Carrie (yes, that Carrie) writes in:

How should we balance frugality with social/environmental responsibility?

I could go to Amazon.com or Sam’s Club and buy all my dry goods there very inexpensively, or I could go make my purchases at a locally owned grocery, where I’ll pay more, but my purchase power makes a positive contribution to the local economy. I could buy a product that is cheap, but that has a more significant impact on the environment or personal health (things like laundry detergent or household cleaners). I could buy blue jeans made by someone who gets a living wage in a good working environment, or I could by cheap jeans made in a sweatshop in Eastern Asia with child labor.

Also, should one’s circumstances have an impact on this balance? Heavy debt vs. no debt, age, family demographics, etc.

Part of the question, I think, relies on the definition of frugality, something I talked about a while back. Wikipedia defines frugality as follows (with my own emphasis added):

Frugality (also known as thrift or thriftiness), often confused with cheapness or miserliness, is a traditional value, life style, or belief system, in which individuals practice both restraint in the acquiring of and resourceful use of economic goods and services in order to achieve lasting and more fulfilling goals. In a money-based economy, frugality emphasizes economical use of money in meeting long term personal, familial, and communal desires.

Quite often, frugality is considered mostly in the personal or familial sense of the word. What choices can we make that will maximize the economical use of my money, or the money for our family?

But our dollars go further than that. Our spending choices have a communal effect as well. Choosing to spend in the most economical way for our family might lead us to shop at Wal-Mart, but that might cause the local corner grocery to close and thus have a negative effect on our community. It might be more economical for our family to buy jeans made by someone in a sweatshop, but communally, you’re not only encouraging sweatshop labor, you’re also reducing opportunities for those working in more welcoming but less brutally efficient environments.

It all depends on your focus and personal perspectives. One family might decide that the cheapest prices are always the best and thus put their personal and familial aspects above the communal. Others might be socially-minded and thus look for opportunities to put the communal aspect first.

Here’s an example: fair trade coffee. It’s more expensive than regular coffee at the store. A person who focuses on personal and familial aspects of their frugality would probably ignore it and buy the cheapest coffee available. A person who focuses on communal frugality would have to make a different judgment call - perhaps that person feels that an extra dollar spent on the fair trade coffee is the best way to efficiently express their communal desires.

Frugality isn’t about what’s cheap. It’s about finding the best value for your dollar. The catch is that the word “value” has different meanings for different people in different situations.

The equation changes, though, in times of economic hardship. For almost everyone, if there are financial difficulties, familial and personal aspects become more valuable and communal aspects become less so. If a person is having difficulty putting food on the table, by all means they should choose to buy the least expensive clothing.

For me, personally, the best frugal tips are the ones that hit all three of these areas. For example, I’m a huge proponent of energy independence - cutting energy use where you can. This is a personal and familial savings in the form of a lower electric bill, but there’s also a communal savings - I’m responsible for less CO2 and mercury emission. That’s why I find value in experimenting with things like LED bulbs - they’re very expensive up front, but they don’t produce much waste in their manufacture, they last almost forever, and they use less than a watt to produce a ton of light. To me, there’s a value there, especially if the light output is decent at all.

Similarly, I dream of living in the country and installing my own wind turbine. We live in Iowa where there is almost constantly enough wind to keep a turbine going, and two turbines could fully power a home and usually result in an excess that could be sold back to the electric company. Is it frugal in the personal or familial sense? Possibly, but probably not. Is it frugal in the communal sense? Almost assuredly - my carbon footprint would almost vanish.

In the end, what does value mean to you? Do you put importance on the communal value of something, or does familial and personal value trump all? There is no right or wrong answer, just a different sense of what frugality means to you and a realization that someone else’s values might tell them that a different choice is the most frugal one.

About a year ago, I posted a general description of how to make your own laundry detergent that proved quite popular. That article basically described in a general sense how one could make laundry detergent at home very cheaply, but it left out a lot of key issues: does it work well? What does it look like as you are making it? What are the real-world costs and time investment? What equipment do you need?

This past weekend, I made a fresh batch of homemade laundry detergent and I took a ton of notes and pictures. I enjoyed the process - I got to make a giant bucket of slime in the kitchen and my wife approved. Let’s see what we can learn from the process that might save us some cash.

Making the Laundry Detergent
The only ingredients you actually need for homemade laundry detergent are as follows:

1 cup washing soda (I use Arm & Hammer)
1/2 cup borax (I use 20 Mule Team)
1 bar soap (I use whatever’s cheap, in this case Pure & Natural)
Approximately 3 gallons water

You’ll also need a container of some sort to store this in (I use a five gallon bucket with a lid), something to stir it (I use a large wooden spoon), another pot to boil soapy water in (I use the pot in the picture), and something to cut up the soap (I use the box grater in the picture).

First thing, put about four cups of water into the pan and put it on the stove on high until it’s at boiling, then lower the heat until it’s simmering.

While it’s heating up, take a bar of soap and cut it up into little bits. I found a lot of success using our box grater, which resulted in a ton of little soap curls.

When the water is boiling, start throwing in the soap. I recommend just doing a bit at a time, then stirring it until it’s dissolved. Here, I made the mistake of just tossing in all of the soap at once, which wasn’t particularly helpful:

Stir the soapy water with a spoon until all of the soap is dissolved. Eventually, the water will take on the color of the soap you added, albeit paler. I used Pure & Natural soap for this, which was a white soap that looked a lot like a bar of Ivory.

