I’ve had the blog Money Saving Mom bookmarked for years. In fact, it’s been a permanent mainstay on the list of 25 blogs I recommend that appears on every page of The Simple Dollar. The blog has a nice mix of couponing content paired with other articles on frugal living.

Unsurprisingly, I was glad when I heard that Crystal Paine (the woman behind Money Saving Mom) had written a personal finance book. Her tone is incredibly friendly and down-to-earth, an approach that appeals to many people and is really welcome among the personal finance books you’d find at the library and at the bookstore.

I knew the book was off to the right start as soon as I flipped past the table of contents. Immediately following that is a feature that should appear in most advice-oriented books: a single page summary of the advice within. Here, it’s a series of seven short paragraphs outlining “Money Saving Mom’s 7 Rules for Financial Success”:

1. Set big goals and break them down into bite-sized pieces
2. Streamline your life and cut the clutter
3. Set up a realistic, workable budget
4. Take the cash-only challenge
5. Use coupons
6. Never pay retail
7. Choose contentment

Each one of those is followed by a paragraph discussing that particular tactic, making it a great way to start the book.

If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Any Train Will Get You There
There are a lot of paths we can follow from where we’re at right now. We can spend like crazy. We can put all of our money into Zynga stock. We can invest very conservatively. We can pay off debt, or we can accumulate it. We can work hard to build a career, or we can count the minutes until “Schlitz o’clock” every day. The real question is where we want to be down the road. A few paths lead to that destination. Most do not. Knowing your destination will help you pick the right path.

Are the Chaos and Clutter in Your Life Keeping You from Financial Success?
It’s hard to be financially successful if you live a cluttered existence. Chaos and clutter make it hard to find the things you need when you need them. This results in things like late bills, missed opportunities, buying things out of convenience, and other financial mistakes. Over time, this adds up to a significant amount of money – and it also adds up to a pattern of living that makes it difficult to succeed.

Give Yourself an Instant Raise Without Increasing Your Take-Home Pay
How do you pull that off? Basically, Crystal Paine’s idea here is to build a basic budget, following more or less the same template that I described in this article about basic budget building. A budget doesn’t magically make you financially responsible, but going through the process of building a real budget often teaches you exactly how you can cut your spending without really altering your life.

Go Totally Plastic-Free – Temporarily
Paine advocates simply dropping all credit card use for a while – and even dropping debit cards for that time frame. Why? Doing that will force you to use cash, and making yourself use cash is a powerful way for you to get deeply in touch with exactly how your cash flows in and out of your life. When you actually see the dollars leaving instead of just swiping a card, each purchase becomes very tangible and very important. Do that enough and you’ve rebuilt (at least in part) your relationship with money.

Coupons Are Not Just For Junk Food
Paine splits the topic of couponing into two chapters (of the nine in the book), which seems to fit since her blog has a strong couponing focus. This chapter really focuses on the basics of couponing, addressing items such as where to find them (the internet, store flyers, etc.), how to organize them (binders, envelopes, etc.), and how to be selective about the coupons you find and use. Simply put, there are coupons for almost anything if you’re willing to look for them and organize what you find.

Beyond the Basics: Advanced Couponing Techniques
From there, Paine goes on to look at how to find a good store to use the coupons you’ve found at (does the store have double couponing? Does it have a customer rewards program?) and how to stack coupons to maximize your savings by finding store coupons, manufacturer coupons, and store sales all on the same item at once. I tend to find that the effort in seeking out such options isn’t worth it, but it’s well worth just keeping your eyes open for these types of bargains.

Twenty-Five Ways to Lower Your Grocery Bill Without Clipping Coupons
Don’t be married to your brands. Don’t be married to your store. Buy things in bulk. Make simple meals at home. Freeze meals that you make. Make your own household cleaners. The ideas in this chapter are great basic frugality tips that anyone can use to save money at home. They just simply work.

Going Out on the Town Without Going Broke
What you’re really looking at here is “bang for the buck.” For example, if you want to go out to eat with your family, try to look for restaurants that offer a “kids eat free” night. If you’re going out with just your partner or spouse, use programs like Restaurant.com to find steep discounts on a meal eaten out. Look for free or heavily discounted cultural events in your area, like family days or free days at local museums or free concerts in the park. There are a lot of things to do out and about that are quite fun but aren’t expensive if you’re willing to look for them.

Embrace Today
A lot of these tactics are filed away by people for “someday.” If you do that, then you’re just committing yourself to more and more of your life devoted to struggling with debt, tied to your job, and feeling that you’re never going to get ahead in life. Today is the day to start living life with more sensibility when it comes to your money.

Is The Money Saving Mom’s Budget Worth Reading?
The Money Saving Mom’s Budget is an absolutely spot-on introductory book to cutting your spending. It focuses much more on the “spend less” part of the equation than the “earn more” part, but that’s often the part of the equation that people find the most success with when they hit that realization that something needs to change in their life.

The title alone somewhat restricts the readership – I probably wouldn’t give a single guy a book called “The Money Saving Mom’s Budget,” after all. However, this would be the first book I’d give to a mother who is just starting to think about making financial changes – a realization that often comes to parents after having a child.

Great book, Crystal.

