Here’s a simple idea from Clossette–make a triage box for your fridge that says what to eat first. It helps organize and focus your eating habits so that you throw less food away, plus it keeps you from buying duplicates because you’re more aware what’s in your fridge. And all that saves money.

From the post:

It’s actually kind of fun trying to come up with a recipe that combines as many of the ingredients in there as possible too. Once I’ve consumed the high-risk items, I populate the triage box with other food that is nearing its shelf life. I haven’t yet run the numbers but I can already tell that I’m saving money and wasting less because I don’t have to throw as many containers in the garbage as I usually do.

I may have to copy this idea.

[Courtesy Ralphieboyo]

As I mentioned in my post on 3 Alternative To Black Friday, I spent the day after Thanksgiving in a national forest. While there, I was confused to see multiple people cutting down Christmas trees and putting them on the top of their cars.

It turns out that these people were not stealing but had purchased a permit to cut down the tree. In the park I was in, a permit costs only $10.

The last time I looked into cutting down a Christmas tree on a farm, a tree cost something like $60. A tree at my grocery store can cost between $20-$40. Considering this, cutting your own tree at a national forest may be a cheap way to get a tree–plus it would be a fun family outing.

The cost of permits depend on the park. According to the US Forest Service:

Each year from mid-November through December, your local Forest Service Office sells permits that allow you to cut a fresh Christmas tree on National Forest Lands. Fees for the permit vary at each local office. The permit allows you to cut one tree for your holiday festivities. It also helps the Forest Service thin tree stands that have a concentration of smaller trees.

To learn more, contact the Forest Service Office for the park nearest you and ask about “Christmas Tree Permits.”

And while we’re at it, here are 5 Tips To Cut Christmas Tree Costs.

For the first time in years, I’m not participating in Black Friday. Instead I’m going to a national park to see some nature and have fun with friends. Since I have never really enjoyed the most crowded shopping day anyway, I’m happy with the change.

Because I usually go shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving, I hold no judgment of those that do. (And there are a lot of them! The stores are expecting 152 million shoppers this year.) However, not only is it politically responsible not to shop on the biggest shopping day of the year, it’s also more pleasant–no crowds, no struggling for parking, no excessive consuming, no headache-inducing lines.

And besides, 90% of the sales will still be there next week anyway.

Here are Three Alternatives to Black Friday:

Buy Nothing Day: This campaign suggests you spend no money on Friday and have fun with your friends and family instead. This year some are calling it “Occupy Black Friday”, saying it’s a way to “stick it to the 1%.” Since the sales after Thanksgiving are carefully monitored by economists, if Buy Nothing Day ever really caught on, it certainly would send a message.

Buy Local Day: If, however, family pressures and a desire to get the Christmas shopping done forces you to go shopping, sticking to locally made gifts is a way to support your community and find unique gifts. In general, I’m thinking of going this route this Christmas.

DIY Presents Day: Instead of buying presents after Thanksgiving, make them. Make the day about creation instead of consumption. Here’s DIY Christmas and DIY Christmas: 34 More Homemade Gift Ideas to get you started.

Do you shop on Black Friday? Why/why not?

[Courtesy The Luxury Post]

There’s good news and bad news about the cost of Thanksgiving this year. The bad news is that food prices have gone up, so everyone will be paying 13% more for dinner this year.

The good news is that Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t cost nearly as much as it feels when you’re shelling out money at the check stand. In fact, the cost for Thanksgiving dinner averages out to mere $5 a person–plus leftovers. This makes Thanksgiving one of the most frugal holidays around.

To save even more, here are 5 tips to save money on Thanksgiving dinner:

1. Make from scratch. Generally speaking, making gravy from pan drippings costs much less than buying the canned stuff and mashing potatoes yourself costs less than the boxed flakes–plus, in my humble opinion, they taste much better.

2. Buy staples in bulk. I buy the staples of a big dinner like butter, flour, sugar, and milk in bulk, which saves significant amounts of money. For example, I buy butter in bulk at Costco. The last time I did the math, I pay $.30 per stick of butter versus paying $.75 per stick in my grocery store. The real cost of a meal isn’t the turkey, but these little extras that you pay too much for at the last minute.

3. Estimate your guests’ appetite. A trick is to sit for a minute and visualize how much your guests are likely to eat and prepare accordingly. Say you’re chopping vegetables for the salad–look in the bowl and imagine the lettuce portioned out among the guests. Do you need a bit more? A bit less? You’ll be surprised how well this works. It will keep you from making too much of something or from putting that extra dish on the table that no one will have room for.

