Living on a Budget

Whether you're directly affected by the economic slowdown (train wreck) or not, it's still not a bad idea to watch the cash outflow from time to time. In this spirit (as your life concierge is dirt poor right now. come on people, concierges get tips...), I offer some of my lower cost alternatives to common life concierge areas.

1. Vapianos (see review in the post below) - most food items are around ten dollars and the drinks are relatively cheap, but it still has a good vibe.

2. Booeymonger - several locations in the DC area including Georgetown and Friendship Heights. This deli offers great breakfast and good hot and cold deli sandwiches that go beyond tuna salad and turkey. I like the Ace, which is a baguette with turkey, russian dressing, tomato, grilled onions and muenster cheese. They have a good selection of sides, sell beer, and are open late night.

3. Deals at select Clyde's Restaurants - Many Clyde's locations offer a lower-priced menu at the bar during the late afternoon hours, Saturdays at lunch, and all day Sundays. Deals include a 5$ burger, discount wings, salads, and a crabcake sandwich. This is also in effect late night certain days of the week.

Clyde's locations that have raw bars have half-priced times that vary depending on location, but most are in the afternoon and then again late night (Gallery Place is all day on Sundays). Jumbo shrimp are just 1.25 per piece and a dozen oysters are 11.95 during these hours. If you're ever going to get the grand shellfish platter, do so during this time and save yourself 40+ bucks.

Many Clydes locations (most frequently the ones that don't have the raw bars) do half priced wine nights either Sunday or Monday. A bottle of Clyde's House Label on these days will be around 11 bucks (their house cabernet and chardonnay aren't bad), with most of the rest of the wine list also at half off.

Visit clydes.com for more information on all of these deals

4. Movies before noon. Alright, I get that some people think going to movies on a Saturday morning is odd. But get this - its almost never sold out, is never really all that busy, and the tickets are dirt cheap. They vary by location but most AMC theatres offer $5-$6 tickets on all shows before noon. A quiet theatre and a $5 ticket is worth an 11am start time if you ask me.

5. To save on Travel, swallow your fears and use a blind reservation system like Hotwire or Priceline. Hotwire simply gives you the price and a relatively exact neighborhood listing with an accompanying star rating for hotels. Priceline you bid low with those same details, you'll likely get a similar price with each system. As I wrote about last week, there are a lot of deals to be had on hotels right now, it may be worth a shot to stay at a nicer place and pay less money than the listed rack rate at the Holiday Inn. Also if you are familiar with the area you can also get pretty good at guessing the hotels by the star rating and neighborhood.

Be careful if using Priceline to book air travel, and be flexible. The system will book you on any flight between 6a-10p if using the name your price feature, but by far the most common flights awarded on priceline are between 6a-7a, so make sure you can travel early.

As the commercials say, Southwest may not have the lowest fares, but they definately do have the lowest (or no) fees. By the time you factor in priceline's fees, you may be a wash compared to the convenience of choosing your exact flights on Southwest. And Southwest only charges 4$ for drinks versus 6$ on the legacy carriers.

6. Don't be afraid of a little corkage fee. Want to go out to Central but don't have the cash for the wine? Pick up a 10$ bottle at the liquor store and pay the 20$ Central corkage fee - you'll still save around $20 rather than buying at list price in the restaurant. Many DC area restaurants will offer discount corkage nights - for example Dino's in Cleveland Park doesn't charge corkage on Sundays.

7. Private sales - Designers often have private sales that will charge an entry fee but have deeply discounted merchandise. If you're looking for a Furstenberg dress but don't want to sell a kidney, sign up for hautelook.com for more info on these sales.

-Please remember if you're at a location where tipping is appropriate that even though you are paying discount, your servers still need to make rent and tip according to normal full price.