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.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Reliable Items appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Canning Beans appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Space Heaters appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Home Photo Printing appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Nick writes in: We rent a home and are responsible for all utilities. It came with a rather nice 8 person hot tub, currently, we will turn it on (warm it up) only when we plan on using it that evening. In the winter it takes about 8-10 hours to warm up. My question is this, should we leave it warm year-round, or only heat it up when we plan on using it. I think currently we use it 2-3 times a month, if we had it warm all the time, we would probably use it 1-2 times a week. Maybe more during the winter. During the summer it retains heat thanks to the cover and the temperature outside, and during the winter, it will retain the heat for maybe a day at most.

Without running the numbers at all, I can tell you that it’s cheaper to heat the water on occasion rather than keep it constantly hot. Hot water will constantly lose heat to the environment, and the greater the difference between the environment and your hot tub, the greater the heat loss at any given time.

Think about a hot cup of coffee. It’s initially very hot, but it doesn’t take too long for it to cool down to the point where it’s drinkable. However, after that, it doesn’t cool down at a very fast rate at all. It does eventually reach room temperature, but it stays at an acceptable heat for quite a while as you’re drinking it. That’s because the closer the liquid gets to room temperature, the slower the heat loss is.

Since the exact heating and cooling of water in a hot tub varies a great deal depending on the model, the insulation, and other factors, the best I can do is look strictly at the heating of the water.

A hot tub of the size you describe holds about 500 gallons of water. It takes about 8.34 BTUs to raise one gallon of water one degree Fahrenheit. So, if you’re raising that water from 40 F to 100 F (in the winter), you’re using about 250,000 BTUs, which is roughly 75 kWh of energy. A kWh costs about $0.12 from your electric company, so your energy cost for heating that much water in the winter is about $6.25 just to heat it for one use.

Now, your major issue with the hot water is your insulation. How much of it are you losing to the environment? For most hot tubs, the hot tub cover has a much lower R-value than the hot tub itself, so that’s how most of your heat is lost.

In your example, you mention that the heat in the tub is completely lost after a day or so if you’re not running the heating. Just using extreme back-of-the-envelope math, you’d essentially be heating the tub’s water each day during the winter, costing you $6.25 per day to keep it hot all the time. That’s going to add up quite fast.

My suspicion is that either it’s retaining at least some heat for longer than that day or your hot tub cover is a pretty thin one with a low R-value – or, most likely, both. I sent an email out to a friend who owns a hot tub in the southern part of the United States and who keeps a pretty close tab on his energy use and he estimates it costs him about $30 per month to keep his tub hot around the clock, but it would cost about $50 a month with a “typical” cover.

Compare that to $18 a month heating the tub for the three times you’d use it during that month.

You might want to stop by a hot tub dealership just to get an idea as to the R-value of the insulating cover on your tub. You can get a good ballpark estimate just by the feel of the covers they sell.

While the math isn’t exact (again, there are so many variables here and the math gets quite complicated quickly), you can compare the cover you do have with some of the others that they sell. If you see one with an R-value twice as much as the cover you do have, it’ll hold in the heat for roughly twice as long as your current cover.

Is a new cover an investment you want to make? If you really desire to leave your hot tub on all the time in the winter, it probably is at least worth looking into, as you’ll repay that cover’s cost eventually in the money you save.

However, the best approach is to simply turn on the tub in the morning if you plan to use it that evening. If you’re using the tub more than six or seven times a month, you may want to consider running it all the time and investing in a very high R-value cover for the hot tub, particularly if you’re going to live there for a long time or if your landlord will help with the cost of the cover (provided it stays with the house, I’m sure).

The savings for making the right choice here is going to be on the order of $20 a month, so it pays to think this one out.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Hot Tub Usage appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

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.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Used Books appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Laura writes in: roasting a whole chicken, only costs about a dollar more to buy it cooked at Sam’s Club and mine didn’t taste as good

For starters, part of the problem may have been your technique. I use a default “beer can” technique whenever I roast chickens, in which I insert a tin can or a beer can into the cavity of the chicken. The can is mostly full of some sort of liquid with various herbs and spices, such as garlic and peppercorns. When the chicken is roasting, the entire chicken is balanced on the can.

I do it this way in both the oven and on the grill and it works great in either context. The flavor and moistness of the meat is wonderful when finished.

I’d highly suggest looking for an oven-roasted “beer can” chicken recipe and using it for your next chicken roast. It really does produce a wonderful whole chicken.

Now that we have this issue out of the way, the real question is whether or not the amount saved on buying a whole roasted chicken is worth the additional time. I went to my local Sam’s Club to find prices on roasted chickens. I found whole chickens for sale for $0.89 per pound and pre-roasted chickens for $1.29 per pound. Assuming I buy a four pound bird, I’m saving about $1.60 buying a raw chicken.

So, what about the prep time? I can take a chicken out of the package, insert a can into the cavity, and have the chicken in the oven in about five minutes, according to my own estimate. It would then take roughly an hour for the chicken to roast, which is passive time. I’d then have to stick the tray upon which the chicken baked into the dishwasher, but that time is negligible.

So, if you assume that you have plenty of time to prep your own dinner, roasting your own chicken is the way to go. You’re saving $1.60 (in this example) for about five minutes of work.