4. Use natural decorations. There’s nothing wrong with buying decorations, but to save money, candles, greenery from the yard, white Christmas lights, and fall leaves work just as well and look festive if applied with a little creativity.

5. Use up leftovers. Duh. But really, be vigilant about those leftovers! Almost everything in a Thanksgiving dinner can be frozen. And don’t forget to turn that turkey carcass into turkey broth.

What are your tips for saving money this Thanksgiving?

I am rather enamored with Mr. Money Mustache’s blog, written by a man who retired from full-time corporate work at age 30 through aggressive savings, investment, and good old-fashioned frugality. According to this post, for 10 years he spent 25% of his disposable income while people around him spent 90%, which “meant saving a good $4,000/month, which rapidly compounds and results in a net savings of $7,000/month after a few years.” After a decade, he and his wife had enough money to do whatever they wanted for the rest of their lives. And he wants you to do the same:

What I want you to do is start thinking of REAL savings. Not putting away $5 or $150 per month, but more like FIVE THOUSAND per month. Not everyone can do that. But a middle-class American family with two teachers making $60k each per year, who are currently saving zero and struggling to get by? THEY SHOULD BE SOCKING AWAY $5000 PER MONTH. Word.

What I like about MMM is that, investment talk and bike obsession aside, he’s basically advocating the same thing Amy Dacyczyn used to advocate in The Tightwad Gazette. In fact, his story reminds me of Amy D’s description of how frugality allowed her to achieve her dream of “a large family and a rural pre-1900 New England farmhouse (with attached barn).” As I point out in my own post about frugality, in 7 years at $30,000 a year in 1980s dollars, the Dacyczyns “… saved $49,000, made significant investment purchases (vehicles, appliances, furniture) of $38,000, and were completely debt free! That is an annual savings/investment rate of over $12,500 per year, or 43% of our gross income.”

Mr. Money Mustache may be the modern version of this, only with different priorities and a higher initial income. Plus he has a lot of good insights, like how learning is one of the pleasure of doing things yourself.

I feel that every time you do something for yourself, even if it’s just washing your own car, you learn new things and build a more balanced personality that learns to love hard work even more. And you build diversity into your day, which allows you to work longer without realizing you are working.

Or his refreshingly sane advice for how to know when you can buy an expensive car like a BMW:

When can you truly afford a fancy car like a BMW? Well, once you have the cash for it in the bank, your house and all other debts are fully paid off, and you are either retired or very comfortable with delaying your eventual retirement for a year or more to pay for this depreciating piece of luxury property, THEN you can roll into the dealership.

People who aren’t frugal sometimes have a hard time understanding why frugal people would bother to make their own cleaner instead of buying the store brand or shave with a safety razor instead of expensive disposable blades or make your own beer when there’s a bar down the street. But it’s all a matter of priorities. When you stop wasting money on small things, they quickly add up to big savings, which you can then use on the things that really matter to you in life.

And it really does work, as MMM’s blog makes clear. [Justinsomnia]

The other day I threw a jar of dill pickle juice down the drain and then thought, ohhh I shouldn’t have done that. I had a feeling that pickle brine was useful, and a little research revealed that I was right. Whether homemade or not, pickle juice can be reused in lots of ways.

Here are some things you can do with pickle brine (or so I hear):

* Re-pickle. Cut up veggies, blanch them in boiling water, stick them in the brine, and leave for a week or so. They won’t be pickles exactly, but they will have soaked up the brine’s flavor.

* Use it in potato salad. Make the potato salad as usual and drizzle in some pickle brine for extra flavor.

* Add it into a Bloody Mary. Apparently it adds a little zip.

* Make Pickle Soup. People swear this Polish soup is delicious.

* Add to tuna or chicken salad for extra zing. I may try this next time I make a tuna sandwich.

* “Pickle” other things–cubes of feta cheese, hardboiled eggs, garlic cloves. Pop them in the juice and leave alone for a few days.

* Use it in dip.

* Make a Pickletini. Think a dirty martini with pickle juice instead.

What do you do with leftover pickle juice?

