A couple days ago, I watched a program on TLC called Extreme Cheapskates, which featured people doing things like using reusable toilet paper and cooking goat’s heads in order to save money.

It was pretty obvious after just a few minutes of watching that the point of the show was to make frugality look ridiculous by choosing to profile tactics that violate other social customs and norms. In some cases, the people were aware of it, but in others, they seemed completely oblivious that they were doing things that others would see as … well, “extreme.”

While watching it, I received a couple emails from readers who were also watching it. One in particular stood out at me:

Is this really the kind of thing you do at home? Some of this stuff is just sick. Some things are worth a dollar or two more.

Simply put, the outcome of this show was to paint a socially uncomfortable face on the idea of frugality. By highlighting people who take frugality to an extreme, they manage to cast a negative glow over anyone who proudly practices frugality.

Here’s the thing, though. This type of negative highlighting happens all the time with all kinds of things.

Focusing on the practices of the Hutaree and the Christian patriot movement casts a false negative light onto Christians, most of whom are wonderful people who try to live their day-to-day life in a positive fashion.

Focusing on the practices of a few large banks that received TARP money and also have consumer unfriendly practices casts a false negative light on all banks and credit unions, most of which do really great work for people.

Focusing on groups like al Qaeda casts a false negative light on Muslims, most of whom are wonderful people who also try to live their day-to-day life in a positive fashion.

The list goes on and on. When you define a large group by the actions of a small, extreme element of that group, you’re almost always making a mistake.

This brings us back to frugality and Extreme Cheapskates. Frugality is not the extreme actions represented on this show.

What you’re actually seeing when you watch Extreme Cheapskates are people who have a overall value set that’s significantly different than yours. It’s the same thing you see in the extreme cases mentioned above.

It does not mean that the larger group these people claim to represent shares their values.

I consider myself frugal. I even consider myself a cheapskate in terms of things that just affect me. I make my own laundry detergent. We make a lot of the Christmas gifts we give away. I drive a used car I bought off of Craigslist. We save leftover vegetable scraps to make vegetable stock, then compost the leftover scraps from that.

At the same time, I don’t do things that are rude to others or unhygenic or dangerous to my health.

Frugality isn’t about squeezing every penny out of everything. It’s about maximizing the value of the things you’re doing, and “value” doesn’t always strictly mean money. Money often plays a significant part in it, but so does time and so does health and so does the relationships you have with the people you care about.

Frugality simply means that you take the time to figure out those relative values for yourself. Have you actually thought about the relative value proposition of buying generic laundry detergent versus making your own versus buying Tide? If you have and you’ve come to a conclusion on the issue, you’re probably frugal. You’ve thought about what you value – money, time, hygiene, relationships. You’ve obtained information on the issue. You’ve come up with a conclusion based on the information that balances what you specifically value.

That’s actually what these “extreme cheapskates” are also doing, but their values likely differ significantly from yours. That doesn’t mean that being frugal or being a cheapskate is weird. It just means that the “extreme cheapskate” puts an extremely high value on the “money” part of the value equation (or an uncomfortably low value on the “hygiene” part or some other part of the equation).

It also means that when you see a list of frugal tactics, you’re seeing tips that represent different levels of value on things like hygiene and time and food quality (and so on), and that you need to filter those lists based on how you value things like hygiene and time and food quality.

Be frugal and smart and live by the things that hold value in your life. Do that and you’ll always win.

If your family holidays are anything like mine, you’re left with piles of remnants: torn-up wrapping paper, empty boxes, and extra food litter the house.

It might be tempting to throw it all away, but there’s a lot of value in those leftover items. Here are some of the things I’ve done with leftover Christmas items.

Wrapping Paper
1. I shred it and use it as packing material when I ship things or when I give gifts in the future.

2. I shred it and mix those shreds with paraffin to make some fantastic firestarters. The easiest way to do it is to take an old egg carton, put a few shreds of wrapping paper in each slot, and pour some heated paraffin on top. Then, tear the egg carton into individual egg-shaped slots (with the egg carton still attached to the paraffin) and you have yourself a dozen fantastic firestarters. This is a great use for camping.

3. I take large pieces of untorn used paper and turn them into a collage, which I then use for future gifts. A collage pattern on a gift looks really distinctive and interesting.

4. I take pieces of untorn used paper and cut shapes out of them, which I then attach to brown paper for future gift wrappings.