However, the key thing to remember is that when you’re buying that whole roasted chicken, you’re basically paying for convenience. There are evenings where busy families simply don’t have an hour to set aside while the food cooks in the oven.

This is the voice of experience here: on evenings where my children have soccer or tumbling class, it can be a juggling act to get a home-cooked meal on the table at any reasonable dinner time.

Lining up a recipe in the oven like this can be a trick, so we often use a slow cooker for meals on these nights. For us, a slow cooker is the best solution to the family time crunch that many families seem to have in the evenings. It enables us to have a lot of flexibility with regards to when we get a meal on the table.

There’s also the health factor. When you prepare food yourself, you have much more control over the ingredients in it. Food sold in stores has a lot of questionable things done to it, from food coloring to imitate freshness to all sorts of artificial things to enhance flavor through chemistry. If I have a choice, I’ll pass on this.

So, if I were doing this, I’d never buy a whole roasted chicken unless it was an emergency. If I had time, I’d enjoy the $1.60 in savings I got from putting five minutes of prep work into the chicken. If I knew I wouldn’t have the time, I’d set up a slow cooker meal. The only time I would consider it is if I had planned to have a lot of time, but something unexpected changing that schedule.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Whole Chickens appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Greg writes in: I was thinking of changing my light bulbs to the new energy efficient CFL bulbs. I counted quantity 14 60watt bulbs in my house. For $25 to buy an 18 pack of 60watt equivalent, each bulb uses 13watts. If I estimate that roughly everyday 4 bulbs are turned on for 5 hours. Saving me 188 Watts of power per hour, giving me 940 watts saving a day. Is it worth it?

It absolutely is.

Let’s do a price comparison of normal incandescent bulbs, CFL bulbs, and the new LED bulbs that are starting to emerge onto the scene, using Greg’s scenario.

Greg can buy a 24 pack of 60 watt incandescent bulbs for $11.87, or $0.49 a bulb. He would have to buy twelve bulbs to replace the ones in his home, costing him $5.94 in bulbs. These bulbs have an average lifetime of 1,000 hours, so to cover 10,000 hours of use, it will cost him $54.90 to use incandescent bulbs.

Greg can also buy an 8 pack of 13 watt CFL bulbs for $8.75 (which replace 60 watt incandescents), or $1.09 a bulb. He would have to buy twelve bulbs to replace the ones in his home, costing him $13.08 for a round of bulbs. These bulbs have a stated average lifetime of 8,000 hours, but my experience with CFLs has shown me that you should roughly halve that, so to cover 10,000 hours of use, it will cost him $32.70.

Yes, even without the energy savings, CFLs are cheaper due to the longer lifespan.

Greg could also buy a single 7 watt warm white LED bulb for $14.99 (this replaces a 60 watt incandescent). I’ve used these and they actually do a really good job of matching incandescent light. He would have to buy twelve bulbs to replace the ones in his home, costing him $179.88. These bulbs have a stated average lifetime of 25,000 hours, so to cover 10,000 hours of use, it will cost him $71.95.

So, for 10,000 hours of light out of twelve light sockets, you’ll have to pay $54.90 for 60 watt incandescent bulbs, $32.70 for equivalent CFLs, and $71.95 for equivalent LEDs.

Now, what about energy use?

Over 120,000 hours of use (10,000 hours per socket), a 60 watt incandescent will use 7,200 kWh of energy. At an average price per kilowatt hour nationwide of about $0.12 per kWh, it would cost him $864 over that span.

Over that same timeframe, a 13 watt CFL will use 1,560 kWh of energy. At a price of $0.12 per kWh, it would cost him $187.20 over that span.

Over that timeframe, a 7 watt CFL will use 840 kWh of energy. At a price of $0.12 per kWh, it would cost him $100.80 over that span.

So, what’s the total cost?

For 12 light sockets over 10,000 hours of use per socket, the total cost of using 60 watt incandescent bulbs is $918.90.

For 12 light sockets over 10,000 hours of use per socket, the total cost of using 13 watt CFLs (which produce light similar to the 60 watt incandescents) is $219.90.

For 12 light sockets over 10,000 hours of use per socket, the total cost of using 7 watt LEDs (which produce light similar to the 60 watt incandescents) is $172.75.

Yes, LEDs are the cheapest option now. The startup cost for such bulbs is very high, but their long lifespans and incredibly low energy use end up making up the difference and more.

On the other hand, even though they’re the cheapest initially, the short lifespan and high energy cost of incandescent bulbs make them incredibly expensive over the long haul.

My suggestion? Try a CFL and a good LED like the one I linked to above. Make sure the lighting is up to the standard you want. If it is, you should absolutely jump ship to the one that provides the light you want, even if the bulb costs more. You’ll save dollars, not pennies, over the long run.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Light Bulbs appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Erin writes in: Making our own wedding favors. It’s so expensive to buy them, so I tried making my own, which ended up costing about as much as just buying them would have and was no where worth the effort even if we had saved a ton of money. I wish we would have just skipped them all together, no one would have noticed and we would have saved a bunch of money.

First of all, I don’t think wedding favors are necessary at all. The vast majority of the wedding favors I’ve ever received wound up in a cupboard within a few days of the wedding and were largely forgotten until I found it a few days later. If you’re getting married and are thinking about giving away a “traditional” wedding favor, I’d just skip it. It’s expensive, not particularly personal, and quite forgettable for the guests.

