand name has rubbed off even though it was never opened.

Little wonder about the sample size’s condition—it came Darcy’s way eleven years ago when she first started perfecting the art of getting freebie products online.

“The first year of doing freebie searches panned out to be nothing. The only thing I got that whole year of filling out freebies was that small pack of cocoa butter and a bunch of spam in my e-mail inbox,” Darcy recalls. “[But] I didn’t let it bother me and that’s why I continued. To this day, I still have that small pack of cocoa butter as a reminder of where I started.”

Darcy is a self-confessed “freebie-aholic.” Getting free samples online is a way of life for her. The forty-seven-year-old divorcée really knew she was on to something when she was able to supplement part of her shopping list with freebies.

“I have not had to buy shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, toothbrushes, or deodorant in ten years,” she told me.

Clearly, this is one lady who knows how to pinch a penny. But you have to when you’re living on $678 a month in disability and $158 in food stamps.

Darcy lives in northern Indiana’s Amish country, in a town called Nappanee, which lies between South Bend and Fort Wayne. It’s just over one hundred miles from Chicago across the Illinois-Indiana border, but it is worlds away from the hustle and bustle of metro areas.

Nappanee is the kind of place where you can still see a homemade stop sign that reads “Please Stop! Horses Have the Right of Way” on the outskirts of town. Darcy lives about half a mile off Main Street in a town where Main Street still signifies the place where people gather to talk about the news of the day over a cup of coffee.

Darcy has embraced the slower pace of life in Nappanee but not willingly. She’s disabled and spends her time at home in a wheelchair. She started receiving disability in 2011, a dozen years after she first had back surgery to remedy debilitating childhood scoliosis.

Still, she makes it a point to get up and out of the chair once a day to move around with the assistance of a walker. Every morning, she vacuums and dusts, picking up after the three pets that she says keep her “sane.”

With maybe too much time on her hands, Darcy is the kind of person who is always ready to share the latest from the hours she spends on the Internet researching freebies and money-saving options.

She effuses over e-mail when talking about Dollar Tree’s recent decision to start accepting coupons. (“So basically, you pay a dollar for something, and if you have a coupon, you can get it close to free—if not free!”)

On the phone, Darcy is eager to pass along a tip about the giant loaves of herb and garlic bread on Walmart’s bakery racks for $1.19. (“If you put them in the fridge, they will last a full month. But if you leave them out, they’ll spoil in just a couple of days.”)

She rents a one-bedroom in Nappanee for $290 a month—paying an extra $10 each month for her pets. There’s Joe the dog, Baldy the cat, and another stray feline named Tangerine, who literally came flying into her apartment in 2011 when the screen door was open and has never left.

“I’ve always had pets since I was a baby. I’ve never been without them. My ex-husband wanted to keep Joe and Baldy . . . but that’s not going to happen,” Darcy says, “knowing how he took care of them, which was zero. I wasn’t having it.”

Darcy could pay less for Section 8 housing, but that would be in a high crime area and she wouldn’t be able to move very well in the event of a home invasion.

Five years ago, things were going somewhat better for Darcy. She was working part-time as a salesperson at Olan Mills, a chain photography studio—six hours a day, three days a week, at $8 an hour. Back then she could afford to earn $7,488 annually because she had a husband who worked.

But that marriage ended in 2011, Darcy says, because of domestic abuse and infidelity on her ex-spouse’s part. It was her second marriage.

Fortunately, she has developed a couple of coping strategies to survive the lean times.

Darcy has saved money on furnishings by outfitting her apartment on the cheap. She found a bed, a nine-drawer dresser, and a couch for under $250 through the Salvation Army. She got her recliner for free on FreeCycle.org, a website that connects people who are giving things away with people who are looking for select items.

She’s also a big fan of dollar stores. Because she is handicapped, she has to pay a driver $15 once a month to go shopping for perishables and nonperishables.

“I found a Dollar Tree that has refrigerator and freezer stuff. I get a dozen eggs for a dollar, hot dogs for a dollar, and large sour creams for a dollar.”

When it comes to the online freebie front, time has taught Darcy what not to fall for when looking at beguiling offers of supposedly free samples online. Requests for your Social Security number and being asked to pay shipping and handling charges for a “free offer” are among the most common red flags.

She religiously reads all the mice type on contracts. That places her among a small minority of Americans who are actually not contractually illiterate. But inevitably, Darcy has had several run-ins with errant companies trying to charge her for goods they advertised as free, including a leading publisher of romance novels and a Big Four wireless provider.

In both cases, she just had to get tough, reread the fine print, and show the companies why their own language substantiated her point.

With the romance publisher, she thought she was signing up to be a member of a free book club that required her to respond to an e-mail with feedback on the three or four titles they would send her. But then the bills started coming.

