Last Tuesday, I spent an afternoon shopping with my wife.

On the surface, it sounds like something we would have done five years ago, charging out to the stores, credit card in hand.

Things were a little different this time, though.

For one, we came home with fewer items than we left with. For two, we spent less than ten dollars all afternoon.

What did we wind up with? A newly refreshed living room, materials for another handmade toy for our child, and some adorable clothes for our rapidly-growing daughter.

Here’s the big shopping secret: we went thrifting.

That morning, my wife and I went through all of our children’s toys and reduced the total volume by about fifty percent, getting rid of items that the children simply didn’t play with that we felt wouldn’t have a ton of resale value at a yard sale. We filled up a large tub with the items and departed, dropping those items off as a donation.

Of course, while we were there, we also looked around the store for clothes for our daughter, as she’s rapidly jumping up in sizes. We found several very nice items for her – including a few that still had tags on them, including items from Baby Gap and similar places.

We also went through their true bargain basement items and salvaged a few sweaters. Why? We utilize old sweaters to make Silly Snakes for our kids (and for other kids, too).

We came home with two small bags of items, having spent less than $10. We also came home to a much emptier family room, one that has more than adequate space for the new toys our children received for Christmas. We also got to spend a (rare) afternoon together, just the two of us.

This is how frugal people live their lives. It’s not weird or uncomfortable or un-fun. We do the same things everyone else does. We update our children’s wardrobes. We work on craft projects. We spend time together shopping.

The only difference is that we start our children’s clothes shopping at the secondhand store instead of at the Baby Gap – and we often wind up with the same exact items of clothing. We focus on projects that utilize materials that are extremely inexpensive to begin with. And when we go shopping, we consider it a virtue to get a lot of bang for every dollar we spend – and the most important part is the time we spend together.

The real trick with frugality in modern life often isn’t figuring out ways to spend less. It’s getting past the mountains of marketing messages and cultural norms that revolve around spending.

There’s almost always an inexpensive way to do the thing you want to do. The question is whether or not you can see it through all of the mixed messages.

Luckily, on a day with my wife, we work together on it.

In a recent post at Get Rich Slowly, J.D. defined the “basic law of frugality” as this: “Decide what’s important to you. Give yourself permission to spend on these things. Pinch pennies on everything else.” That’s a pretty spot-on definition, in my opinion.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that it speaks to the problems that both overspenders and cheapskates have.

Overspenders?
In most situations, it is easily possible for a person to spend substantially less than they earn. So what causes a person to spend more than they earn?

The answer is hidden in that phrase. Overspenders stretch their definition of what’s important to them to cover a lot of things.

I’ll use myself as an example. Back in my overspending days, there were a lot of optional things in my life that I defined as being important enough to throw my money at. I went golfing a lot. I bought gadgets by the truckload. I bought more video games than I could ever possibly play. I bought carts full of books.

The end result was twofold. First, I often didn’t have time to actually enjoy all of the stuff I had bought. Second, because of all of the spending, my life was in a rough place.

My definition of what was important in my life was skewed. I had elevated too many things to the threshold of “permission to spend freely.” Because of that, I spent much more than I needed to spend, but I had too many things in my life to actually thoroughly enjoy the things I was spending money on.

The solution? Cut back. Ask yourself what things you most enjoy doing and toss the rest of it. Look for ways of minimizing the costs of the things you do enjoy.

Frugality is often said to be miserable because you have to give up so much. In reality, frugality means not giving up the things that are actually important to you. The trick is stepping back, looking at your life, and figuring out what things are important and what things are not.

Cheapskates?
On the other side of the coin are cheapskates, a role that I’ve almost fallen into a time or two over the past few years.

Cheapskates apply principles of penny-pinching to every aspect of their life, even the important ones. Although they have financial stability in their lives, they do it at the expense of other elements of their life that could add a great deal of value.

Here’s an example from my own life. I love to read books. I read several books a month beyond what I review on The Simple Dollar.

For the better part of a year, I refused to buy a single book. Instead, I just reserved books that interested me at my local library and patiently waited for them.

