Before our son was born, we had a baby shower in which we asked everyone to bring a small package of a different kind of diaper in newborn and stage one sizes. We actually made a list of them, giving the harder to find ones to closer relatives and the easier ones to more distant friends. After the shower, we found ourselves with a huge assortment of diapers.

After using them for a while, we quickly found ourselves gravitating towards a small number of brands. Most of the other diapers leaked, broke with only minimal force applied to them, or (worst of all) had explosions up the back of them. This caused all sorts of problems, including having to toss out largely unused diapers, tons of extra costs for laundry and wipes, and extra time spent dealing with them as well.

In the end, it became clear that most of the “generic” brands (and a few of the “name” brands, too) were repeatedly failing us, causing great additional cost per diaper and time spent dealing with the poor diaper quality.

The problem is that most diaper buyers don’t consider total cost of ownership when purchasing diapers. They see the store brand on sale, think “a diaper is a diaper,” and toss it in their cart. It’s true that in many cases generics work just as well as name brands, but this is not true of diapers.

We eventually wound up exclusively using Pampers Swaddlers (and their “older baby” version, Pampers Cruisers), simply because we have never had a failure with them and coupons are extremely easy to obtain. Even with coupons, we paid (and still pay) a decent premium per diaper over the generics, but our total cost of ownership per diaper (adding in extra wipe costs and extra laundry costs) is only slightly more than generics, plus we have much more time to play with our child instead of cleaning up his disasters.

This philosophy holds true for most purchases: don’t just buy the cheapest version without thinking; step back and consider the total cost of ownership for a moment or two.

Now that the Christmas shopping season is upon us, many of us are wondering what on earth we should get for people in our family. “What do I buy for my ultra-trendy teenage niece?” you might be wondering, or “How can I get something that will wow Uncle Ron without breaking the bank?”

Interestingly enough, this is an area where blogs shine for usefulness, because you can easily get a lead on some really interesting gift ideas that will leave your niece thinking that you’re a bit less of a loser than everyone else in the entire universe and, at the same time, put a big toothy grin on ol’ Uncle Ron’s face.

Here’s the exact process I used this year to find some smashing gifts for several picky family members using nothing more than blogs, a few price comparison sites, and a bit of time. To show you how it works, I’m going to walk through the procedure using three test cases:

Grandmother is an old-fashioned woman who believes that a woman’s place is in the kitchen serving her family – and that’s where you’ll often find her. If you ask her what she wants, she sighs and says, “Oh, nothing.” If you press her, she’ll look around the room and name something completely off the top of her head.

Uncle Ron is a retired farmer who sold his farm years ago and now lives in a beautiful house in the city. His tastes are upscale, but he has a bit of an old fashioned nature to him. He’s got a quick wit, is a bit sarcastic, and usually sees the utility in things. He almost always holds court at family events at the card table, talking politics and sipping on a drink of some sort. In other words, your favorite uncle.

Katie is a fifteen year old strong-willed young woman who is so firmly entrenched in Generation Z that you can scarcely make heads or tails out of her. She’s always listening to her iPod and seems to have a general disdain for the entire world. She’s your only niece, but she makes about as much sense to you as Fidel Castro riding down Wall Street on the back of a hippopotamus.

So, let’s begin.

Find out what their favorite things are.
Don’t worry at this stage about what they might want, just make a list of a few of their favorite things. Give a call to someone living with them if you have no idea, or maybe pay them a visit and see how they spend their time or what they show you that is interesting to them. Don’t ask for gift ideas, because you’ll make the experience of opening the gift much less of a surprise.

Grandmother spends all of her time in the kitchen, so you think that something convenient for her kitchen might enable her to sit down a bit more with the family. You stop by to pay her a visit and you see her mixing some cookie dough up with a fork. Of course, you eat a couple a half dozen a dozen of the cookies before you leave. A new cookbook might be okay, but something that can mix that cookie dough faster might be even better, so you don’t have to spend all of your time talking to her back while she’s busy at the counter. The spending cap on Grandmother is quite high; if you find a very expensive item, there are always plenty of others that are willing to go together with you to buy it.