One thing I have learned from my post on turning a bar of soap into liquid hand soap is that some people prefer soap to have lots of foam. The homemade liquid hand soap doesn’t easily foam, and there is a good reason for this. According to a comment from Sabrina Sumsion:

The sudsing effect is actually added to all store bought cleansing beauty products. The reason is because of marketing. To convince women to stop making their own products and buy off the shelf, they spent a lot of money to sell the idea that suds are necessary to prove a cleanser is working. Since homemade products rarely produce suds (because it’s not necessary) they were portrayed as inferior. … The short answer is the suds come from added ingredients. Your bar may have a lower ratio of “sudsers” in the ingredients and when diluted further, the sudsing effect is basically negated.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with liking soap to lather. If that’s your ilk, try putting the liquid soap–homemade or not–in a liquid foam dispenser. These devices aerates the soap and makes it extra sudsy. Foaming dispensers start at about $5, but since they use less soap overall, they pay for themselves over time, which makes them a fairly frugal option for your house as well.

When I graduated from college, I learned I was tens of thousands of dollars in debt. Here I was just starting out in life, yet I was heavily in debt and had to start paying right away. It was depressing and scary.

So I feel for the people in this NPR piece who are struggling with student-loan debt. Some of them owe $80,000 or $100,000. While that’s excessive, the burden for paying for college is worse than when I was in school, and the price of education is still going up.

It took me 10 years to pay off my school debt. I don’t regret going into debt for my education–getting a college degree is one of the best things you can do for yourself–but I could have owed much less if I had gone about things differently.

So learn from my mistakes. Here are 5 Ways To Save Money In College:

1. Pay Attention To The Loan Terms. Don’t just sign papers. Try to get loans that have low interest rates, or better yet, no interest rates–they do exist for student debt. Understands the terms of the loan: what are the monthly payments? What are the penalties if you don’t pay? How long can you defer payment after you graduate? It’s important to know what you’re paying for school, if for no other reason that it’s a motivator to do well in class. You certainly won’t want to pay for the same class twice.

2. Reconsider The Dorms. Let me put it this way: when I graduated from college, the vast proportion of my debt was from living in the dorms. Had I gone right to living in a house with roommates, as I did later in college, I would have had a LOT less debt to deal with. There are benefits to staying in the dorms, and many schools require you stay there your first year (although I find that rules are usually negotiable), but dorms are often overpriced for what you get. You may do better living off-campus, so do a cost comparison.

3. Cut The Meal Plan. Make sure you are paying for what you will actually eat. My first year, I paid for eating in the cafeteria three times a day when I really just ate there once. That was a waste of money. Also, consider feeding yourself–a microwave and a small fridge (if allowed in the dorms) may be cheaper than a meal plan.

4. Be Smart About Books. Textbooks are notoriously expensive, so don’t just buy them in the student bookstore. Shop around. Most college towns have bookstores that sell used textbooks for cheaper than the school, and there are websites that sell used textbooks for a fraction of the retail price. There are other options too–you can share a book with a classmate or get it out of the library, although this can be difficult and annoying during exam times. Another option, and this worked for me, is to wait until you get to the class to see what the professor actually uses. Many times, they will assign books that they barely glance at during the class, so wait to see what the syllabus says before purchasing. It can save a surprising amount of money.

5. Don’t Procrastinate. Late fees. Parking fees. Handing in student aid forms after the deadline passes. Not getting a scholarship because you didn’t apply in time. All these things have one thing in common: procrastination. And procrastination is expensive. I racked up hundreds of dollars in parking fees because I was too lazy to get the change I needed to pay the parking meters. Eliminating procrastination can save thousands over the course of a college education–and isn’t a bad policy for studying, either.

So there are my tips. What tips do you have for saving money in college?

Stale bread is one of those kitchen ingredients that can be used many ways. I never throw it out.

Here are five things to do with stale bread:

Bread Crumbs–Instead of buying them in the store, grind old bread up and store in the freezer until needed.

Make Croutons–Easy to do and great in salads.

Bread Pudding–Bread pudding may be one of the thriftiest desserts around, but it is also served in the fanciest restaurants. It all depends on how it’s made. This recipe looks good.

Make Ribollita–”A simple, earthy Tuscan soup made from whatever vegetable scraps and stale bread is on hand.” I’ve got to try this.

Make Bread Sticks–From Cooks.com:

BREAD STICKS

Remove the crusts from any slices of stale, close-textured bread, and cut in strips about five inches long and one-half inch wide. Roll in melted butter and brown delicately in the oven, or fry in deep, hot fat without rolling in butter. These can be served with cheese instead of crackers.

What do you do with stale bread?

The other day, Mr. Savvy took a rare trip to a fast food restaurant. It cost him $2.17 to eat lunch. I had to admit, that’s a hard price to beat. You can eat for less by cooking at home, but when you add in the convenience and speed, I understand why people make fast food a regular part of their diet.