In the end, you’ll have some very warm soap soup:

Next, get out your large container and add three gallons of warm tap water to it. I’m using a bright orange five gallon bucket that I had lying around:

To this bucket add a cup of the washing soda and the soap solution you made and stir. The borax is optional - some people say that it’s too harsh, but I’ve always found that it did a good job getting clothes clean and fresh smelling, so I recommend adding a half cup of borax to the mix.

After stirring, you’ll have a bucket full of vaguely soapy water:

Don’t worry if your batch doesn’t match the color of my own - it varies depending on what kind of soap you use. I made a batch with Lever 2000 in the past and it had a greenish tint to it, and I’ve heard reports of all kinds of different colors from other people who have tried this.

At this point, let the soap sit for 24 hours, preferably with a lid on it. I just took our bucket to the laundry room.

When you take off the lid, you’ll find any number of things, depending on the type of soap you used and the water you used. It might be firm, like Jello; it might be very watery; it might even be like liquid laundry detergent. Just stir it up a bit and it’s ready to be used.

My batch wound up being rather slimy. It had some slimy-feeling water with various sized pieces of white gelatinous stuff floating in it. Here’s what it looked like - I’m using a video here because images don’t really capture it.

Don’t worry about the texture - it’s completely fine. Just use a measuring cup and use one cup of the detergent per load of laundry. If it’s got “globs” in it, get a mix of the water and of the globs - it’ll break up very quickly in the washing machine and wash your clothes well. If you’re still concerned, you can mash up the globs quite easily, but I saw no reason to do so.

How Well Does It Work?
Naturally, I wanted to test this detergent out. I tried to think of a good way to do something foul to a shirt, but something realistic - something I might do as a rather normal Midwestern guy that might also occur to any other guy in America. The answer hit me quickly.

Mustard.

I took two white t-shirts and squirted them both down with mustard, all over the front. Here are the two t-shirts:

The above t-shirt is the one I washed with Tide with Bleach Alternative, which is the laundry detergent we’ve used by default when we don’t have any homemade detergent on hand. It’s the one most highly recommended by Consumer Reports and this is the perfect opportunity to show what it can do. After I took the picture, I smeared the mustard into the shirt a little.

The above t-shirt is the one I washed with my homemade detergent. My mustard container ran out near the end here so the trail of mustard isn’t as long. I had already smeared in the mustard when I took this picture. Also note, although the pictures don’t clearly reflect it, the one smeared with homemade detergent was somewhat dingier right off the bat - it’s an older shirt, I believe.

Down in the laundry room, I pre-treated each stain by taking a small amount of each detergent and rubbing it into the stain with a brush. Then, I washed each shirt in a normal load - one load with Tide with Bleach Alternative and one with my homemade detergent.

Which one won? I fully expected the Tide to win - in fact, I was just hoping the blowout wasn’t too bad so I would still have a good reason to write this article. In fact, they turned out almost identically - they both smelled clean and looked quite white coming out of the dryer. Take a look:

With the homemade detergent, you can still make out parts of the mustard streak, but other parts appear to be completely gone. With a proper pre-treatment or a washing in bleach, this shirt would be as good as new.

With Tide with Bleach Alternative, the same exact story is true. You can still make out where the stain was if you look close, but it’s almost completely gone. A proper treatment would have resulted in no stain at all.

Here they are, side by side, for you to judge. The Tide shirt is on the right, while the homemade detergent shirt is on the left:

They’re pretty close. They’re both obviously very clean white tee shirts with a slightly noticeable mustard stain. At different points in each mustard streak, the streak appears completely gone - at other places, it’s fairly noticeable. That’s likely due more to my pre-treatment application than anything else.

Frankly, I couldn’t tell a difference between the two. Both detergents produced a clean-smelling shirt. Both produced a very white shirt with just a slight remnant of a mustard stain - a remnant that was almost identical in the two shirts. In a nutshell, I believe my homemade detergent cleans comparably to Tide with Bleach Alternative.

The Cost Breakdown
Here’s what I paid for the ingredients:

The box of Borax, which contains enough Borax for at least twelve batches of detergent, cost $2.89. The box of washing soda, which contains enough soda for six batches of detergent, cost $1.89. The soap, which came in packs of three (as pictured above), cost $0.89 per pack - I bought two, to ensure I had enough for six batches. The Iowa sales tax on this stuff was $0.39, giving me a total bill of $6.95 for the ingredients - enough for six batches. I also used perhaps a penny’s worth of water and a penny’s worth of heat to heat it - a total cost of $6.97.

Each batch of detergent contains 52 cups of the solution - 48 from the three gallons in the bucket, and four more cups of water with the dissolved soap. Since I use one cup per load, this means a single batch makes 52 loads’ worth of detergent.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that I make six batches of the stuff and use the other half of the box of Borax for something else. That means I’ve made enough detergent for 312 loads of laundry for a total cost of $6.97. That’s roughly two and a quarter cents per load of laundry.