Several titles came out that I was eagerly anticipating. I was able to read some of them fairly quickly (within three months) of their release. Others? I’m still waiting.

Even more noteworthy is that at least two of the books I checked out and read during that period were books that I strongly fell in love with and wanted to read again (and I was quite sure I would read them many times in the future, as I love returning to books that really make me think).

But I was cheap. I didn’t buy these books. I resolved to just check them out at the library when they became available again.

One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting at home, having just finished a book. I looked at my unread books and realized that the book I most wanted to read wasn’t there – a book I had read before and returned to the library after thoroughly enjoying it. The library didn’t have it, either. I checked on Amazon and realized I could have the book for just $7. And I talked myself out of buying it.

That’s when I realized I was being a cheapskate. I was avoiding spending $7 on something that I knew would give me many hours of enjoyment now and quite a few hours of enjoyment later on, plus it would be a book that I could recommend to friends and loan to them while they loaned me books as well. To not spend $7 on something I cared so deeply about – and it was a $7 I could easily afford – was pure cheapness.

It’s okay to spend money on things that are truly important to you. In fact, it’s good, because spending money specifically on things truly important in your life directly raises your quality of life much more than any other way you could spend your money.

Reading is important to me, so I’m no longer afraid to spend money on it. Yes, if I see a book I want to read, I’ll check to see if the library has it and read it from them first. Yes, I use PaperBackSwap religiously. But if those outlets don’t connect me with a book I’m passionate about, I’m no longer scared to go to the bookstore and pick up that book that I want. Doing so raises my quality of life quite a lot.

The Winners Are in the Middle
The best place to be is at that place between the overspenders and the cheapskates. People who know what’s truly important to them and aren’t afraid to spend money on it enjoy a higher quality of life than people who spend themselves into debt (adding a lot of stress and challenge to their lives) and people who never spend a dime (missing out on things that they truly value in life).

What are your central values? What’s really, truly important to you? Give yourself some permission to spend in those areas without worry – but then lock down the ship in the other areas of your life.

Jenna writes in:

My husband and I have been talking about signing up for Netflix, but we’re just not sure if it’s worth the extra monthly bill. Do you have any thoughts or pointers?

Sarah and I have been on-again off-again Netflix users for most of the past decade. Our experience taught us a few things about Netflix – and about some broader money and personal issues related to watching DVDs.

First of all, Netflix really does what it says that it does. You get DVDs in the mail along with a return prepaid envelope. You can keep the DVDs as long as you want and watch them at your convenience. When you’re done, drop them in the envelope and stick it in the mail. It takes between one and two days for you to get a DVD in the mail. Plus, you can watch many of the items Netflix has available directly on your computer via internet streaming.

In all my years as a Netflix customer, the only issues I ever had were a few scratched DVDs, which were handled easily on the Netflix website. As a service, it does exactly what it claims to with very nice customer service.

The question really is do you actually need this service?

One reason that many people subscribe to Netflix is that they believe they’ll use the service a lot. They think of all of the movies and other media they’d like to watch, imagine receiving it in the mail (meaning no hassle at the video store), and they sign up.

But that’s not the reality of the situation.

Before we ever tried Netflix, we would watch about three movies at home per month. When we first signed up, we blew through a big pile of DVDs in the first month or two – a honeymoon period.

After that, we watched about three movies at home per month. And, to put it quite frankly, that wasn’t enough to warrant paying a monthly subscription fee to Netflix, not when we have quite a few friends who are happy to swap DVDs with us all the time and Redbox is easily available to us if we want to watch a new release.

Having Netflix doesn’t change your movie viewing habits beyond the honeymoon period unless there are other adjustments in your life. If you enjoy watching films or watching television series on DVD – and you do this quite often already – then Netflix will probably be a service that you get your money’s worth from.

However, if you don’t watch many movies now and you’re only considering subscribing because you imagine you’ll watch a whole lot more because it’s more convenient, you probably won’t, at least not after the honeymoon period (where you watch a flood of them at first).

