“Frugal Living” is a series of tips for saving money. Some may be of use to you, some may not. I don’t use all of the tips and neither will you - we all have our comfort levels and our “things” that we don’t think we would want to give up or change, but you’ll surely find something of use if you check our site regularly!

Do you have a jar or a water cooler bottle half full of change somewhere in your house? We do. The last time we emptied it was about a year ago and I think we had nearly $75 in it. My husband is better about putting his change in there than I am, I keep mine in my wallet and end up using it, but why am I letting cash just sit in a jar??

Get it out of the house and into the bank, either into a savings account where it can at least earn a little interest or into your checking account so you can turn around and pay off some debt.

Be sure to call your bank and ask them if they want it rolled or not. The last time I emptied the jar, we spent a few hours rolling it all up just to watch the teller have to unwrap it all and put it in their hopper thing to separate and weigh.

Oh - and don’t use those Coinstar machines, please. They charge 9% to do what the bank will do for free.

Note: This originally posted in July but I’m moving it to now because it’s a GREAT way to start the New Year. I don’t actually expect you to do much on actual New Year’s Day … I’m certainly not planning on it … but at least print out a year’s worth of calendars from your word processing program or from an online calendar program and then this weekend, go through the rest of the exercise …

Like most people, I hate putting together budgets. Blech.

You sit down, you know you SHOULD do a budget. Heavy sigh. You make spreadsheets of income and expenses, most of the time not all that accurate because you didn’t take the time to go back and see how much you actually spend in categories like gas, dining out, and food in the first place so you just toss a number in there and hope for the best. You promise to follow it and within a week, it’s at the bottom of a pile of mail and the next time you look at it, you realize that you’ve totally gone off course and you feel like a weak-willed loser.

In other words, budgets are like diets. And do you know what else? Just like most diets, they’re simply not realistic because they don’t fit in with our actual lives. In the case of budgets, the issue isn’t only about the net inflow and outflow, it’s about WHEN the money comes in and goes out.

So guess what - I don’t want you to do a budget. Yay!

Don’t get too excited, I still want you to write down your income and expenses, but try this instead of using a spreadsheet:

1. Get a monthly calendar with plenty of space to write in the date areas. Please don’t go spend a lot of money on a calendar, a free giveaway one from a store will work just fine as long as it’s big enough. I actually just print out a bunch of months from Word, punch holes in them and put them in a three ring binder.
2. Pull together a copy of any bank or credit card statements that note regular monthly expenses - mortgage, credit card payments, direct deposits, utilities, insurance, etc.
3. Write the payment for each bill in pencil on the day that the money is set to leave your account (not the due date). For example, if your water bill is usually about $100 per month and it goes out on the 15th, write that in on the calendar on the 15th, with parentheses around the amount to denote a debit. If your regular bills change monthly (water bills tending to be higher in the summer if you have a yard, for example), either remember to adjust them for an estimated upward amount in the appropriate months or see if your utility company has some sort of level billing program (if they don’t, you can still set up a level billing program - just send more than necessary in low payment months and let a credit build up).
4. Enter any irregular (special) upcoming expenses, such as summer camp tuition or annual car registration expense.
5. Enter your income on the dates that you receive/deposit your paychecks.
6. Add up how much you spent in the last month on groceries, gasoline, eating out, and other things like clothing and entertainment, multiply it by 12, divide it by 52, and enter that amount as a debit (parentheses) on each Saturday.
7. Get your calculator and write down a running balance in each day - I usually put all of my debits and credits at the bottom of the box and keep my running balance (again - in pencil!!) at the top of the box.

What you’ve done is essentially lay out an actual cash flow for your household. I want you to do it in pencil because things change over the course of a year, but I guarantee you that having a year’s worth of cash flow written out.

Why is this preferable to a simple, “we make this much, we spend this much” monthly budget?

