Posting so I can find this again. I just wrote a frugal Hamilton story in my journal and I'm going to attempt to cross-post. Wish me luck!
ETA: I did It! This is wordy, but I promise you it contains frugally gotten Hamilton tickets. I dug up this thread so I can follow the helpful tips y'all have provided to maximize our enjoyment of the show. There's no way we're going to see this twice, let alone four times.
Oh, and it might be helpful for me to mention DH's mother has Alzheimer's, which we discovered when his dad died three weeks after we got married. She lives with us now, in a ridiculously beautiful clown house we bought because neither of our pre-wedding houses was suitable for her needs. I haven't gotten to the house story in my journal yet, but I will, eventually. It even has a somewhat frugal angle, for a HCOLA.
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When I married DH, he owned both an RV and a pair of jet skis. It was a mental red flag, but I knew he had no debt, so I wasn't too worried. When we bought our clown house and moved his mother in with us, we parked the RV in the driveway. The jet skis went over to his brother's house. We were so busy merging households and getting his mom's affairs in order that we didn't have time to use the RV, but it came in very handy when we had visitors. Until the rainy morning when we discovered his mom outside in her bathrobe, pounding on the RV door, demanding that our guest get out of "her" RV. We took one last trip, then DH sold the trusty rig to a friend of his brother's for almost what he'd paid for it a decade earlier.
I kind of forgot about the jet skis, except when registration time rolled around. I finally asked DH about them. He told me he had inherited them from his first wife's father. DH used to pull them with the RV so he could go fishing while family camping. By this time, I knew without asking that he hadn't taken out a loan and purchased them new, lol. I figured they had sentimental value (DH is a widower), so I didn't give them another thought.
Recently, DH brought the jet skis home from his brother's. Over the last few weeks, he has cleaned them, tuned them up, and done his CraigsList research. Early Saturday afternoon, he posted them on CL for $2k. He had a call within 15 minutes. By the the first caller got here he'd had two more calls. Then, while the potential buyer was checking them out, DH's phone was blowing up with calls, so he came in the house and pulled the CL ad. This created quite a sense of urgency and the first buyer took the jet skis with no haggling. Boom. One hour after posting, the deal was done, jet skis gone, cash in hand.
Today (Sunday), DH was in the garage, taking pictures of something that looked like a part of the jet ski paraphernalia. When I asked him about it, he said it was a winch he'd ordered for the jet skis. I asked him why he hadn't included it in yesterday's deal. Seems he'd ordered two on line and the company had double shipped them. When he contacted the company, they said they were so heavy it wasn't worth the return freight. On Saturday, he decided to hang onto the last spare and sell it separately. An hour later, he had another $25 in his pocket. What a guy!
Tonight, I checked NextDoor just before going to bed. Someone was offering Hamilton tickets for face value!!! That's $375 each, still a fortune to this mustachian. Three people had asked for the tickets, but it looked like they weren't sold yet. After a quick chat with DH, I messaged the seller and mentioned that I had cash in hand. She called me right back and I'm picking the tickets up in the morning. As you may know (there's a whole thread on the subject), Hamilton tickets are so hard to get that they're selling for way over face value. Much as I wanted to see the show, I knew my frugal soul could not bear to pay those prices.
And that, my friends is the story of how we're going to see Hamilton for "free" on Friday! The sale of the winch will cover the cost of our BART fares. I'm even thinking of using points to spend the night in the City in a fancy hotel afterwards. And the rest of the jet ski money? Don't need anything. We'll just squirrel it away.