Photo Credit: chefranden

I found this earlier this week, and thought that while it is a departure from thinking about frugality in terms of dollars and cents, it brings up another facet of frugality that I often see overlooked: frugality with time. Yes, time is money.

Sometimes, it’s really easy to overlook how much you can squeeze out of just a few minutes. When looking at a task, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by the surrounding tasks. Next time you walk by one of these tasks, give it a try. Focus on nothing else but the small task, and see how much easier the big picture is.

So, check out About.com ’s take on 30 Second Chores.

I am mentally debating focusing a few more articles on frugality of time. Let me know if you think this is a good idea.

Photo: rakspassion

Some Background

This is just an idea that I have been kicking around. I think it might have legs. I actually searched for two whole minutes to see if it had already been done. I found one, but it wasn’t what I really liked. Rather than bore you all with a design spec, I will tell a little story.

I’ll Tell you a Story

This evening, I was cleaning up my office, and I realized that I needed some plastic storage totes. I see them all the time in sales circulars for dirt cheap at local stores. Unfortunately, I don’t remember when I saw them last. I don’t know which store. I do know that I can find the flyers online, and go through each of them. Although it’s totally awesome to be able to get all the flyers at once, this still seems like only half a solution.

After mulling this around, I decided to go ahead just buy them at the first place I hit tomorrow, and dream up a solution in the meantime.

A Possible Solution – In English

Wouldn’t it be great if there was a website that did the following?

1. Pull all the sales flyers and circulars from the internet.
2. Index them.
3. Allow users to search those indices based on geographical location.

For instance, I need plastic containers. My profile would know where I live, and spit out a listing of all plastic containers in my area. I could also do the same search with “pork chops”, “oranges” or whatever.

That way, I could quickly find the best deal at the time on the items I am looking for. For things I buy all the time, like milk, I could set up an alert that would tell me where milk goes on sale each week.

While I am still in the “I’m thinking out loud” mode, I really think this could be done. Sadly, it would take more than just one guy (me) to do this. I could handle the coding, but not the design or the social engineering of the site. If you are interested in what I am talking about, read the next section.

A Possible Solution – In Dork

Just about everything about this site is simple. No one is going to bust a brain stem on this. There is, however, some work that would need to be done.

Without doing much homework, I am guessing that most store sites (CVS, Walgreen, and the like) do not have an RSS feed of their weekly sales. I don’t really have any interest in figuring out where the sites host their sales, then either scraping their site, or indexing their pdf (well, this might not be too bad.. yeah.. it will). Meanwhile, you would have to monitor each site for any changes in how the code their sites and where they store their info (yick!). It might be better to work out a deal with the store to get access to an RSS feed. I would imagine that the companies would be more than happy to sit down and hear out the pluses on them doing such a thing.

The other problem is that, once a deal is struck and the RSS feed is a reality, anyone else could step in and do the same thing. I also don’t know how I would feel about getting exclusive rights to an RSS feed. That just feels sleazy to me. Be that as it may, I still have bills to pay, and have to have some income coming in. On the other hand, the site could rely on ad revenue.

Anyway, I am still thinking out loud, but I would love to open a discussion on this, and possibly make it a reality with the help of one or two other people.

Let me know what you think.

photo: NuriKharah

Okay, over the past few weeks, I have been flooded with requests for my meatball recipe. To type this thing up, I have to find time to sit in front of my computer, open up a text editor, and bang away. I have decided that while I am at it, I might as well write an article I have been promising myself that I would write soon.

If all you’re looking for is the recipe, it’s at the bottom of this article. Feel free to scroll past the breakdown.

The main reason I wanted to look into this is that I saw a story on TV stating that it was cheaper to eat out than to cook dinner. In all reality, they were eating at drive throughs and buying off the dollar menu, but it really did make me wonder how much it cost to feed my family a good nutritious meal. My test meal? Spaghetti, meatballs, and garlic bread.

Having had such a meal in restaurants infinity times, I let’s break this down for a family of four:

For four: $46.96 + $9 (tip) = $55.96

This excludes dessert and grown up drinks. Add those, and your bill can really skyrocket.

How much to cook in?

Let’s price out the recipe below. Your mileage may vary, but I am gonna say you should have enough for dinner one night, and lunch for someone the next day (we cage match over the leftovers.. just sayin..).

*I am making the assumption that you are making bread from scratch, according to an old post I wrote on baking. This also includes a whole full sized loaf of bread.

So, let’s pretend we are being really tight, and we go through the drive through, and everyone gets one item. This would be a total of $3.96. In other words, for $3.38 cents more, the family could eat a great meal.

Let’s also pretend that instead of eating leftovers tomorrow, that one person bought another burger for lunch. That means it’s only $2.39 more. If, at any time two people want fries, the difference is now only 41 cents.

So, eating off the dollar menu doesn’t sound so good anymore does it?

Conclusion

while feeding everyone (1) one dollar hamburger might sound cheaper up front, it’s really only marginally cheaper, and horrifyingly less nutritious.

Post Conclusion – Is this doable?

The big question that people are going to ask: where do I get the three hours to cook? The quick answer would be to make a triple batch, split it into three parts, and freeze two of those parts. Then, at mealtime, all you have to do is thaw, boil some noodles, and eat!
There are more solutions, but we can hit them in a later article.

