Don't Let Restaurants Deprive You

Sometimes we go to restaurants, fast food joints, and Starbucks because we don't want to feel like we are being deprived of the "restaurant experience."  However, we have been looking at this deprivation thing all wrong.  In our area, most "regular people" restaurants suck.  

On about 30% of our restaurant visits, something is prepared wrong.  If you can under-cook something, burn something, make something too spicy, or make something too bland, restaurants in our area will do that to your food.  When they don't do that, they'll often let you sit at your table for far too long before being served or they will be surly when taking an order.  While the food quality won't send you out to wretch your guts out in the parking lot, the food quality and service are just poor enough to make you wonder if visiting the restaurant was worth your time and your money.

When we realize that low quality restaurants are not worth our time and money, we realize that we are not being deprived when we don't go out.  Instead, we realize that we are being deprived when we go out and don't get our money's worth in food and service quality.

Then, when we go to the grocery store, buy decent ingredients, and make a great meal at home, we realize that we've been crazy to go out and waste our money dining out all along!

Let's look at an example of a great home cooked meal.  My wife recently made enchiladas at home.  The can of beans was around a dollar.  The rice and tomato mixture is actually low carb cauliflower rice and canned tomatoes.  The tortilla is also a low carb variety and the ground beef inside was the lowest fat variety we could buy.  This entire meal for two people probably cost about $11.  At a local Mexican restaurant, it would have been about $45 when you include a tip.

Home-made enchiladas

By cooking at home, we controlled the ingredient quality, the nutrition, and the price of our meal.  We also saved about $30.  By eating out, we would have been deprived.

How to Save Money Using Radical Tactics

Choosing a Slightly Different Lifestyle Can Yield Real Savings

To compete globally, Americans may have to live differently and use radical tactics to get off of the treadmill and save money. Sometimes the American dream can be a treadmill. You have to spend money on a reliable car, suitable clothes and shoes for work, and for a safe place to live. All to often, there is little money left at the end of the day. But, to compete globally, Americans may have to use different tactics to get off of the treadmill and save money. Here are twelve radical tactics for saving money:

1. Drive your car forever. With routine maintenance cars can last for hunreds of thousands of miles. If you can make your car last, you can avoid the high monthly payment, high taxes, and high insurance rates that come with a new car. Even payments on a modest new car can run over $400 a month and that doesn't count the cost of insurance or gasoline. It's radical thinking to think that your car might last for twenty years instead of five, but it is a mindset that saves money.


2. Live close to work. If you want to keep miles off of your car, avoid the high price of gas, and save time and money each and every week, simply move closer to work. If you have the guts to be an urban pioneer, you really can keep your car forever and cut your time in traffic.

3. Walk, bike, moped, motor scooter, motorcycle, or take mass transit to work. If you can avoid driving to work entirely, you will avoid wear and tear on your car and in some urban areas you may be able to avoid car ownership entirely. Just be careful, it's not a very friendly world for bicyclists, pedestrians, and motorcyclists.

4. Cut your cable. With internet entertainment, digital TV, and extra broadcast channels, you may be able to ditch cable and satellite. That's another significant monthly bill reduced to zero. It might take a radical change of mindset, but a smart person might not have a smart phone.

5. Get a pre-paid cell phone and pay as you go. With Smartphones, Apps, and all the ways your phone can prompt you to spend more money, it might be time to step back and take a close look at your bill. How much to you really want to spend on telecommunications? If you want to save money, you can buy a basic pre-paid cell phone and reserve your minutes for bona fide emergencies.

6. Cook at home. The cost of dining out really adds up over time. Even $8 fast food meals can get costly when consumed nearly every day. Every breakfast, lunch, and dinner eaten at home is money back in your pocket. You just need to learn how to save money at the grocery store.  If money is really tight, you can temporarily sacrifice good nutrition and eat super cheap foods.

7. Adopt a retro lifestyle. If a product was cool in 1987, it's probably still pretty cool today. By adopting a retro lifestyle, you can save lots of money at thrift stores, garage sales, and flea markets.