That being said, I have actually been to a few weddings (or heard of a few weddings from friends) where the wedding favor was quite memorable:

+ At one wedding, where the wedding couple were both writers, they gave every adult who attended the wedding copies of each of their latest books, signed by them. These were very inexpensive for the couple (who just requested a bunch of copies from their publisher) and actually useful for many of the guests, who were almost all avid readers.

+ At another wedding, there were place settings for every person they expected at the reception. At each one, there was a custom-made bookmark depicting the couple on one side. This bookmark was inserted inside of a handwritten card from either the bride or the groom thanking that person personally for attending the wedding.

+ My favorite one was a wedding where a wonderful soup was served at the reception. Then, on the tables, were small jars containing the ingredients for that soup along with a note describing how to make it. This wasn’t particularly inexpensive, but it was very thoughtful and it got used.

+ Another wedding I attended had homemade soap given away as a wedding favor. One of the friends of the couple simply made a bunch of homemade soap bars, wrapped them with a custom wrapper that commemorated the wedding, and left them out on the tables at the reception.

Each of these favors succeeded because of several different factors.

They were inexpensive or free. In some of the cases, the items were truly inexpensive. In other cases, a member of the wedding party or a close friend stepped in to help out with a homemade item.

They were something that the guests would actually use outside of the ceremony. In each case, the memorable favors were items that would actually get used. No more knick knacks, no more commemorative salt shakers.

They were often personalized. Most of these items had some personalization to them. They were either made by someone actually involved with the wedding – or sometimes even by the wedding couple – or they were intimately connected to the couple. Many favors have no such connection.

I’ll run the numbers on two examples.

At one wedding I recently attended, the wedding favors consisted of small sacks of chocolate coins. There were perhaps 100 of these bags sitting around with 20 coins in each one. They weren’t particularly memorable or particularly tied to the couple. I was able to find chocolate coins for $0.20 each. At that rate, the bags themselves cost them $400 – I sincerely hope they found a less expensive rate.

On the other hand, at the wedding where there were personalized cards and bookmarks, I called a local printer who said that he could print a set of 100 bookmarks and 100 cards for about $60 without much trouble. I’m sure that if you shopped around, you could find an even cheaper price.

Stick with personal, simple, and useful if you’re going to make a wedding favor. It will cost you less and it’ll mean more to the guests.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Wedding Favors appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Stephen writes in: with Christmas coming around, what about LED Christmas lights verses regular (incandescent I assume) lights. This is our first Christmas in our new house, so we’ll probably buy some lights soon.

Today, Christmas lights are generally sold in one of two general types: “mini” lights and LED lights. The exact energy use of these different light types varies quite a bit, so I went down to my local Home Depot and looked at a lot of different strands.

My numbers indicated that the average wattage of LED lights is about 0.1 watts per bulb, while the average wattage of “mini” lights is about 0.4 watts per bulb. We’ll assume that for calculation purposes.

So, let’s say you’re going to hang 500 lights from your home, you’re going to have these lights on for 30 evenings during the holiday season, you intend to run them for six hours per evening, and you hope to use the strands for five years. I think these are all reasonable assumptions.

With the LED bulbs, you’ll be using about 0.3 kWh per day to run the bulbs, given the six hour assumption above. That adds up to about 9 kWh per holiday season, or 45 kWh over five years. At an average cost of 0.11 per kWh from your electric company (this is a rough nationwide average), the cost of running the LED bulbs over that five year span is $4.95.

With the “mini” bulbs, you’ll be using about 1.2 kWh per day to run the bulbs, given the six hour assumption above. That adds up to about 36 kWh per holiday season, or 180 kWh over five years. At an average cost of 0.11 per kWh, the cost of running the “mini” bulbs over that five year span is $19.80.

In other words, you’d save about $14.85 over the five year lifetime of those 500 bulbs by using LEDs instead of “mini” bulb strands.

The real question is whether or not you can make up that $14.85 when buying the bulbs. Can you make up $14.85 when buying 500 mini bulbs versus buying 500 LED bulbs?

After examining the prices at a lot of different places, I would say you could save that much or perhaps even a bit more… but only if you’re buying right now at full prices. In November and early December, Christmas lights tend to sell at a very high price.

However, there are tremendous sales on Christmas lights right after Christmas. It’s not uncommon to see 100 bulb strands for $1 during such sales. My wife and I have several strands of LED bulbs in our garage that we bought at such a post-Christmas sale.

So, what should you do? If you’re absolutely convinced that you must buy bulbs for this year, the lowest total cost will probably come from buying “mini” bulbs provided you can find them for $3 per 100 bulb strand less than the LED bulbs. If you can’t, the LED bulbs are going to be the better deal.

If you can possibly wait, though, do so. Buy a big pile of LED bulbs shortly after Christmas during the big bulb sales because you should be able to find strands of those at a very inexpensive price (and probably very close to the price of the “mini” bulbs).

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Christmas Lights appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Marie writes in: Did you ever do a cost analysis on dishwashers vs. hand washing dishes??? My dishwasher is not functioning properly [I may overstuff the thing] wondered if the old fashioned way is better economically.

This is a really tricky one to quantify, because the real cost in washing dishes comes from the cost of hot water. This is easily the largest cost component of doing a batch of dishes, as one often uses $0.40 or $0.50 of heated water in doing a batch, whether in the dishwasher or in the sink.

