Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

In the past, I discussed how you can do very well with the Borders Rewards program, but the effectiveness of free customer rewards programs extends far beyond that of just Borders. In fact, I sign up for any free customer loyalty program that is offered to me if I believe there is any chance of my return to the establishment. Because of this, just in the last three months, I’ve received two free large pizzas, a free sandwich, $20 in free groceries, and about $30 in additional discounts and savings. For just a minute’s worth of effort here and there, this is a very nice return.

Here are some general tips for maximizing rewards programs without revealing key personal information.

Set up an email address to handle nothing but rewards program emails. Then, whenever you sign up for a program, give this address. Keep tabs on that address every once in a while and see if you can dig out some good offers. Many rewards programs mail out great coupons via email that can really save some cash.

If you’re cautious about giving out other personal information, make it up. This might violate the rules of the program, but in most cases, the program’s benefits are “virtual,” meaning they don’t require direct contact with your identity.

Slim down your wallet by combining a bunch of the cards. Use justoneclubcard.com to cut down the size of your wallet by up to 87% by literally combining up to eight rewards cards onto a single card. I have several of these cards and I’ve found that they really work great.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

Ever received a product that was severely worse than your expectations? For example, ever bought a bag of chips that was horribly stale, or bought some salsa that tasted bad, or a bottle of laundry detergent that was dried out on the inside? Most companies are quite willing to help you to make things right, simply because it is good public relations.

What’s the benefit? If you get ahold of their customer service department for most smaller consumer goods, you’ll often receive coupons for replacement products – often in multiples. For example, I received a huge pile of coupons for free salsa in the past, and I got about fifteen coupons for $3 off any package of Luvs disposable diapers (since I could get small packages of them for $4.99, each one made for nearly free diapers).

What’s the drawback, then? If you start to call on a regular basis, you will be noted and your rewards will go down rapidly. Most of the major consumer good providers share a database of frequent callers, a “blacklist,” if you will, and thus this technique has serious diminishing returns.

Got it – don’t overdo it. So what do I do? If you buy a consumer good and are unsatisfied with the experience, take a minute to call the customer service number on the package. Simply tell them exactly why you’re dissatisfied, but be open to trying the product again or trying similar products. The usual result from this (almost every time, from my experience) is that they’ll send you a supply of vouchers or very strong coupons that can save you some serious money.

For example, I had an incident with Luvs diapers a while back (about one in every three diapers in the bag had an elastic band that fell apart almost immediately). I called the company, explained the problem in detail, and several days later I received some vouchers for more diapers, plus a nice pile of $3 off coupons for Luvs diapers.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

This is a tip that my parents discovered the hard way after I moved out, and it simply works. When I first moved out, my parents stopped heating the upstairs of the house because there was no one using the bedrooms upstairs. They simply went upstairs and closed up all of the vents without thinking too much about it. It makes sense, right? You’re just paying extra for the furnace to blow heat into rooms that aren’t being used.

Wrong.

They didn’t notice the problem the first winter because it was viciously cold; the bill was quite high, anyway, and they blamed it on the frigid temperatures.

The second winter, though, they expected to have nice low bills – and they weren’t so low. In fact, their average bill was roughly $30 higher a month than they expected. Why? It turns out that their gas usage in the furnace was higher than two winters previous, even though the outside temperature was warmer.

How is that possible? First of all, the furnace in their home was designed to blow hot air into every room in the house. By shutting off the vents, they were wasting a lot of hot air that was simply just circulating around and eventually coming out of the other vents.

Second, and more importantly, the cold air upstairs was draining the heat downstairs. Heat rises, and thus the heat from the first floor would seep up into the cold second floor through the stairwell and even directly through the ceiling to a degree. This same principle is true even in a one-story home if you have some rooms that you’re not heating – you’re often losing heat if one room is significantly colder than the rest.

In the summer, for their central air, it didn’t matter nearly as much because, again, the upstairs would be hot and they wanted only cool air. However, in the winter, they are much better off with the vents open than with them closed.

If you have closed vents in your house during the winter, open them up, especially if you have multiple stories in your home.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

An average clothes dryer is a real energy hog; it uses 5,000 watts. Let’s say it takes 50 minutes of use for you to do a load of laundry, and you do an average of eight loads a week (quite reasonable for a small family). This adds up to about 150 kilowatt hours, or $15 a month, or $180 a year. That’s a lot of cash, and it isn’t hard to trim some of it down with a piece of long nylon rope and some clothespins.

