20 Secrets to Real Food, Cheap

Coupons aren't necessarily all they're cut
out to be. Courtesy: Fiscal Fizzle

Forget Extreme Couponing.

Coupons combined with sales net you mostly processed food, while requiring weekly trips to multiple stores and lots of time organizing ads and coupons. And for what? A box of Hamburger Helper that has about $.25 worth of ingredients in the box? A box of Cap'n Crunch that your teen scarfs in less time than you spent in the cereal aisle? Even if it's free, I'm not especially impressed.

Here I expound upon frugal eating secrets presented in my Grand Rapids Press feature (Creative and resourceful Grand Rapids mom feeds family for $100/month):

I like to buy my oats this way, too.
Courtesy: Heavenly Homemakers

1. Base meals upon inherently inexpensive ingredients. Examples are rice, dried beans, oats, and other grains and legumes. Things that grow when you add water usually fall into this category. If you can find these cheap in bulk or at a salvage store, excellent, but if not, they are still a food bargain. Use small amounts of more expensive ingredients, such as cheese or meat. If you're dealing with diet restrictions, don't necessarily try to replace "normal" foods, rather, find inexpensive foods you can eat.

2. Choose the right cookbooks. For the purposes of frugal cooking, a good cookbook is one which doesn't rely on convenience foods or odd, expensive ingredients. Vegetarian cookbooks are a good place to begin looking. Public libraries have cookbooks.

3. Once you have some interesting cookbooks on hand, think about substitutions, eliminations, and additions to make the recipe easier, cheaper, or to use up stuff you need to get rid of.

When you see a store with bins like this, see
if they'll sell you an entire 50-lb bag
at a discount. Courtesy: Groovy Green Livin'

4. See if your area has food salvage stores, or stores like Gordon Food Service or Country Life Foods where you can buy whole foods in bulk. Ideally, nothing will be wasted, but even if some is, you're still likely better off than if you were to buy smaller packages repeatedly. When you find a store that sells things in bulk, see if they'll give you a discount if you buy a whole big bag. Most people protest that they could never use that much, but consider this: if a 50-lb bag of oatmeal costs $20 (which is what I paid for my last bag), and a 42-oz canister of oats is $2, all I need to do is use a little over half the 50-lb bag to break even, and anything extra I use is essentially free food. As Amy Dacyczyn wrote in The Tightwad Gazette, don't feel that food absolutely has to be stored in the kitchen or pantry. You can put it under the bed if you have to, so storage needn't be a problem.

5. If you shop the salvage stores, buy lots when you find a good deal. Don't be afraid to stock up (see below). If you aren't sure if you'll like it, if you can, open one of the items (one that you'll purchase no matter what), and try it right there in the store. This will help you avoid a buying error, or its opposite, the dreaded I-didn't-buy-enough error.

6. Grow what you can, can what you grow. Even a tiny little garden can have a surprising yield. Freeze things; preserve what's in season. 

7. Eliminate waste. Cut off bad spots, use up leftovers, plan cooking around ingredients that need to be used ASAP. Freeze it if it looks like you won't be able to use all of it in time. Share with friends when you have too much, and later they're likely to return the favor.

My whole grain muffins have in
them more food, less junk.

8. Keep non-nutritive food purchases to a minimum. Consider only eating true junk food when you go to parties or events with treats. Homemade snacks can be air-popped popcorn, and, for example, tasty muffins that at least have some nutritional value.

9. Never say, "My kid won't eat that." YOU train your kid to reject good things and demand packaged and processed foods. If you're not good at this, check out a parenting book from the library--seriously.

Taking advantage of $.40/lb blueberries.
Unfortunately, there is no photo record of my
true foraging, so this photo will have to do.

10. Take advantage of opportunities for free food, such as wild berries, fruit in public places, and pumpkins after Halloween. Dumpsters at small grocery stores can also be really, really good; for instance, you can find a sack of potatoes where only one is bad, or cans that are dented. Some orchards might let you pick up drops free or really inexpensively--it doesn't hurt to ask. If you're too shy or are unsuccessful in finding free produce, check your local grocery for a marked-down produce area. Sometimes it's priced close to free.

11. Dress up humble foods with fresh herbs grown in pots, and plenty of spices. Ethnic grocery stores often have well-priced spices.

12. Save energy when you cook. When running the oven, fill it up. Use a pressure cooker (from a garage sale), and a homemade solar cooker. Keep lids on pans.

13. Cook big pots of food so you have leftovers and won't need to cook every day. You'll be less likely to turn to restaurants or convenience foods.

14. Cut out the weekly trip to the grocery store with homegrown produce. Eat seasonally (who wants a tomato shipped 1000 miles anyway).  Use dry milk--reconstituted properly, it tastes good. Or just incorporate it into recipes instead of drinking it.

Drink water. Courtesy: Laura's Last Ditch.

15. Everyday drinks=water or tea (especially ones brewed from your homegrown herbs).

16. Have a can-do attitude, and be thankful for what you have. Inexpensive doesn't necessarily mean inferior. If you cook from scratch a lot, you'll probably get good at it and come up with some mighty tasty creations.