There’s also the problem of variability in that some dishwashers use more hot water than others and some people use more hot water than others. It’s very hard to precisely quantify these things for such a comparison.

If you want to minimize hot water use while handwashing dishes, the way to do it is to fill one basin with hot water and soap, then use cold water to rinse your dishes after they’re scrubbed. This generally uses less hot water than the average dishwasher, but even then, it’s hard to quantify exactly how much.

So, to distinguish between the two, we have to largely ignore water.

What costs are we left with, then? For starters, dishwashers run on electricity. This report estimates that a dishwasher unit uses somewhere around 1.5 kWh on average to run a load of dishes, excluding the costs of the incoming water. That’s a cost of about $0.17 or so in the average American home.

There’s also the startup cost of owning a dishwasher. This, of course, relies on the assumption that a kitchen sink is a “default” piece of equipment in a home and a dishwasher is not, which matches my experience growing up (and my first places where I lived after moving out) quite well.

This site estimates the lifespan of a mid-range dishwasher as being approximately 10 years and having a cost of $500. That adds up to $50 per year. This report estimates that an average dishwasher runs 215 loads per year, so you’d have a cost of about $0.46 per load for the cost of the dishwasher.

Since you’re using cleaning supplies in both the sink and the dishwasher, we’ll assume that those are essentially equal, too.

Thus, your total extra cost per dishwasher load of dishes versus doing them by hand is about $0.63. It’s a little bit higher than this if you do dishes by hand by filling up a basin with hot water and using only cold water to rinse the soap from the dishes.

Based on my own experiences doing both, I invest about ten minutes more doing a sink full of dishes by hand than by putting them in the dishwasher. Note that I’m not saying I can wash a sink full of dishes in ten minutes, but that my total time invested in doing a sink full of dishes starting from a big pile of dirty dishes after a meal to clean dishes in the cupboard takes about ten minutes more than it does putting them all in the dishwasher, running it, and unloading it.

Is that enough to make handwashing worthwhile? You’re saving about $3.80 per hour of handwashing dishes versus using a typical dishwasher. That, to me, isn’t enough of a savings, so I’ll usually run the dishwasher and enjoy the extra time with my family or extra time sleeping, which is worth $3.80 per hour for me.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Dishwasher or Hand Washing appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Gayathri writes in: Driving 1mph slower than posted speed limit. Yeah, that’s a myth.

Actually, it’s not a myth. Most cars made in the United States maximize their fuel efficiency at about 55 miles per hour and drop off rapidly above that limit (this is actually from a study – West, B.H., R.N. McGill, J.W. Hodgson, S.S. Sluder, and D.E. Smith, Development and Verification of Light-Duty Modal Emissions and Fuel Consumption Values for Traffic Models, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, March 1999).

This means that if you’re tooling along on the interstate at the speed limit of 65 miles per hour and drop that back to 64 miles per hour, you’re actually improving your gas mileage by about 1.5%, according to fueleconomy.gov.

So, let’s work out what that’s really worth.

Let’s say you have a typical car that gets 25 miles per gallon at 55 miles per hour. At 65 miles per hour, it’s going to get roughly 15% worse gas mileage, or 21.25 miles per gallon. If you trim that back to 64 miles per hour, your gas mileage is a bit better – you’ll be getting 21.625 miles per gallon, more or less.

Now, let’s say you’re going on a 400 mile trip on the interstate and that gas is available for $3.25 a gallon.

If you go 65 miles per hour, it will take you 6 hours and 9 minutes to make the trip. You’ll burn through 18.82 gallons of gas, which will cost you $61.17.

If you go 64 miles per hour, it will take you 6 hours and 15 minutes to make the trip, six minutes longer. You’ll burn through 18.5 gallons of gas, which will cost you $60.13.

In short, driving one mile per hour slower will add six minutes to the trip and save you $1.04 in gas. Your savings simply by driving one mile per hour slower is $10.40 per hour. That, of course, is after-tax money.

That figure, as mentioned above, assumes a 25 mile per gallon car, but other mileages have similar savings. It also assumes that you’re slowing down a bit from a speed above 55 miles per hour.

So, should you just go 55 on any road you’re on? I wouldn’t do that. Instead, I’d stick to the posted speed limit and maybe go a mile an hour or two below that in the slower lane on an interstate.

Doing this serves three purposes. One, you’ll put cash in your pocket for the extra time you spent driving. Two, you’ll never get a speeding ticket. Three, you’re sticking more or less with the flow of traffic (going much slower would disrupt that), so you’re not disrupting traffic flow and endangering yourself that way.

The next time I’m rolling along some flat four lane road in southern Iowa, I’ll just set the cruise to a couple of miles per hour below the speed limit and roll along. Sure, I might get there five minutes later, but I know I won’t get pulled over for speeding, I’ve got something entertaining on the radio, and that bit of extra time will put a bit of money straight into my pocket.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Going Below Speed Limit appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Jeff writes in: How much money do you ACTUALLY save in time and money by making your own coffee at home? I would appreciate the assumption that the user is using non-generic, non-Folgers or Maxwell House coffee.

For some standardized data on this, I visited the website of the SCAA – the Specialty Coffee Association of America. In one of their protocol documents, I found this information, which I’ll use to analyze how a great cup of coffee is constructed at home:

The optimum ratio is 8.25 grams of coffee per 150 ml of water, as this conforms to the mid-point of the optimum balance recipes for the Golden Cup.