Of course what you gain in price, you lose in nutrition, quality, and taste. And when you consider that poor-quality food affects health long term, it is penny smart and pound foolish to eat a lot of fast or junk food. What you make a habit of eating today will have ramifications in your body tomorrow.

On the other hand, healthy food is expensive. Eating healthier food can add almost 10 percent to the average American’s food bill, and since the price of food is going up, that is not good news.

Still, I believe it’s possible to eat well for cheap. And you don’t have to resort to extreme couponing either.

Healthy food might cost more, but it’s worth it to pay for quality. With some strategic planning, you will find you don’t have to sacrifice good nutrition for the sake of cheaper food.

Here are 10 ways to cut your food bill while still eating healthy:

1. Grow a garden. I have mentioned this before, I know, but growing a garden is the best way to save money on food. A garden will give you ten times–if not a hundred times–the effort you put into it. It is a way to have an abundant supply of fresh, healthy, better-tasting food for little money. With canning, freezing, and all-season gardening, it will give you food all year long.

2. Cook from scratch. It’s usually cheaper to cook from scratch. Almost anything you see in the store you can be made at home, which includes bread, spice mixes, pastas, broth, soups, pancake batter, jell-0, cheese, beer, salad dressing, sauces … you name it. When you cook from scratch, you find that instead purchasing of a cart full of food, you buy just a few staples instead. One bag of flour can replace pancake mixes, cake mixes, bags of bread, bags of cookies, pastas, etc. That means big savings. (Although, admittedly, more work in the kitchen.)

3. Buy in bulk. I find it’s worth it to buy staples like the above bag of flour in bulk. Not only is this a more efficient way to shop, since you don’t have to shop as often, it usually costs less. In my case, it pays to buy butter, cheese, coffee, and flour in bulk. I would say I save between 30%-40% on these items that way, and I go to the store less often too.

4. Do the math. Which brings me to my fourth point–do the math on the prices. Divide the price of the item into how many units of it you are getting and compare that to other options available. No really, don’t skip this step, even if you have to stand in the store with a calculator. I have even gone so far as to make a price book that breaks food down to the smallest price so I can compare. How do you know if it is cheaper to buy the bulk beans or the bagged beans? Math. How do you know if it’s worth it to make bread instead of buying it? Math. How do you know if you’re saving money by buying in bulk? Yep, math. It’s the shopper’s best friend.

5. Buy in season. It’s usually cheaper to buy things in season, especially when you are talking about produce and meat. As a bonus, buying in season means you can get local food, which is better for everyone involved in the food distribution chain. Sometimes this means waiting until an item is available, but that’s a good trade-off for locally produced, reasonably priced food. Really, who wants to eat fish from China? I’ll wait until it comes up from my own ocean instead.

6. Eat more vegetarian dishes. As I have mentioned before, eating vegetarian is cheaper. Beans alone are a low-cost, high-protein staple that gives you plenty of nutrients on the cheap. I’m not advocating giving up all meat for most people, but dedicating a night or two a week to vegetarian eating will reduce the food bill and probably help people lose weight, too.

7. Make big batches. This means cooking a large quantity of food–soups, stews, chilis, enchiladas, etc.–and then divvying it up into individual sizes, which you then freeze for later eating. Not only is this cooking from scratch, which I already mentioned as cheaper, but it curbs eating out or buying ready-made meals. When you are too tired to cook, you can pull the individual serving sized dish of the freezer and eat that instead.

8. Cut down on waste. There are lots of ways to reduce waste in the kitchen. Eat leftovers or freeze extra food. Turn vegetable ends into vegetable broth. Find new ways to turn existing food into a different dish. Try a Use It Up Challenge where you list all the extra food in your kitchen and concentrate on, well, using it up. You get the idea.

9. Find free sources of food. I am astounded how much free food is out there. I have begun bartering with my neighbor and yesterday she brought me a huge bowl of fruit from her trees. A friend of mine gave me some meat from a boar he hunted and I turned it into sausage. I have foraged free food, particularly mustard, fennel, and blackberries. I want to learn to pick mushrooms next. Use your imagination and get to know the people in your neighborhood, and you will be surprised what comes to you.

10. Make good food a priority. This is an attitude adjustment that I find helpful: since there’s such a strong connection between eating good food and having good health, it’s important to make healthy nutrition a priority, especially if you have children. If this means cutting extras–sodas, sweets, alcohol, etc.–in favor of a better cuts of meat or more fresh fruit, so be it. Of course that’s obvious, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind when shopping.

How are you saving money on your food bill?