That’s not to say no one who subscribes to Netflix doesn’t begin to watch more movies – I know of at least one person who unquestionably does. However, Netflix wasn’t the root cause of that change. That change in how he spent his time was a personal choice to spend more time watching films than to engage in other activities, such as World of Warcraft. This could have been done without Netflix at all – Netflix merely made his new hobby substantially less expensive.

If you watch less than a movie a week at home, Netflix probably won’t be worth it to you. If you watch a movie or more a week at home, Netflix probably will be worth it to you. What matters is your already-existing film watching habits – Netflix alone won’t change them.

One of my biggest time management weaknesses is gaming. I love taking breaks to try out a new free computer game. Most of the time, though, the game’s not engrossing enough to hold my interest.

This list is filled with the exceptions.

Here are six free computer games that are so filled with incredibly enjoyable game play that I find myself going back to them time and time again for just one more play.

League of Legends
http://www.leagueoflegends.com/
League of Legends is a fast-paced competitive online game that mixes fast-paced game play and careful planning in an interesting mix. In the game, you play as a champion who battles other champions in online matches. The gameplay is really straightforward – mostly, you’re competing on a large map (that’s extremely reminiscent of Warcraft III) where you move your character around with the mouse and order it into combat against the enemy. As you battle, your character grows stronger, learning new abilities, and it also picks up gold, which you can use to buy better weapons and armor within the match. Usually, you play in groups, where two teams of five players compete against each other. The game also includes a really smart matchmaker which pairs you against people of a similar skill and experience level as you.

What makes this game so interesting is that as you play more matches (win or lose), you slowly earn experience points, which allow you to not only unlock new champions to use in the matches, but also allows you to make your various champions stronger. The addictiveness of the gameplay is immense – you find yourself improving your character a bit, then you want to jump back in and play some more.

If you play League of Legends, you might see me on from time to time. My summoner name is Volarus (a name I sometimes use in online games).

Desktop Tower Defense
http://www.handdrawngames.com
I’ve mentioned Desktop Tower Defense before, but I’ll mention it again here for two reasons. One, after four years, I’m still playing it. Two, they have a new “pro” version with a ton of scenarios and other features to play through.

Desktop Tower Defense is a very simple game in which you place towers within a small rectangle while little critters run across the screen. The towers you place shoot the critters and, with each critter taken out, you earn a bit of gold. However, each wave of critters is a bit stronger than the next, so you have to use your gold to either upgrade your current towers or place new ones.

It’s really addictive and plays quite easily in your web browser.

Line Rider
http://www.official-linerider.com/default.aspx
Line Rider isn’t really so much a game as it is a creative sand box. With your mouse, you draw a line, then you click start. A little guy appears and begins to slide along your line, being pulled downwards by gravity. When he reaches the end, he leaps off into the abyss.

Then you try again, with three or four lines – or whatever you want. Then you click start and see what happens.

And again. And again. And again. Until you make something like this. Well, maybe not, but you’ll almost assuredly make something goofy and elaborate.

Bridgecraft
http://www.candystand.com/play/bridgecraft
Bridgecraft’s name basically says it all – you build bridges so that a person can easily cross it. The first few are easy, then suddenly the difficulty goes way up. You have to step back and think about the problem for a while – thus, it almost becomes a puzzle game of sorts.

Never mind the cartoony graphics, there’s a ton of gameplay to be had here.

The Space Collective
http://www.casualcollective.com/#games/the_space_game
A simple version of Starcraft, playable in a web browser? That’s probably how I would describe this one, as it’s a real time strategy game in which you gather resources, defend your resource-gathering structures, and build structures to attack the resource-gathering structures of others.

The learning curve is a bit steep, but if you play around with it, it’s pretty easy to figure out, particularly if you’ve played games like Warcraft and Starcraft in the past.

Fantastic Contraption
http://www.addictinggames.com/fantasticcontraption.html
This is a very addictive little puzzle game in which you’re simply building contraptions in order to move a ball into a goal. As the game goes on, the required contraptions become more and more elaborate and require more and more forethought to assemble.