Uncle Ron is rarely seen without a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label; he even brings a bottle to family events and tries to get everyone to drink a glass with him. Thankfully, he can hold his liquor well, except one should avoid talking politics with him in the late evening; last Christmas, he referred to your brother-in-law as a “rotten liberal hippie” and threatened to beat him to death with a golf club for stating that everyone in America should get top quality health care for free. You decide on something golf or scotch related for him. Uncle Ron is especially close to you and gives stellar gifts, so I often spend as much as $60 on his Christmas gift.

Katie basically doesn’t speak to anyone. You give your sister a call to see what’s going on with her and all you hear is that Katie spends all of her time listening to old ’70′s records in her room and playing her acoustic guitar. On the good side, she’s apparently paying much more attention to her appearance; on the bad side, she’s dressing like Woody Guthrie. You decide that a couple CDs of good modern folk-type music would be a good gift for her, as your spending limit is $20 for her.

Specifically search blogs for these topics.
You head over to Technorati and Icerocket to try to find some potential gift ideas. At this time of the year, people are beginning to post “best of” lists, so the goal is to find a few of those and compare them. The primary goal is to find many independent references to the quality of a particular item with the goal of figuring out the type of item and the make of the item. Another advantage of blog searching is that bloggers often make organic connections that comparison sites won’t necessarily make, plus a perfunctory look at a blog can quickly tell you whether or not it is written by a company, whereas product reviews are often impossible to truly read.
Grandmother‘s idea seemed clearest, so you search for “best mixer” dough at Technorati (to avoid music mixing devices) and find two distinct references on cooking blogs to KitchenAid making the best mixers, so you narrow her gift down to a KitchenAid mixer. Searching simply for KitchenAid confirms this. So, you’ve decided that this year, you’re going to get Grandmother a KitchenAid mixer that will tear through pretty much anything she might ever want to mix in the kitchen.

Uncle Ron would probably appreciate a good bottle of scotch, so you search for “best scotch” to see what you find. After reading a number of posts about different people’s concepts of best scotch, you find several references to Caol Ila as a great tasting and moderately expensive scotch. Following their recommendation, you decide to get Uncle Ron a bottle of Caol Ila scotch for Christmas.

Katie is apparently heavily into folk music, but you get a general sense that she might not be impressed with your collection of Peter, Paul, and Mary records, so you search Technorati for “best folk” 2006 and “best folk” 2005 to find some of the best new folk music releases. The names Laura Cantrell and Devendra Banhart come up over and over again as you read through the listings, so you decide to look for CDs by both of them.

Use product review sites to narrow this down to specific items.
Now that you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you’re buying for each person, use some product comparison sites to narrow it down to a specific item. I find that the old standby, amazon.com, works very well for most items. though many people swear by sites such as bizrate. At this stage, we’re mostly just concerned with finding the exact item for each person; later, we’ll worry about the best price for that item.

Grandmother deserves a high-end KitchenAid mixer for her kitchen. After reading tons of reviews of different KitchenAid mixers, you decide on the KitchenAid KSM150PSCR Artisan 5 Quart Mixer for Grandmother this Christmas, even though the first price you saw makes you quickly dial some other relatives and ask them to go in on it with you. It’s a gift that suits her passion; making wonderful soul food for the whole family.

Uncle Ron is getting some good Caol Ila scotch for Christmas. After reviewing several sites on scotch (like scotchwhisky.net) and looking for a variety of recommendations, you choose to get him a 12 year old bottle of single malt Caol Ila scotch, which will apparently fit within your price range and won the gold medal at the San Francisco Spirits competition. Sounds tasty; maybe Uncle Ron will pop open the bottle over a game of bridge and give everyone a taste.

Katie will be receiving a CD or two by Devendra Banhart and Laura Cantrell. You found several stunning reviews of Humming by the Flowered Vine and Cripple Crow, so these are your top two choices for her. If they’re relatively cheap, they might both fall within your budget. You’re kind of concerned that she may already have them, but if they’re good, she will appreciate the thought and be able to trade them for others.

Use price comparison sites to find the best price.
Now that you have very specific items in mind to buy people, it’s time to use price comparison sites to find the absolute best deal you can. I recommend using Froogle for this purpose, as it is very good at narrowing things down quickly.

Grandmother‘s KitchenAid KSM150PSCR Artisan 5 Quart Mixer costs $329.99 at the local kitchen supply store, but can be had from iKitchen for $239.99, according to Froogle’s results. You could find even lower prices, but iKitchen seems to have a solid reputation as a seller of kitchen implements. Just that quickly, you’ve saved at least $90 on an amazing gift for Grandmother – and softened the blow on the wallets of a few grandchildren, too.