“I e-mailed them and told them that I would not be paying for the books that they sent me through the free club when I followed all the instructions by answering the questions and sending them back.”

Minor mice-type scuffles aside, Darcy has perfected the art of getting freebies to supplement her small income. And if things ever get too grim, she has Joe, Baldy, and Tangerine to see her through.

While Darcy has had a hard go of it, she hasn’t lost her ability to survive on a much smaller income than most—even with limited mobility. She’s a survivor. What can you learn from her story?

Decorate your home with free or gently used furniture.

• Furnishing a home or an apartment can cost thousands of dollars. But it doesn’t have to. Darcy furnished her apartment on the cheap by paying for gently used furnishings at the Salvation Army and getting a free recliner on FreeCycle.org.
• If you’re not familiar with FreeCycle, it’s a free site that matches up people who are giving stuff away with people who are looking for select items. One time the sister of a close friend of mine saw a funny post on FreeCycle where someone was looking for my books! I love that the individual was really getting my message about being extra thrifty.
• Twitter.com/Yoink offers a hyper-local version of this idea catering to New York City. When Hurricane Sandy hit in October 2012, Yoink went into overdrive as a crowdsourcing response tool to help connect desperate New Yorkers with food, clothing, and more—all of it free for the asking.
• Make sure you thoroughly inspect any items before bringing them home because of the possibility of bedbugs. Be sure to cover every mattress and box spring, new or used, with the highest quality cover you can buy. It’s cheaper to deal with a potential problem proactively rather than after the fact.

Stay out of the store to save money.

• One of the challenges we face in our nation is that everything is available all the time. It’s hard to overcome “affluenza” and “want-itis” when stores are open twenty-four hours a day.
• Darcy’s limited income and the difficulty she has moving around means she’s locked into shopping only once a month for both perishables and nonperishables. That’s a pretty unusual situation. But there’s a certain wisdom in voluntarily adopting what she’s forced to do.
• You can buy groceries on a weekly basis, of course, as your situation allows, but why not try to shop for nonperishables and other necessities only eight or twelve times a year? The more you stay out of the store, the more you limit your opportunities to overspend.

Know the deals at dollar stores.

• In Living Large in Lean Times, I include a list of the best deals at dollar stores. More recently, I saw a cute item on Yahoo! News with their tally of screaming deals.
• Unfortunately, the list was as dull as dishwater, with mostly products for household chores making the cut. It included dish soap, bleach, fabric softener sheets, dishwasher detergent, toilet cleaning bleach tablets, bleach spray cleaner, and sandwich bags.
• My favorite dollar store buy? “Belly Flops” at Dollar Tree and 99¢ Only stores. They’re bags of irregular jelly beans for a buck!

Beware of free trial offers.

• Free trial offers are a dime a dozen all over the Internet and on bad late-night TV. Most require you to divulge a checking account, debit card, or credit card number so they can bill you for a nominal shipping and handling charge.
• But that small fee is just a ruse to get your account information. Once they have that, the marketer typically says you missed your chance to cancel the trial, and they begin posting huge charges to your account without your permission.
• There is a way under the law for you to stop the funny business. See “Suspend automatic drafts from your account” on pages 175–177 of my last book, Clark Howard’s Living Large in Lean Times, for an explanation.
• If you’re already going through this ordeal, it’s up to you to watch your account like a hawk going forward. Let’s say you think you’ve gotten the mischief stopped. Don’t be surprised if the same marketer re-emerges anywhere from six months to two years later and tries to pull from your account again!
• Perhaps the simplest rule of all is this: It’s much easier to get into trouble than to get out of it. When you see the free trial offer, don’t do it.

Read the mice type.

• When you’re presented with a contract, do you know what you’re reading? Most of us don’t. In fact, Business Week reports that only one in eight Americans can read a long, dense passage of text and comprehend it.
• If we expect consumers to sign agreements, we should also expect that contracts be written in simple English. The nation’s newspapers usually write at a sixth-grade level. If they can tackle world issues at that level, why is it that we don’t require our contracts to be written in plain English?
• My guess is that if you knew what you were agreeing to in a contract, you would never sign one! But capitalism functions best when there’s complete transparency. Until that time, you have to do your best to read all the mice type like Darcy.

Don’t give up.

• Darcy’s story offers a great example of how to handle being thrown curveballs in life. As I’ve noted elsewhere in this book, everything I write for you in these pages—all the advice, all the guidance—none of it will work if you just give up on life. You’ve got to steel yourself when you face challenges like Darcy has done, and you’ve got to do it in the kind and gracious way she has. Darcy, you truly know how to make lemonade out of life’s lemons. This glass is for you!