frugality

12 ways to save money on groceries.

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If you want to balance your budget, start by looking for ways to save money on groceries. You probably can’t negotiate your rent/mortgage or car payment downward, but you can find wiggle room in your food bill. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly one-third (32.7 percent) of our food dollars go toward meals prepared somewhere else.

Saving money on groceries means different things to different households. Not everyone lives near a warehouse store, or can afford to belong to one. Nor can everyone grow a garden or visit you-pick farms.

Fortunately, plenty of other ways exist to keep food prices as low as possible. This article’s focus is on getting food at low prices.

Use some (or all!) of the following hacks to eat well without breaking the budget.

Look for “manager’s specials”

Not store-wide sales, mind you. No, these are items that are close-dated or otherwise no longer welcome at the store. You’ll generally save 50 percent and sometimes more.

Meat and dairy items need to be used or frozen quickly, of course. I grab half-price milk whenever I see it, for making yogurt, but milk can also be frozen. Ask the dairy and meat departments at what time(s) of day these marked-down products are put out.

With regard to shelf-stable specials, sometimes it’s because they’re holiday items (canned pumpkin, chocolate bunnies) that have to move along. It might also be a new product that didn’t do as well as the manager hoped, which is how we scored a dozen boxes of mango-flavored gelatin for practically nothing. (We prepared some of it with apple juice instead of cold water and called it “mangle” Jello.)

Sometimes the manager’s special rack includes scratch-and-dent stuff, such as canned goods that have been dropped by shoppers or boxed/packaged items with torn or crushed corners. We’ve gotten some extremely good prices this way; last year we found several giant cans of pickled jalapenos for less than a dollar apiece.

Note: According to the USDA you shouldn’t buy any can that has visible holes or punctures; is swollen, leaking or rusted; is crushed/dented badly enough to prevent normal stacking or opening with a manual can opener; or has a dent so deep you can lay your finger into it.

 

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No-spend February: What have we learned?

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Really, really enjoyed the no-spend February. The month showed me that sometimes even super-frugal types are susceptible to advertising. It reminded me to keep an eye on impulse purchases. And on the bright side, it spotlighted how ingrained my careful spending habits tend to be.

I also loved the sense of community, of seeing readers encourage one another and suggest tactics to help stay on target. This has long been a sharing group; the no-spend month merely confirmed that.

It was great fun to read about everyone else’s frugal hackery, including but not limited to:

Slowing down (staycations, letting bad weather keep us indoors, craft activities, taking the time to watch TV or read free Kindle books)

Substituting (adding chopped apples to the oatmeal because the raisins are all gone; substituting not-quite-right yogurt for the sour milk in a recipe; trading a discount movie for a friend’s DVR queue)

Stretching (adding some water to full-fat milk; turning doggy bags into additional meals)

Setting things to rights (repairing a vacuum cleaner with help from a YouTube video

Sunk-cost strategies (fixing meals based the cupboard and freezer; using on-hand items to make snacks rather than buy them; bringing coffee from home vs. hitting Starbucks)

A lot of good money habits begin with the letter S.

And now that the month is over, we can all spend again! But will we?

 

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No-spend February, Week 2: Lots and lots of Tater Tots.

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This week reminded me, once again, that retailers are ultra-skilled at coaxing us to spend on stuff we hadn’t expected to buy.

Yep, I backslid.

But since it was all in the food/healthcare category, I’m going to give myself a pass rather than regret the dollars that flowed from my wallet – or the chopped, formed and extruded potato scraps that landed in our freezer. (More on that later.)

After all, one of the points of the no-spend month is that each person gets to determine what “essential” and “non-essential” spending means. What’s vital to you might be a pffftttt…are you KIDDING me? to someone else.

For example, some people consider coffee an urgent need (DF calls it “God’s blood” – and he’s religious) while others can take it or leave it. The first group will therefore deem a replacement bag of grounds, or daily cups from their favorite java joints, as essential.

The second group will shrug and say, “Not in the budget right now” and either stick to water or bring coffee from home. Which brings me to the mad frugal skillz of a reader named Kate.

 

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The dollar-an-hour rule.

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One of my blogging buddies, J. Money, recently published a post that bounced off a comment from yet another post.

(Blogging: Sometimes it’s a Ponzi scheme.)

That comment was from a guy who believes that entertainment should never cost more than a dollar an hour.

For example, a video game that costs $70 (!) needs to be played for at least 70 hours. A $60-a-month cable bill should mean your household watches a total of 60 hours of TV per month. And so on.

In “The ‘buck an hour’ rule,” J. Money noted that $1 was “a bit arbitrary and perhaps simplistic.” Just for fun, he took at look at some of his own ongoing expenses (only some of which were actual entertainment).

“It wasn’t pretty,” he admitted cheerfully.

Netflix yes, local newspaper no. Cellphone good, coffee not so much. Gasoline nope, currency collection nyet, historical society donation nein.