5. I take pieces of untorn paper and use it to teach my children basic origami, like a fortune teller or a dove or a jumping frog.

6. I shred it and use it for paper maiche projects. For example, we made a paper maiche Great Saiyaman helmet for our oldest son that he wears all the time (and which provided a centerpiece of his Halloween costume this year).

7. I take small pieces of it and use it to cut out snowflakes. Often, I’ll just fold them up so that they’re ready to cut, then store those folded pieces until next November for the following year’s Christmas decorations.

Empty Boxes
8. I reuse cardboard boxes over and over and over again. I just break them down so that they store flat in our garage, then use them whenever I have the need.

9. I convert leftover cardboard boxes into a dollhouse for my daughter. This gives her full ability to decorate the thing as she sees fit.

10. I cut cardboard boxes into strips and save them for campfire starters. This is particularly good for boxes that have been mangled enough that they’re not good for other uses.

11. I cut the cardboard into rectangles and use it for backing on framed photographs. Some frames come with the cardboard, but for those who do not, cardboard can be essential in preventing photos from slipping.

12. I convert larger boxes into “pet houses.” This can be a perfect way to enclose a dog’s sleeping area or give a cat a place to hide and play. Again, you can decorate them to your heart’s content.

13. I cut cardboard into tiny pieces and use it for garden mulch. It does a great job of minimizing weeds and then slowly decomposing into the soil.

14. I cut cardboard boxes into flats and use them for organizing smaller items in my closet, like CDs and DVDs. This makes it easy to see the exact contents without the items spilling everywhere. Just trim the box down to the height of the items you want to store.

15. If you still have leftover paper and cardboard, get creative with the reuse. I’d contact a daycare center or orphanage or even an elementary school in your area and see if they have any need for it, for craft projects and the like. Contact an animal shelter and see if they have any need for it as liners or bedding material. These options are far better than simply recycling them in your recycling bin.

Leftover Food
16. I just freeze as many of the basic ingredients as I can. Items like leftover turkey meat, leftover vegetables, and so on are perfect components for soups and stews and casseroles when you pull them out of the freezer.

17. I convert them into alternative dishes in the next few days. Leftover ham, for example, might become a ham-and-bean soup. Leftover sweet potatoes might become sweet potato pancakes.

18. I package it up and give it to holiday party guests to take home with them as something of a final gift. I’ll get a bunch of inexpensive containers that I don’t need back and allow them to have a meal at home.

19. I’ll prepare meals for shut-ins that I know and take the food to them. Several years ago, we lived near an elderly shut-in that we often took meals to and it was a very rewarding experience.

20. I use leftover vegetables and vegetable scraps to make vegetable stock and leftover meats and meat scraps to make meat stock. All you do is put the materials you want to make stock out of into a crock pot, fill it with water until there’s about three or four inches above the top of the food, then turn it on low and let it sit all day. Strain the liquid and save it – it’s a great starter for all kinds of dishes.

Don’t let holiday waste fill up your bins. Put that stuff to better use and save yourself a few dimes, too.

I’ve mentioned quite often that I tend to shop at Goodwill/consignment shops/secondhand stores for various items. Whenever I mention this, I tend to get a bunch of responses along the lines of this message from Tessa:

How do you find anything good at Goodwill? Whenever I go into one, all I find is a lot of junk. I can’t believe you find anything good there.

There are a few basic tactics that you should use if you’re shopping at Goodwill.

First, visit Goodwills that are located in upscale areas. Don’t visit the Goodwill in the poor part of town or even the medium income part of town. Look for the Goodwill stores and secondhand shops that are located as close as possible to the rich part of town.

What happens is that people in the rich part of town often have more money than sense, so they’ll often get rid of very nice clothes having only worn them a time or two – and they do the same thing with other items. I’ve been in Goodwill stores in the peripheries of rich neighborhoods that have had far higher quality stuff than almost anywhere I shop at. I’ve filled up my book collections, my video game libraries, and, yes, my wardrobe thanks to such visits.

I’ll give you an example. Once, I stopped into the Goodwill store at Washington and Racine in Chicago and walked out with about fifteen video games and about ten new shirts. The store was nicer than many Wal-Marts and Targets I’ve been in and the quality of the merchandise and prices were fantastic.

Second, be picky. If you go into a Goodwill that seems to mostly be full of junk, you don’t have to buy that junk. Walk out and put that one on your “avoid in the future” list.