Let’s look up Tide with Bleach Alternative, the Consumer Reports recommended detergent. You can buy four bottles of the 150 ounce Tide with Bleach Alternative from Amazon for $62.60. We’ll assume free shipping and no taxes here to help Tide’s case out. Each of those Tide bottles has enough detergent for 78 loads of laundry, meaning the case will cover 312 loads of laundry. Thus, each load of laundry using Tide with Bleach Alternative costs almost exactly $0.20 for detergent costs.

In other words, nine loads using my homemade detergent has the same detergent cost as one load of Tide with Bleach Alternative.

To put it in another perspective, let’s say I do one load of laundry a day for a year using each detergent. Using my homemade stuff, I spend $8.15 for the detergent over the course of the year. Using Tide with Bleach Alternative, I spend $73.23 over the course of a year. Using my homemade detergent instead saves me $65.08 a year. Plus, it was fun to make.

My Conclusion
Given that the detergent seems to do roughly as well as our regular name-brand detergent and is ridiculously cheaper, I plan on using my homemade detergent for the foreseeable future. I make no claims or guarantees as to the effect the detergent will have long term on your clothes - frankly, I don’t know. But I do know it cleans well - it passes muster for me and seems to handle difficult stains roughly as well as Tide with Bleach Alternative - and I do know I plan on using it for a long while. It’s hard to say no to that kind of savings.

A few weeks ago, I posted an article written by Carrie, a close friend of my wife who has been using cloth diapers for her daughter, Elizabeth, since the baby was born. The analysis of cost that Carrie provided was a huge hit (67 comments as of my writing) and convincing enough that it got my wife and I to attempt cloth diapering on a small scale with our daughter, who is about six months old. Here are the notes on our real world experience as parents used to disposable diapers trying out cloth diapering for the first time in an effort to save money.

Our Current Diapering Costs, Financial and Otherwise
Since our son was born, my wife and I have used high-end disposable diapers (namely, Pampers Swaddlers/Cruisers) largely because of their convenience: they’re very easy and quick to put on, almost never leak, and have no maintenance cost or effort whatsoever. Here’s more information about our disposable diaper buying process if you’re interested.

Over the long period of raising our son and our daughter (our son is just over two and our daughter is six months), our total cost average for disposable diapers comes out to 26 cents a diaper.

However, for us there’s another cost. Disposable diapers are one of the worst things you can put into a landfill - and we certainly do produce a lot of them. To us, the environmental damage caused by disposables is a real cost, one that bothers us and we’re committed to changing.

Selecting a Cloth Diaper
The biggest factor that drew us to using Swaddlers/Cruisers is their convenience and quality - they’re easy to put on, easy to dispose of, and rarely leak. It minimizes our time with every single diaper change, and that saved time gradually adds up like interest in a savings account.

When we decided to dip our toes into cloth diapers, we looked at several different options and eventually went with bumGenius. These diapers are designed to effectively replace disposables - and they’re amazing. They’re constructed so that anyone who can handle putting on a disposable can immediately pick up a bumGenius and know exactly what to do. There’s no “plastic pants,” no confusing process to put the diaper on, and our daughter seems to be quite happy with them on (except at first she would sit funny while wearing them because they’re proportioned differently than disposables). So far, we’ve seen no leakage at all.

However, these diapers are expensive. They’re available for $17.95 a pop at Amazon - if you dig around, you can shave maybe a dollar more off of the price. That’s a significant investment, and so we bought only three for our test run.

Challenges
Just to make things clear, if we’ve previously spent $0.26 per disposable diaper in the past and are now using bumGenius at $17.95 a pop, it would take 69 uses of the bumGenius just to get down to the cost of the disposable - and that’s not including laundry cost. If you go this route, realize that the number of washings you have to do to recoup your cost versus disposables is very high - but what you get for that price is much greater convenience per diaper change.

Putting them on and taking them off is easy, but what about the washing process? Following the directions led us to using a separate load for just those three diapers so far - basically, we just rinsed them quickly to get rid of any solid waste, then ran them as a normal load of laundry except with additive-free laundry soap and a second rinse cycle. We then dried them normally, and we calculate that this complete process costs about $0.08 all told. That extends the “break even” point out to approximately 80 uses of the bumGenius diapers to get them down to the price point of the disposables we normally use. My estimate is that we could wash about 25 of the bumGenius diapers in a single load if we were to scale up, which would help.

Are We Going To Scale Up?
After using these three diapers several times, I think we’re both happy enough with the process that we’d be willing to scale up to a much larger number of these diapers - with one caveat. It entirely depends on whether we are going to have a third child. With just the two children we have, we’re not fully confident that each diaper would get the 75 or so uses that it would require to reach the break-even point. With a third child, our scale changes - we would definitely reach the break-even point with a lot of room to spare.

Recommendations for New Parents
If you’re an expectant parent out there wondering if cloth diapering is worth the added hassle, my conclusion (having used disposables for years and now trying bumGenius) is that it’s definitely worth it, but that with more cumbersome cloth diapers, it would probably not be worth the effort. My suggestion, if you’re on the fence, is to request a few bumGenius diapers as a baby shower gift, then mix them in with the disposables. If you find the cloth ones work just fine for you - something we just now discovered is true for us - then scale up and go to primarily cloth diapering.

Over the long haul, the financial savings is real, even with expensive cloth diapers, and the environmental savings is quite real, too. It’s a frugal choice that I think my wife and I are both happy with.

