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Friday, April 10, 2009

Frugal Master Quiz

Hope you enjoy this silly quiz I wrote. Have a good weekend, my fellow wannabe frugal masters!

Are You a Frugal Master Quiz – Take this unscientific questionnaire to discover where you are in the journey to becoming a Frugal Master. Choose the answer that best describes you.


1. Take a look at the coats in the closet, what do you see?
A) Several stylish coats to go with different outfits.
B) A warm one from the thrift store and a really warm one you got on discount 10 years ago.
C) Why would you look in the closet? You wear your coat 24/7 in your 60 degree house.

2. Why would you buy a rabbit?
A)As a coat
B)As an Easter present for a kid's pet that you will end up wishing you had never bought because the kid won't go out in the cold to take care of it.
C)You'd get two -- An endless food supply.


3. What's for dinner at your house?
A)Chinese Takeout
B)Meatloaf, Instant Mashed Potatoes and Rice Pilaf from a prepackaged bag
C)Soup, of which the ingredients have come from varied paths: stale bread, leftover veggies from yesterday's stir fry, the meat juices from the day before's pot roast and the leftover hamburger patty the 2 year old refused to eat.

4. What do you do with junk mail?
A)Throw it away.
B)Collect it for recycling and you have gotten on the no junk mail list
C)The envelopes are used for shopping lists and notes, the newspapers for mulch in the garden, the magazines for children activities and the rest in a pile to burn, recycle or for whatever else you can come up with before it goes either place.

5. What does the UPS man have to walk around to get to your door?
A) An ornate ironwork gate and a jacuzzi tub
B) The kids second hand bicycles and a potted plant
C) A raised garden of tomatoes growing in a tire, a windchime made of old silverware you couldn't bear to throw away and the goat who got loose from his pen.

6. How do your family members spend their time when visiting your house?
A) Relaxing with a glass of wine, watching pay per view movies and playing the latest video games
B) Barbecuing on the grill, chatting around the fire place and playing with the children
C) Helping you finish your house remodel, moving drying racks of clothes around to get to the couch and insisting on buying you the things that you don't have but obviously need like Windex and paper towels.

7. What do your co-workers think of you?
A)All of them wish they were your friend to get invited to the summer bash you throw every year around the pool with a live band and pig on a spit.
B)They think you are pretty average and like/do not like you based on your personality
C)They think that you are pretty strange and keep their distance, but once they fall on hard times, they run to you for suggestions.

8. How much money do you have horded away?
A) None really when you take into account the outstanding balance on your loans and credit card balances.
B) A bit, and you contribute to your 401k.
C) Everyone thinks you are dirt poor, but you know that you are debt free and have more socked away in high yielding interest accounts than 80% of those around you who make more money than you do, and you have hobbies that make a little money on the side.

9. If some major catastrophe like the Great Depression happened again, how do you think you would fair?
A)You've never thought of it, you suppose you would lose most of your possessions and move in with your parents.
B) You worry a little about it and think you would have to start spending less and maybe bring in a boarder to share the house payment.
C)You think of that all the time. You keep adding to your knowledge base of things to do to become self-sufficient, like gardening and butchering your own animals, and sewing and mending of clothing. You have already cut spending to a minimum before hardships even loom on the horizon, and you love to pick old folks brains for how they lived on the farm.

10. What is your gross out factor?
A)Anything mildly gross that has to be cleaned up you try to pawn off on someone else or do it with your eyes closed holding your breath.
B)Toilet backups, baby diaper explosions, and body fluids
C) You rarely get grossed out anymore, you are perfectly ok with using cloth diapers and reusable feminine hygiene products, snaking your own toilet backups, shoveling animal manure to use in your garden, butchering chickens, and turning your own compost.


11. You have a rare weekend without the children, what do you do?
A) Hop on a plane and go sightseeing or on a cruise
B) You eat out and go to a concert and maybe go shopping at a store complex you have had your eye on.
C) You use it to get finished those projects at home little hands have interfered with, buy some fancy piece of meat at the supermarket to grill that you never would have paid for on a normal grocery trip and watch a few movies you got second hand or from the library.

12. What is your idea of a garden?
A) The Olive Garden or the Botanical Gardens
B)A nice relaxing hobby where you can grow some pretty flowers and have some fresh great tasting cheap produce for the summer months
C)Your main attack against grocery bills, you know how much you need to can in order to get through the winter and the excess crops you plan to sell at the farmer's market

13. What is your opinion of thrift stores?
A) You donate to them clothes that you have tired of to help clothe the homeless
B) You stop there occasionally to supplement your fast growing child's wardrobe and sometimes find a neat trinket
C)You do all your major clothes shopping there, and not only that, but you buy clothing there for their fabric to refashion into quilts, diapers and shopping bags.