However, having said that, there are a lot of gems to be found, particularly in areas of income disparity. A college town is a perfect example of this. A college town often has a wide variety of incomes and perceptions of money, which means that their Goodwill stores tend to include a lot of cheap stuff and a fair amount of good stuff.

You often have to dig for those gems, though. What I often do is look for examples of high-quality things, even if I’m not particularly interested in buying them. If I see some high-quality items, even if they’re not perfect for me, I know that there are some diamonds hidden in the piles here.

So, how does that really work? I’m often willing to try a Goodwill that’s in a decent neighborhood that I’ve never been to before.

The first thing I do when I go in the door is look for items that I know really well. I’ll look at their men’s shirts or their smaller youth clothes or their books.

I look for items that fit me or that will fit my children, of course, but I also simply look for quality items of any kind. If I can find good items with some consistency while looking around, then I know the store is worthwhile even if I don’t specifically find items that match my needs.

So, with men’s shirts, I’ll look for items that look like they’re reasonably close to new, not faded, and are well constructed. I don’t necessarily expect to find a treasure trove in my size (like I did at that Chicago Goodwill several years ago), but I’m much more likely to stick with it if I’m finding some indication of quality items.

If I don’t find anything that seems of reasonable quality, or if I only find maybe one item in forty or fifty that looks worthwhile, I leave the store and often don’t look back.

The trick is to investigate lots of Goodwill stores, consignment shops, and secondhand stores in your area with these tactics. You should fully expect that some of them are going to be of poor quality and not worth visiting again.

However, if you’re like me, you’ll eventually find a series of stores that you’re happy to visit time and time again because the prices are excellent and you often find incredible discounts on nearly-new stuff. Such discoveries are well worth the time invested in finding them.

As many of you know, I sometimes buy shirts and other items of clothing at Goodwill, thrift stores, and consignment shops. I don’t have too much luck finding tall things (I’m six and a half feet tall), but I do find a lot of clothes for my children and my wife sometimes finds items for her as well.

The reaction that many people ask when they hear this is aren’t you just wearing shabby, worn out clothing? The general perception is that most of the clothes that you find at such places are well worn and won’t look good on a person.

To an extent, that perception is correct. There are a lot of clothes at such stores that I wouldn’t want to wear and that I wouldn’t want my children or wife to wear.

I shop there for two reasons.

One, sometimes I find a gem in the rough. I found the single most beautiful dress my daughter has ever had at a consignment shop for less than $3. I found a pretty-much-new sportjacket for myself at a Goodwill that fits almost like a glove for $5.

Two, these are the perfect places to get “weekend” clothes. These are clothes that you’re happy to wear when you’re out in the garden, mowing the yard, doing housework, or spending a lazy day around the house reading. Old t-shirts, old jeans, whatever – as long as it fits, it works.

These two scenarios make up most of the clothes in my wardrobe. I do, of course, have a selection of nice clothes that I wear outside the home.

Of course, this brings up a second question: why bother at all with nice clothes?

I don’t ever try to be the best-dressed person in the room. That’s a rat race that you never win, and there’s negligible reward for winning that race even some of the time.

On the other hand, I think there’s significant value in not being the worst-dressed person in the room. I won’t wear my old torn-up Chicago Cubs t-shirt when I’m meeting a professional acquaintance, for example.

I usually strive to hit the average – or just below the average – of the level of dress of people I’m with. This is a level that achieves every goal I want in a social situation: it makes the other person feel comfortable, but doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable because I’m way overdressed or underdressed compared to them. If I achieve that, I’m happy.

The thing is, that’s pretty easy to achieve on a low clothing budget. I don’t need very many items of “nice” clothing to pull this off, and most of my other clothes are just comfortable ones for workdays at home. Even when I worked in an office environment, it wasn’t particularly expensive to maintain a level of appropriate dress. I just needed a small number of nice shirts and a variety of pants that worked well with all of the shirts, and mixed and matched them.

So, would I rather spend a certain amount of money on a bunch of cheap shirts or one good one? I don’t think either answer is correct. The cheap shirts are perfect for wearing around the house or doing dirty work in. The one good one won’t be worn very often, but it will last for a very long time.

As with everything, it’s all about maximizing value. You get a lot of value out of an old well-worn shirt at home, but you get more value out of dressing appropriately when in public. Careful shopping can minimize your costs in both regards and not leave you wearing an expensive shirt in the garden or wearing beat-up clothing when you’re out and about.