Check out additional reviews and notes of The Money Saving Mom’s Budget on Amazon.com.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Erin writes in: I have a question for your “Saving Pennies or Dollars?” series. It’s about dried beans, like pinto, great northern. Would it be worth the time to buy dried beans and can them myself, or am I better off just buying the cans at the store when they are on sale. I have a pressure canner and a simple recipe for canning my own beans.

First of all, it’s pretty easy to find canned beans at the store for $1.50 per can or even a bit less than that. Canned beans are not a particularly expensive item.

Having said that, you can easily find dried beans for $1.40 per pound or less.

So, how much does that equate to? Beans approximately double in weight during the cooking process due to the absorbed water. A 15 ounce can of cooked beans, in other words, equates to about 7.5 ounces of dried beans. Thus, the cost of an equivalent amount of dry beans is about $0.65. You’ll save about $0.85 per can cooking them yourself, in other words.

However, that accounts for just the cost of the beans. If you wish to can them, there is significant cost to the canning process – a pressure cooker (for non-acidic items), a large pot (for water-bathing acidic items), jars, lids, and rings are all required to make this work, and these items all eat into the $0.85 per can you’re saving by canning yourself.

Lids can vary greatly in cost. If you want reusable plastic lids, you’ll be spending about a dollar each to get started, but you can reuse them a few dozen times before dings begin to make them not work, bringing the cost down to $0.03 per use. Other lid options have a lower initial cost, but are one-time use.

Jars and rings often come together for approximately $1 apiece in twelve packs. Again, you’re going to reuse these things many times, so the cost quickly goes down into the range of $0.05 (given my own history of breaking jars, 20 uses seems like a reasonable number).

A pressure cooker is going to be your big cash outlay. You can get a decent pressure cooker for about $40, which should last you a long time. Let’s say you use it 100 times with 6 jars each, though. That’s still a cost of about $0.07 per jar for the canner.

These costs quickly knock down the savings you get from canning. In fact, it’s going to take several batches of canning for you to reach a point where you’re breaking even on the supplies compared to buying cans of the food in the store.

If you notice, the cost per jar for each of the items above assumes a lot of uses, so if you’re only canning a few times a year, it’s probably not cost effective to do it.

From my own experience, I find that the time invested per jar canned across a lot of different things is about eight minutes. In other words, if I’m canning six jars of something, the time to actually can the items versus just making the items and putting them in the refrigerator is about forty five minutes or so.

Now, if I’m saving $0.65 per jar (the $0.85 in savings from using my own beans minus the $0.20 in costs for canning) and it’s taking me eight minutes per jar, I’m saving about $4.88 per hour of canning. Frankly, it’s not worth it at that price for me just as a savings method. There is savings there, but not enough to make up for the lost time.

However, the food quality is a factor, too. I’d far rather eat a food item I canned myself than a canned food item from the store. The quality of garden-fresh salsa I made myself and canned versus a jar of salsa from the store is huge, for example. The same is true for almost anything else – including beans.

So, are you doing this to save big money? No. You’re saving a little, but not a lot. You’re doing this because you’re turning out high-quality food for your pantry and saving a little bit of money, too. For me, that adds up to a worthwhile deal.

So, what can we do about it? Here are some options to consider. I have used all of these at various points.

Plain brown paper This is an old standby, of course. It creates a classic look for packages (“little brown packages tied up with string…”). You can easily jazz it up a bit with a stamp and some ink, covering the paper with little red candy canes or other festive shapes.

How can I get this inexpensively? The easiest way is to just request paper bags at the grocery store. Most grocery stores will bag your groceries in brown paper bags upon request. Then, when you’re home, save the bags. When you’re ready to wrap, just cut off the bottom of the bag, cut a single slice through the side of the bag, then flip it over so that the bag labeling is on the inside of the package.

Newspaper When I was growing up, many of my relatives would give gifts wrapped in the comic pages from the Sunday newspaper. They’d just save them throughout the year and use them as their gift wrapping for all gifts. I actually thought it was incredibly cool at the time, especially since the relatives that did it usually gave interesting gifts. When I was in college, one friend of mine would wrap all of his gifts in old issues of The Onion that he’d get from his parents.

How can I get this inexpensively? There are lots of ways to get free or discounted newspapers. For instance, one local gas station will give away old newspapers if someone is willing to take them, so I would often get the Sunday paper for free there early on Monday morning (for the coupon flyers, if nothing else). You can also keep an eye on recycling bins or else pick up copies of the local free newspaper.

Themed magazines A few years back, I started saving old magazine covers for a project. I simply asked some friends if I could have their old unwanted magazines and saved the covers from them.

When it came time to wrap gifts, I took covers from magazines associated with the gift itself and used it for the wrapping paper. For books, I used things like The New Yorker or The Atlantic. For CDs, I used covers of Rolling Stone. For an article of clothing that I gave to a female, I used a fashion magazine (I think it was W). For a piece of sporting equipment, I used Sports Illustrated.

How can I get this inexpensively? Tell your friends that you’re working on a project and you’d love to have any old magazines they have laying around. You’ll be surprised how many magazines come out of the woodwork if you ask. Then, just save the covers from them throughout the year and try to associate them with some of the gifts you’re giving.

Children’s drawings If you happen to have an excess of children’s art, this can make a perfect wrapping paper for gifts for the child’s grandparents or doting aunts or uncles. I can certainly say that we have an excess of children’s art around our home.