That’s right, I’m recommending doing what my parents used to do and I often do: hang up your clothes to dry. A few hours out on the line on a breezy day can dry a load of clothes and often leave them smelling fresher than in the dryer (especially if you live in a fairly rural area). It doesn’t take long, either; just about five minutes to hang up a load of laundry and maybe a minute or two to take them down, which isn’t all that much longer than it takes to load and unload the dryer, plus the folding is quicker if you fold them straight off of the line (they’re already ready to fold, no unraveling).

All you need is a big pile of clothespins, a long nylon rope, and a place to hang it up. You can even do it indoors if you have a place that catches a bit of a breeze and the climate is such that you can leave a window open for a while. Tying them up is easy, just use two half hitches on each end (make a loop around a pole, put the end of the rope through the loop, pull it tight, and repeat once.

How much does it save? Every load of clothes takes about 4.2 kWh in an average dryer. With electric prices averaging about $0.09 nationwide right now, you’ll save about $0.40 per load for every one you hang out, plus the laundry smells substantially better. It only takes an extra few minutes to handle a load – and not even that much if you have access to a proper clothesline. If you live in an apartment and only have access to a coin-based machine, your savings from using a clothesline can be quite tremendous. Want another reason? This is definitely the environmentally friendly way to dry your clothes.

Seems like too much effort. It’s really not, especially if you work it into your schedule. Toss a load in the washing machine first thing in the morning, then hang up a load before you leave for work. In the evening, you have a wonderful, fresh smelling, clean load of laundry to fold up, you saved some money, and you did something environmentally sound.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

This is a “five minute” trick I do twice a week or so: I assemble a big, delicious sandwich and put it in a brown paper sack to take to work with me. It just takes a few minutes in the morning (or in the evening before) to have something delicious at work the next day – and if you go out for lunch regularly, this will save you a lot of money. Just take five minutes, make yourself a sandwich, and put it in a brown paper sack. Don’t like sandwiches? Package up some leftovers.

Here are a few complaints I had with the “brown bag” club – and how I address them.

I don’t want to mess up the kitchen for this! I’ve found that for me the best time to do this is during clean-up time from supper. The kitchen is already a mess, so I just make my food for the next day and stow it away in the refrigerator.

I’ll lose out on valuable networking time if I do this. Unless you work in a tiny office, there are probably some people who don’t eat out. If you just take your lunch half the time, you can actually improve your networking by eating with the brown bag club sometimes and the regular crew other days.

Brown bag lunches taste like my mom’s old bologna. Brown bag lunches can be tasty if you do it right. For example, there are several slick tricks for making leftovers a lot better, and getting high quality condiments can make a boring sandwich great (I love my French mustard).

I use eating out for lunch as an excuse to get out of this miserable office. Take your sack lunch outside and eat in the fresh air. You can even take it to your car and drive to a park or something. Brown bagging it doesn’t require you to eat at work.

I don’t think I can miss out on kvetching with my friends. Try to convince a bunch of them to start a brown bag day once a week – it will be good for all of your wallets.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

Most American households still have all of their light sockets filled with old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs and have yet to convert them over to CFLs. If you’re still using traditional light bulbs to light your home, you’re throwing away money every time you flip on a light switch. In the past, I’ve waxed ecstatic about CFLs and how much they can save, but today I go one further: replace all of your bulbs NOW with CFLs, whether they’re burnt out or not.

I’ll use my own situation as an example. I replaced every light bulb in my apartment (a total of 22 bulbs) with CFLs. Almost all of the old bulbs were 60 or 75 watt bulbs; the new bulbs all used 20 watts. We kept track of our light bulb usage over a week or so and discovered that each bulb was on for an average of three and a half hours a day; in other words, an average day sees 77 hours of total light bulb usage, thus we’re saving about 3.45 kilowatt hours a day, or 104 kilowatt hours a month. At a price of about $0.10 per kilowatt hour according to our electric bill, the light bulb replacement saves us $10.40 a month, every month.