Let’s say we’re looking at a 16 ounce cup of coffee – what you might fill a to-go cup with from a coffee shop, for example. A 16 ounce cup of coffee is approximately 473 mL, which, using the ratio above, would require 26 grams of coffee to make it yourself. An ounce is 28.3 grams, just for measurement’s sake.

So, how much does “good” coffee cost? I asked my wife to select what she considered to be a very good coffee for the price and she chose Eight O’Clock Coffee’s original ground, which can be obtained at a rate of $0.39 per ounce.

Simply put, you’d need about $0.38 of decent ground coffee to make a good 16 ounce cup of coffee at home. There’s also the negligible cost of water and electricity (say, one cent per cup), plus the ongoing cost of filters (say, two cents per cup), plus the cost of the cup (say, one cent per drink prorated out over time), plus the startup cost of purchasing an inexpensive pot to brew the coffee with (say, another two cents per cup, prorated out over time). That’s a cost of about $0.44 for a 16 ounce standard coffee.

Now, if you add cream or other ingredients to that, you’re increasing the cost, but not significantly. For example, International Delight French Vanilla liquid creamer costs $0.08 per cup. Other options might ding you as much as a quarter per cup for flavoring, which is still leaving you below $0.70 per cup.

Depending on what exactly you order at your typical coffee chain, a 16 ounce coffee will set you back somewhere between $2 and $5. The variation here is pretty impressive, but even if you’re comparing the low end of a purchased coffee with the high end of a homemade cup, you’re still talking about a savings of a dollar per 16 ounce cup. It’s quite likely you’re saving even more than that.

What about the time? I’m not a coffee drinker, but Sarah usually sets up the coffee pot the night before. It takes her about a minute. When she gets up, she flips a switch, and then she drinks a cup a little while later, then fills her to-go cup on her way out the door, taking her maybe another minute or two. She usually cleans the pot up when she gets home from work, taking another couple of minutes.

The time invested is perhaps five minutes total per day, and she’s probably saving $2.50 or so per day, making for a pretty good hourly rate. Plus, she believes the coffee made at home tastes better.

If you drink coffee more than a time or two a week, you’re going to save money making it at home, and it’s probably going to be well worth the small amount of time invested, too.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Coffee appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Larry writes in: What so you think the value is in the saved time of a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner?

The difficulty in evaluating a device like the Roomba is in the sheer number of factors to consider…

How often do you actually need to vacuum? A single person who isn’t at home very much doesn’t need to vacuum nearly as often as a family of five with three children under the age of six.

What is your standard of home neatness? Some people feel the need to vacuum on a very regular basis. Others vacuum on occasion. Some rarely vacuum at all.

How big are your rooms? Roombas work much better in areas with significant open floorspace. They tend to work in a redundant fashion (meaning that they don’t clean as much floor space per charge) in smaller rooms, particularly with crowded floorspace.

How empty is the floorspace in your rooms? If you’re looking at rooms with just a couple of chairs and perhaps one table, a Roomba will do a very good job. If you’re looking at rooms with tons of obstacles (like a child’s play area), a Roomba won’t do as good of a job.

It was these factors in combination that caused us to not use the Roomba we were gifted very much. It worked really well in two rooms in our house. It was useless (or nearly so) on the stairs, in many of the bedrooms, and in the room where most of our children’s toys were.

In other words, unless you live in a residence with a single floor and a very open floor plan, a Roomba is only going to supplement a normal vacuum cleaner. This, of course, means that the reason you would buy a Roomba would be solely as a time saver, not as a money saver.

So, is it a time saver? As I mentioned above, it was very useful in specific rooms. We could set it to run in our living room and in our carpeted hallways and it did a great job. It would also do a “good enough” job in my office and in most of the family room.

The real advantage is that one person could multi-task with the vacuuming. I could set up the Roomba in the living room, then vacuum the stairs. This would directly reduce my vacuuming time to some extent. My estimate is that the entire house could be vacuumed in about 25% less time, saving about 30 minutes per vacuuming.

For me, that means a savings of about 12 hours per year, all told. Is that worth the $300 I’d have to invest in a Roomba, plus the energy cost of charging it (a few dollars a year)? This, of course, assumes that the Roomba works flawlessly and never has a problem, because any problems cut directly into that time saved.

I was glad to have it as a gift, but I would not spend the money on one as a time saver. It does save a little time, but not $300 worth of time.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Roomba appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Melissa writes in: I’d be interested in knowing if its economical to make your own pasta. I did it the first time the other day to make noodles for my chicken noodle soup because i didn’t want to run to the store. The noodles were far superior, but it did take a bit of time as opposed to dumping a bag of egg noodles in the pot.

This is fairly hard to quantify, actually. Making your own noodles can be surprisingly inexpensive. All you really need are eggs and flour to put together noodles at a lower cost than what can be found in a store, and, as you mentioned, they are just fantastic noodles. Once you start using them, it’s really tough to go back to purchased noodles because the quality difference is immense.

The challenge here is time. To make your own noodles, you’re going to have to invest some significant time in making the dough, rolling it out thin enough to make noodles, then cutting it up.