How can I get this inexpensively? If you have a child in preschool or elementary school, chances are you’re going to wind up with more art than you know what to do with. Just save some of the more charming pieces (that you’re willing to part with) and use them to wrap gifts.

Plan ahead If none of these really appeal to you, the best way to inexpensively wrap gifts is to simply plan ahead – way ahead. Just after Christmas, wrapping paper is usually on deep discount at department stores, so that’s the best time to buy yourself an abundance of the stuff.

How can I get this inexpensively? Take a bit of time to buy some paper between Christmas and New Years and stow it away in a closet for next year. Problem solved.

Here’s exactly how we do it.

The Basic Tools
Obviously, the most basic thing you need to have is a soup pot or two. We often make soup in these 5 1/2 quart enameled cast iron pots, but any pot that ranges from five quarts or so on up will be sufficient for making soup. I highly recommend having a lid.

You’ll also need to have a ladel, as it makes serving the soup into bowls much easier. You’ll also, of course, need bowls and spoons for eating and a spoon for stirring the soup.

That’s really all you need in your kitchen (aside from a stovetop) to make soup pretty much any time you want.

The Basic Ingredients We Always Have on Hand
We keep a steady supply of a few key ingredients on hand at all times for soup making.

Our three most frequent soup ingredients are barley, egg noodles, and dried beans. These form the backbone of many of the soups we make, plus they store quite well in the pantry in their dry form. When we find a sale on these, we stock up every time.

We also keep a few basic seasonings on hand, such as salt and pepper. In addition, we also usually keep some homemade vegetable stock around for the liquid of the soup. We also keep some vegetable boullion around in case we’re out of stock.

If you like beef soups, use beef stock or boullion instead. If you like chicken soups, use chicken stock or boullion instead. Keep whatever it is that you like around.

In addition, we keep a few basic spices around: thyme, sage, and bay leaves, for starters. These work well in most soups.

We also keep oyster crackers around as a condiment for the soup.

This is actually all you need to make a flavorful passable soup at the drop of a hat. Just cook the main ingredient, add some herbs and pepper, and simmer for a while until it smells too good to resist.

Varying Things Up
Of course, you’re going to want to vary this for variety’s sake. How do you do that?

The way we do it is that we simply watch for vegetables that are on sale at our local grocery stores. If potatoes are on sale this week, we use potatoes in a batch of soup. The same goes for almost any vegetable, from turnips to kale to spinach to corn. Whatever’s fresh and inexpensive, we try it and use it.

You can also include meat in your bargain hunting, too. If you find chicken or beef or pork on sale, pick it up and use it as an ingredient. If it sounds good to you, it probably is good.

How do you cook it? The first step is to simply boil your liquid ingredients – water and/or stock. You’ll start with this, then likely add more liquid during the cooking process if the soup gets too thick. Don’t worry about evaporated water – the flavor will just get richer over time.

The easiest way is just to search for your ingredient on Google with the addition “time to boil.” So, if you want to know how long to make soup with, say, turnips in it, you’d search for “time to boil turnips.” You’ll find that turnips take 25-30 minutes to boil.

Then, just make a list of all of your ingredients and how long they take to boil. Add the ingredients in order so that they all finish cooking at the same time. So, for example, if you have beans that take two hours, turnips that take 30 minutes, and potatoes that take 20 minutes, you’d start the beans, let them cook for an hour and a half, add the turnips, and then ten minutes later, add the potatoes.

The exception to this is the meat. If you’re adding meat (I actually also do this with onions and a few other things, too), I suggest cooking it separately until it’s done, then adding it with about ten or fifteen minutes left to go for the soup. Take some of the soup broth you have going, pour it in the pan that you cooked the meat in while the pan is still hot, then pour it back into the soup pot to add some delicious flavor.

It’s incredibly easy, incredibly tasty, and incredibly inexpensive – my kind of meal!

Shaun writes in: This time of year (late fall, early winter), the local hardware stores offer several varieties of space heaters. Is it possible to realize meaningful savings by using one or more space heaters to locally heat parts of your house while keeping the thermostat at a very low setting?

This is absolutely a great way to save money in the winter for the reasons you describe. If you have a space heater and run it in only a room or two, then keep the thermostat in your home quite low, you’ll save a ton on your energy bill.

For example, in my own home, we use this 1,500 watt space heater.

Most of the time during the winter, particularly on weekends, we let the whole house stay cool and keep only the family room warm. When we switch to this mode, we turn the thermostat down to about 45 degrees, which is cool enough that the furnace virtually never turns on.

Then, we all settle into the family room. When we notice it getting cold, I’ll flip on that space heater full blast for a while, using 1,500 watts for about ten minutes until the room is warm. Then I’ll turn it on really low, where it uses about 200 watts, and this – plus our body heat – keeps the room we’re in pretty warm.

So, let’s compare that for a 24 hour day against the use of our furnace.

With normal furnace usage, we’ll leave the house set at about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. We wear long sleeves and pants during the winter, so this feels fine. We have an approximately 25 kW furnace (based on the information I could find on the labeling, which is appropriate for a house of our size in a cold climate), which flips on for about ten minutes per hour, on average (I’ve measured it on cold winter days).

Thus, over the course of a full day, our furnace will run for four hours. With a 25 kW furnace, that’s 100 kWh of usage, or about $12 in energy use.