You may have to spend $40 or so to get enough bulbs to replace all of the old incandescents in your home, and you’ll have to discard your old bulbs, but it will only take a few months to make that money back. If you don’t feel comfortable pulling bulbs out of your sockets, you can just replace them as they go out, but it only takes a month or two to make up Even better: CFLs have five times the life of old incandescents, so you won’t have to replace them for years.

So, what’s the game plan? All you need to do is go to your local hardware store and buy a couple jumbo packs of CFLs. I recommend using the next higher “watt equivalency” that the packages tell you; for example, CFLs with a 60 watt “equivalence” aren’t quite as bright as real CFLs, so get the 75 watt “equivalence” bulbs – these use just fifteen watts, so you’re still saving 45 watts per hour per bulb. I personally recommend GE’s 20 watt bulbs, which are a 75 watt “equivalent” (meaning you should probably replace your 60 watt bulbs with them – they’ll be just a bit brighter than the old 60 watts) – those are the exact ones we use all over the place at our home and we love them dearly. They light well and they quietly make serious savings on our monthly energy bill.

So take five minutes, get some bulbs, and replace your old lighting today!

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

According to CarCare.org, underinflated tires can reduce gas mileage by 0.4% for every 1 PSI below the recommended maximum in all four tires. Even more amazing, a car tire can be 10 PSI or more under this recommended maximum and not appear low at all with visual inspection, reducing your gas mileage by 4%. Over a year, keeping your tires properly inflated can save $40 even on a car with good gas mileage (10,000 miles driven in a 20 MPG car with gas costing $2 per gallon). If you drive more, or your auto gets worse mileage, you can save substantially more.

Even better, keeping your tires at the proper inflation reduces wear on your tires, thus extending their life, and also reduces the risk of a blowout. Though this savings is a bit more intangible, it will save you money over the long run.

The procedure for airing up your tires is very easy and can be done for free at most gas stations. The only thing you’ll need is an air gauge, which you can borrow from the front counter at many stations (though I found it easier to just start keeping one in my own glove box). Here’s what you do:

1. Look inside the door jamb of your car for a sticker. It should tell you the recommended maximum pressure for tires on your automobile.

2. Let the tires cool before checking their pressure. In other words, if you go to the station to do this, go to one near your home shortly after starting to drive after letting your automobile sit overnight.

3. Remove the cap from the valve on one tire. The valve is pretty obvious – it sticks out and has a little cap on the end that you can easily twist off. Put the cap somewhere where you won’t lose it (I lost one the first time I did it).

4. Push the tire gauge hard onto the valve. If you hear hissing, pull it off and try again, because that means you’re leaking air. You want to line them up straight and push firmly.

5. Add air to the tire. Take the air hose, press it onto the valve in much the same way as the gauge, and push about half a second for each PSI your tire was under the recommended maximum. Check the pressure again and add more if you need to using this rule of thumb.

6. Replace the valve cap.

7. Repeat steps three through six for all of your car tires.

You can also use this opportunity to check the wear on your tire. Jam a penny with the head out into the tread; if you can see any of Lincoln’s head, you might want to think about getting new tires.

How often should I do this? You should do it monthly during warm months and maybe once every two weeks in cold weather. I do it about every other fill up in the winter and about every third or fourth one in the summer.

Five Minute Finances is a series of tips on how you can save significant money or reorganize your financial life in just five minutes. These tips appear Monday, Wednesday, and Friday on The Simple Dollar.

This is one of my favorite money saving tips, mostly because it’s so surprising to most people. Drink water? What does that have to do with saving money?

Give this exercise a try for one week. Before you prepare or order or buy any food, drink eight ounces of water (twelve or sixteen ounces if you’re a bigger fellow). It only takes a moment or two and you can do it almost unconsciously, but you’ll find yourself eating a smaller portion. This means a smaller bill at the restaurant, smaller meal preparations at home.

Not only do you directly save money on food bills (I estimate saving several dollars a week for myself alone by doing this), you may also indirectly save money on medical bills. The Cornell University Medical Center found that the majority of Americans are deficient enough in water intake to actually be considered dehydrated. To quote, “Asked to describe their beverage consumption habits, participants report drinking an overall average of only 4.6 8-ounce servings of water per day-most health and nutrition experts recommend at least 8 servings per day.”

In other words, drinking a little water before each meal is a real money saver in more ways than one. Today, when you start thinking about a meal, have a glass of water before you even get started. The end result? You’ll eat less, feel better, and save some money, too.