Uncle Ron‘s 12 year old bottle of single malt Caol Ila scotch can be had from the local liquor store at $74.99, but can be obtained from Premium Home and Garden for $44.99 according to Froogle, a savings of $30. Many other retailers also offer it below the $50 mark, so a bit of research into shipping might uncover a better deal. Ol’ Uncle Ron will be goofy again this Christmas, it seems.

Katie‘s CDs are also cheaper than the local music shops. Humming by the Flowered Vine and Cripple Crow can both be had new in the shrink wrap for about $20 total (after shipping) on eBay, as discovered by Froogle. A few bids now will mean that your Christmas gift for Katie will be ready well in advance of the big day.

In short, careful use of different avenues of research on the internet, when combined, can isolate stellar gifts for family and friends while also finding stellar prices. In short, follow these four steps to excavate great gifts this Christmas:
1. Figure out what they like (but don’t ask directly what they want) by calling or visiting them
2. Determine a great idea for them by using blogs and blog search engines like Technorati.
3. Break it down to the exact item via product comparison sites, such as amazon.com.
4. Get a great deal on the item using comparison shopping sites like Froogle.

When I compared ING and HSBC, I discussed how HSBC’s annual percentage yield of 5.05% is significantly better than ING’s annual percentage yield of 4.4%, but I felt that ING’s service was significantly better. One of the comments, from Boston Gal, made the astute observation that ING’s current “signing bonus” of $25 did a good job of offsetting HSBC’s higher interest rate, thus making the financial difference a wash.

I wanted to calculate this out to see whether or not this is true and to determine whether or not you’re saving money by using ING versus HSBC over a period of one year. Obviously, for longer term investments than this, you should be considering a certificate of deposit; if you’re moving funds pretty regularly, then service becomes a bigger factor and the balance shifts more toward ING.

First of all, I need to convert the stated APY on each account into the actual earned interest rate. ING’s APY of 4.4% becomes an interest rate of 4.314% when compounded monthly, while HSBC’s APY of 5.05% actually amounts to an interest rate of 4.937% when compounded monthly.

So, how much would you have to deposit in HSBC for the superior interest rate to overcome ING’s $25 “signing bonus”? To calculate this, I set up an Excel spreadsheet with ING’s interest rate and HSBC’s interest rate as static values and a cell in which I could enter different initial deposits. The spreadsheet would then take this initial deposit, calculate the interest each month, and then produce a difference between the totals at the end of the year.

At first, I entered $250, the minimum amount needed to get the ING signing bonus. At this level, at the end of the year, the ING account held $24.38 more than the HSBC account. Not bad.

Next, I tried an initial deposit of $10,000. At this level, the HSBC account held $38.99 more at the end of the year. A win for HSBC.

So, the correct number had to be somewhere between these two amounts. After entering many different values, I found the sweet spot: in order to overcome the ING “signing bonus” in a single year, a person would have to make an initial deposit of $4,002 in an HSBC Direct savings account.

What does this mean? If you discard all other factors, the ING signing bonus means that ING is the best solution for beginning savers, whereas if you have a large principal, you’ll make more at HSBC. The cutoff number for one year’s worth of saving is $4,002; for longer periods, other investment options are likely to beat either bank.

In my opinion, ING is much stronger than HSBC on service-related issues, which is clearly a factor to take into account when selecting your savings account. I stand by my recommendation that ING is the best choice for beginning savers; for those with large balances, other options besides online savings might be better yet.

For those of you out there who are still using Internet Explorer, there is another option that won’t open your computer to all sorts of security holes. Better yet, it will automatically kill most pop-up windows and, when you switch to it, it will incorporate all of your bookmarks from Internet Explorer. I switched years ago and it’s the best thing I ever did; in fact, I now get frustrated when I have to use Internet Explorer on other machines.

First things first: download Firefox. If you look over on the right hand side of this post, you’ll see a button that will take you straight to the Firefox download page (you might have to scroll down a bit to see it). Download the program, install it, and give it a whirl.

Got Firefox installed? Good. Firefox is an extensible browser, meaning that with just a click you can download additional pieces that will allow your browser to do all sorts of interesting things. As for me, I like browser options that make it easy for me to save money. Here are ten Firefox extensions that will make it easier for you to save money while using the web.