Just to measure the time, I made a batch of egg noodles in my own kitchen recently. You just take four cups of flour, plus four eggs, plus enough water to make the volume of the eggs equal a cup (if needed, it might not be depending on your egg size). Knead the eggs and flour together until it makes a dough, then roll it out flat repeatedly, folding it over, and rolling it out again on a floured surface, then cutting the noodles and leaving them out to dry. This is about $1.20 worth of ingredients, and it took about forty five minutes to convert all of the dough into noodles working at a steady pace.

I then went to the store and found a pound of extra wide egg noodles for $2. In terms of cost, I saved about $0.80 on the batch, but the noodles I made were light years ahead in quality.

If you’re doing a strict cost comparison, I saved about $1 per hour of work making the noodles from scratch in a typical home kitchen environment. If you’re making them from scratch just to save money, it’s not worth it.

The problem with that simple conclusion, though, is that you’re not quite comparing apples to apples. The quality of homemade noodles far surpasses what you’re ever going to buy in a store.

If you really value the food you make at home, then making homemade noodles is going to be worth it. It’s enough to turn a regular meal into a memorable one and a great meal into a fantastic one. It’s the kind of thing that will leave your guests truly enjoying the meal you prepared and leave you with a satisfied mouth and stomach.

It’s also going to be healthier, because you control the ingredients. If you want to use whole wheat flour and egg whites, you can. If you want to make your own specific flour mix, you can. If you want to use farm fresh eggs, you can. You control it all. There’s no hidden ingredients or preservatives or mysterious industrial processes or anything else.

Such value, though, is incredibly hard to quantify because it comes down to the value you hold in such things.

If it were all about the dollars and cents, you’d probably never make your own noodles.

But sometimes, it’s not about the dollars and cents.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Noodles appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Aimee writes in: how many loads of laundry do i need to do to have an energy efficient pay for itself?

Obviously, this is going to vary quite a lot depending on the specific “normal” washing machine and the specific high-efficiency washing machine. I’ll go into the calculations using some aggregated statistics to show how many loads, on average, you’d have to do in a high-efficiency machine to make up for the extra cost.

CNet reports that you can buy a normal top-loading washing machine for $300-$650 and a high-efficiency machine for $600-$1,600. We’ll take the 40th percentile in both ranges, as it will more or less average the ones readers might actually buy and ignore the very high end ones with unnecessary bells and whistles.

This means we’ll be using a cost of $440 for the normal machine and $1,000 for the high-efficiency machine. That’s a difference of $560.

What about energy and water use? I used the energy calculator on the Mr. Electricity site and calculated that a top-loading (normal) washer would use $0.62 in energy and water per load, while a front-loading (high-efficiency) washer would use $0.41 in energy and water per load. I assumed that you’d be doing equal amounts of hot, warm, and cold washing and an electric water heater with a cost of $0.12 per kilowatt hour in obtaining those numbers.

That means, for each load of laundry done, a high-efficiency washer would save you $0.21 per load.

At a rate of $0.21 per load, you’d have to do 2,667 loads to make the high efficiency washer worthwhile.

That’s a lot of loads at first glance. However, the average American household does almost 400 loads per year, which means you’d be at that level in about six and a half years.

Of course, much of this calculation is dependent on the exact numbers used. Let’s say, for example, you’re comparing the lowest-end top loader with the lowest-end front loader, you’d have a difference of $300 instead of $560. That would only require you to do 1,428 loads to catch up. That’s about three and a half years.

Let’s say you’re living in an area with an energy cost of $0.15 per kilowatt hour. Your savings per load would jump to $0.22 per load, requiring you to have to do only 1,364 loads to catch up. You’re getting down to three years and a few months.

Here’s the real truth: the big cost in washing clothes is the cost of heating the water. If you want to start saving money on each of your laundry loads, the best way to start is to minimize your cost of heating your water. A simple step would be to turn down the heat level on your water heater. A more drastic (and expensive up front) step that would save money in the long run is to use a tankless water heater.

For me, it would come down to cash on hand. If I were buying on credit, I would get the least expensive washing machine I could, as the interest on credit card debt destroys any energy efficiency savings I might get. If I were paying cash and could afford either option, though, I’d get a reliable energy efficient one, sticking with recommendations from Consumer Reports.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Energy-Efficient Clothes Washing appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Kelly writes in: My husband I have lots of hobbies/interests and finances do not excite either of us so we are not savvy. We are great savers but don’t really know what to do with the money. We have our retirement accounts through work (Fidelity) and an emergency fund in a high interest checking account. In addition we had about $60,000.00 (that we don’t have plans for) in Vanguard money market funds until the rates dropped and we were not earning any interest. Because there is not a Vanguard office near our home (and we did not know where to put the money) we met with an advisor at Fidelity. We moved the money into stock market accounts and have made a significant amount of money. I have heard and read that Fidelity has higher fees than say, Vanguard, but if we can meet with an advisor yearly and are making significant money on this money do you think it is worth it? Or, is there a way to figure out what funds to put the money in at Vanguard? Are we talking about saving pennies or dollars?

In this instance, you’re comparing apples to oranges. Comparing a Vanguard money market account to a Fidelity stock fund isn’t even close to a realistic comparison. Money market accounts are typically invested in things that would be considered ultraconservative, like U.S. treasury notes. On the other hand, stock funds are invested in the stocks of companies and, by their very nature, are much more volatile, with big gains and big losses within the realm of possibility.