I’ve become convinced lately that the most cost-efficient food in our kitchen is beans, and it’s a food that people often overlook. Beans are loaded with protein and are quite flavorful, particularly as a substitute for meats in a vegetarian diet.

How Cheap Is It?
Here’s a real world example of how inexpensive they can be. My family quite enjoys bean soup with a wide variety of beans in it. Let’s say, hypothetically, that we were to order this soup from Amazon Grocery. You can get four 29 ounce bags of 13 bean soup there for $18.96 and free shipping. Now, when I prepare a pot of soup beans for my family, I use about a pound of beans, so each of those bags would in effect be eight meal preparations. Even more amazing - each batch of soup I make will feed my family of three (since my daughter isn’t quite old enough to eat such things yet) plus make at least enough to freeze two bags of completed soup, each of which will provide another meal for all three of us.

So, I get eight batches out of this $18.96 order, and each of those batches provides three family meals of bean soup, and each of those family meals feeds three of us. That’s 72 meals, meaning the cost of beans per meal is about a quarter. Even if I spent that much just on spicing it up with leftover ham, pepper, salt, and such things, that still means I’m paying $0.50 a meal. That’s ridiculously cheap.

Even better, you can easily just buy several one pound bags of various bean types and mix them yourself in a large Tupperware container. This substantially pushes down the price of the beans - you can reduce the total cost by 40% or more beyond this just by doing some frugal shopping and mixing them yourself.

Beans can be used in countless dishes - burritos, casseroles, side salads, soups, and even breakfast. It’s also very easy to accent their flavor: pepper, salt, leftover ham, and most savory seasonings work very well with beans. There’s also a substantial variety in bean flavor and texture, so it only has to be repetitive if you let it get repetitive.

Here are five of my favorite bean-oriented recipes that you can make at home very inexpensively. Pick up a bag of dried beans (or even a can of them, though it’s not as frugal) at your local grocery store and give these a shot.

General Dry Bean Preparation Tips
Dry beans are by far the cheapest way to purchase beans - and much tastier and full-flavored than canned beans, in my opinion. The only drawback is that there’s some preparation work involved - but don’t worry, you can get it started before you go to work and finish pretty quickly when you get home.

It’s easy. Before you go to work, get the biggest pot you have and add a pound of beans to it (roughly two cups). On top of that, put six cups of cold water and let it sit on the counter top all day.

When you get home, pour off the water they’ve been soaking in and pick out any bean skins that might have soaked off of the bean. Put two tablespoons of oil in there (this keeps it from boiling over), then pour on six cups of fresh water, add a half a teaspoon of salt, and put the pot on the stove to boil. Get it at a gentle boil and then just let it boil there for an hour and a half or so - once you get it right, you can easily walk away from it if need be, as the oil will prevent boiling over.

In the end, you basically have bean soup. You can drain off the liquid if you want to use the beans for other purposes, or you can just eat the soup as is. However, note that most soups taste better if you add all of the other soup ingredients early in the boil. Also note that after you’ve boiled the beans, you can just drop them in a container for storage in the fridge - they’ll be fine for a day or two.

Beans and Eggs
Easy as pie. Just crack four eggs, add half a teaspoon of milk and some pepper, and beat them rapidly until they’re consistent in texture. Pour the egg mixture into a skillet and add half a cup of cooked black beans (or a bean mix, if you prefer). Scramble the eggs by repeatedly moving the eggs around in the skillet as it cooks until it’s nice and fluffy and full of beans. Put some cheese and salsa on top and you have one of my favorite breakfasts in the world - plus it’s an ovo-vegetarian dish.

Balsamic Vinaigrette Bean Salad
Take two pounds of cooked beans, any variety you’d like, and add in a diced medium red onion. To this, add two tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, four finely chopped garlic cloves, a quarter of a cup of extra virgin olive oil, and mix everything together. Add some ground black pepper to taste. This makes a very big batch of the salad, which is a great thing to take to a potluck dinner - for home use, you should probably halve the entire recipe (one pound of beans, a small diced onion, one tablespoon of vinegar, two garlic cloves, and an eighth of a cup of olive oil).

Beef and Bean Burritos
Cook a pound of ground beef. As the meat is cooking, add half a cup of chopped onion and a minced garlic clove. Stir the meat often to break it up, then when it’s well cooked, drain it, and add to it two teaspoons of chili powder, one teaspoon of oregano, half a teaspoon of cumin, half a teaspoon of salt, and half a teaspoon of brown pepper. Mix it all together and you have the beef part of the recipe. Just fill a large tortilla with this meat, some lettuce, and whatever beans you like - I prefer black beans or pinto beans or even refried beans.

Sixteen Bean Soup
Just follow the cooking directions above with your favorite multi-bean mix, except add half a pound of leftover meat to the soup as it’s cooking. I like to add cubed ham myself, but you can add other meats. Also, add a small minced onion to the soup, too, just as it begins to boil, and also add salt and pepper to taste.

Bean, Ham, and Tomato Casserole
Basically, take the soup you made with the sixteen bean soup recipe and drain off all but a cup of the liquid. Mix into the soup two diced tomatoes, put a bit more pepper on top, and (optionally) put a thin layer of finely ground Cheddar cheese on top (the cheese is highly optional). Bake it at 350 F (160 C) for about ten minutes and it turns out surprisingly well and often very distinct in flavor from the sixteen bean soup.