With a space heater, over that same period, I would run it at 1,500 watts for about 10 minutes, then at 300 watts permanently afterwards. That totals approximately 75 kWh of usage, or about $9 in energy use.

In other words, if we are going to spend most of the day in the family room, we’ll save dollars by turning the furnace very low and just heating the family room with a space heater. (At the end of the day, we’ll often go upstairs and position the space heater between the bedrooms at a fairly low rate and it keeps us quite warm during the night while the rest of the house is cool.)

For us, that savings is about $3 a day, according to my math.

However, the variables for your situation are large. How big is your house? How cold is your climate (generally, furnaces in colder winter climates tend to have higher wattages)?

Perhaps most importantly, how much of a difference is there between the area you want to heat via space heater and the area you want to heat via furnace? If you’re living in a small apartment, for example, or have a house that’s less than 800 square feet or so, you’re probably not saving much at all with a space heater.

The savings kick in if you have a large house and are only heating one room with a space heater and if you live in a climate with a large difference between indoor and outdoor temperature.

Because we took some time to plan the trip in advance and involved everyone going on the trip in the planning, we ended up finding quite a few free and frugal things to do on the trip. We were also able to save money on the trip by only taking one vehicle.

However, there were other elements of the trip that weren’t quite as frugal. Our housing wound up being quite costly, for instance, as did our food bill.

This leads us to this winter. Sarah and I often plan the details of the following summer’s family vacation during the preceding winter so that we have plenty of time to find bargains for the upcoming travels.

We’re essentially planning two vacations for 2012, and both of them are going to be quite frugal. What do they have in common? They’re both group vacations.

Here are some of the things we’re doing to maximize fun and minimize cost on these trips by leveraging the fact that we’re traveling as a group.

We’re going with people with a similar mindset. None of the people we’re choosing to travel with next year are heavy spenders. All of them are frugally-minded people. They’re also people that we feel good about spending a significant amount of time with over a week. We want to have a reasonably-priced vacation and they’re on board with the same idea.

We’re splitting costs, looking for deals, and budgeting in advance. For both of these vacations, we’re essentially budgeting costs as a group, looking for deals as a group, and splitting costs as a group. These moves enable us to look at our situation through a lot of different eyes and the net result is reduced costs.

We’re going to visit places that are within a reasonable driving range. One vacation is within our own state. Another is only two states away. On trips this short, it makes a lot of sense to drive, not just based on money, but actually based on time. Not only that, driving means we can bring more of our own supplies, which makes these other options easier.

We’re going to camp for at least some of the vacation. This drastically reduces our housing costs. For us, it also adds to the flavor of the vacation due to the exposure to the outdoors. We’re also considering renting a cabin for our larger group vacation.

Because we’re camping, we’re also going to make most of our own food instead of eating out. Rather than going out to a restaurant, we’ll prepare a meal in our Dutch oven. We can still have something delicious and memorable without spending a ton of money.

The vacations are based on experiences rather than being a tourist. Some of the big things we intend to do on these trips involve going on hikes and fishing, not going to pricy “tourist-y” places. Because of that, our overall budget for vacation is much lower.

In the end, it’s all about people and experiences. Keep that in mind and you’ll find yourself having a great vacation without a great dent in your pocketbook.

Chelsea writes in: I’ve always wondered if it’s cheaper to print photos from home, rather than having them developed at a drugstore. Nowadays, most printers have photo capabilities and the quality is pretty stellar for the average consumer, but the convenience of uploading files and just picking them up when they’re done is tempting.

As always with questions like this, there are a lot of variables to consider. I decided to calculate our home cost of 4″ by 6″ prints just to see how expensive they really were.

The printer itself Our current printer is a Canon Pixma MP480, which is currently discontinued. We were able to pick one up new for $69.99 when it was being discontinued. We have used the printer to print well over 1,000 documents at this point without any difficulties and with an anticipation that we’ll be using it for a long time to come, so the cost per page for the printer is quite low. I think it would be reasonable to estimate that the cost of the printer itself per document printed is $0.02.

This is perhaps the hardest factor to truly quantify. It has a lot to do with the reliability of your printer as well as the price you paid for that printer. A low-end printer with good reviews from a reputable brand, preferably bought during a sale, will get you the best price per document printed.

The ink We can get a new color cartridge for our printer for $19.96. We use Canon 211XL color cartridges. I kept track of our last cartridge use to find out how long they lasted. We were able to print 344 documents that were either full color or largely color before the ink began to fade out with that cartridge. This adds up to a cost of $0.06 per picture printed.

My experience has been that, if you have the option to buy the cartridge with more ink, that’s the one you should choose. They generally give you more printing for the penny.

What about refilling your cartridges? I’ve mostly had good experiences with this, but not always. I have had a few experiences where cartridges have completely clogged and another experience where the ink filling process broke the cartridge in a subtle way, resulting in ink all over the insides of my printer. This can save you money, but you’re also looking at a bit of risk.

The paper I can get 200 sheets of blank 4″ by 6″ photo paper for $20.68. That gives us a cost of $0.10 per picture printed.

I’ve found that if you go really low-end when it comes to photo paper, you end up with very dull-looking snapshots. You don’t have to buy the premium paper, but the cheapest paper usually doesn’t hold ink and doesn’t look good. Research your paper brands before you buy. We usually use Kodak glossy paper.

Adding these all up, I can print a 4″ by 6″ at home for $0.18 per print.

