Monday 6 November 2006

Frugal living: Recycling Calendars and Diaries

Often you can buy "old" calendars and diaries for almost nothing when the year is half over - stores don't want to hold onto stock and there's little chance of selling a calendar that only has a few months of useful life left.

If there were no leap years, then every calendar would be recycled on a 7-year cycle, the first day of the year moving forward by one each year (because there's an extra weekday each year: 365 mod 7 = 1). Due to leap years making non-leap year calendars incompatiable with leap-year calendars that start on the same day, the calculation of reusable calendars is a bit complicated - usually a calendar can be reused 6 or 11 years later. I've listed the reusability years for the next 10 years worth of calendars below.

Therefore, if you find you have an unused calendar at the end of the year, and you have some spare storage space, just put it aside and you can probably reuse it in 5 years time. If you're really frugal you could wait for the chance to buy calendars for 80% off, and put them aside for 5 (or more) years until you can use them. Although you'd miss out on interest on the money paid for the calendar, the price of printed items tends to go up faster than the general inflation rate, so it's a pretty good hedge against inflation. Of course you have to be prepared for some odd looks when you use a calendar that appears to be half a decade out of date ;)

Calendar Re-use 1-JAN 1-MAR
Year Year is a is a
2006 2017 SUN WED
2007 2018 MON THU
2008 2036 TUE SAT - it's probably not worth keeping this one! ;)
2009 2015 THU SUN
2010 2021 FRI MON
2011 2022 SAT TUE
2012 2040 SUN THU - and you can toss this one out too ;)
2013 2019 TUE FRI
2014 2025 WED SAT
2015 2026 THU SUN

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I usually go out on New Years Day and buy my calendars for the year. I like ones with nature/animal photos. Today I mentioned to a friend that some years I can't find any with photos of apes or other primates. She suggested reusing old ones. (She knows me well enough to guess I had probably saved them for the photos.) When I got home I checked an online perpetual calendar and found that a 1998 calendar will work for 2009. I dug through my stack of old ape/primate calendars and found TWO -- one for home and one for the office. Neat. Sometimes it pays to be a packrat.