Like DTD, above, this is a game I’ve played for years and keep coming back to time and time again.

I actually had an seventh game on this list, but I chose to remove it because it featured a very loud ad for a feminine hygiene product as the game was loading. No matter how good the game is, I’m just going to click away from that. (And, no, this isn’t sexism – I have similar feelings about any male ads along similar lines.)

If you reach the end of this post and haven’t enjoyed yourself for several hours (for free, no less!)… well, you need to go back up there and try out some more links.

Earlier this week, I offered up a post detailing how I wrap Christmas gifts, utilizing brown paper and yarn. The response was mixed – some people didn’t like the aesthetics of the packaging, while others did (obviously, I’m in the latter camp, as I love the aesthetics of brown packages and yarn).

Guess what? We’re both right.

For some people, there’s a lot of value in a certain gift aesthetic. Having a bundle of beautifully-wrapped presents under the tree adds value to their holiday season because of the visual appeal it brings to their home. That’s cool.

Others don’t really care that much about the wrapping and instead focus on the items inside. It doesn’t matter how they’re wrapped, just that there are presents people will be happy to receive under the tree. That’s cool, too.

Each of those groups will seek to maximize their value in a different way. The individuals who love beautifully wrapped gifts will spend more of their Christmas budget on wrapping paper, bows, ribbons, and other decorative elements. They’ll also spend more time wrapping gifts so that they look perfect and wonderfully appealing to the receiver. Others (myself included) will spend more time thinking carefully about the item the recipient will want and view wrapping as merely a way to disguise the item from the receiver. Their Christmas budget will minimize wrapping costs in favor of spending a little more on the gifts themselves.

And there’s nothing wrong with either perspective. Frugality is all about your personal value – maximizing the “bang for the buck” for the things you value. For me, it’s not the gift wrap on a present – for others, it’s all about beautiful gifts under the tree.

This pops up time and time again when you talk about frugality. Some people think it’s ludicrous to make your own laundry soap. I think it’s unnecessary to wash sandwich-size resealable baggies. Some people are simply disturbed that we’ve bought second-hand cloth diapers off of eBay to diaper our children with. I won’t dumpster dive or dig through items people set out by the curb for trash. Robert Pagliarini, in his CBS column, actually called me out for talking about brewing my own beer.

Frugality isn’t just about following a list – and then judging a list to be useless because some of the items don’t match your values. It’s about absorbing lots of ideas and utilizing the ones that fit your life. It’s about thinking about the things that work for you, not tossing aside everything because some ideas work better for others.

The next time you come across a tip for saving money, don’t discard it immediately because you don’t think that it applies to your life. Think about it in detail. Perhaps some aspect of it could be of use to you – wrapping small gifts in cut-up brown paper bags, using yarn as a decorative element, or so on, in the example of the gift-wrapping article. Or maybe none of it is – but someone else you know might find it useful, in which case you can pass it on and increase your own social capital a bit.

Frugality is about value and there’s value in almost everything – but that value is different to some people. Good luck.

One of the best bargains in your local grocery store is plain old white vinegar. You can get a 32 ounce jug of it (half a gallon) for about $1.50 and it has a multitude of uses beyond the edible ones (like pickles and salad dressings). Here are fifteen uses for white vinegar, most of which I use myself.

Toilet cleaner Got a toilet bowl that’s difficult to clean? Before you go to bed, dump a cup of vinegar in the bowl, then close the lid. I usually spread the vinegar around the bowl a bit with a brush to coat the sides. In the morning, the whole bowl will be really easy to brush. I can’t remember the last time I bought actual toilet bowl cleaner.

Refrigerator cleaner I take a gallon of warm water in a bowl, add about two cups of vinegar, bust out a rag, and use that solution to clean the inside of the refrigerator. It does a great job of cleaning things up without much effort at all. If something’s really bad, I’ll put a tablespoon or so of pure vinegar right on it, let it sit for a bit, then give it a scrub.

Sunburn Is your skin a bit sunburnt? Just rub some vinegar on the affected area and it’ll feel much better really quickly. If it’s bad, you can reapply the vinegar a few times.

