Sean Martin
August 6th, 2004, 02:50 AM
With common sense and forethought, you really can cut back without suffering. Watch as the little things add up -- to two grand a year.
If you’re a die-hard, black-belt, frugal-living type, this article is not for you. I can’t offer you a new way to knit dryer lint into sweaters or a recipe for house paint made from ingredients found in your own back yard.
Your time would be better spent browsing your well-worn copy of the “Tightwad Gazette.” Author Amy Dacyczyn knows how to pinch a penny until it sues for harassment.
This article is designed for those who shun coupons, shudder at shopping discount stores and shiver at the idea that somebody might catch them being thrifty. We hear from these folks on the Your Money message board all the time: those who associate saving money with horrible sacrifice and public disgrace.
Then again, some of you are just lazy, and these tips are for you, as well. I’m offering seven simple ideas that should net you about $2,000 a year, all with a minimum amount of effort.
Who knows? You may decide, after trying these out, that saving money isn’t so bad after all. It might even be something to be proud of.
Tip 1: Use less
A pea-size bit of toothpaste. A tablespoon of dishwashing powder. A half-cup of laundry detergent.
That’s all of most cleaning products that you need to use. The rest is typically overkill. Try less and see if it doesn’t work just as well.
Instead of spritzing and scrubbing, spritzing and scrubbing, do it the lazy way: Spritz and let soak. Stains on your clothes or gunk on your counter will come off easier, with less effort and using less detergent, if you let the cleaning stuff work for a while on its own.
You also can save money by not falling for the latest fancy cleaning products and gadgets. The old standbys -- a broom, a vacuum, a dust cloth and a sponge -- work as well or better.
The typical household spends $509 on housecleaning products, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. You can probably cut that in half with no one the wiser and save about $250 a year.
Tip 2: Use more
Americans waste about 10% of their food dollars, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, by buying groceries they never use. Produce rots, bread molds and canned goods gather dust instead of getting eaten.
There’s a simple fix. Cruise through your refrigerator every few days and incorporate the stuff that’s aging into that night’s dinner. Rubbery carrots can get chopped up into stews or spaghetti sauce, for example, and that stale loaf can make a killer bread pudding. Make a monthly inspection of your pantry and use whatever cans have been shoved to the back.
If you’re not accustomed to the use-it-up style of cooking, have a chat with your grandma or check out some of the frugal living Web sites (see Related Sites at left).
If you spend $4,404 annually on groceries (the average for a family of four in 2001), you can easily save more than $400.
Tip 3: Cook once, eat twice
This one is simplicity itself. Whenever you cook a meal, make twice as much and freeze or refrigerate the excess for a future dinner. (In your grandma’s time, they called this “leftovers.” Imagine that.)
Deborah Taylor-Hough, author of “Frozen Assets,” used a variation of this technique to cut her family’s food bills from over $700 a month to just $400. But her approach requires a daylong cooking bash to store up a month’s worth of meals.
We less-motivated types can achieve some of the savings with much less concentrated work. If the frozen meals mean you eat out just 10% less, you can trim $300 a year from your family’s overall food bill.
A caveat: If you have teen-age boys in the family or adult males who forget they are no longer teen-age boys, you may need to freeze the second night’s meal before you serve the first night’s. Otherwise, your hordes may consume everything in their path, leaving them as overstuffed as a Victorian couch and you without a respite meal. So says the voice of experience.
Tip 4: Don’t shop
Tracey McBride, author of “Frugal Luxuries,” discovered that, when her husband was laid off, she was fine living on a tight budget -- until a catalog arrived in the mail. No matter how content she was before she opened the glossy pages, she would be miserable with attacks of the “I wannas” before she was through.
She found peace by tossing catalogs as soon as they arrive. Those who shop for recreation and entertainment may find they need to stay away from malls or shopping Web sites. If you spend just $10 a week on recreational shopping, you’ll save over $500 in a year.
Tip 5: Drive less
Gas and oil set the average household back $1,279 a year, according the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. Drive one less day a week and you could save about $180 in a year -- and maybe more, if less wear and tear results in lower repair and maintenance expenses.
You can accomplish this in lots of ways. You could hitch a ride into work with a friend, telecommute, take public transportation or simply leave your car in the garage one weekend day.
Tip 6: Go generic
If you’re old enough, you may remember the days when supermarkets stocked white-labeled canned goods with no brand or logos on them, other than what was inside: Peaches. Tomato Juice. Olives. Those cans left a generation of people who will forever associate “generic” with weird flavors, off colors and strange textures.
There’s one area where you typically don’t have to sacrifice quality for price, however: generic drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter. Just check the ingredient label on the back of that generic aspirin or cold remedy: It will match that of the name-brand version next to it, typically for one-third less cost.
The average person under 65 spends about $485 on prescription drugs and about $200 on over-the-counter medicines annual, government statistics show, so you may save about $200 a year by going generic when possible. (Folks over 65 spend more than $1,100 on prescription drugs, which means the potential savings could be even greater.)
Tip 7: Be fee-free
The average person who didn’t maintain a minimum account balance paid $217 annually for a checking account, according to the latest U.S. Public Interest Research Group survey. Add to that the ever-higher fees for bouncing checks and using an ATM, and you could easily be paying a bank more than $300 a year for the privilege of accessing your money.
Knock it off. It’s not that tough to keep track of your balance or to find your own bank’s ATMs. The information is almost certainly on your bank’s Web site, or a simple phone call away. There’s minimum effort involved and you can save a few hundred bucks a year.