8. Re-use and recycle. While dumpster-diving is a radical way to save money, it is an extension of the movement to recycle, re-purpose, and re-use goods. For example, there a lots of resealable plastic containers on the market. But, few of them work as well as a pickle or peanut butter jar. Why pay $30 for a system, when you can soak a glass jar, scrape off the label, wash it, dry it, and put stuff in it. In more affluent areas where people often redecorate, you can even furnish your home for free with curbside finds.

9. Get roommates or rent out the basement. Remember how your rent was about $100 a month back in college. The low rent was a byproduct of having roommates. If you want to lower you mortgage or rent today, take in roommates again or rent out your basement or garage apartment.

10. Grow a garden. If you grow your own garden, you'll be able to eat no matter what happens to your paycheck. Growing your own food, saves money, provides better nutrition, and is an important step towards self-reliance. A garden can radically reduce your grocery bills.

11. Become a Lord of Darkness. If you want to cut your power bills, turn off the lights, minimize your use of utilities, conserve water and take shorter showers!

12. Live in a Smaller Space. If you can minimize the size of your space, you can minimize your utilities, lower your rent or mortgage and really start to save money. Many people are considering microhomes like tiny efficiency apartments, micro cabins, or mini cottages.

Savings - Set up a Rainy Day Fund

If you think things are bad now, they could get worse.  That is why it's important to have some money tucked away for a rainy day.  The obvious question:  how is someone who is flat broke going to stash some cash?

Photo By Jericho [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

How To Free Up Credit

It's a fair question.  The answer is too start small. If you have credit card debt, set aside some of your credit cards for emergency use only.  It's important to have a card that will only be used if the car breaks down or for a medical emergency or for unforeseen vet bills.  Just set the card aside in a drawer and refuse to use it.  As you pay down your balance, you're emergency credit will build up.

How to Save Your Change

Of course, available credit isn't the same as cash.  It's better to have some cash stashed.  You can start by tossing all your coin change into a change pot or piggy bank.  Pretty soon, you'll have $20 or $30 saved up for little emergencies.  You can also put a few dollars in an envelope every pay period. Pretty soon, you'll have a little stash.

How to Save Money

But, you really need money in a savings account.  Open a savings account with your local credit union.  Take your cash envelope down and deposit it from time to time.   Get in the habit of transferring some money to savings each pay period.

Don't think you can save any money?  Look at the stupid things you spend money on.  For example, you could stop smoking and stash the money you save. Here is a calculator on how much you would save by giving up cigarettes:  Smokefree.gov.  You can also give up some small luxuries like Starbucks.  If you want to save, you have to make some sacrifices.  There are tons of ideas for saving money at FeedthePig.org.

Saving Money Around Your Home: Saving Money Behind The Scenes

You can save a lot of money behind the scenes at your home. All you have to do is distinguish between public facing household expenditures and private facing household expenditures.

• Have you ever noticed how the landscaping around your apartment complex is nicest at the entrance and near the demo units? 
• Have you noticed how the buildings often have a brick facade in the front, but cheap vinyl siding around back? 

It's not surprising. Businesses want to put their best foot forward towards potential customers. However, they control costs by saving money behind the scenes in less visible areas. In your life, you can do the exact same thing.
When you examine your personal spending, you can also spend more money to put your best foot forward and less money on private facing behind the scenes expenses. When it comes to spending money on your home, it makes sense to buy nice comfortable furniture. You'll use it every day and guests will see it. However. no rational person will ever judge you by the brand of toilet cleaner you use. That is one reason that I like to buy basic cleaning supplies and cleaners at dollar stores like Dollar Tree. There is only one caveat: each product has to work.

No one can see and no one would care that we use a wide variety of Dollar Tree toilet cleaners, glass cleaners, multi-surface cleaners, and dish washing soaps. We also like Dollar store scrub brushes and sponges. If we use a national brand name product, we use it because it has proven itself to work better on an important function than any generic substitute. For example, when funds are tight, we will use Sunlight brand dish washing detergent from Dollar Tree. But, when funds are available, we prefer to use Cascade because the results are visibly better. Similarly, we've tried various store brand laundry detergents, but we usually return to Tide.