When I was a child, my father used to grow plants in our basement all year long. I remember going down there in the middle of the winter with several inches of snow outside, only to find tons of tomato and pepper plants thriving under an array of grow lights. I remember how the basement smelled like fresh spring while the rest of the house smelled like… well, a winter home. I remember the deep green color of the vines and how the tomatoes seemed vibrantly red in contrast to the white and grey of winter outside.

Eventually, my father stopped doing this. Part of the reason was that the ceiling in our basement was pretty low and he had to stoop constantly when he was down there working and I think it began to bother his back.

The other reason, though, is that he began to really wonder if it was worth doing it compared to just buying vegetables at the store in the winter.

Lately (particularly as winter has descended upon Iowa), I’ve found myself thinking about those grow lights in the basement and wondering if I couldn’t clear out a spot in our basement for a small winter garden.

The question, of course, is whether this would be worth it. Would I actually be saving money growing my own vegetables in this way?

Grow lights This is where the real cost of the system comes in. Let’s say I decide to grow about 80-100 square feet of vegetables in my basement. This could be covered by an array of small grow lights or a single large grow light. After looking at a lot of options, it seems that the best choice is a single industrial-strength grow light like this one. The problem is that such a light costs around $300 depending on where you buy it. There are lower-cost alternatives, of course, but those have their own problems.

This single light would allow me to convert an 80 square foot room in our basement into a greenhouse, more or less.

Energy use of grow lights The grow light described above uses 1,000 watts of energy. If you ran the grow light 12 hours a day for three months, that’s 1,080 hours of use. The energy cost of this would be about $120 for a season of vegetables.

Pots We’d also need a collection of pots to grow the vegetables in. Thankfully, these can be found pretty cheaply and would be a one-time investment of about $100 or so.

Soil I’m lucky to have access to adequate soil and compost, so the cost here is negligible for me. However, if you’re made to use potting soil, the cost would be rather high for 80 square feet of vegetables.

Seeds The seeds for this project would be relatively inexpensive on the whole, totaling perhaps $3 per growing session (assuming that you’re not using heirlooms, in which case this would be a one-time cost of $4 or $5).

Water The cost of the water would be negligible. We’ll figure a dollar’s worth of water per season.

So, let’s figure up the costs here for ten “seasons” of growing.

One grow light, costing $300.
Ten seasons of electricity, costing $1,200.
Pots, costing $100.
Seeds, costing $30.
Water, costing $10.
(You’ll also need soil if you don’t have access to it.)

The total cost of all of these elements is $1,640, or $164 per season.

There’s also the housing cost of having 80 square feet to devote to such a project, plus the cost of heating and cooling the room (I’d just keep it at our house temperature plus the grow light), which would add some additional cost to the equation.

Using this as a guide for vegetable square footage, I could plant a lot of vegetables in 80 square feet.

Without getting into the complexities of a diverse collection of vegetables, let’s just say I could plant a single tomato plant per square foot and that tomato plant would provide ten pounds of tomatoes. This would mean I would get 800 pounds of tomatoes out of this room every growing season, assuming that because it is indoors, I’ll minimize or eliminate pest or disease problems.

This would give me a cost per pound of tomatoes of about $0.20. Compared to the cost of tomatoes at the store this time of year (about $2.99 a pound), that’s quite a deal.

The problem is that pulling this off is a tremendous amount of work and planning. I would be installing grow lights, hauling tubs of dirt into my basement, planting lots and lots of seeds, and performing all sorts of regular maintenance. I would easily estimate that I would spend 100 hours per growing season cultivating these plants.

There’s also the issue of dealing with that much fresh food coming in at once. Much of it would have to be canned or frozen, adding to the cost and time, or given away to friends, increasing the cost per pound of production but also providing a gift to friends, or perhaps even sold in small amounts if an arrangement could be found.

In the end, this type of gardening can save you some money, but it’s going to be a labor of love along the way. If gardening is something you’re passionate about, you will save money with this effort. I would estimate that you could even approach minimum wage with it for the time invested if you canned all of the excess vegetables along the way.

Still, the question really is whether you find personal value in doing this. If you do, this can certainly be a great project for an extra room in your home.

One of the most empowering things I do on a regular basis is to create a detailed sketch of what I want my life to be like in five years or so, and then I repeat this exercise with periods further down the road (ten years and twenty years and then when I’m about 70). I usually do this in detail every few months or so.