Book Burro BookBurro may be my favorite FireFox plugin of all. You don’t ever notice it except when you visit a bookseller site, and then it pops up quietly on the upper left of the page. When you visit a book, it drops down, showing you prices for that same book at other booksellers. Not only has this saved me money on several book purchases, it also saves me the time of jumping from site to site. If you read much at all, this is the most important download on this list.

Pronto Pronto provides a tool similar to BookBurro, but not quite as elegantly. Pronto provides price comparisons on a wide variety of products with a floating button in the lower right of the screen. I’ve found this to be useful (interestingly enough) when shopping for kitchen products; Pronto helped me find a much better price on a great mixer.

Skype Sidebar This plugin integrates Skype with Firefox, making it very easy to call people and manage your contacts while surfing the web. For those unfamiliar, Skype is a program that allows you to make free person-to-person telephone calls via the internet, and extremely low cost calls to any telephone number. I find this particularly useful when discussing web materials with people; not only is the call free, but it is much easier for both parties to understand what is going on.

Gmail Space Rather than using a memory stick to transfer files, I often just use Gmail Space on the various machines I work on. This FireFox plugin lets me use my Gmail account as a tool for transferring files from place to place, provided I have an internet connection. This plugin is installed on every machine that I access with any regularity.

FareFirst FareFirst integrates with FireFox to enable you to quickly compare travel costs from location to location. If you’re planning a trip, you can just enter the information here and FareFirst will keep an eye on the trip for you. Each time you run FireFox, it will let you know what the best deal for the trip is.

Sage Sage is a site feed reader that integrates itself into Firefox, enabling you to add feeds to it with just a click. This extension saves me both time and money; I monitor a lot of blogs that update to mention good deals and other financial information and this tool enables me to keep tabs on all of them in reasonable time, thus saving both time and money.

Package Mapping As a frequent eBay seller, it’s financially important to me to keep track of packages as they’re shipped around the country. Package Mapping makes this very easy; I can keep tabs on where each package is and it alerts me when packages are delivered. It makes the process of tracking shipped items very easy, and that makes my work selling items on eBay that much easier and financially secure.

Minute Minder for Cingular This plug-in alerts you to the minutes you have remaining on your current cellular plan, which can be invaluable at helping you avoid overage fees. It quietly inserts itself into your browser window, so you can keep an eye on it without wasting valuable screen space. The only disadvantage is that this plugin currently only works with Cingular; I’m hoping to see it expand to other carriers soon.

Grocery List Generator I often see tasty and inexpensive recipes on the internet, but then I forget to buy the items for those recipes at the grocery store. Grocery List Generator incorporates itself into Firefox and makes it easy to add ingredients to a shopping list, whether you are finishing with a cupboard inventory or you want to make sure to buy some tarragon for that egg recipe.

Quitomzilla Although I’m not a smoker, several members of my family are, and I’m keenly aware how expensive the habit is. Quitomzilla is a plug-in that provides record-keeping and constant motivation to help people to quit smoking. If you’re a smoker, you’re burning up a lot of money; Quitomzilla can be priceless in helping you to kick the habit.

If you’re reading this, you likely have ready access to a computer with an internet connection. Most people are aware of a few ways that a personal computer can save them money, but there really are a plethora of simple, ethical ways that anyone can use a computer to make a few dollars. Here is a list of 14 ways your computer can put money in your pocket that anyone can do without ripping anyone off. Many of these ideas may have occurred to you, but I’m sure there are at least a few here that are new to you. Hopefully, something on this list will spur you on to try something new and perhaps have a little bit of extra pocket money. Please note that I am only mentioning fully legal methods for such services in this article, and I’m usually directing people towards easy-to-use services if there are a multitude of options. For example, I am aware that there are a lot of programs for playing back audio on your computer and I am aware of the ease of obtaining pirated music and video.

1. Switch your phone to VoIP. VoIP refers to the use of your home computer’s broadband connection as a telephone service. There are different programs that have various features and benefits, but they are almost universally less expensive than traditional land lines and cellular phones. Two of the most popular options are Skype (free to other Skype users, but fees for calls to non-Skype phones) and Vonage (flat monthly rate for unlimited calls in the United States and very cheap per minute internationally).