Behind the scenes in our home, we use Ajax dish washing soap from Dollar Tree on the few pots and pans that need to be hand washed. For kitchen counter and table surfaces, Dollar Tree offers Spic and Span Multi-Surface cleaner. In the bathrooms, we use Dollar Tree's Jonny Fresh toilet bowl cleaner and Home Store Bathroom Cleaner. The Home Store Bathroom Cleaner is a close substitute for Scrubbing Bubbles. We even use Dollar Tree toilet paper. When we are done, we use SoftSoap hand soap from Dollar Tree. If it is allergy season, we use Scott brand tissues from our Dollar Tree, too. Unless they read this article or snoop beneath the counters, people visiting our apartment won't know what brands of cleaners we use or where we got them. However, my wife and I can predict our budget for cleaning products because everything is $1.


Dollar Tree is great for controlling your cash flow with predictable pricing. However, if you have more storage space or a larger family, you may achieve better savings on a cost-per-unit basis by making bulk purchases from a warehouse store. The key is to minimize your spending on basic behind-the-scenes household supplies that aren't visible to the public. Even when you go out in public, no one will know that you used Barbasol shaving cream from Dollar Tree.

Slow Down the Velocity of Your Money and Slow Down Your Spending

According to Investopedia, the "Velocity of Money" is defined as -

The rate at which money is exchanged from one transaction to another, and how much a unit of currency is used in a given period of time. Velocity of money is usually measured as a ratio of GNP to a country's total supply of money. 

 

It's a term that I remember from Economics 101 -- a valuable course that continues to help me explain being perpetually broke.  While the velocity of money is an obscure term that economists use to measure how quickly money is being circulated in an economy and the health of an economy, I just think about slowing down the rate at which money leaves my personal bank account.

 

 Do we really have to spend our money so fast?  If you put off a purchase until tomorrow, then your money gets to stay in the bank for another day.  Tomorrow, you might not still want to make that purchase or an emergency might crop up and divert that money to a more important end.  My thought is that if you can keep postponing purchases, some of the money might not ever leave your account.  You might even save some money.

Every pay period, we pay our bills and try to live on the meager amount that is left.  Every day that money is in the account and is unspent is a day that we aren't broke.  Every day that we don't spend puts off the day that we have to rely on a credit card or a line of credit.

The moral of this story:  Don't buy today what you can buy tomorrow or next week or next month or never.

Cutting Back on Expenses

In America, it is hard to cut back on expenses and save money.  We are constantly bombarded by commercial marketing messages and we constantly see seemingly affluent people sporting the latest gadgets and driving the latest cars.  When you try to keep up, you can easily find yourself on a never ending treadmill of purchases and payments.

Fortunately, we are not alone.  There are plenty of Americans who are trying to forego silly spending, retire debt, build up retirement nest eggs, and build wealth.  I recently read a good article on Yahoo Contributor's Network by Damon Malcom who outlines ways to cut spending and build wealth:

6 Ways to Cut Back on Spending and Save Money

Dealing with The Fiscal Cliff

This blog isn't about politics.  It's about stretching pay checks. However, this "Fiscal Cliff" has me worried.  Taxes could go up 17% on most pay checks.  That's a lot of money out of each paycheck.

Here are some strategies for saving money:

How You Can Cope with Fiscal Cliff Tax Hikes

If companies want your business . . .

. . . they wouldn't put the job you used to do over in China.  They wouldn't hire and illegal with a wink and a nod and a handful of bogus ID documents.  They wouldn't replace your full-time position with a part-time position.  They wouldn't favor short-term contractors over permanent employees.  They wouldn't provide a raise that lagged behind inflation.  They wouldn't let your resume languish in a vast database while they wait for an M.B.A. to fill a basic office work function.  They wouldn't charge you 25% interest on a basic consumer credit card.  If the business community has let you down, why should you continue to buy from them? 

If you are flat broke and need to watch every dime, you might want to subject your purchases to some extra scrutiny.  Why not buy from Goodwill?  Why not try Salvation Army?  Why not buy from the desperate guy on eBay who needs the cash to stave off foreclosure?  Why not look for "Made in USA" on the label?  Why not think about every purchase once or twice before you get to the cash register?  Why not keep the money in your pocket?  "They" can earn your business.