Kitchen drain odors If your kitchen drain has an odd smell, pour a cup of white vinegar down the drain, then don’t run any water for at least an hour. When you do run water, run quite a bit of it to flush out the drain. This usually takes care of any odors – if any still linger, repeat this a time or two.

Fabric softener Instead of using fabric softener, use about half a cup of white vinegar. It has largely the same effect without coating your clothes in chemicals and costs a lot less.

Rusty tools Just soak anything that’s rusty in vinegar overnight, then clean it thoroughly with a brush. The rust will wipe away nearly as well as it does with any expensive rust remover I’ve ever tried.

Vinyl flooring If you have a vinyl floor that needs cleaned, mop using equal amounts of water and vinegar. This works really well for getting up stains, especially if you go over it twice. Don’t do this with wood or wood laminate, however, because vinegar can react with the wood.

Window cleaning Forget Windex. Just put some vinegar in a spray bottle and get to work on any glass surfaces. It works really well and doesn’t seem to streak much at all.

Eyeglass cleaner If you use eyeglass cleaner, just take an empty container and fill it with vinegar. It cuts through grease on your lenses really well, leaving them looking great!

Microwave cleaning Put a cup of vinegar in the microwave, then run the microwave on high for three minutes. Let it sit undisturbed for half an hour, then remove the cup. The gunk in your microwave will be very easy to wipe down.

Carpet odors Did your dog do something funky on the carpet (or your toddler, for that matter – yes, I have used this tip to clean up some early potty training accidents)? Pour half a cup of vinegar on the spot that smells and just let it dry. This will kill off the odor and it’ll also make it easier to clean any stains.

Garbage disposal odors If your garbage disposal smells a bit odd, vinegar alone usually won’t do the trick because it doesn’t get into all of the cracks and crevasses in there. Instead, fill up an ice cube tray with vinegar and put it in the freezer until you have vinegar ice cubes. Toss those cubes into the disposal and run the disposal for five seconds or so (with water). Then let it sit for an hour or two, then run it again. This always works for us.

Air freshener Got that spray bottle of vinegar from the window cleaning? Spritz it in the air a few times to kill general odors. It smells vaguely vinegary for the first minute, then it just smells clean.

Nasty air Got a room that really reeks of smoke or paint fumes? Put a bowl of vinegar in there and just let it sit. If the room’s really bad, put out two or three bowls. The odor in the room will drastically improve in a few hours.

Whitening clothes Put a cup of white vinegar in a load of whites along with a quarter of a cup of baking soda. This will whiten your whites as effectively as bleach without the harshness.

These uses just scratch the surface. Whenever there’s a cleaning mission in my home, I usually tackle it with vinegar and baking soda as the first line of defense.

Do you have any great uses for vinegar? Share ‘em in the comments!

Melanie writes in:

Between the wrapping paper, ribbons, bows, tags, and other things, I’ve often spent $20-25 on just wrapping the gifts at Christmastime. This seems silly. How do you wrap presents? I’m sure you’ve got a less expensive way.

To me, the purpose of wrapping paper is simply to disguise gifts from the receiver while at least looking moderately visually interesting – nothing more, nothing less. I don’t see the purpose in spending lots of money on the “perfect” wrapping paper or on elegant ribbons when they’re going to wind up being a big pile of trash on Christmas morning.

Instead, here’s my Christmas wrapping strategy. All told, I’ll spend about $4 on materials and those materials will provide more than enough for several Christmases.

In the picture above, I’m about to wrap a copy of the video game Nintendogs for my eight year old niece (her parents might read The Simple Dollar, but I’m pretty sure she does not). I’m going to wrap it in plain brown paper, the type you would use for packaging things to mail via the Postal Service or UPS.

You can get an enormous roll of such paper for just a couple dollars. Even better, you can get brown paper at the store by requesting paper bags and trimming off the bottoms of the bags. Starting in about September, I start requesting such bags at the store so that I can give the bags a second life.

Here it is, all wrapped up. A little secret: I took pictures of several presents being wrapped and this one turned out the best – I’m not exactly a gift-wrapping expert, even though I’ve done it many times.