• It gives you an opportunity to look forward and see where in the month you will have quite a bit or not very much money at all.
• Keeping the running total at the top of each day gives you a bit of a goal - if you overspend, you won’t be able to hit that number, right?
• Sharing this calendar with your partner can help show him or her that even though it looks like there is a bunch of money in the bank when they look at the ATM receipt right after payday, that money is already “spent” in the future.
• Seeing where you tend to accumulate funds might offer you an opportunity to send extra to credit card companies or savings accounts before it gets spent little by little on lunches, entertainment, etc.

E-mail me at info@foolsandsages.com if you would like for me to send you an example of what this type of cash flow calendar looks like. I scanned one but it ends up being so small on the page that you can’t really see the writing.

If you’ve been visiting the Fools and Sages community for a while, you already know that one of my favorite websites is The Grocery Game. I’ve written about it here, here, here and most recently, here. I hope you have been able to carve out some time and check it out.

If you haven’t, I humbly implore you to go to the site right now (well, after you finish reading this post), see if there is a program in your area and at least sign up for the $1 five week trial. I’m begging, because I saw the video version of this story tonight on the news:

With just a few weeks until Christmas, the Salvation Army says they’re worried about the lack of food donations, which are down about 30 percent in just the last year. Last month, the charity was forced to turn away 300 families who showed up to their food pantry looking for help.

This is in the Denver area, but I’m sure the same story is playing out all across the country.

You can make a difference, and The Grocery Game can help.

For example, quite often you’ll find that turkeys and hams are on sale, but there are limits of one per shopper’s club member. If you are planning on having turkey for your holiday dinner but there are hams at a great price, see if a local soup kitchen could use a fresh donation and pick one up … or pick up a super cheap turkey if you’re planning on having ham.

Look through the list for inexpensive non-perishable goods that you can pick up with coupons while they’re on “super sale” and take them to your local food bank. Even if you can’t get some of the great sales the first couple of weeks because you haven’t built up your stock of coupons, these organizations are still going to be in great need after the holidays when people pressed for cash are going to have to decide between paying for heat or paying for food. And if there are toiletries on sale, pick those up too. Most food banks welcome non-food items for their patrons.

Some examples of great prices from this past week’s sales from King Soopers/City Market/Kroger:

• Cook’s Spiral Sliced Ham - regularly $3.79 per pound, on sale for $1.49 per pound. … 61% savings.
• Olay Quench Therapy Hand and Body Lotion - regularly $7.69, on sale for $3.84, plus a coupon for $2. …. 76% savings.
• Arm & Hammer Antiperspirant and Deoderant - regularly $3.99, on sale for $1. … 71% savings.
• Kroger Anti-Plaque Dental Rinse - regularly $3.49, on sale for $1. … 72% savings.
• Goody Stay-Put Headbands - regularly $5.99, on sale for 50% off.
• Betty Crocker Brownie Mix - regularly $2.99, on sale for $1. … 67% off.
• Manischwitz Potato Pancake Mix - regularly $3.99, on sale for $1. … 75% off.
• American Beauty Pasta - regularly $2.49, on sale for $1. … 60% off.
• Mrs. Cubbison’s Stuffing Mix - regularly $2.39, on sale for $2, plus a coupon for $.55 (doubled up to $1). … 58% off.

That’s just a small sampling of this week’s specials, most of which are 50% off or more. And, as you’ll notice, most of the sales don’t even require a coupon, so you can make a difference THIS WEEK.

Just imagine, though .. if you got one each of the items above, assuming a five pound ham, you would spend $18.29 for merchandise regularly priced at $51.97, including some items that could be real food treats for a family, plus some that could help with hygiene, and even a couple of items that could be a small gift or stocking stuffer for a family that has fallen on hard times.

If you use the Grocery game for your own shopping, that $18.29 would probably VERY easily be covered by the savings you can glean from your own needs.

This weekend before you do your grocery shopping, I urge you to sign up for The Grocery Game and print out some items that you can pick up for those in need.