See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? A couple thousand bucks saved, and nary a coupon was clipped.
If you’re a die-hard, black-belt, frugal-living type, this article is not for you. I can’t offer you a new way to knit dryer lint into sweaters or a recipe for house paint made from ingredients found in your own back yard.
Your time would be better spent browsing your well-worn copy of the “Tightwad Gazette.” Author Amy Dacyczyn knows how to pinch a penny until it sues for harassment.
This article is designed for those who shun coupons, shudder at shopping discount stores and shiver at the idea that somebody might catch them being thrifty. We hear from these folks on the Your Money message board all the time: those who associate saving money with horrible sacrifice and public disgrace.
Then again, some of you are just lazy, and these tips are for you, as well. I’m offering seven simple ideas that should net you about $2,000 a year, all with a minimum amount of effort.
Who knows? You may decide, after trying these out, that saving money isn’t so bad after all. It might even be something to be proud of.
Tip 1: Use less
A pea-size bit of toothpaste. A tablespoon of dishwashing powder. A half-cup of laundry detergent.
That’s all of most cleaning products that you need to use. The rest is typically overkill. Try less and see if it doesn’t work just as well.
Instead of spritzing and scrubbing, spritzing and scrubbing, do it the lazy way: Spritz and let soak. Stains on your clothes or gunk on your counter will come off easier, with less effort and using less detergent, if you let the cleaning stuff work for a while on its own.
You also can save money by not falling for the latest fancy cleaning products and gadgets. The old standbys -- a broom, a vacuum, a dust cloth and a sponge -- work as well or better.
The typical household spends $509 on housecleaning products, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. You can probably cut that in half with no one the wiser and save about $250 a year.
Tip 2: Use more
Americans waste about 10% of their food dollars, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, by buying groceries they never use. Produce rots, bread molds and canned goods gather dust instead of getting eaten.
There’s a simple fix. Cruise through your refrigerator every few days and incorporate the stuff that’s aging into that night’s dinner. Rubbery carrots can get chopped up into stews or spaghetti sauce, for example, and that stale loaf can make a killer bread pudding. Make a monthly inspection of your pantry and use whatever cans have been shoved to the back.
If you’re not accustomed to the use-it-up style of cooking, have a chat with your grandma or check out some of the frugal living Web sites (see Related Sites at left).
If you spend $4,404 annually on groceries (the average for a family of four in 2001), you can easily save more than $400.
Tip 3: Cook once, eat twice
This one is simplicity itself. Whenever you cook a meal, make twice as much and freeze or refrigerate the excess for a future dinner. (In your grandma’s time, they called this “leftovers.” Imagine that.)
Deborah Taylor-Hough, author of “Frozen Assets,” used a variation of this technique to cut her family’s food bills from over $700 a month to just $400. But her approach requires a daylong cooking bash to store up a month’s worth of meals.
We less-motivated types can achieve some of the savings with much less concentrated work. If the frozen meals mean you eat out just 10% less, you can trim $300 a year from your family’s overall food bill.
A caveat: If you have teen-age boys in the family or adult males who forget they are no longer teen-age boys, you may need to freeze the second night’s meal before you serve the first night’s. Otherwise, your hordes may consume everything in their path, leaving them as overstuffed as a Victorian couch and you without a respite meal. So says the voice of experience.
Tip 4: Don’t shop
Tracey McBride, author of “Frugal Luxuries,” discovered that, when her husband was laid off, she was fine living on a tight budget -- until a catalog arrived in the mail. No matter how content she was before she opened the glossy pages, she would be miserable with attacks of the “I wannas” before she was through.
She found peace by tossing catalogs as soon as they arrive. Those who shop for recreation and entertainment may find they need to stay away from malls or shopping Web sites. If you spend just $10 a week on recreational shopping, you’ll save over $500 in a year.
Tip 5: Drive less
Gas and oil set the average household back $1,279 a year, according the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey. Drive one less day a week and you could save about $180 in a year -- and maybe more, if less wear and tear results in lower repair and maintenance expenses.
You can accomplish this in lots of ways. You could hitch a ride into work with a friend, telecommute, take public transportation or simply leave your car in the garage one weekend day.
Tip 6: Go generic
If you’re old enough, you may remember the days when supermarkets stocked white-labeled canned goods with no brand or logos on them, other than what was inside: Peaches. Tomato Juice. Olives. Those cans left a generation of people who will forever associate “generic” with weird flavors, off colors and strange textures.
There’s one area where you typically don’t have to sacrifice quality for price, however: generic drugs, both prescription and over-the-counter. Just check the ingredient label on the back of that generic aspirin or cold remedy: It will match that of the name-brand version next to it, typically for one-third less cost.
The average person under 65 spends about $485 on prescription drugs and about $200 on over-the-counter medicines annual, government statistics show, so you may save about $200 a year by going generic when possible. (Folks over 65 spend more than $1,100 on prescription drugs, which means the potential savings could be even greater.)
Tip 7: Be fee-free
The average person who didn’t maintain a minimum account balance paid $217 annually for a checking account, according to the latest U.S. Public Interest Research Group survey. Add to that the ever-higher fees for bouncing checks and using an ATM, and you could easily be paying a bank more than $300 a year for the privilege of accessing your money.
Knock it off. It’s not that tough to keep track of your balance or to find your own bank’s ATMs. The information is almost certainly on your bank’s Web site, or a simple phone call away. There’s minimum effort involved and you can save a few hundred bucks a year.
See, that wasn’t so hard, was it? A couple thousand bucks saved, and nary a coupon was clipped.