This looks fine, but it is a bit drab. Surely, there’s something we can do to color it up a little…

Yarn is what I use. You can buy an enormous amount of it for a very low price (the depicted roll cost less than a dollar) and it adds a certain homespun flair that just isn’t captured with ribbons.

It’s very easy to use yarn to add flair to your package.

To measure the length of yarn, I wrap it around the gift about three and a half full loops, or about seven times the average length of the package. It might be a little long, but you can trim off excess. I prefer to go longer than I need than to go too short.

After I cut off an appropriate length, I spread out the yarn in a straight line on the table, then set the package face-down in the middle of the piece of yarn. I pick up the two ends and…

… loop them together like so. Then, I turn the package over, tie a simple bow on the front (one that can be opened with a good tug, basically the same knot as is used to tie shoes), and I’m finished with the wrapping.

I like the big, floppy bow look – you may not. If you want a shorter bow, just tug on the ends of the bow until the loops are as short as you like, then trim the long ends. You could also use very long ends to make a lot of loops for a more decorative bow, if you’d like.

I personally really like the aesthetics. It calls to mind the old Rodgers and Hammerstiein tune … little brown packages tied up with string / these are a few of my favorite things.

What about the name?

I simply write it on the package in black marker, no fuss, no muss. You may also choose to write it on the back so the front looks undisturbed by the ink – whatever you’d like.

If you use paper bags from the store, the cost of such wrapping is approaching free – you’re using a tiny fractional amount of a roll of tape and of the yarn bundle and that’s all. Even if you’re using a roll of packaging paper, the cost is still far below what one might spend on typical wrapping paper.

Other ideas to consider:

Have grandchildren decorate packages for grandparents. Give them some markers and have them decorate such a package to their heart’s content.

Use the comic pages from the Sunday newspaper for children’s presents. Just save them for a few weeks and you’ll have plenty.

Print your own designs on the brown paper. Measure off a size that your printer can handle and print a design right on the brown paper. This works really well for smaller gifts.

Good luck!

Marco writes in:

Most of your “money tips” are stupid. Why would I waste my time doing this stuff to save fifty cents? I want to learn how to make money not how to save a nickel.

Whether or not you take advantage of the huge benefits of frugality is all a matter of perspective. If you spend your time looking at just the short term, I’d agree that many frugal tips aren’t big savers. Quite often, a given tactic saves you just some pocket change or a dollar or two once.

That’s an incredibly shortsighted perspective to have.

Let me walk you through the math on three different frugal strategies we use in our home so that you can clearly see how these things can put a lot of money in your pocket. (I’m using Marco as a straw man below with his permission.)

Homemade Laundry Detergent
I’ve written about how we make our own laundry detergent in the past. Instead of going to the store and buying a jug of Tide, I’ll often make a bucket of homemade detergent instead.

Why Marco doesn’t like this strategy: It saves you eighteen cents per load versus Tide. Eighteen cents?
Why I love this strategy: It saves us about $60 per year – post-tax money that goes directly into our pocket – for a little over an hour’s worth of effort spread out throughout the year.

I can make a batch of homemade detergent in about ten to twelve minutes (with the help of my kids). This single batch contains enough detergent for about fifty five loads of laundry, according to my count. Thus, I need to make about seven batches a year – about an hour and fifteen minutes worth of work, annually, spread out over the entire year in ten to twelve minute increments.

On average, we do a load of laundry each day. Every time we use our homemade detergent instead of the homebrew, we save the eighteen cents that Marco doesn’t think is worthwhile. Yet, if you do that every single day for a year, it adds up to about $60.

Now, if I actually earned that $60, I’d have to pay taxes on it. There are also costs connected to earning it – transportantion, time spent working, child care for the time working, and so on. It’s easy to see that I’d have to bring home well over $100 to match what I get from the detergent over a given year.

Eating at Home
I love cooking at home, as I’ve mentioned many times before. It’s turned into something of a passion for me, but I got started on doing it when I realized that we could easily save a couple dollars a head eating at home versus eating out.