14. A guest enters your bathroom, what do they find?
A)A tropical theme: the curtains match the rug, shower curtain, towels and soap dispenser. A timer on the wall spritzes the air with perfumed freshener periodically
B)Clean, but bare bones bathroom with a bulk amount of 1 ply toilet paper stored under the sink and recycled magazines for reading
C)An instruction sheet on when or when not to flush and how to use the cloth toilet paper, two wastebaskets for burnables and non-burnables and homemade soaps and shampoos and a space heater to only be turned on when they are in the bathroom.


15. Where is your clean laundry?
A) At the cleaners
B) In the dryer
C) Hanging on a line in a snow storm

16. What is in your freezer?
A)Fancy Sorbet from the health food store, Diet Popsicles, and tubular ice cubes to put in your bottled water
B)Packages of frozen veggies, a bucket of ice cream and juices from concentrate
C)It has many dinners frozen in serving portions for future use, half a cow and wherever there are spaces, milk jugs full of water to keep the efficiency of the freezer top notch.


17. What does your pantry look like?
A)Pretty Threadbare
B)Has a lot of the things you eat, some items have been sitting there for 6 months+ which will be donated to the next food drive
C)Packed with homemade canning items, large amounts of canned goods found on sale so you bought 10+ cans and those things that were bought by mistake, given to you or you found out you didn't particularly like -- you are bound and determined to figure out someway to use them before they go bad

18. What pets do you have?
A)You have a $1000+ pure bred dog who lives inside or in an air conditioned dog house.
B)You have a few family pets for the kids.
C)You only have animals that contribute to the family. Chickens for eggs, cats in the barn for mice control, goldfish in your rain barrels to eat mosquitoes

19. How do you view utility companies?
A) You most often pay the bill on time and want the best service they can give you.
B) A necessary evil, but you are determined that they will not get all your hard earned money, so you try to remember to turn off the lights, turn down the temp at night, go with the low end internet speed and take a shower instead of a bath.
C) Outrageous thievery! You take in your own trash, burn wood or make solar panels out of aluminum cans to reduce heat bills, use daylight or CFL bulbs or candles for lighting, collect water in rain barrels and are seriously thinking of building or are in the process of building a windmill to start making enough energy that the company is paying you for electricity.

20. How do you get recipe ideas?
A)You watch cooking shows that have great recipes such as Mahi Mahi, Sushi and Scallops, but you rarely touch the stove.
B)You peruse cookbooks and you pick up ones at the grocery store checkout line, but you generally stay with the tried and true or the ones off the back of the box of food you are using.
C)You surf the internet for recipes according to what food you have about to go bad or leftover and you really get a kick out of cookbooks written prior to the 1900s or ones with titles like The Weed Cookbook.




Frugal Master Quiz Results

All A's – Not going to elaborate, since you aren't reading this quiz.

Some A's and Some B's – You most likely have realized you have to start cutting back on your costs and want to become more frugal, but reading the C answers on this quiz have made you a little leery of becoming that frugal.

All B's - You have been happy thinking that you are quite good at this frugal thing, but then you will stumble upon a crazy frugal blog, or meet a cloth diapering, chicken butchering, bread making, do-it-yourself house remodeler and realize there is another level. You go your own way for awhile, but one day, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, you will be staring at your check register and think back to those crazy frugal things you heard about and try to come up with one or two that you think you could pull off without the spouse and friends thinking you have gone crazy.


Some B's and Some C's – You know that you have room to improve on your frugality and are actively seeking out better ways to scrimp. You've been inspired by the some of the C answers and are planning right now how to implement some of them.

All C's – Congratulations, you are a frugal master. You are searching for the email address of this author to give her some tips since some of the C answers weren't frugal enough.

Do not reprint without permission of the author. © 2009 Melissa Jagears

4 comments:

Michelle said...

Oh man, that was funny!! Oh, and BTW, I am in between a B and C. We don't have chickens yet, LOL

Jill said...

Oh man, I can't believe there's no references to Dumpster diving or curb hunting! Who needs thrift stores when you have Monday night before pickup day! Braving used kitty litter and rotten garbage to rescue a bag of clothes that you can cut up and make into cloth diapers....now THAT'S frugal! ;)

Together We Save said...

That was great. Very funny.

Sewing-Chick said...

All Bs and Cs here! Would you mind if I copied and pasted it into my blog so I could take the quiz and elaborate on my answers? I would give you credit of course!