2. Utilize online-only savings accounts. In the past few years, a number of branchless, online-only, FDIC insured banks have cropped up that provide astoundingly high interest rates on a normal no minimum balance savings account. These rates tend to be eight or nine times as high as typical banks (which offer a 0.5% rate of return on average). Two of the most popular include ING Direct (currently offering 4.4% APY and very easy to sign up) and HSBC Direct (currently offering 5.05% APY). This means that investing $100 in an ING Savings account would return $4.40 in a year, or $5.05 at HSBC Direct, versus $0.50 at your typical bank. Plus, you can fully manage your account on your computer, transferring money to and from your checking account as you wish.

3. Combine your entertainment needs. A modern personal computer can replace your stereo, your television, and your video game consoles. You can move all of your music on CD to your computer using programs such as iTunes, then use your computer speakers to play back music when you want it. If you have a large monitor and a TV tuner card, you can use your monitor as a television by playing your television feed through your computer. You can also sign up for services such as GameTap to utilize your home computer as a video game console.

4. Keep an eye on your finances. I use online banking and credit card accounts to keep a daily tab on what’s in my accounts and what I’m spending my money on. This way, I know what I can afford to spend and what I can’t. Many banks and virtually all major credit card providers allow online account access, which gives you very easy control over your money. Beyond that, there are a number of excellent packages out there that enable you to manage your finances as a whole and do your own taxes, though they can be complex to set up. I use Microsoft Money, which can be downloaded for a 90 day free trial.

5. Sell your hobby. Whatever your hobby is, you can probably find a place to sell the products of that hobby. eBay is a great place to get started, though there may be better places for your specific hobby. Here’s an example: a friend of mine likes to fold simple origami pieces while doing other things, such as watching television; it’s a nervous tic for her. So she started folding lots of paper cranes. She was aware that a thousand paper cranes are often given as a gift among the Japanese, so she decided to start selling thousand crane lots on eBay. Thanks to her computer, she can sit at her rural home, watch television in the evening, and sell the numerous cranes she makes with her own hands.

6. Write about your random thoughts and interests. It is incredibly easy to get a simple blog at Blogger and put a Google AdSense bar on the side of it; Blogger walks you through the process very gently. With this, you can write anonymous random thoughts on whatever you want: your personal life, your favorite television show, whatever. You can just channel some of your own thoughts into a written form and post them. Not only does it provide an outlet for you to express yourself, it also enables you to improve your writing skill over time as painlessly as possible and you can earn a few dollars from the AdSense bar.

7. Do some comparison shopping. There are a multitude of places to shop online, and there are often many places selling the same item. For example, just for books alone, I used to check amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a few others. It’s easy to find a better price for an item than you might find in your own town. Even better, people are beginning to create software tools to make comparison shopping even easier. My favorite is Book Burro: when you view a book on a site like amazon.com using FireFox, it will pop up a little window immediately informing you of the cost of that book at various other online sites, helping you to quickly find the lowest price.

8. Throw out your reference texts. With an internet-accessible computer, there’s little need for such reference texts as a dictionary or a thesaurus or an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a suitable replacement for an encyclopedia for general usage. Dictionary.com provides the same usage as a dictionary, and thesaurus.com is a functional thesaurus. In the modern world, there’s little need to invest in such reference texts.

9. Find a better credit card. We’ve all signed up for some pretty terrible credit card deals in the past, but the internet enables you to find a credit card offer that matches your needs much better. You can easily return 2% of your spending to yourself if you can locate a strong credit card offer. Even better, you can easily find balance transfer offers that will eliminate the interest you’re paying on a card. Obviously, a credit card is a tool that you need to be careful with, but I use one for my primary spending (groceries, etc.), keep the balance paid each month, and they literally pay me to use it. I would have never found this offer without the internet.

10. Use a computer as your cooking aid. Many people eat out because of the hassle of preparing food at home. It might not be tasty, you think, or you might mess it up. Plus, many people don’t want to invest in cookbooks or other methods of teaching themselves how to cook. Wikipedia offers extensive explanations of culinary techniques, even if you’re scared of boiling water. Plus, there are countless recipes available on the internet for dishes of all levels of complexity: RecipeZaar, for example, has thousands of recipes for beginning cooks. Not only will you learn a new skill, but you’ll quickly see how much cheaper it is to cook at home, a process aided by your computer.

