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 incompatible 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 Of course you have to be prepared for some odd looks when you use a calendar that appears to be half a decade out of date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
Frugal living: Recycling Calendars and Diaries
November 30th, 2006 at 02:23 pm
November 30th, 2006 at 02:33 pm 1164897218
i get them at the dollar store, full size for a buck any time of year. i then cut the calendar along the seam so i have several sheets with a picture on one side/calendar printing on the other. i find the glossy photo side makes great 'occasional' wrapping paper for things like birthdays, office gift exchanges, etc.
you can also paste the photo onto a 4X6 index card, trim, and TADA you have a postcard. nice thing with this is you can get several post cards from one full-sized calendar page.
or, if you really like the picutres in the calendar, trim them to size and put them in frames to give/decorate with. since they all are deisgned to blend with one another, the group winds up looking pretty cohesive.