The prices for prints from digital sources at various stores varies quite a lot. The least expensive regular price I could easily find for 4″ by 6″ prints was $0.20 a print from Target. Other stores charged substantially more – WalMart, for example, charged $0.28 per 4″ by 6″ print. There are some online services, like CVS Photo, that offer rates as low as $0.19 per print, but you have to wait to get the prints. There’s also the cost of actually going to these places, which is at least somewhat alleviated if you’re making the stop for multiple purchases.

I actually find it far more convenient to print at home. I usually use Picasa to manage all of the documents.

Is it a big savings to print at home? No. It’s clearly in the “pennies, not dollars” camp. However, I find it to be more convenient and pennies do add up over time.

I plan on continuing the series on an irregular basis, but doing the series each week has taught me some worthwhile lessons about food, frugality, and time management.

Experimentation has rewards
One of the big reasons for us to start doing this series was that we both enjoy experimenting with our cooking. We love trying new meals and, believe it or not, our food adventurousness has rubbed off on our children as well. I’m amazed when we have friends with children over (or visit them) and their children refuse to eat most of the items on the table. Our children try them with relish.

The biggest reason why I love experimenting is that I am constantly discovering new ingredients. For example, I would have never even thought of getting fresh tarragon, chopping it up, and putting it into scrambled eggs. I tried it on a whim due to a suggestion of how to use tarragon – and I found that it made the eggs wonderful. Now, whenever I can find some fresh tarragon, I make some amazing scrambled eggs.

Try a new vegetable or a new fruit or a new herb or spice or a new type of cheese. You might find something that you really enjoy that you never expected. Even better, you now have something new to look for during food sales as well as a broader repertoire of ingredients you feel good using in your kitchen.

At the same time, there’s always another meal
Of course, the immediate drawback that many people point to with such experimentation is that you might wind up with a meal that you don’t like at all.

My philosophy on that is this: I usually try new ingredients when I can get a good discount on them. That way, if it turns out that I don’t like it, I’m not out very much money. Most of the time, though, I find that I do like this new ingredient. Even during the worst case scenario, where I find the meal inedible, I can always find something else to eat if I’m hungry.

The upside to discovering something new that I like is far greater than the downside of a dollar or two lost and the potential prospect of remaking a single meal.

A regular repertoire of meals is invaluable
We’re a two income family with three children, two of which are in multiple activities. The simple reality of things is that we don’t have the time in the evening that we would often like to have. Quite often, one of the parents is on autopilot when it comes to dinner preparation. We simply want to be able to prepare something easily, something that we know how to do, and something that will please everyone while being reasonably healthy.

When we try new meals, we’re often asking ourselves whether this meal should become part of our regular meal repertoire. However, most nights, particularly during the school year, we just pull a meal from that repertoire and assemble it for dinner.

Adventuresome meals are fun, but they often don’t work in the context of a typical day at our house. The vast majority of the time, we rely on things we know how to make or variations on those themes.

Preparing meals in advance is invaluable, too
Along with that tactic is the incredibly useful tactic of preparing meals in advance. We’ll often prepare a full meal, store it in a sealed container in the freezer, and pull it out the night before or in the morning of a day when we know that dinner plans are going to be tight. Sometimes, we actually just pull out a kit we’ve assembled from the freezer and just add it to the crock pot. Other times, we put out a frozen casserole dish with a note saying “put this in the oven at 350 degrees at 4:30.”

These meals prepared in advance also make being adventurous a bit more difficult, as you don’t want to prepare a quadruple batch of something before you’ve tried it out with the family. Thus, our premade meals are invariably old standbys, like tuna casserole or vegetarian lasagna.

Having these meals on hand makes it possible to get one kid to soccer, another kid to dance, and still have a good meal on the table when everyone converges at home.

Let what you have on hand lead you
People often get stressed out about following recipes and finding a bunch of obscure ingredients. You really don’t have to do that. Just use what you have on hand and you’ll almost always come up with something good.

What really works well is when you have a “framework” recipe, like the flexible casserole recipe or ratatouille. These are recipes where you can basically plug in whatever ingredients you happen to have and make something that works. At least a couple of the “Dinner with My Family” posts resulted from this type of experimentation.

Instead of panicking about what to have, just throw open your cupboard door and try to assemble something. Keep an open mind and you’ll be surprised at what you can come up with.

Let what’s on sale in the grocery flyer lead you, too
We love using fresh ingredients in our meals, but they can often be expensive at the store. So, often, we just buy whatever produce is on sale and use that as the backbone for our meals for the week.

If cabbage is on sale, we’ll make some sort of cabbage rolls or cabbage-based soup. If eggplant is on sale, we’ll make eggplant lasagna. If spinach is on sale, we’ll make a spinach alfredo and have spinach salads with other meals. If bananas are on sale, we’ll eat one bunch and use another to make a loaf or two of banana bread.

Again, many of our “Dinner with My Family” recipes have resulted from just this type of purchase. We buy some vegetables that are on sale and make a dish based on them. It’s cheap, tasty, and fun.

One, which I called “success in the margins,” refers to things like frugality, cutting costs, saving diligently, and so forth. The other, which I called “success in the mainstream,” referred to things like entrepreneurship and career building.