11. Make your own calendars and other documents. Many people buy wall calendars for their home when a few printed pages will suffice. “But I don’t have a program that will make a calendar!” you say. Open Office is a free software suite that includes a word processing program, a spreadsheet program, and much more; even more important, it includes templates for making calendars, newsletters, and so forth. We use an old wall calendar for its pretty pictures and just tape printed pages over each month.

12. Save money when you travel. I am consistently surprised at the number of people who still choose to pay high prices by booking flights directly from the airline or through a travel agent when there are numerous easy tools online that will save you tons of money on your travel costs. Priceline, Travelocity, and Expedia all are amazingly easy to search and find the cheapest prices from your location to your destination and back – and they can sometimes save hundreds of dollars on your travel over calling a travel agent or directly calling an airline.

13. Print coupons before you shop. The internet provides unbelievably good access to coupons that you can use at your local grocery store, and a little bit of effort can transform coupons directly into cash. I check sites such as coupons.com before each shopping trip, checking to see if there are any manufacturer coupons available for items I’m going to buy, then just take them to the store with me and convert them to cash at the register.

14. Learn marketable skills. Your computer can teach you a lot, too. When I first purchased my computer, I was an atrocious touch typer, but I utilized sites like Learn2Type and TyperShark to teach myself how to type 80 words per minute. Want to know the intricacies of Word and Excel to better market yourself for a job? Microsoft offers extensive training on how to perform those tasks. You can also learn how to create web pages from scratch. Each of these skills will give you a leg up in the workplace.

The computer can be a very valuable tool – you just have to know how to use it.

It seems like a surprising claim, but simply switching your regular lightbulbs for CFLs, even though they have a higher initial cost per bulb, can easily save you $100 a year. Let’s look at them in detail.

I took the information off of GE Soft White A19 bulbs in both their regular and CFL form and wrote down some basic information. The bulbs are nearly identical when in the socket (very very close in initial lumens), so what we’re interested in is the cost, the wattage, and the life of the bulb.

GE Soft White A19 (regular)
840 initial lumens
60 watts
1000 hours
$2.99 a four pack (at Target)
$0.75 per bulb

GE Soft White A19 (CFL)
825 initial lumens
15 watts
10000 hours
$18.73 a ten pack (at Lowe’s)
$1.87 per bulb

Let’s start out with the bad news. Let’s say your residence has 15 light sockets. To fill each light socket with a non-CFL bulb, you’ll spend $11.25, but to fill each light socket with a CFL bulb, you’ll spend $28.07. This means that the cost of converting all the bulbs in your home from regular to CFL is about $16.82.

Now we turn to the many financial benefits of CFLs. Over 10,000 hours of use, you’ll use 15 CFL bulbs (on average), but you’ll use 150 non CFL bulbs (they’re rated for 1000 hours of use, so you’ll blow ten of them on average over 10,000 hours). So, with the CFLs, you’ll spend that same $28.07, but with regular bulbs, you’ll spend $112.50, a savings of $84.43. The average bulb is on for four hours a day, so you’ll need several years to see this savings, but if you figure it down to the month, you’ll save about a dollar a month on the bulbs alone, or about twelve dollars a year.

Given the information on the bulbs themselves, a non-CFL bulb uses 60 watts, while a CFL bulb uses only 15 watts. Converted to kilowatts, that’s 0.06 kilowatts for the non-CFL bulb and 0.015 kilowatts for the CFL bulb. For calculation’s sake, I pay about $0.08 per kilowatt hour for our electricity (on average), and we have all of our bulbs on an average of four hours a day.

Let’s see how much we save in a day in our home with fifteen bulbs. We use fifteen bulbs for four hours each, so that means we use 60 hours worth of bulbs each day. The non-CFL bulbs use 0.06 kilowatts, so we multiply 60 hours by 0.06 kilowatts to get 3.6 kWh for the normal bulbs. The CFL bulbs, though, use 0.015 kilowatts, so we multiply 60 hours by 0.015 kilowatts to get 0.9 kWh.

So, each day, the savings in kWh usage by using CFL bulbs in our example is 2.7 kWh. If we pay $0.08 per kWh, simply by having the CFLs in our light sockets, we save about $0.22. Every day. Automatically, without thinking about it a bit.

Over a month, the CFL savings is a dollar (the savings you make because CFLs are durable) plus 30 days at $0.22 a day (the savings each day because of less energy use), which comes out to be about $7.50 a month. And the best part is that because CFLs last so long, you’ll spend a lot less time changing bulbs!