I try to create optimistic (but not unrealistically optimistic) pictures of the future. I don’t paint pictures of myself as a rich person or as some sort of perfect citizen. Instead, I focus on where I’d actually like things to be based on where things are now and where they’re heading.

A five year picture, for example, sees three intellectually curious and healthy children. It sees me having written a handful of novels. It sees us living in a more rural area than we live right now. It sees me in a bit better physical shape.

That picture is filled with a lot of details, and it’s in those details that I see what’s actually really important to me. This is the life that I want to lead.

Yet, what I notice when I paint these pictures of the future is that they involve very few things that actually involve spending money.

Intellectually curious and healthy children are in large part a result of invested time, as are the novels and the improved fitness. Moving into the country probably won’t cost us much money on the whole.

Simply put, the things I want out of my life don’t involve spending money. The things I genuinely label as important in my life moving forward aren’t related to spending money.

What they do involve, however, is time (and energy). Time is really the magic ingredient in making these things happen. My children need time. My spouse needs time. My health needs time.

The more money I spend, the more time I have to spend working. I have to have the income to cover what I’m spending, so if I’m spending a lot, I’m going to be spending more and more of my time earning money.

The more time and energy I spend working, the less time and energy I have to spend making that picture come true. The elements of the life I want are realistic and achievable, but only if I have time and energy to devote to them.

So, how do I minimize the time and energy I devote to work? The answer is simple: frugality.

If I simply don’t spend my money on unimportant things, I can afford to take on less demanding work that gives me more space to work on my other life goals. I don’t have that pressurized job at the office – in fact, I left that in 2008.

Spend some time thinking about what your goals are. Create that detailed picture of what you want your life to look like in five years. Ask yourself what you really need to achieve those goals. I’m willing to bet that time and energy are more vital ingredients than money is.

Then, each time you consider spending money on something important, ask yourself if it’s holding you in a place where you don’t have time or energy to pursue your goals in life.

Money isn’t everything.

Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a great discussion on The Simple Dollar’s Facebook page concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I’m going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.

Marie writes in: My grandfather was not a wealthy man, but he always told me to buy the best quality I could afford, it will last longer. When I was in my early 20′s I purchased a professional hair dryer for about $250.00. This was in the mid 90′s. So that’s about $20 a year so far. I feel like I am already ahead considering a $20 hairdryer never worked for a year. What products are worth spending money on…and I find when possible buying industrial or professional grade products last longer.

Marie makes a great point, albeit one that’s hard to quantify exactly. I’ll try to dig into it with a few examples, but suffice it to say, it’s really only worth paying significantly more for reliability if you use the item all the time. Of course, if you’re rarely using the item, why buy it to begin with?

Take my kitchen knives, for example. Sarah and I received a good (but not great) kitchen knife set as a wedding gift in 2003. The primary knife I used from that set was the chef’s knife. After about two years of steady use (steady meaning roughly every other day), the chef’s knife was nearly unusable. I could get it moderately sharp immediately after a sharpening, but the blade would lose what little edge it had by the time I was finished chopping a single carrot. The end result was that I was burning significant time sharpening and honing this poor knife, not to mention the extra time spent actually chopping the food plus the mangled food that resulted from this.

I then invested in a single high-end chef’s knife, an $80 Global knife. I still use it every other day, but now I hone it perhaps once a month and haven’t sharpened it in three years. I’d estimate this knife saves me five minutes over the other knife every single day.

Here’s the thing: most people would simply shrug their shoulders at five minutes compared to the $80 cost of a knife. However, over the course of three years, five minutes every other day adds up to 2,738 minutes. That’s about forty five and a half hours I saved not having to deal with the knife. That means my cost per hour saved by that knife is about $1.75.

Now, let’s say I only used a chef’s knife once a month, but I still saved five minutes each use from a better knife. Over three years, that’s 36 uses, which at five minutes each adds up to three hours. My cost per hour in this case is about $27.

Clearly, in the first case, the knife was worth it, but in the second case… not so much. The difference between the two is one thing and one thing alone: frequency of use.

So, take Marie’s case. Let’s say she uses her hair dryer daily. She finds that after 350 daily uses, her $20 cheap hair dryers fail. On the other hand, her industrial dryer has withstood 7,000 daily uses (roughly) and is still going. For her, the industrial dryer is worth it.