Several readers wanted a real-world analysis of the costs and benefits of cloth diapering. Luckily, my wife’s closest friend, Carrie, is cloth diapering her daughter Elizabeth and has contributed this lengthy analysis of cloth diapering. Carrie writes some notes about parenting and art at her personal blog, Dangerous Crayon. I have some notes in response to this that appear in th first comment. Take it away, Carrie!

Recently, when The Simple Dollar told readers to ask him anything they want, there were several commentors who asked for a cost benefit for cloth diapering. While there are lots of resources out there to analyze this, I thought I’d take a shot at figuring out in my own situation what the cost of cloth diapering has been over Elizabeth’s first year of life.

My methodology is a little hazy, but hopefully it’s decent enough to give a realistic analysis. If you have suggestions for other ways to provide a better view of the cost, please advise me, and I will report back!

The Background

All of our appliances are electric. I wash diapers approximately 3 times a week. My wash routine for the majority of the year has been: 1 cold wash and rinse, no extra rinse, no detergent; 1 warm wash and rinse, extra rinse with detergent, 1 cold wash and rinse, no extra rinse, no detergent, typically followed by 2 - 45 minute dryer cycles. I found this to be most effective for me. Some people do fine with a cold rinse, warm wash with 1 extra rinse, which could potentially reduce the amount of water and electricity used by almost half.

Currently, I change diapers about 7 times a day, making for about 50 diapers a week. Even though diapers were changed more frequently in early months, I figure this is a reasonable number to use, so that makes for about 2,600 diaper changes per year. On a side note, if it takes about 1 minute to change a diaper (ha, right!) then that means I’ve spent in the neighborhood of 44 hours changing diapers - that almost 2 full days of diaper changes!

My diaper stash is a mix of inexpensive (prefolds, pins, and cheap covers) and the pricey (pocket diapers). The way I figure it, I have about 53 diapers - 30 infant prefolds or fitteds that were used up to about 14 lbs, 12 premium prefolds we’re using now, and about 11 one size diapers that we’ve used all along. Over the course of the past year, we’ve purchased some disposable diapers, and we were give some as gifts. I figure we used about 360 disposable diapers - usually when we were gone on vacation somewhere, which, with all of our family and church activities, was in the neighborhood of 6 weeks. We also used them occasionally when diapers weren’t washed in a timely fashion.

The Numbers

The total value of my cloth diaper stash is $705.53 *
Detergents - $51.00
Utilities (water and electric) $173.55**
Total cost for cloth diapering in Year 1 (2007) - $930.08

If one assumes that 50 diaper changes a week is a reasonable yearly average, then, if we cloth diapered exclusively, that would work out to 2600 diaper changes in 2007. Considering that we know we did about 360 changes less than that average, we will use 2240 as out number of diaper changes in 2007. That works out to about $ 0.42 per washed diaper in Year 1.($930.08/2240)

* This number includes ALL diapering items - prefolds, covers, snappis (replaces diaper pins) onesize pocket diapers, reusable cloth wipes, diaper pail and reusable liners, a diaper sprayer to remove solids from diapers, and a few other miscellaneous diaper accessories.

** To calculate utilities, I made a basic assumption that the increase in cost between 2006 and 2007 is all diaper related. The reality is that utility rates have increased, there was additional baby-related laundry, and we used the air conditioners more in the summer of 2007 than we had in previous years. I believe the actual cost related to cloth diapers would be noticeably lower. We used less water in 2007 than in 2006 because of changes in the number of people living in our home (1 adult was replaced by one infant) But, for grins, and because we had changes in people and fixed several plumbing leaks in 2007, I’ll go ahead and include a cost for water. In electricity, we used about 1732 kWh more in 2007 than in 2006.

Less than $1000 doesn’t seem to bad, but it doesn’t seem too far from what you might expect to spend on disposable diapers. However, one must consider that these diapers should last us another year, so the only additional expense in Year 2 should be utilities and laundry detergent. If we assume that the prices on those items will remain constant, then over the course of 2 years, the cost would be more like this:

Year 2
The total value of my cloth diaper stash - $0 - bought it all last year
Detergents - $51.00
Utilities (water and electric) $173.55
Total for Year 2 in cloth - $224.55

Not too bad. I think I can scrounge around and find that in pocket change over the course of a year!

Total for 2 years in cloth: $1154.63

If we assume 2240 diaper changes in Year 1, and lets assume that there will be fewer diaper changes in Year 2 (we’ll say on average 5 changes per day - 1825/year) then we would say that over the course of Year 1 and Year 2, there will be 4,065 diaper changes. That gives us a cost of$.28 per diaper change.

Comparing to Disposables

Since I haven’t used disposable diapers exclusively, I will have to estimate the cost for Year 1 and Year 2 diapers, based on the same changing habits. I went to my local big-blue-box store, and priced out diapers in the lower range - the White Cloud store brand. I priced at purchasing in bulk when possible, and since in real life we can only buy whole packages of diapers, I “bought” however many packages I needed to cover the number of changes, even if I ended up with extras. Since the cost per diaper of disposables varies depending on size, I reviewed Elizabeth’s growth chart to guess the number of weeks that she would have been in a given size, still using the 50 changes per week. (This, I think, is under-estimating since there are more diaper changes in the first few months.) I’m also assuming 2.5 wipes per change because my experience is that I’ll use one wipe for some changes, and 6 or 7 for the messier changes.

