During this difficult economic phase, my wife and I are doing everything possible to save money. For that reason, we’ve been cutting down on more expensive foods – regrettably including steaks, one of our favorites from the grill.

But during a party at a friend’s house we met a guy who told us he can get us great prices on beef – only a couple bucks for every pound! The kicker was we had to purchase 1/2 a cow. Where could we put that much meat? We’d need a freezer, but we had no space for a horizontal chest. Even though we had a 2nd refrigerator that we keep in the garage, so that there’s always cold soda and beer available.

My wife suggested that we could replace it with a stand up freezer. We began by looking over stand up freezer reviews. We narrowed down our choices to a GE at Sears and a Whirlpool at Fry’s according to selection and cost and headed out to the outlets to check them out. There we noticed that the GE was only coming in a right-hand door configuration and we wanted left.

Then, while checking out the Whirlpool we understood that the amount of meat we were considering wasn’t going to be simple to pack into the available space without some falling out while we opened the door. So ultimately we made up our mind not to purchase. The available units didn’t quite seem to fulfill our requirements.

Just two days later, our neighborhood newsletter arrived and one of our neighbors had one stand up freezer for sale! We checked it out and found it opened to the left. Further, our neighbor said that he’d been using it for exactly the same purpose we intended and had arranged elastic nets inside to prevent things from falling out! The freezer was certainly not in “new” state – beaten up and also a showing a little corrosion on some of the outside edges.

But then, he only asked $50 for it so we had a deal. And a couple weeks later we sold our old refrigerator for $50, so it wound up costing us nothing! We now have a freezer full of cheap meat. However, I don’t have an extra stash of cold beer. Ah, the compromises we make.