Success in the margins, I pointed out, is a sure way to success, but there is something of a cap to that success. You’re limited in how much you can save by your income and your fundamental living expenses. On the other hand, success in the mainstream doesn’t have a cap, but it is far from a guarantee. Entrepreneurship and career pursuit are risky enterprises that often don’t turn out.

Anyway, a reader recently took me to task for referring to frugality and saving as “success in the margins.” In his words, “There is nothing marginal whatsoever about the money you can save by living sensibly and putting some money into investments. It’s practical, anyone can do it, and the positive results can be repeated over and over again. That’s far from marginal.”

I agree completely with his statement. The reason I named it such was not because it is a marginal method, but because it is inherently capped by your income and lifestyle. Frugality, by its very nature, is about shaving away a little bit from the edges and saving what you’ve trimmed. That money comes about from the margins of your life.

For example, one of the first moves I made when I started my financial recovery is to reboot my work commute. Before the change, I would drive by a coffee shop on my way to work and many days I would be tempted to stop in there, have a cup of coffee, and often follow it with a bagel. On my way home, I would drive by an electronics store and a bookstore, and I would visit both of them a few times a week. Naturally, each week, I found myself spending a lot of unnecessary money.

When I changed my commute, I no longer went by the coffee shop, the electronics store, or the bookstore. I decided that it was just fine if I happened to go to them, but with my new route, I had to make the willful choice to go there. The big sign wasn’t hanging out there along my route tempting me.

So, every once in a while, I’d decide to splurge and go to one of the places, but most of the time, I barely even thought about them on my way home from work.

Those coffee shop and bookstore visits were in the margins of my life. They were things that I did, but they weren’t deeply important to me or to who I was. They just filled up some of my time and attention. I barely noticed when I cut them away.

That, to me, is “success in the margins.”

Frugality does not work if it’s removing something you value more than the money you’re saving. If you’re making yourself miserable to save a few dollars, it’s not worth it.

Quite often, when people think about frugality, they don’t think about the margins. Instead, they think about the things they value deeply. They don’t want to lose that valuable thing, so they just toss aside the idea of cutting back.

Frugality works well in the margins. It works when you’re trying a different kind of dishwashing soap. It works when you cut out a routine shopping trip that’s become boring. It works when you give up on and get rid of the pieces of a hobby that you’re no longer passionate about. It works when you make a bunch of meals ahead of time, buying the ingredients in bulk, so you can store the made-ahead meals in the freezer and always have something convenient to make for supper.

So often, these kinds of changes are really easy to make. You pretty much forget about the change once you’ve started doing it, and the only impact it has is the savings that appear in your checking account.

Success in the margins does not mean marginal success. It means finding success in the areas of your life that don’t deeply matter to you.

This reader went on to mention several activities that they enjoy, some of which overlap with the ones I mention below.

While I see where this reader is coming from, I don’t fully agree. I think there are a lot of activities that people engage in besides shopping that are regular money drains, such as playing golf, going out to eat, going to coffee shops, going to the movies, and so on.

Whenever an experience requires you to spend money, requires you to spend additional money beyond what you would normally spend, or heavily involves spending money, you should rethink whether or not you want to engage in that activity. Instead, it’s really worth your time to find things you enjoy doing that don’t involve spending money.

It would be easy for me to just start listing outdoor activities. I love spending time outdoors. I love taking walks in parks, playing soccer with my children, coaching youth sports, going swimming at one of the many lakes here in Iowa, going camping… the list goes on and on.

However, if you live in a winter climate like I do, you’re finding yourself stuck with indoor activities right now, so I’m going to name ten things I enjoy doing for little or no cost in the winter. These are all things that I fill my time with indoors, and each of them has little or no cost.

I don’t expect you’ll enjoy all of these. Instead, I suggest reading all of these and trying one or two of them (or more, if you like). Everyone is different and everyone has different passions.

Play a board or card game
First of all, if you associate board games and card games with endless, boring games of Monopoly from your youth, you’re missing out. Monopoly was first published in an early version in 1910. Comparing Monopoly to a modern board game is like comparing a Model T to a Lexus.

Try playing a more modern board game, like Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride. Look for a local hobby shop in your area and ask for a demonstration of the game if you don’t have access to a copy, just to see if you enjoy it. Board games can make for a great holiday gift.

If nothing else, a standard $1 deck of playing cards can provide lots and lots of gaming. You can play poker, euchre, pitch, bridge, rummy… the list goes on and on. There are also many, many solitaire games to play.

Read (or re-read) a book
My shelves have quite a few great unread books sitting on them, right next to a big pile of some of the greatest books I’ve ever read. There are few better ways to burn a few hours than to read a great book.

If you don’t have any books available to you, visit your local library. There are thousands upon thousands of books available there for free borrowing.

I could list hundreds of books that I’ve enjoyed over the years. The key, though, is to find something you enjoy, whether it’s something challenging or a complete page-turner.

Thoroughly clean a room in your house
Whenever I thoroughly clean a room in my home, I feel really good. Not just because of the exercise I got from cleaning the room with a good tempo, but from the enjoyment of having an uncluttered and very clean area in my home.

By cleaning, I don’t just mean dusting and vacuuming. I also mean getting rid of items that you don’t want or don’t use any more. A cleaned room generally has far less stuff in it compared to when you started.

This is just a great way to spend an afternoon. It makes your living quarters that much better and it can give you a good workout, too.