Please pass this post to friends as well, and let them know that if they use your e-mail address as a referral, you can earn free months with The Grocery Game. They can too, if they recommend this simple and inexpensive program to friends.

I am grateful to you in advance, and so are those who are in need of these wonderful charitable organizations this season.

Admittedly, this is an extra frugal tip but hey, I thought I’d toss it out there.

This year, don’t throw away the holiday cards you receive from friends and family. Instead, put them aside until next year and recycle them as holiday postcards.

Simply cut off the second page, make a line down the middle (just like a postcard) of the inside of the front of the card  and write your message. Postal rates are $.27 for a card no larger than 6″ x 4.25″ and $.42 for cards larger than that.

Obviously this won’t work for all cards - some people write on the insides of the front of the card, embossed cards might be more difficult to write on, and … it’s probably a good idea not to send the same card back to the person who sent it to you in the first place. You’ll probably still end up sending some regular cards, if card-sending is your thing in the first place, because you won’t have enough cards that you can use to reciprocate to everyone who sends you one.

Still, it’s inexpensive, it’s green, and it’s a creative way to send your holiday message to people who also appreciate the value of a dollar.

As you may know by now, I’m a big fan of The Grocery Game. Even though the program does cost a few dollars a month, I like the format and particularly like that the lists are laid out in the same order as the store - a big time saver that is worth a few bucks in exchange for not having to trek back and forth across the store.

Although I generally wouldn’t suggest buying stuff that you won’t use even if it’s a Great Deal, I do want to take this opportunity to remind you that there are people in need all year round and using some of these fantastic savings opportunities is a way to donate frugally and therefore stretch your generosity.

If you attend a church that has a soup kitchen, you might be able to work out a regular communication with whoever runs it to see if particular sale items from the produce section or other areas might be of use every week. Homeless shelters might also find particular use from fresh produce. You can also bring non-perishables to food banks, and I’ve noticed that holiday cooking needs are already starting to show up on special. For example, this week I saw that Carnation Evaporated Milk was on sale with a coupon for $.50 per can, down from $1.79 - that’s someone’s pumpkin pie. A few weeks ago I remember seeing those crunchy onions on crazy sale, and I’d bet next week or the week after there will be a few great deals on canned pumpkin.

So, if you’re using the Grocery Game or some other coupon site to help you save money - and I highly recommend it, 50% off your grocery bill is really not hard to do - keep an eye out for those non-perishable goods, toiletries for shelters, and even fresh food for soup kitchens and shelters if you know what they need.

Although fuel prices have dropped precipitously - I saw $1.90 per gallon in my neighborhood yesterday - restaurants are still expecting to see much higher food prices and are changing their menus accordingly.  If you have a favorite restaurant that you frequent regularly enough to be able to recognize alterations in portion sizes or prices, it might be fun to see if you can see where they’re making the adjustments.

From the Associated Press:

CKE Restaurants Inc., which operates the Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. chains, stopped offering Double Cheeseburgers in its 2 for $3 promotion at the end of August and replaced them with Jumbo Chili Dogs and Hot Ham ‘N’ Cheese Sandwiches to avoid selling pricey beef at a lower price.

Even fast-food leader McDonald’s Corp. is considering making some changes to its popular dollar menu — either by changing the items on the menu or bumping up prices — saying the cost of selling meat at such low prices might be too high.

I feel sorry for the resturants, in a way - they’ve gotten used to Americans eating out constantly. Over the last year, though, dining out has cut back quite a bit and food prices have gone up, so the restaurants are hit with a double whammy. If they raise prices or cut portions (and therefore, “value”), they’ll lose even more business, but they really don’t have any choice.

“This is the most challenging environment for restaurant operators regarding food price inflation on the wholesale level for almost 30 years,” said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research at the National Restaurant Association.

Riehle said wholesale food prices have jumped 8.7 percent year-to-date through August. That’s on top of a 7.6 percent increase in 2007.

