Freakin' Cheap: How to Fly with a Pet Without Paying Fees

December 26, 2017, United Airlines 5637, MSP--SAN. The two women in the AB seats in our row had two dogs on their laps for the entire flight. They stowed two collapsible kennels in an overhead bin.

United Airlines charges $125 per pet brought on board, and it has to be stowed under a seat in a kennel at all times. You might think the round-trip fare for two dogs would be $500.

Wrong. Dogs can travel at no cost.

Freakin' Cheap: Almost-Free Flights

How about an almost-free flight to Tokyo?

How about applying for a credit card with a 70,000 airline frequent flyer (FF) mile signup bonus, using the card for three months, then cutting up the card? 70,000 miles can buy a round-trip ticket from Minneapolis to Tokyo.

Flying is not always the best way to accumulate FF miles. Airlines are moving to price-based loyalty schemes. Instead of awarding one or more FF miles per mile traveled, Delta Airlines awards between 5 and 11 FF miles for each dollar spent on the ticket. If I'm lucky enough to find a really cheap fare, I'm not going to get so many FF miles.

These days, credit cards are a lucrative source of miles. It's not too hard to find signup bonuses ranging from 50,000 to 70,000 FF miles. Sign up for an airline-affiliated credit card, spend a minimum amount in the first two or three months, then get tens of thousands of miles credited to your airline FF account.

The key to collecting miles is to churn credit cards: apply for an airline-affiliated card, use the card for the required time period, get the bonus miles, then cancel the card. We've found that credit card issuers won't accept another application for about two years. So, two years later, reapply for the card and repeat the process.

70,000 miles is nothing to sneeze at. United Airlines has excellent availability in Economy between Minneapolis and Tokyo round-trip in the next few months for 70,000 FF miles.

Freakin' Cheap: Almost-Free Homemade Stock

Risottos, soups, and gravies taste best when they're made with homemade stock. I want to make these dishes quickly, but stock takes a long time to prepare. My solution is to make stock in bulk and freeze it.

My stock is basic, and varies from batch to batch depending on ingredients on hand. It provides a foundation of flavor and body.

I don't buy any of the ingredients specifically for stock, and I try to make the preparation as unfussy as possible.

Freakin' Cheap: Eliminating Unwanted Phone Calls

A few years ago we reached a tipping point with unwanted phone calls.

When the phone rang, it was usually a call we did not want to take: fundraisers punishing us for our previous gifts, pollsters, sales people, scammers.

Then I came up with a solution that for a one-time cost of less than $25 has eliminated all unwanted calls. Over the past 5 years our phone has not rung several thousand times.

Freekin' Cheap: Free Landline Phone Service

Google Voice and a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) adapter give us free dial tone on all our landline phones.

Almost all calls within the US and Canada are free. International calls are near enough free.

We use our home landline phones the same way we have always used them. People continue to call our old landline phone number.

We've been using Google Voice since 2009. It has most of the features of regular POTS (plain old telephone service) and a few extras for people who like to travel. It emails voice mails, filters spam, and lets us have a single number for our home and cell phones.

It takes a few days to set everything up, but if you value saving around $4,000 over the next ten years, this is the way to go. There are five steps:

Freakin' Cheap: Free Telecom

The typical household pays north of $20,000 over ten years in landline, long distance, and mobile phone fees.

In our household, we pay almost nothing for these services.

There is a long history behind free telephone service. In the 1960's and 70's, phreaking was the art of hacking the public phone system using tone generators called blue boxes.