Make a great meal using what’s in your pantry
It’s easy to go out to eat… but that’s going to eat up money. It’s also easy to just go to the store and pick up a premade meal… but, again, that’s going to eat up money. Not only that, both of these options don’t help you learn how to prepare food or use up the multitude of things you have in your cupboard.

Making a meal from the items you have on hand can be a bit of a challenge, but it can be very rewarding, too. It gets some of the unused items out of your pantry and results in a delicious meal for you and your family.

Quite often, this ends up being close to a “free” meal because the items you use are things that would have otherwise never been used.

Make some homemade gifts
Homemade gifts are a great way to cut back on your budget while also producing something that the recipient will actually want and value. Instead of throwing your money at a person, you’re throwing some of your time, which often means a lot more.

There are a lot of great homemade gifts you can make, from jars filled with soup mix to original examples of any art that you’re skilled at.

The key is to invest the time to make it well, and to make something that the recipient will value. Do both of those and you’ll create something memorable out of your spare time.

Learn about a topic you’ve always been curious about
Most of us have some degree of curiosity and find ourselves wondering about some topic or another. There are few better ways to spend an idle hour or two than learning more about that topic.

The easiest way to do this is to start at Wikipedia, type in your topic, and start reading. Remember that this is a starting point – if you begin to dig deep into a topic, it’s often a good idea to move on to books on the topic.

I actually do this quite often. Recently, I’ve been learning about specific philosophers, using the entry on Wikipedia as a starting point and moving on to their writings.

Host a potluck dinner
A potluck dinner simply means that you invite friends over and have them each bring a dish. Together, you have a varied and delicious meal.

This is actually a great way to spend an evening socially without spending much money at all. Generally, you’re only in charge of one or two items which you can prepare or buy in bulk. In exchange for that, you get a great meal and an evening with friends.

We host potluck dinners about once a month. They’re always quite fun, and they often end up with a bunch of us sitting around a table playing a game, laughing and joking with each other.

Do volunteer work for a political campaign
If there’s a candidate or cause you believe in, donate your time from home to work for this campaign. There are always tasks that political campaigns would love to have volunteers for.

In the past, volunteers have written letters on behalf of candidates or issues, made phone calls, stuffed envelopes, maintained social media tools, and countless other little tasks that campaigns need fulfilled.

Most of these tasks can be done from home. I know one person who used to stuff envelopes for her preferred candidates. They would drop off reams of papers and envelopes and she’d prepare the documents and mail them for the campaign. She loved doing it.

Make a yearly calendar
This is a project that I do each year. We still rely on a wall calendar, so one afternoon, I’ll sit down and transfer all of the birthdays and other events from the previous year’s calendar to the new one. I’ll also incorporate things from my own personal Google calendar.

It can be quite a task when you fill in birthdays, anniversaries, and other such events. I like to write in reminders of those events a week in advance so that I remember to pick up a card or a gift if needed. I also like to note other important things, like key dates on our children’s academic calendars and the like.

This can take several hours, but a calendar with all of your important dates on it can be a godsend. You’ll find yourself relying on it so much that the time you invested up front will repay itself in a smoother life and better relationships throughout the year.

Get rid of your unwanted stuff
Virtually all of us have unwanted stuff in our home – old stuff filling up the closet, items that we might use “someday” but really won’t, items from abandoned hobbies that might have value.

If you haven’t used an item or really thought about it in a year, it’s probably safe to get rid of it. Once you make that decision, you have several options. You can sell it, you can donate it to Goodwill, or you can simply toss it in the trash.

Even with the options that don’t involve receiving money for the item, you’re still improving your life because you’re decreasing clutter. If you’re making money from it, too, all the better.

There are countless things to do with your time without spending money. The key is to just find things that you enjoy and do them.

Each year, my mother takes charge of preparing a huge family Thanksgiving meal. Each year, there’s a small mountain of leftovers to deal with.

I know that many other families find themselves in the same boat. What do we do with all of these leftovers? This year, I spent some time perusing a pile of old Thanksgiving food magazines, cookbooks, internet sites, and other places looking for good things to do with leftovers from Thanksgiving. Here are some of the ideas I found.

Leftover turkey can easily be cut into small pieces and used as part of a pasta dish three days later or so. Preparing a turkey marinara or a turkey alfredo is easy – just prepare the sauce, add some cubed turkey, and put the sauce over your preferred pasta. The sauce alters the flavor of the turkey so much that it becomes a new meal.

Another approach is to use leftover dark meat and bones to prepare some turkey stock. Take everything that’s left from the turkey and put it all in a crock pot along with any extra leftover vegetables (such as green beans), some pepper, and a small dash of salt. Let it cook on low all day, then filter out all of the leftovers, leaving behind some delicious turkey stock. Freeze the stock, then use it as the base for soups and other things throughout the winter.

My favorite use, though, is to just cube it and save it in small bags. This way, you can quickly pull a bag of the turkey out of the freezer and use it as a salad topping. I did this for multiple Thanksgivings and found that I was always happy to toss some cubed turkey on top of my salads at home.

Leftover mashed potatoes can be used in a lot of ways. My personal favorite is to save them for a few days, then form them into discs and fry them with a bit of vegetable oil, making potato pancakes. If your potatoes are particularly soft, you may want to add just a bit of corn starch to thicken and harden the pancakes so that they don’t fall apart in the pan.