In 2006, in comparison, wholesale food prices climbed just seven-tenths of one percent, Riehle said.

Those numbers understate the increase in beef costs by quite a bit - the article states that beef and veal have gone up almost 20% from August 2007 to August 2008 - which probably means that you’ll get a little less meat in your taco salad or a few more fries on your plate to make up the difference.

There’s a lesson in here, and I’m betting you know what it is - Meat Is Expensive.

The easiest way to save money on your grocery bill is to eat less of it. Stretch your meat use with more veggies.

Instead of having a steak at home with a salad and maybe some potatoes on the side, slice up half a steak and throw it on top of the salad. A spicydressing made by combining about half and half ranch and salsa will “kick it up a notch” and help fill you up.

Other ways to stretch your meat without getting too much flack from the family …

• If you use ground meat in your pasta sauce, just use less. They probably won’t even notice.
• Make soups. Stew meat is cheaper, and if you have lots of veggies in there, they provide texture to compensate.
• For those soups, add beans - you see this with chili already, it’s helpful in regular soups as well. Barley is also a good addition to soups.
• If you’re making stir fries or Mexican dishes, slice up some mushrooms and combine them in with the meat. Portobellos provide some good “bite” but even button mushrooms can help extend enchilada or taco filling (chop up the mushrooms really small for taco filling).

Switching out beans and veggies for meat is not only less expensive, it also cuts back on fat. Don’t worry about missing out on your protein. For almost all of us, low dietary protein is simply not an issue.

Just a short post this morning on a solution to slow drains that I tried out last week. This is a great way to loosen up a bathroom drain without expensive and dangerous chemicals and as a side benefit, it’s fun! If you have kids or grandkids, let them help with this little frugal housekeeping trick.

First off, put a pot or teakettle of water on the stove and start bringing it to a boil. While that’s heating up, take a half a cup of baking soda and a half a cup of vinegar and pour them together down the drain (that’s the part the kids will love). Let it sit for a few minutes and foam up, and then you, the adult, pour the boiling water down the drain to clear everything through.

I don’t know if this would work with a shower drain clogged with hair, but it worked wonders on a sink drain that was kind of gooped up with months of soap buildup and such. It would probably be a good idea to do this once a month or so, just to keep things running smoothly.

Are you a Rachael Ray fan? She’s quite a dynamo, isn’t she? Her energy level is admirable, as is her drive and what appears to be her genuinely kind personality.

I’ve been thinking about her lately during my time in the kitchen. I never really got into her 30 Minute Meals show, mostly because I don’t happen to have a magic cupboard that holds everything I need for a recipe and partly because as nice as she is, it took approximately one appetizer demonstration to realize I never wanted to hear the term “EVOO” or the word “sammie” ever again.

Still, I like that she doesn’t get fussy about measurements, doesn’t change her kitchen for every show or put together over the top tablescapes, and almost everything she makes looks actually kind of tasty. She’s not intimidating, in other words, and makes you believe that you can cook. You know you can cook, of course, but I think to a large extent many of us have forgotten or never learned the basics. Her show demonstrates cooking without all of the pretentious “I’m a CIA grad” blah-dee-blah.

The reason I’ve been thinking of her lately is that with our tightening economy, people are looking for ways to eat at home more often. Grocery stores are encouraging this trend, which in my opinion is great, but not if family dining out experiences are replaced with frozen, overly processed garbage and not if you actually spend $75 trying to mimic a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal when more healthful recipes would save you money, time and calories.

Multitasking in the kitchen can save you time, money, and effort, and if you go into it with the right attitude, it can be very empowering. Maybe that sounds a little silly, but when you can’t turn on the TV without seeing reports of market crashes, bailouts, foreclosures, failing banks, and endless political ads, a little empowerment goes a long way.