The only way to really gauge the impact of investment fees is to compare identical investments from two separate investment houses, which is extremely difficult since it’s rare for two investment houses to have identical offerings. Even if you compare very similar investments, like the Vanguard 500 and the Spartan 500, it’s still not an exact comparison because of small variations between the funds.

For example, with the funds above, the basic level investor shares of the Vanguard 500 has an expense ratio of 0.17%, with Admiral shares (with a minimum investment of $10,000 required) havving an expense ratio of 0.06%. The Spartan 500, offered by Fidelity, is somewhere in the middle at 0.10% (but has a $10,000 minimum investment). This gives an overall nod to Vanguard based solely on the expense ratios.

How much does that save, though? Let’s say you invested $10,000 in each of those two funds. An expense ratio means that, in a given year, that percentage of the assets is being used to maintain the fund, employ the people running it, and so on.

So, at the end of 2009, a fund with a 0.06% expense ratio might have a face value of $10,000. Another fund with an expense ratio of 0.10% also has a face value of $10,000.

During the year 2010, the assets in those funds gain, let’s say, 2%. At the end of that year, the 0.06% expense ratio fund would have a balance somewhere close to $10,193.88 (depending, of course, when the expenses were taken out) and the 0.10% expense ratio fund would have a balance close to $10,189.80. This amounts to $4.08.

In other words, when the difference in expense ratios is small and your investment amount is relatively small, the amount of money you’re saving and losing is small.

However, let’s say you’re investing $1,000,000. The amount of money due to the difference in expense ratios is much closer to $408, and suddenly you’re talking about significant money.

Even with the $60,000 mentioned in the question, you’re talking about an approximate annual difference of $24.08, which may be less than the value they get from talking face-to-face with an advisor.

What about the difference in expense ratios? Let’s say that one fund has an expense ratio of 0.06% and the other has a ratio of 0.60%. You’re talking about a rough difference of $55.08 per year on an investment of $10,000, and $5,508 per year on an investment of $1,000,000. That’s a big difference.

Again, these types of comparisons only mean anything if you’re comparing very similar investments. The greater the difference between the investments, the less it means in the sense of a direct comparison.

As a rule of thumb, I usually subtract the expense ratio from the annual return numbers on any investment I look at. Although this isn’t anything like an exact comparison, it does give me an idea of how much I’m going to be hamstrung by their expense ratio over the years.

Usually, this leads me to investments with very low ratios. Usually, I find these types of investments at Vanguard or Fidelity, the two places you mention.

It is important to note that you shouldn’t just chase low expense ratios when you’re investing. Putting everything in the investment with the lowest expense ratio isn’t well diversified and will lose you money.

To put it simply, when you’re investing small amounts and the difference between the expenses in comparable investments is small, you’re talking about pennies (or a few dollars). But if either of those factors grows large, you’re quickly talking about dollars – and often lots of dollars.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Investment Fees appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Alexis writes in: My husband and I go through a jar of salsa a week. Problem is, the brands without high fructose corn syrup average $2.79 at our grocery store. Would it be cheaper to make our own? Since tomato season is about to end on the East Coast, would canned tomatoes make a difference in the DIY route?

I’m with you on avoiding the high fructose corn syrup in salsas. I try to avoid it in everything I eat. The human body doesn’t need it, to say the least.

Of course, when you make that choice, prices go up. As you mention, it’s pretty tough to find salsa in the store without corn syrup in it for under $3 per jar.

But how much does it cost to make salsa at home? I like Alton Brown’s simple salsa recipe, so I’ll use that as an example. It contains:

6 Roma tomatoes, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 seeded and minced jalapenos, plus 2 roasted, skinned and chopped jalapenos
1 red bell pepper, fine dice
1/2 red onion, fine chopped
2 dry ancho chiles, seeded, cut into short strips and snipped into pieces
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 lime, juiced
Chili powder, salt, and pepper, to taste
Fresh scallions, cilantro or parsley, to taste

I went to the local grocery store and price-checked these items, using a few simple substitutions (like diced tomatoes for the Romas). I came up with a total of $4.40.

I then made a batch of this and found that it made a volume of salsa equal to about two and a half typical salsa jars. I saved it fresh in the refrigerator.

So, my cost per jar of making it from scratch is about $1.80. This assumes, of course, that I keep it fresh in the refrigerator and don’t can it. If I choose to can it, the cost is going to start approaching that of just buying a jar in the store.

My conclusion is that if you’re just making some fresh salsa for a party or something, it’s cheaper to make good salsa yourself. However, if you’re making it to can, you’re going to want to think about your approach carefully.

Of course, there’s one big key to all of this: the garden. If you have a garden that can provide you some or all of the ingredients in the recipe, your salsa is going to be less expensive whether you can it or not.

For example, pulling just the tomatoes and a bell pepper from one’s own garden drops the price of ingredients by about half. Plus, your salsa will taste better. This saves dollars, not pennies, and it saves your taste buds, too.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Making Your Own Salsa appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Jenny writes in: One thing my mom always did and that I’ve started doing is to make the equivalent of prepackaged meals and store them in Ziplocs to use in the future. How much does this really save?

On the surface, I think this is a really good idea. Many mixes that you buy at the store can very easily be assembled at home, where you have much more control over the individual ingredients and thus the healthiness of the meal mix as well as the price.

The question is whether or not you can actually save a significant amount of money by doing this. My calculations seem to show that most of the time, you do save money by making the mixes yourself.