Now, let’s look at me. I dry my hair maybe once a month. My hair is short and most of the time, a vigorous towel drying and a comb gets me where I want to be.

For me to burn out a $20 hair dryer, I would have to use it 350 times, as per Marie’s estimation. If I use it once a month, that means I would have to use the dryer for 28 years before it would reach that 350 use level.

For me to reach Marie’s use level on an industrial hair dryer, I would have to use that hair dryer, at my current pace, for 583 years.

Simply put, it’s not cost efficient for me to buy an industrial hair dryer. It probably is for Marie, but it’s not for me. What’s the difference? Frequency of use.

It is absolutely worth your while to own a quality, reliable version of an item you use every day (or close to that). You’ll save a lot of dollars (and/or a lot of time) over the long run in such cases. However, when you start looking at less frequent usage, the math is going to start working against you.

Jane Black recently wrote a fascinating article for The Atlantic entitled “Fast Food’s Dirty Little Secret: It’s the Middle Class Buying Burgers“:

For years the conventional wisdom has been that fast food is poor people’s food; that, thanks to government subsidies that ensure cheap calories, the drive-through is where people who can’t afford the “good” stuff — organic, grass-fed, etc. — go to feed their families on a budget. Why else would anyone eat that stuff?

But a new study to be published in the Journal for Population Health Management reveals the dirty little secret of the American middle class: It’s not cash-strapped Americans who are devouring the most Big Macs and Whoppers, it’s us! According to the study, a household earning $60,000 a year eats the most fast food, and one bringing in $80,000 is actually more likely to have it their way than one with $30,000. Suddenly, last year’s news from the Centers for Disease Control makes sense: Nearly half of obese adults in this country are not poor but middle-class, earning at least $77,000 for a family of four.

Why?

What actually drives families to the drive-through are two simple truths. First, it’s convenient. Fast-food hours accommodate odd shifts and offer playrooms to appease screaming children and give moms a break. And, after years of calculated expansion, the restaurants are everywhere we are — in office buildings, department stores, rest stops, schools, Walmarts, airports, even hospitals — which makes fast food America’s default dining-out option. Second, people like the way fast food tastes. No matter how often or how loudly food crusaders preach about the nasty and ecologically disastrous bits that end up in those burgers, fast food’s carefully calibrated mix of salt and fat is hard for many to resist.

To put it simply, people don’t roll up to McDonalds and order a double cheeseburger off of the dollar menu because it’s cheap. They do it because it’s convenient and because it is engineered to taste good.

It’s not even cheap, either. As Mark Bittman points out:

In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28.

I can make a much better meal than that at home for far less than $28.

So, what’s the point of all of this. The point is that convenience is often the driving factor for people when they make spending choices. They will spend more money and sacrifice other factors such as healthiness in order to maximize convenience.

This is actually a completely understandable thing. If you’re trying to manage a busy career, start a side business, have community responsibilities, and have a spouse and children at home (a situation that sounds awfully familiar to me), convenience can be an enormously important factor. If there’s a way to shave some time out of a daily routine, that usually directly translates into a bit more sleep or a bit more quality time with their family or a bit of simple leisure time.

That’s why I believe that one of the best frugality tactics is to heavily incorporate convenience into your frugal methods. Two examples:

One thing Sarah and I often do is make meals in advance. We’ll either freeze them so that they can easily be pulled out and tossed in the oven, or we’ll package them up in such a way that they can just be tossed into a pot (preferably a crock pot) and cooked with minimal effort. We’ll often assemble a bunch of meals for the next week or two on a weekend afternoon. We’ll do similar things with convenience foods like frozen burritos, too.

I often like to use premeasured soap for washing dishes and laundry. It’s actually really convenient to do this. All you need is a squirt bottle that emits a significant volume per squirt. Then, just figure out how many squirts you need for a load using the actual measurements recommended on the package. So, for example, if it takes two squirts to fill up your laundry detergent cup, then you can just use two quick squirts into the washing machine. This saves money in a very subtle but very real way: we tend to drastically overuse laundry detergent, so a squirter helps out with that problem and causes less detergent to be used per load.

I could go on with many, many examples of this: programmable thermostats, online banking, seasoning packets, and so on.

The key thing to remember is that in the midst of a busy day, convenience will usually trump frugality. If you know that in advance and can make it so that the convenient choice on that busy day is also the frugal choice, you’re going to see some significant savings over time.