Another use for leftover mashed potatoes is in shepherd’s pie, which can be made a day or two after Thanksgiving and easily frozen for later use. Just fill a 9″ by 13″ pan about half full with leftover vegetables, add some cooked meat that you prefer, pour some appropriate broth on top (about a cup), and then spread the mashed potatoes on top. You can even sprinkle a little cheese on top if you’d like.

One final trick – and this is a great thing to do if you have mashed potatoes that you’re going to freeze – is to incorporate them into a simple biscuit recipe. Just add them in to give your biscuits a special texture and flavor. Biscuits are easy. All you need is 3 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of baking powder, a teaspoon of salt, a quarter cup of sugar, half a stick of cold butter, a beaten egg, and somewhere between half a cup and a full cup of buttermilk. Combine all of the ingredients until the dough you make is just barely sticky (start with half a cup of buttermilk and add more if it’s just too dry). If you’re using potatoes, just mix in the potatoes with the dough for a bigger batch.

Leftover dressing (or stuffing) can be a bit of a challenge. One technique that seemed interesting was to press as much of it as you can into a square container, squeezing it in there very tightly. Leave it there for a while, then remove the stuffing. You can then slice the stuffing, using it for sandwiches (yes, that would be pretty carb-heavy, but you could also add plenty of other condiments and toppings).

One important thing to note, though, is that stuffing/dressing freezes really well. Usually, we freeze our leftover dressing and then use it in a month or so with another meal when we’re in a pinch. It can make a great side to an otherwise dull meal.

Leftover cranberry sauce simply begs to be used in muffins or scones, particularly if you have the whole-berry kind and not the gelatinized sauce (though that can be used, too). Simply find your favorite muffin or scone recipe and use the cranberries as an ingredient in them. Delicious!

My favorite use, though, is to turn it into barbecue sauce. That’s right – barbecue sauce. Just take a cup and a half of the sauce and put it in the blender with 3/4 cup ketchup; 1/4 cup honey; a tablespoon of cider vinegar; a teaspoon each of Worcestershire sauce, onion powder, and garlic powder; and a pinch of cayenne pepper and ground black pepper. Mix this into a puree, then save it for next summer for a tremendous barbecue sauce.

Leftover turkey gravy can be used much like a stock if you freeze it. You simply water it down and use it as the base for a soup at a later time. It works surprisingly well, as the boiling and the stirring causes the gravy to thin out into a flavorful soup starter.

You can also save the gravy to use as part of a pot pie, or use it as the liquid ingredient in the shepherd’s pie above (though that may be too much Thanksgiving taste right after the meal, so if you do this, I’d freeze the shepherd’s pie to use at a later date).

Hopefully, these tactics will keep you from throwing out perfectly good holiday leftovers this year!

Connie writes in: I trade books by mail. It costs me about $2 to send out a book via media mail and I have to also spend the materials to wrap it. If I just swap page turners at my local used book store, I can get them at $2.50 a pop if I buy a bunch at once. Am I really saving anything trading by mail?

This sounds like you use PaperBackSwap, a service I love and have been using for years. Much like you, I’ve been curious at times whether or not it’s worth it and I’ve ran the numbers several times. Each time, I’m pretty sure I’ve decided it’s a good deal.

For starters, my estimate of the cost of my supplies is about ten cents. I use a sheet or two of printer paper, a single printed page with black and white ink on it, and some packing tape. Media mail varies by weight, but the typical range for me is $2.41 for a paperback in the mail. So, my total cost for shipping out a book is $2.51.

Now, let’s compare that to the used bookstore. At my local used bookstore, they will take most books in trade for anywhere from $0.25 to $1. They also sell used books at varying prices, anywhere from $1 (for Harlequin romances and the like) to $5 (mostly hardbacks). There’s also sales tax on your purchases, so that tacks on another 7%.

If I were just swapping for Harlequin romances, the local used bookstore would probably be cheaper. I could trade in one for $0.25, buy a new one for $1 (minus the $0.25 credit), and walk out of there having paid about $0.80 for a novel.

However, most of the books I want to read there are on the $3 or $4 shelves. I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, some science fiction and fantasy, and some general fiction, too. I might get $0.50 in trade for the books I bring in, but my net cost is either $2.50 or $3.50 for a book I want to read, plus the sales tax. That means either $2.68 or $3.75 for a new (to me) book after paying the sales tax.

If you add on top of that the fact that I can do PaperBackSwap at home whenever I want and there’s a much more extensive selection there, it starts to become a no-brainer.

In Connie’s case, she’s shipping out books for $2.51 via media mail, or she’s buying them for $2.68 at her local used bookstore. For her, the cost is pretty close, so it really comes down to other values. Would she rather support the local business? Or would she rather enjoy a larger selection online?

As for me, I’ll just keep using PaperBackSwap. It’s a service I’ve used for many years to recycle my read books because it’s convenient and the selection is pretty good.

There’s also another take-home point here. If you’re an avid reader, trading used books is really a bargain. Let’s say I spend eight hours reading a book that I swapped for $2.51. That means I was entertained for a cost of about $0.30 per hour.

While that’s not as cheap as the library, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s no danger of late fees or other such things if you don’t get your book finished or if your son drops a library book behind his bed.

Not only that, if you read something at least a little challenging, you’re growing your mind, too. You’re learning something new and improving your literacy. That’s what I call a real value.