Year 1
NB - 100 changes, 3 pkgs (40/$6.97) - $20.91
Sz 1 - 100 changes, 1 jumbo( 88/$12.74), 1 regular pkg (44/$6.97) - $19.71
Sz 2 - 400 changes, 5 pkgs (80/$12.74)- $63.70
Sz 3 - 2000 changes, 24 pkgs (84/$13.98) - $335.52

Wipes (at 2.5 wipes per change) 6500 - 11 pkgs at (648/$11.82) - 130.02

And, just for fun - Diaper Genie 2 - $29.96 and 15 refills - $89.10

Once we figure sales tax in, this comes up to about $858.83 for Year 1, or about $.33 per diaper change (yes this is a little fuzzy, because it does not account for the extra diapers purchased in each size.)

Year 2

Assuming that children use fewer diapers on average per day as they get older, I’m pretending that Elizabeth would have about 5 diaper changes per day, for a total of 1,825 changes in a year. If that were split evenly between the next 2 sizes, then it would look like this:

Sz 3 - 913 changes, (84/$13.98) - $153.78
Sz 4 - 913 changes, (72/13.98) - $181.74
Wipes (at 2.5 wipes per change) 4680 - at (648/$11.82) - $94.56
11 diaper genie 2 refills - $65.34
Total cost in Year 2 after sales tax - $495.42, or about $.27 per diaper change.

Total cost to use disposable diapers for 2 years - $1354.25
Assuming 4,065 diaper changes over the course of 2 years, that gives us a cost of $.33 per diaper change.

If you were inclined to use more expensive brands - I priced out Pampers’ Swaddlers and Babydry style diapers - then you could expect to add about $90 in the first year, and about $100 in the second year, for a total of $1601.83 to diaper for 2 years in a more expensive disposable.

Conclusions

Year 1, Cloth - $930.08
Year 1, Disposables - $858.83

Year 2, Cloth - $1154.63
Year 2, Disposables - $1354.25

If I had opted out of a larger stash, and some accessories, I believe that the cost in Year 1 of cloth diapering would be on par with the cost of disposables.

Since most children are not potty trained by one year, I would say that cloth is cheaper, even when you have some of the more expensive diapers. Actually, for the money that I “save” by using cloth - $199.62 - I could have added more than 8 pocket diapers to my stash, and still come out on top.

Factors That Make Disposable Diapers More Expensive Than Calculated

The brand As I indicated above, if you go for a more expensive brand, it will cost you more. One of the reasons I opted for cloth is that I think there are health benefits to avoiding disposables. If I use disposables, my preference is brands like 7th Generation, which have fewer dioxins, and hopefully, are healthier for babies. Those brands are even more expensive than brands like Pampers.

The size of the package Some parents are cautious about buying in bulk, since it means you could be stuck with lots of diapers in the wrong size. Some parents don’t have the upfront cash to buy diapers in bulk, so they end up spending more per diaper when they buy smaller packages.

Frequency of changes While I used a 50 change per week average, the truth is, diapers should be changed more frequently for health. We shouldn’t be letting the disposables fill until they are falling off the bottoms of the babies. More diaper changes mean a noticeable increase in expense with disposables, while with cloth, more changes do not significantly impact the number of washes. More changes mean the cost per washed diaper keeps dropping.

The leaks The times that I used disposables, I found that they tended to leak more, which sometimes rendered clothing stained beyond public wear.

The garbage Although I haven’t personal experience with this, some people have reported to me that their garbage service charges more, because they set more bags/barrels of trash out on the curb.

Factors That Affect Your Personal Cost to Cloth Diaper

Your stash If you go with the cheapest end of cloth diapering - all prefolds, inexpensive covers, inexpensive detergents, then you will see a greater benefit. If you use the most expensive options - all-in-one diapers or pocket diapers, then your cost recovery will be much slower. If you buy a large stash, the diapers individually will last longer, but of course, the cash outlay for 48 pocket diapers is substantially more than that for just 24.

Your routine If you wash more often, or have more rinses, etc., then you’ll see greater utility costs.

The number of children The more children you have who will wear the same cloth diapers, the greater your savings.

And, if you’re not convinced that cloth is less expensive (aside from the potential health and environmental benefits), check out these sites:
Punkin-butt: Diaper Dollar
Cloth Diapers: Can I afford to cloth diaper?
Nicki’s Diapers: How much money can you really save?
Pinstripes and Polka Dots: how much will cloth diapers cost?

As my final day at my “real” job grows ever closer, I’ve started reflecting in detail on the numerous changes that are going to happen in my life. In essence, most of the routines of my normal day are going out the window and I’ll be forced to find new grooves. This led me to consider the many ways that these routine changes will save our family money.