I’ll use minestrone soup as an example.

You can easily get Bear Creek minestrone soup mix for $3.96 a bag. A bag mix weighs about 9.3 ounces and has the usual ingredients you’d expect for minestrone soup.

What about a dry soup mix? I based my “dry” minestrone soup off of this recipe from the Washington Post. A dry mix would thus contain:

2 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon good-quality beef bouillon granules (may substitute vegetable bouillon granules)
3 tablespoons minced dried onions
3 tablespoons coarsely chopped dry-packed (not oil-packed) sun-dried tomatoes (may substitute chopped freeze-dried tomatoes or dried sweet pepper pieces or dried chives, or a combination)
1 1/4 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
1 teaspoon dried marjoram leaves (may substitute dried thyme leaves)
1/2 teaspoon dried minced garlic (may substitute garlic powder; do not use garlic salt)
Scant 1/8 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes (may substitute 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper)
1/4 cup uncooked pearl barley
1/4 cup dried red or brown lentils
1/4 cup dried green or yellow split peas
1/4 cup dried kidney beans
1/4 cup dried cannelloni beans or great northern white beans
1/2 cup dried medium-size macaroni, penne or corkscrew pasta

This recipe ends up making about twice as much as the Bear Creek mix.

Much like the Bear Creek mix, I found each ingredient on Amazon, estimated how much of it I would use in this mix, and added up the cost. It came up to about $4.23 a batch, which is about twice the size of the Bear Creek bag. If you divide this in half, you have a total of about $2.11 per bag – about $1.85 cheaper than the Bear Creek minestrone mix.

I did some very rough estimates of other mixes and consistently found myself coming out with an ingredient cost adding up to about 60%-75% of the prepackaged mix.

You might be thinking, “Great! Let’s make our own mixes and save money!” Not so fast.

First of all, there’s a time cost involved. You’re going to have to invest some time into this project. Each mix will have to be made by hand, measured out, and mixed.

Second, you’re going to need containers. We often use small Rubbermaid containers for these kinds of things, but Ziplocs work, too. Yes, you’ll reuse these containers a lot, but there’s still a cost.

Third, and perhaps the most painful, you’re going to have some leftover ingredients. Unless you want these ingredients to go to waste (which would reduce the value you get from doing this), you’re going to have to plan for other mixes and meals to use the leftover ingredients. One solution, of course, is to just make a lot of mixes and give the extras away as gifts.

For me, these three drawbacks aren’t severe enough to overcome the benefits and savings of making my own mixes. I love having a container in the cupboard that I can just toss into a pot, add some water (and maybe some vegetables), and immediately have soup. This is especially nice when I know the ingredients in the mix are good and it’s less expensive than buying a soup kit in the store.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Meal Mixes appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Ron writes in: Does it really save a lot to ride a bicycle around town instead of driving? I have a Ford pickup that gets about twenty miles per gallon If I were to drive to the post office and the grocery store, it would be a four mile round trip. From what I can see, that bicycle ride would only save me about sixty cents in gas.

This is a lot trickier than it sounds. The biggest reason is that the cost of using your truck for this excursion is much greater than just the cost of gas. So let’s start by running through these expenses.

Gas If gas is $3.50 a gallon and your vehicle gets 20 miles per gallon, that’s $0.18 per mile just for gas.

Prorated cost of the vehicle Let’s say you bought this truck for $15,000 and intend to drive it for 100,000 miles. That means that the cost per mile for the vehicle itself is $0.15.

Oil If you can get your oil changed for $30 every 3,000 miles, you’re adding $0.01 per mile to your drive.

Other maintenance This varies so much from vehicle to vehicle that it’s difficult to estimate, but I’d put it at at least $0.03 per mile.

There’s also the fact that some number of failures are going to happen while you own the vehicle, which has to be prorated into the cost. If you have three repairs of $1,000 each, you’re going to be spending $0.03 per mile to effectively cover those repairs.

Insurance Insurance needs to be prorated into every mile that you drive it, too. If you drive it 1,000 miles a month and insurance costs you $80 a month, you’re spending $0.08 per mile to cover insurance.

That’s $0.48 per mile, right there.

If your trip to the post office and the store requires four miles of driving, then you’re burning $1.92 in that short trip.

Now, what about that bicycle? The bicycle I own cost less than $100 and requires no upkeep other than air, which I get for free at the gas station. I’ve ridden on it for thousands of miles by now, which gets me down well below $0.10 per mile in cost.

Riding that trip, for me, would cost about $0.30 on my bike, give or take.

Clearly, riding a bike for simple errands is less expensive than using a vehicle. However, the vehicle is going to be quicker than the bicycle. How much quicker depends heavily on where you’re at. For example, I can get to many destinations within my town almost as quickly on a bicycle as I can in a car because I can take shortcuts through parks, utilize bike lanes, and so on. This varies a lot depending on your community.

There’s also the fact that bicycle riding is far better for your health than driving a car. The exercise you get while riding a bike has health benefits in the long term and energy benefits in the short term, a value which is again hard to calculate but leans toward the bicycle strongly.

Is riding a bike around town going to save you a mint? No, but it will save you a little and it’ll improve your health at the same time without adding too much time to your day.

The post Saving Pennies or Dollars? Riding a Bicycle appeared first on The Simple Dollar.