So what kinds of things can you do to multitask? It all amounts to basically thinking ahead. For example, the other day I was making a Thai-ish stirfry with cabbage. I only actually needed about half a cabbage (I used it to replace quite a bit of the noddle part of the dish - less wheat, more fiber), but I shredded the entire head anyway. While my veggies were steaming, I grated up a carrot or two and made a quick slaw dressing - mayo, a little sugar, a splash of milk, and either vinegar or, if you really want to go old school frugal, some juice from a pickle jar - and voila, I had dinner for that night and slaw for the next few days. Had I only made my dinner recipe and put that cabbage away to make something else later, I can almost guarantee you that it would have gone bad and gotten tossed.

Another example came just a couple of days ago. We decided to bake up some potatoes and top them with leftover chili in the freezer, but since the oven was on, we baked a few extra potatoes for work lunches or quick dinners later in the week.

Or this past weekend watching football, I prepared some radishes, celery sticks, and actually peeled and cut up carrots. They all went into a large plastic tub filled with water, which keeps them nice and crispy in the fridge. When it’s time to make lunches, grabbing a handful of veggies couldn’t be easier.

There are also cleaning tips and tricks to save you time in the kitchen.

• If you’re going to be in the kitchen for a while and will have a few minutes between tasks while something is simmering or baking, take the opportunity to clean your microwave. All you need is a large microwave Set it on high for a few minutes to get a good boil going. Let it sit for a few minutes and then wipe clean - the condensed steam will loosen just about everything.
• Let your cleaner do its work. Don’t be like the folks in the commercials who squirt their cleaner on and wipe everything off a half a second later. The only time that works is when you’re using seriously strong chemicals, which is of dubious benefit in my opinion. A spray bottle filled with half water and half white vinegar will take care of most of your kitchen and bath cleaning needs - unless you have marble. Don’t use vinegar on marble.
• If you are cooking with lemons or limes or just ate some kind of citrus fruit, toss the peels into a small saucepan with water and simmer for a free air freshener that doesn’t smell like chemicals.
• If you have a double sink, fill one side with halfway water while you’re cooking and put used utensils into the water as you finish with them. Anyone who has ever made mashed potatoes or oatmeal and left them to dry in the pan knows why this is a good idea.

Those are just a few examples, and I’m sure you have your own tricks. Please do share!

This weekend as my husband and I wandered into Lowe’s to look for chainsaws, we walked past the huge holiday decoration display. We didn’t venture down the aisles because the toddler would have lost his mind entirely but some of the bigger objects were impossible to miss. Let me just say one thing here … I can’t stand those huge nylon blow-up yard decorations. Absolutely hate them. For those who live in my town who are reading this post and have one (or two, or ten), I’m sorry - to each his or her own, they just aren’t my cup of inflatable tea.

Anyway, off to the side of the decoration area was a pathetic little display of Halloween stuff marked 50% off, which got me to thinking, not for the first time, why do we pay full price for holiday decorations? Ever? We know that on November 1st, everything Halloween related will probably be marked down at least 75%, and ditto the day after Thanksgiving or Christmas. Why not wait until those times to get your decorations, if you need them at all? I mean really - you’re going to keep them for more than a year I hope, so why do you need to have the current year decorations?

Can someone explain this to me? Am I just a huge grinch?

I went searching for the other post I wrote about heating costs. Found it - from February 2006 or so. My memory has apparently failed a bit as the underwear I described as plain white yesterday was apparently themed. Read on …

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I reached today’s topic in a bit of a roundabout way. This morning a co-worker came into my office giddy with excitement over her newest purchase - a Tempurpedic bed. I know you’ve all seen these - space age memory foam, blah blah blah. I happen to know a little bit about mattresses after a brief stint as a furniture salesperson and here’s a little tidbit for you: a Tempurpedic mattress will snap like a dry twig if it is kept too long on an uninsulated truck or left outside. These mattresses rely on your body heat to do their miraculous form-fitting action, which is something to keep in mind if you have one and it’s too firm - you may be negating any benefit from the bed if you have a thick mattress pad or tend to wear heavy jammies.