How to Save Even More Money on Fast Food

It seems like we've been on a pretty tight budget for a long time.  We've even got the whole McDonald's "Dollar Menu-Aire" thing down to a science.  When we're tight on cash, we can get in and out for almost nothing.
 

Four Amazingly Simple Ways to Save Money at the Fast Food Drive Through Window

When McDonald's introduced their dollar menu, it was a cool way to save a little money. Everyone loved their commercials introducing a new class of citizens: The Dollar Menu-aires. Now more fast food restaurants have value menus and more people than ever are ordering off of dollar menus. However, there are a few little tricks that can help you save even more money when you order off of the dollar menu.

1. Bring A Limited Amount of Cash. If you know that you will be ordering a McDouble, a side salad, and any size tea for $1 at McDonalds, don't show up with a $20 bill. You'll be driving past pictures of Big Macs, Super-Sized Fries, and Delicious Coffee drinks. But, if you only bring $3.50, you won't be ordering any of the expensive stuff. You'll be ordering the meal you originally planned to buy.

2. Bring a Cooler and Water. When money is tight, I'll throw a few bottles of water into a small cooler and bring those with me to the fast food drive through. It's an easy way to save a few calories and a couple of bucks at the fast food window. Even if you bring a soda from home, you'll be paying just a fraction of the price of soda at the fast food window.

3. Do Dinner or Dessert - Not Both. There's no reason to take in all the calories of fast food for both dinner and dessert. You've got to pace yourself a bit. We enjoy the new Oreo Ice Cream sandwiches at our local Steak-n-Shake. They are sinfully, delicious, and only $1. For just over $2, we get a little bit of heaven and we don't break the bank. We also impose a little bit of portion control by just getting one apiece.

4. Count the Carbs. If you are a guy, 60 to 65 grams of carbohydrates should suffice for a meal. For breakfast, that equates to roughly two Egg McMuffins at McDonalds and a bottle of water. At McDonalds for lunch, that pretty much provides for one premium burger or two smaller burgers up to a McDouble off of the Dollar Menu. You can forget the fries and you can forget the soda. You did bring the cooler right?

While it can feel a little strange not to order a super-sized value meal and it can be a little embarrassing to hand the crew member a crumpled dollar bill and 6 quarters to pay for your whole fast food order, your body and your budget will thank you for exercising a little restraint and a little self-control when you order fast food.

Living the Retro Lifestyle

When you are stuck in an economy that doesn't seem to be moving forward, sometimes the thing to do is embrace the decline.  If you can't go forward, go backwards and adopt the retro lifestyle!  You'll find the coolest things in thrift stores, online on ebay, and by the curb on Craiglist.  Plus, if you shop thrift stores, you'll be helping charity.  If you find new uses for old items, you'll be recycling.  It's all good!

Saving Money by Living a Retro Lifestyle

Saving money on exercise equipment

This economy is stressful.  Being laid off is stressful.  One of the best ways to handle stress is to exercise and get in shape.  Of course, you can't buy a lot of high dollar exercise equipment when you are flat broke.  Here are some ways to improvise and save money on exercise equipment:

Four Ways to Improvise and Save Money on Exercise Equipment

Money Saving Gadgets in the Kitchen

There are a zillion gadgets in American kitchens.  Many Americans have so many small kitchen appliances that they have to build an island with counters and cupboards just to store them all.  However, when gadgets actually encourage you to cook and prepare food at home, they can actually save you money!  For example, if an iced tea machine helps you avoid buying soda, it's a winner!

Eating Cheap!

Even if you are broke, you still have to eat.  Fortunately, there are still some dirt cheap foods at the grocery store.  They aren't the healthiest foods on the menu.  But, they'll do in a pinch if you have to stretch your money!

Five Super Cheap Foods for a Recession

 By Daniel K. Gebhart (photo taken by Daniel K. Gebhart) [CC-BY-2.5 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons

Dealing with a Lay Off - Saving Money

Nothing makes you economize more than a lay off.  If you've been laid off in this economy, it's a full out emergency.  You try to minimize your spending, you try to eat in, and you try to eat cheap.  If you've been used to a comfortable lifestyle, being laid off with a real punch in the gut.  Here are some tips to help you save money after you've been laid off.

Immediate Steps to Save Money After You've Been Laid Off