Reduced breakfast costs I eat breakfast at work about three days a week, simply because I run out of time to take care of it at home. A work breakfast, usually consisting of something from the coffee shop near the office, usually runs $6 or so. These three breakfasts will be replaced by oatmeal or fruit - a cost of $0.50 or so. Thus, each week, I’ll save about $16. Annual savings: $832

Reduced gasoline usage My daily commute ate about a gallon and a quarter of gas and put about thirty miles on my vehicle. If you just figure in the cost of gas and oil changes, this commute costs about $4 a day, day in and day out. I might make such a similar trip once a week now in an effort to do research, so my weekly cost will go down about … $16 again. Annual savings: $832

Reduced lunch costs I eat out for lunch with coworkers on average three days a week, with the other two weeks being leftovers. The average lunch costs about $10 with drinks and such included. Since I’ll be at home, I’ll instead eat simple meals at home or leftovers, probably costing about $1 a pop. That adds up to $27 in savings a week. Annual savings: $1,404

Reduced daycare costs While I haven’t figured out my final schedule yet, I’m quite sure the costs of daycare will go down significantly. Even if it drops just $50 a week for my two children, that still adds up. We normally take them to daycare about 45 weeks out of the year, so that really adds up. Annual savings: $2,250

Reduced incidental spending Perhaps once a week, I’ll wind up spending money on something incidental that I don’t need, simply because I wind up there. I’ll buy a schedule book at Office Depot, a used DS game, or something like that. These often happen as I’m out to lunch with a coworker who needs to stop for something on the way back. Let’s figure that I would spend $10 three times a week. That goes away, saving $30 a week. Annual savings: $1,560

Drastically reduced clothes expenses I don’t need to dress nearly as well on a daily basis, as I can just wear old t-shirts around the house. This means less annual clothes expenses - a reduction I would estimate at $300. Annual savings: $300

Reduced eating expenses When both my wife and I were working out of the home five days a week, we would often eat out or eat take-out once a week or so, and we’d often have an overpriced prepackaged meal once a week or so, too. Compared to the cost of preparing the food myself, each meal cost us $5 overall in extra costs on average, totaling up to $10 a week. Annual savings: $520

Eliminated extra travel expenses I had to travel about once every three months for my job. The reimbursement policy was rather stingy, plus I would often pick up a souvenir (like a local food or something like that) for my wife and my kids. Each trip easily cost me an extra $100 beyond what I would normally spend. Annual savings: $400

Reduced entertainment expenses Perhaps once every month, I would be involved in some sort of office-related social event, usually costing $15-20 total (or so). Annual savings: $240

The best part is that these are after-tax savings. Each month, the expenses of my job (and there’s nothing really extraordinary here) were eating just about $700 out of my post-tax income - my real paycheck. Those expenses simply disappear - and knowing that eases at least some of the fear of making that leap.

If you’re considering making such a leap, run through this exercise. Knowing that just the normal changes in my routine will save that much money on my living expenses (about six months’ worth of mortgage payments, for example) just reinforces the other positive qualities of this transition.

Last week, while traveling for work, I had an opportunity during a schedule break to catch an episode of the Oprah Winfrey show, where she discussed “freegans.” Here’s Wikipedia’s description of freeganism:

Freeganism is an anti-consumerism lifestyle whereby people employ alternative living strategies based on “limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.” The lifestyle involves salvaging discarded, unspoiled food from supermarket dumpsters that have passed their sell by date, but are still edible and nutritious. They salvage the food not because they are poor or homeless, but as a political statement.

In other words, it’s a political movement that basically scavenges the garbage for stuff that’s still good but has been deemed by modern society to be “unacceptable.”

I find this perspective to be quite fascinating. It offers not only its own questions, but really opens up some interesting questions about the frugality we practice in our day to day lives. What are the limits of frugality, and why are those limits in place? Why do we really practice frugality? Is it purely about saving money, or is there a grander purpose?

As I sat down to write about these issues, I received an email from a reader that further illustrates this topic:

Your review of Simple Prosperity (and your statement about your “green” period) made me think of an Oprah episode that aired last week. Lisa Ling reported on Freegans, people who go against the consumerism lifestyle.

They go so far as to look through the garbage bins at the grocery store for food. Not because they are hungry, but because the food happens to be perfectly fine, just not fit for sale (such as too close to the expiration date, spot on the fruit, etc). It was fascinating to see what is wasted each day, as well as the people (most who are well off in monetary terms) who have chosen to ensure that the food does not go to waste. Anyway, it was a wonderful episode that pointed at how wasteful Americans can be.

That night, I needed to go on a late night run to the grocery store and I decided to conduct my own “social experiment”. Sure enough, I found about 20 boxes of assorted flavors of Tastycakes in the can out back.

What would you do??

As I cannot turn down free food and as it was safely individually packaged, I am enjoying my (free) treat as we speak

So, let’s look at the question. If you saw twenty unopened boxes of Tastycakes in the trash behind a store, would you take them home with you? My expectation is that this question would get a very healthy mix of yes answers and no answers from people. For me personally, I’d have no objection to taking them if I would normally eat Tastycakes.

Not too long ago, for example, I was in a grocery store late in the evening where they were about to pitch some very brown bananas and the stock boy seemed completely fine with me just taking them for him. If I had not been about to leave on a business trip, I would have taken those bananas home with me and made banana pancakes and banana bread with them. To me, this is just being frugal - brown bananas are the exact ingredient you want for such recipes and if a store just gives them to you, I see no problem at all.