17. Expiration dates are a suggestion. Inspect the item and use your good judgment.

18. Use scraps you normally pitch: celery leaves or radish tops can be chopped and thrown into stew; make apple or pear cores into vinegar; use dandelion greens from your yard on your sandwich; veggie scraps or bones can go into a dedicated freezer bag until you have enough to make stock.

19. Liberally use Google. You might want to make your own taco seasoning mix or vinegar, find a substitute in a recipe, or see how to make soap from your bacon drippings.

20. Some additional thoughts:

What you have in your pantry will be dried staples, along with whatever else you found that gives good nutrition and/or is filling for the price. Concentrate on getting a good value rather than a "good" discount  (90%-off caviar is still more expensive than canned tuna, so stick with the tuna, for example).

When it's time to cook, you make what you're able from the food you found that was a good food value. Try to match up recipes with the items you've already stocked, while avoiding the supermarket. I rarely have to shop, and almost never at the regular grocery store. I spend less than $100/month for a family of three, and spend no more time with cooking and shopping combined than I did when I couponed back in the day.

When you find yourself perusing the coupon circular in the Sunday paper or coupon websites, remember this: It's empowering to cook good food with inexpensive ingredients instead of depending on the whims of food marketers who decide what's on sale and what gets a coupon. And when you eat good, wholesome food instead of packaged junk, your kids learn good eating habits and the whole family enjoys better health.

Do you go to extremes to save on food? Leave a comment below. If you found this post helpful, please "share"!

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Thanksgiving: Quintessential Tightwad Holiday

Thanksgiving is a wonderful tightwad holiday. Nothing on the must-have food list is very expensive, and people usually cook from scratch for it; there are no gifts to buy, and few, if any, decorations. The best thing, though, is that an attitude of thankfulness in and of itself saves money. If you're thankful for what you have, you won't feel so much need to upgrade to a bigger house, bigger TV, or fancier phone. If you know just how blessed you are to have decent clothes to wear when so many people around the world do not, you'll find thrift store threads sufficient. When you know how blessed you are to have sufficient food to eat, you won't let your kids throw away their bread crusts.

I find it shameful this is followed by the Black Friday buying binge, as if we, as a society, have not taken the lesson to heart. Being thankful will save you money, but also compel you to respond by giving. This reminds me of Heidelberg Catechism Q & A 86:

Q. 86 We have been delivered from our misery by God's grace alone through Christ
and not because we have earned it: why then must we still do good? 

A. To be sure, Christ has redeemed us by his blood. But we do good because Christ by his Spirit is also renewing us to be like himself, so that in all our living we may show that we are thankful to God for all he has done for us, and so that he may be praised through us. And we do good so that we may be assured of our faith by its fruits, and so that by our godly living our neighbors may be won over to Christ.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

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10 Crazy Secrets to Saving Money on Printer Ink Cartridges

When I hear people decrying the high cost of printer ink, I cannot join the lament because it costs me almost nothing to print. While some of my strategies won't work for you, some may apply to your situation. Read on, for 10 crazy secrets to saving money on printer ink cartridges:

I can find ink for my old printer at
garage sales and thrift stores.
Courtesy: 360 Technologies

1. I use an old printer, from 1998, for which it's easy to find ink cartridges very inexpensively on eBay, at garage sales, or thrift stores. If you have more than one printer (if you see another one in the trash or really cheap at a garage sale, you might want to pick it up), you double your chances of finding a good deal on the right ink cartridge.

2. Know what kind of ink you use, so you can take advantage of thrift store or garage sale bargains. Expired ink, even ink that is several years expired, is usually fine. Writing your ink types on the back of a business card kept in your wallet, or keep a memo on your iPhone.

3. Exchange your used ink cartridges at an office supply store for store credit. An ink cartridge you paid $2 for could yield $2 in store credit once you've used the ink. If you use your store credit for something you have to buy anyway, this essentially makes your ink free. For that matter, if you're driving down the road and see a printer in the trash, stop the car and nab the cartridges to exchange, even if you leave the printer behind.

4. The pen is your friend. Print less. If there's only a small amount of information you might need, grab a pen and scratch paper to jot down pertinent information; or, if you can just save it on your computer or flash drive, do that instead. 

5. Reduce the size and print quality. The method varies by operating system, but in Windows Vista and Windows 7 (which is all I can vouch for), in the "Print" pop-up window, go to Properties, and in the Paper/Quality tab, choose "draft;" in the Layout tab, I often choose two pages per sheet. Not a good idea for a doctoral thesis, but it will be good enough for many applications.

6. If you're printing a document for which you can choose the font, choose a thrifty font. Some fonts use far less ink than others.

7. Proofread and use the Print Preview feature so you don't have to reprint due to a typo or other error. If you need to make multiple copies, print just one first, to be sure everything is fine, so you don't end up with 20 sheets that have errors. Depending on how cheaply you find your ink, it might be less expensive to use a copy machine to make additional copies rather than printing them all on your printer.