You never know when some “random thought” could affect a habit, J. Money concluded. So I decided to examine some of my own entertainment costs.

 

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Free stuff at the garage sale.

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Once while shopping at a garage sale I was given a box of canning jar lids and bands for free. I was perfectly willing to pay the $1 price, but the proprietor said “Oh, you can have it” – probably because I was buying a bunch of other stuff.

At another garage sale, my daughter and I showed up just as the hosts were So Done with the event. Everything left was free, they said. And not just some limp paperbacks and yellowed doilies, either: We’re talking a bed frame, kitchenware, sports equipment, a kitchen table, linens and more.

The easiest way to get free stuff, though, is the most obvious way: Look in the free box.

 

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Enchilada sauce and the domino effect.

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On Sunday I finally cooked the red enchilada sauce I’d been planning to make for ages. Generally I do a double batch and freeze half, because the recipe calls for three ounces of tomato paste and the cans are all six ounces.

Make ahead and save, right? Especially when you see how much you save: The red enchilada sauce at the store cost $2.79 to $4.49. By comparison, this recipe cost me maybe 50 cents (and probably not even that much) for more than four cups of the stuff. In part that’s because I used clearance-rack tomato paste (29 cents a can) and cumin and chili powder from Costco-sized jars.

Better still: I can control how much sodium goes in, and I can tinker the recipe a bit. For example, I added a little unsweetened cocoa powder for richness and replaced the water with broth made with chicken bouillon. But since both these additions had also been found on the clearance rack, they didn’t boost the total cost by much.

Naturally the flavor of the homemade stuff is so much better than the canned variety. No preservatives, less salt and it’s amazingly easy to make. We’re taking 10 minutes, start to finish. The recipe is from a delightful cookbook called “Budget Bytes: Over 100 Easy, Delicious Recipes to Slash Your Grocery Bill in Half.” (You can also access it at the BB website.)

Bonus: Finally making time to do the enchilada sauce led to all sorts of shenanigans. In a good way.

 

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Welcome, NerdWallet readers! (Here’s a coupon.)

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Thanks for finding your way to my site from Amrita Jayakumar’s article, “These young adults are debt-free – true story.” I’m not exactly young, but I was broke when I was very young and again when I was middle-aged, so I was thrilled to chat with her for the piece.

My goal was to share some of the tactics I used as a teen-ager running a household of three on a very thin margin, and later as a woman furiously treading financial water during a protracted divorce. You could say I took what I learned at age 16 and embroidered on it.

If you’re new to the site, here’s what I learned about being broke: You can make a good life on the money you currently have, without losing your dignity or your hopes for a better future.

And if you’re new to the site, let me tell you about the two books I wrote on that very topic. (Also about a way to get a free PDF of the “stealth savings” chapter from the first book.)

 

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Giveaway: “Frugality For Depressives.”

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Greetings from sunny Phoenix! I’m visiting my daughter and meeting some deadlines. While I do have to finish the paying work, I also wanted to put up a new post. Yet why come this far south and spend my non-work hours writing?

The solution came to me this morning: Do a giveaway post! Haven’t done one in a while, after all.

And why not make the prize a copy of Abby’s book? That’s a hostess gift she can really appreciate. #virtualetiquette

One lucky reader will get either a paperback or Kindle copy of “Frugality For Depressives: Money-Saving Tips For Those Who Find Life A Little Harder.”

Of course a mother would think her kid’s book is awesome. But I’m not the only one who thinks the book can help depressives and the chronically ill (and maybe others — more on that below).

 

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Five fast financial fixes.

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This post is a second-generation copycat post. Specifically: My daughter wrote “5 fast, easy ways to improve your finances” after being inspired by a post from the Bitches Get Riches website (whose title is not ready for prime time, but definitely worth a read if you’re not averse to salty language).

Hey, if it worked for their readers, it should work for mine.

 

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Hey, Josh Radnor: You’re frugal.

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The other day I read an article about Josh Radnor, the actor who played Ted Mosby on the television series “How I Met Your Mother.” Now 43, he talked about staying in his $750-a-month sublet for the first two years of the show, even though it was a megahit.

“You don’t know, as an actor, how sustainable things are going to be, how long things are going to last,” he told CNBC.

Finally he bought a house – the last person in the cast to do so – and by the end of the series he’d made the Forbes list of the highest-paid television actors, earning $10 million (salary plus syndication bucks).

Normally I don’t write about celebs, but I want to highlight something Radnor said in the article:

“It’s not that I’m frugal. I don’t mind spending money if I believe in the thing. (But) there’s not a lot of stuff I look at in the world and say ‘Oh, man, I gotta have that’.”

As long as we’re doing TV today, I’m going to paraphrase Eleanor Shellstrop* from “The Good Place”: Josh Radnor…Ya frugal!

 

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