Why Marco doesn’t like this strategy: Making food at home is a lot of hassle to save two bucks.
Why I love this strategy: We save at least $100 a week – money that’s after taxes, of course, meaning it goes straight into our pocket – by eating almost exclusively at home. That’s over $5,000 a year.

When we eat out as a family, it costs us – at the bare minimum – $20 to eat a decent meal. Quite often, it’s more than that. But, if you were paying attention this summer, I posted eight (yes, one two three four five six seven eight) detailed meal plans – with lots of pictures – for family meals that cost less than $10 each. The series covered a wide variety of cuisines, healthiness levels, and ingredients in an effort to show that you don’t have to wed yourself to one certain kind of meal.

Thus, each time we eat at home, we’re saving a minimum of $2.50 a head over eating out – usually, our savings is more than that per person. Even if we just calculate one meal a day in this regard, that’s twenty eight meals a week – even at $2.50 a meal, that’s $70 a week. If you consider that the gap between eating at home and eating out is usually greater than that and that we often eat lots of leftovers, most weeks our savings is well over $100 a week.

“Yes, but what about the time?” Well, in order to eat out, we have to leave our home and go to a restaurant (15 minutes), go inside and get seated (another 5 minutes – hopefully), order and wait for our food (thirty minutes), eat (fifteen to thirty minutes), then leave the restaurant (five more minutes) and go home (fifteen more minutes). That’s an hour and forty minutes.

At home, I can usually get a meal prepped from scratch in forty five minutes – some meals take less time, some take more. If we spend a half an hour eating, we’re done in an hour and fifteen minutes.

Usually, it takes less time to prepare a meal from scratch and eat it at home than it does to eat out.

You can amplify both the financial savings and the time savings by using tactics like quadruple batch preparation as well.

Yes, there are some caveats. The savings isn’t nearly as great if you’re single. Also, if you live very close to a restaurant district, the time investment for eating out is less, too.

Installing a Programmable Thermostat
A programmable thermostat lets you set up a program that will automatically adjust the temperature in your home while you’re at work and while you’re asleep, allowing your energy bill to catch a breather.

Why Marco doesn’t like this strategy: You spend fifty bucks on a thermostat and it only saves you five bucks a month.
Why I love this strategy: You spend fifty bucks on a programmable thermostat then save sixty bucks a year for the next fifteen years with no additional effort – a total of $900 for a $50 investment with no work.

The idea that a programmable thermostat will save you $5 a month is a very low-end guess – in most cases, the savings will be much more than that each month. This is particularly true if your house stands empty during weekdays and also if you live in an area where the climate varies wildly between summer and winter. But we’ll assume $5 a month for argument’s sake here.

Let’s say you plunk down that $50 (or some similar amount) to buy the programmable thermostat of your choice. You spend an hour hooking it up and playing with the features. Yes, after the first month, it’s a big loss. After six months, it’s a loss. After a year, you’re just barely ahead.

The second year? Pure profit with no extra effort. The third year? The fourth? It’s all gas down the road – you use less energy without expending any effort to do so.

The Real Scoop
Most frugality tactics aren’t all that cost effective if you look solely at a single use. Frugality’s value kicks in when you alter something you do all the time, like eating a meal, heating your home, or doing the laundry. Shaving a few cents off of each of those uses adds up to a substantial chunk of change over the long run.

When you read frugality tips, ignore the ones that only apply to things you don’t do or things that you rarely do. They’re not really useful to you at all. Instead, look for the ideas that intersect well with your own life – the little tweaks you can make that don’t reduce your quality of life but save you just a little bit each time you engage in the activity. If you’re a meticulous cleaner, look for tips on cleaning supplies. If you use a lot of home electronics, look for energy-saving tips. If you’re a homeowner… the possibilities are endless.

It’s those “a few cents a day” tips that really add up. Do several of them and you’re saving “only” a few bucks a day. But those few bucks a day add up to a thousand dollars at year’s end – and that can make a huge difference, especially since they just fall right in line with your life.