8. While you're saving ink, you can save paper, too. Make a stack of scratch paper with blank back sides, and keep it near your printer, so you can save your good paper for when you really need it.

9. Don't print this blog post. 

10. Did I miss anything? If you have any other strategies for saving ink, please comment!
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If You Love Garage Sales a Little Too Much

Courtesy: Frugal Cafe

Most tightwads love garage sales and thrift stores. It's really fun to shop them, but sometimes you bring home a "bargain" and wonder, "What was I thinking?" Unless you purge religiously, you probably can gather up several boxes of this stuff. You can donate it and get a tax deduction if you itemize, you can sell it at your own garage sale or Craigslist and maybe make a little something, or you can sell on eBay and make quite a bit.

The average person has no idea what to sell on eBay. In fact, if I showed you three photos of random items, you'd probably guess wrong on all of them. There's a Weird Al song about eBay my favorite line of which is, "The kind of stuff that you would throw away, I'll buy on eBay." This is true. Is it junky? It might not matter--I once sold a pair of very worn vintage whisk brooms from a trash pile for $41. Is it worthless and useless? I've sold an empty lip balm tin for $20. Is it obsolete? Probably not so obsolete no one will buy it (check out what Polaroid film goes for, and VCRs). What about your trash? Some of that sells, too! My point is that almost anything can be eBayable, and you won't know unless you check the prices.

To check prices on eBay, you need to sign in, put something into the search box, then click on "completed listings" in the left hand column. This way you will see what items have sold for, not just what the asking prices are. You can sort items from highest to lowest sale price, or vice versa. If you find you have something good, list it. If you don't know how, just dive in and figure it out as you go along. I started out knowing nothing, and now this is my family's main source of income. If you get hung up on trying to do everything "right," you'll never start, and never succeed.

The good thing about selling on eBay, aside from the obvious bonus of making money, is that once you work through selling the junk around your house, armed with your new-found knowledge of what sells and of what you like to sell, you can now go to thrift stores and garage sales with a new set of eyes,eyes that recognize what you can eBay. Now you can get your shopping fix and make money. But there's that saying, "Your eyes are bigger than your stomach," to chastise a person who has taken more than he or she could possibly eat. It's easy to do that while shopping for eBay fodder, too. Just have to be careful not to buy too much, because it will cut into your profit and clutter your home anew.

Ready to try it? Let me know what happens!
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Lower Expectations = Stress-Free Christmas

Think her mom ran all over town trying
to find the season's hot gift?

People think kids need presents for Christmas--and lots of them--hundreds of dollars' worth per child. Parents even let the kids dictate, to a certain extent, what they want, via a wish list. Many of these same kids are ferried around, allowed to dictate the dinner menu, and have parents who do almost all the housework. Parents are relegated to a serving role while kids are coddled. Is it any wonder, then, that Christmas is a financial and emotional drain? What if I can't find the hot toy on my kid's wish list? I'd rather run from store to store, or overpay on eBay than disappoint my little princess!

Does this come to your house? Cancel it.

But, we can teach our kids that it's not about me, me, me, and model it ourselves by not demanding the latest gadgets or fashions, a bigger house, or faster car. We can practice contentment, using our resources instead to take care of our own financial obligations and to care for the legitimate needs of others. And we can teach discernment with advertisements, such as, "Yes, that remote control helicopter with built-in video camera in the Toys R Us ad looks really fun, but it doesn't look well made, and it would probably break after it flew into a wall, and all we could do is throw it away, and that wouldn't be a good use of resources," or, just promptly recycle the ad. And point out that, "Yes, your friend Suzie has some really great American Girl dolls with all the fancy accoutrements, but     (list trade-offs here, such as day care, stress, less leisure time)         in order to work to pay for those fancy toys and a big house to fit them in."

Remember simple Christmases, by
buying this plate you don't need.

If we teach children right, we needn't worry they'll be deprived. It's loving, caring parents they need, not a bunch of fancily wrapped packages that become outgrown, broken landfill fodder, or clutter bound for U-Store-It. Remember  Little House on the Prairie, how the Ingalls girls delighted in oranges in their stockings?

Kids need to learn to care about others. I have a friend who lets her kids decide, in lieu of a bunch of presents, which non-profit organization to donate to each Christmas. Kids can have such big hearts when it's cultivated and modeled by the adults in their lives.

We get our son one or two gifts for Christmas, from a garage sale or thrift store. He remembers what they were. He enjoys them, more than a toy we might buy last-minute from the store, throwing something mildly appropriate into the cart amidst a throng of last-minute shoppers, just so he'll have a haul as big as his friends'. Raised this way, he does not expect a Christmas-morning windfall. A kid with other expectations will need to be told ahead of time that family priorities are changing--not because times are tight, necessarily, but because excess consumption doesn't really provide lasting satisfaction, and it does not fit with the family values.

But a parent who isn't stressed, who doesn't need to work overtime, and who teaches values that matter is the best gift of all.
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