Anyway, I digress. I told her that my husband and I had thought about one of those but decided against it because we keep our home pretty cool in the winter to save on heating. In fact, we keep our heater at 64. She gasped and told me that there was “no way” she could stand having the house at 64, they keep theirs at a minimum of 72.

SEVENTY-TWO! Frankly, at 72 I would be downright nauseous from the heat. That’s almost nursing home temperature, if you ask me. My grandmother keeps her little apartment at about 80, I swear, and I can’t even sit in there for more than 10 minutes before getting an almost irresistable urge to stick my head out a window. Unless you actually have an elderly person, an infant, or perhaps someone with circulatory problems in your home, 72 just sounds like crazy hot.

The thing is, though, that I think part of my aversion to overly warm homes comes from being brought up in a rather nippy household. When I was a kid, there was a period of about a year when my family lived in an old drafty farmhouse because after a bad run-in with a tornado, our former home was in need of a complete rebuild.

That farmhouse was so cold that I would take my clothes for the next day to bed with me at night so that I didn’t have to get out from under the covers to get dressed. We spent our days and nights in layers of clothes, clothes full of fiberglass strands from the tornado, which itched like hell, because we couldn’t afford to turn up the heat. If we said we were cold and didn’t have at least a shirt, a sweater, pants, and socks on, we’d get a quick laugh and a wave of dismissal. In the evenings, we hung out with sleeping bags and blankets.

And guess what? We lived.

Much like how I forgot about the public library as I grew older and left my mother’s frugal household, I also forgot about bundling up. It all came back to me a couple of years ago, though, when one of my kids came downstairs in the middle of winter and announced that he was “freezing,” could we please turn on the
fireplace? My left eyebrow shot skyward and I told him to dream on. Before you assume that I am a terribly mean parent, let it be known that when he said this, his only attire was a pair of Spiderman briefs.

At that moment I realized that I had strayed too far from the path and that my kids were being raised to be a teensy bit spoiled. Couldn’t have that. The thermostat now rests at a brisk 64 and let me tell you - nobody’s wandering around in their BVDs anymore.

So how much can you save by lowering your thermostat? A general rule of thumb is about 3% energy savings for every degree that you drop, over a 24 hour period. So, if you drop your thermostat from 72 to 71 for an entire day, you’ll save 3% of that days heating energy. If you drop it from 72 to 71 for eight hours (while you sleep), you’ll save 1%.

My suggestions:

• Start lowering the thermostat one degree at a time until you find a comfort zone. We didn’t do that - I set it at 64 and told everyone to deal with it, but maybe you are a kinder and gentler minder of the homestead.
• Lower the thermostat even more when you go to bed at night - at least 5 degrees lower than what your daytime setting is. You can raise it back up in the morning. There is a common misconception that it takes more energy to raise the temperature of your home back up than to maintain it - simply not true.
• If you have trouble remembering to turn the thermostat up and down every day, consider investing in a programmable thermostat. It will definitely pay for itself.
• If you have reversible ceiling fans, set them to turn clockwise in the winter and turn them on low every so often. Doing so will redistribute hot air that has risen back down to the lower levels of the room.
• Turn your thermostat down to 55 if you’re leaving home for more than a couple of days.
• After you’re done with the oven and have turned it off, leave the door open - it’s a little thing, but why not disperse that heat to the room instead of trapping it inside?
• Use the colder temperature as a great excuse to cuddle up on the sofa with the people you love.

Now, I know this is perhaps in the “duh, everyone knows that” category but sometimes the simplest solutions are the ones we overlook. Managing your finances isn’t all about the glory moves like saving hundreds on your car insurance or your mortgage refi, it’s about the dozens of little things we can do to save a bit here and there so that we can take those savings and put them towards our debt or our investments.

Now go put on a sweater!