On the other hand, true dumpster diving for food isn’t very sanitary - you vastly increase the chances of acquiring spoiled food, for starters, and the health risks of just jumping into a dumpster and digging around are small but significant. I would not go that far in seeking out free items.

Where’s that exact line in the sand, though? For me personally, I’m not sure. It’s somewhere between free overripe bananas and jumping in the dumpster. For others, the bananas might be too much - or they might be okay with diving in for some food opportunities.

The biggest difference between frugality and freeganism is the belief structure behind it. Both freegans and frugal people would agree that minimizing your expenses and minimizing the amount of “stuff” you buy are noble goals, but frugal people primarily look at the options that improve their personal quality of life, while freegans are primarily making a political statement. As a frugal person, I might point out to someone that I have CFLs installed in my home, but my reasoning would be that they’re more energy efficient and thus more cost efficient - the environmental aspect is nice, but secondary. On the other hand, a freegan would likely be much more interested in the political nature of a CFL - they’re making a lifestyle choice that reflects their politics.

What’s the real lesson to be learned here? Different people have different “lines in the sand” when it comes to reducing their expenses - and different reasons for doing it. You can listen to all sorts of sources for ideas on how to live frugally and efficiently, but you never have to accept all of someone else’s ideas - just find techniques that work for you. Frugality is really about finding unexpected value - if you find value in some of what the freegans are doing, then by all means, incorporate it. If you think it’s foolish, then move on to finding something else that works for you.

As for me, I’m mostly just hungry for banana bread - and I’m wondering if I should hit that grocery store again late in the evening.

For the first time in my adult life, I have adequate space for a real kitchen garden. We’ve got two boxed gardens in the back yard, a big batch of winterized compost, and big plans.

What’s a “kitchen garden”? A kitchen garden merely refers to a garden that consists almost exclusively of plants intended to be eaten. Although one might put a few decorative plants around the edges of such a garden, the vast majority of the garden is intended for food.

What to plant? As spring is just about to dawn, we’re already thinking about what sorts of plants will go into our garden. For a kitchen garden, the best method is to examine the food that you want to eat as a result of the garden.

For us, we want to be able to make several things. First and foremost, we want lots of tomato-based things, as we intend to do some canning. We want tomato juice, tomato sauce, spaghetti sauce, pizza sauce, and salsa, all canned fresh. Thus, we’re going to need quite a few tomato plants. We’ll also plant a few pepper plants and a nice balance of herbs, particularly Italian ones.

We also want to be able to make fresh salads in late summer, straight from the garden. This means some amount of lettuce, if nothing else, and probably some carrots as well.

In a nutshell, don’t just plant whatever you think should be in a garden - instead, let the food you want to eat lead you towards your planting choices.

How much to plant? Using this basic framework, we then make a rough sketch of what we’ll plant in our two boxed gardens. Tomatoes, herbs, lettuce, a few pepper plants, and carrots all need to have room, and perhaps a few other things we like in any leftover space, like eggplant or okra.

This requires some research, so I start looking into how these vegetables are planted. Carrots can largely be planted in a row, as can some types of lettuce, but peppers and tomatoes are often standalone plants that need some free space around them. We also need to look at when we can plant them to avoid weather damage - here in Iowa, planting too early runs the risk of your plants being killed off by overnight frost.

We then look at which items are the most important - and for us this year, that’s tomatoes. That’s the item that should be overplanted, especially if you have use for as much of it as you can grow. We’re actually filling one of our boxes 75% with tomato plants, planting 12 plants by our diagram.

The rest of the space is filled by the remaining items in order of importance. The remainder of the tomato box has pepper plants, while we’re planting a fair number of herbs plus lettuce and carrots in the other box.

How does this save money? A healthy, well-cared-for main crop tomato plant, like a Burpee’s Big Girl, can easily produce 100 pounds of tomatoes by itself, something that would cost you at least a dollar a pound at the grocery store. I’m giving a low estimate here, as I remember my father’s garden having only a few plants and also having a daily harvest of tomatoes so heavy you could barely carry them for month after month.

Even better, you can easily use organic methods at home - we’re using compost for fertilizer, for example. Organic tomatoes tend to go for something close to $2 a pound, meaning one tomato plant can produce $200 worth of food. If we grow 12 plants, that’s $2,400 worth of tomatoes and, yes, more than half a ton of tomatoes over the whole growing season.

This doesn’t include the other vegetables, nor does it include the social benefits of being able to share or trade with your neighbors or friends.

Obviously, there is some cost (basic equipment, straw, tomato cages, etc.), but the cost of a bit of straw and the investment in a few tomato cages that can be used for years and years is pretty low. Even in a startup year, where you might buy a small tiller and a few garden implements, you can still come out money ahead on a small kitchen garden.

The real investment, though, is time. It takes regular time to keep the garden weeded and keep an eye out for pests. There’s also some research time required, and if you’re storing some of the output, that takes time (and space… and a bit of equipment) as well.

A kitchen garden is a cost-saving activity that can really be enjoyed as a hobby. I recommend starting very simple, even as simple as a single tomato plant, and then building up from there. Gardening is a hobby that isn’t enjoyed by everyone, but if you get into it, gardening can save you a ton of money over the long haul.