The Meatball Recipe

Okay, here goes. The first part is for the sauce, the second is for the meatballs. This is the base recipe. It will easily feed four people. You can multiply this recipe from here.

The Sauce

• One half green bell pepper, chopped
• One half white onion, chopped.
• One clove of garlic.
• Half a teaspoon of fennel seed
• A sprinkle of cayenne.
• 1/2 tablespoon of oregano
• 1 15 oz can of your favorite sauce – I use Hunt’s.

Into a blop of olive oil, toss the fennel seeds. Heat until they start to sizzle. Toss in the peppers and onions. Enjoy the smell! As soon as the onions start to go translucent, toss in the garlic. Cook for about thirty seconds, stirring. Drop in your can of sauce. Lower the heat and cook covered, as this stuff will splatter on your kitchen and clothes and make a mess.

The Meatballs

While your sauce is heating, hit this:

• Half Pound of Italian Sausage
• Half Pound of Ground Beef
• 1/2 cup bread crumbs
• 2 eggs
• 1/4 water
• Half a small can of tomato paste
• 1/2 Parmesan. Get real parmesan and grate it. Not out of a can!!

Mix the sausage and the hamburger together. Mix it well. You can do it by hand, I use the paddle on my stand mixer. When mixed, add the rest of the ingredients. Mix only well enough to combine everything. Don’t mix the hell out of it. Just make sure everything is well combined.

Using wet hands, make egg sized (but round) meatballs, and place them into the sauce. Make sure they are all covered.

Simmer for about 45 minutes with NO STIRRING. This will allow the meatballs to form without getting mushy. Cook another hour and a half or so.

Enjoy!

eraphernalia_vintage

At first glance, it sounded like a neat idea, but I quickly remembered that I have been doing the frugal kitchen thing for quite some time, and did not have endless stockpiles of Hungry Man meals at my disposal. I let the idea drop.

Until.

Looking into my pantry, I realized that it was overflowing with purchases that I had made without really thinking. I also had things stuffed into corners of the pantry that were picked up by a more impulsive shopping partner. My whole kitchen could maybe make three meals, tops, but the accumulation of canned kitsch was impressive.

I decided that the herd of cans and packets needed to be thinned. Not like a lion casing the joint for a wobbly zebra, but a slower and more complex hunt. It was on.

Some Definitions

Fumbling through my dusty pile, I realized that there were only a few categories that these cans fit in:

• I’d Hit That! – These are foods that I really would eat. I usually forget that I have them in the house, so I buy them again. And again. Cans of tomato paste, tomato sauce, italian sauce, green beans. You get the idea. Anything you would possibly eat (even if it’s at 2AM after last call) goes in this category.
• No Way, Jose – These are the things no one in your house would touch. Some leftovers from out of town visitors, an ex flame who had this thing for cans of pickled hobbit knuckles, canned okra. That kind of food goes in this category.
• Expired – Yes, even modern food preservation techniques can’t be stretched into eternity. Sooner or later, your pickled beets will be magically transformed into purple botulism death.

Armed with these definitions, the rules are simple.

Rules of the Game

Here’s where it gets interesting.

While you are making your artful frugal grocery list , each meal must address one of those mystery cans.

Take a good hard look at your shelves, and pick one can for each day. Once you do this for a week, you might even want to do two cans a day. Take that one can, and categorize it:

• I’d Hit That! – This can goes into one of your meals. Craft your menu around using that can for a meal. Hit a few cans of soup for lunch, and you can save a pile of money!
• No Way, Jose! – While canned smoked ox tongue may sound horrible to you, chances are that if they made a whole canning factory to put said tongues into said cans, someone out there thinks this is a delicacy. Put this in a box. This box is destined for charity. There are probably several charities in your town which would gladly take your cast offs.
• Expired! – Well, do us all a favor and throw this out.

Do this for a few weeks, and watch your pantry become magically cleaner!

Endgame

Since I no longer stockpile my refrigerator or freezer with unnecessary purchases, they are both in good shape. If you are new to restraining from rote and impulse grocery shopping, you might want to play this same game with your refrigerator.

It beats the pants of cleaning everything all at once, and I think it encourages some actual thought before randomly pitching things.

Advanced Game

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Does it pay?

When I was a kid, my parents would follow us around the house shutting off lights and mumbling something about money growing on trees. Now that I am a parent, I find myself in that same role. While I have no aspirations of finding that tree money grows on, I have started to wonder if:

1. My panic at seeing all the lights on is warranted.
2. Keeping all these lights running is really costing me that much money.
3. Since I have replaced my burned out lights with CFL (compact fluorescents), is this taking the edge off?

I started crunching the numbers, and this is what i found.

Determining usage

How the electric company figures your bill

The electric company pretty much has a gizmo just like this (but more rugged, and more thoroughly calibrated.) Your bill is based on killowatt hours. This is wattage used by an appliance multiplied by the time that wattage is used. For example:

• A 100 watt bulb, running for ten hours, uses 100 watts x 10 hours / 1000w/kw = 1 killowatt-hour.

• If you look at your electric bill, you will see that they tell you how much you pay per killowatt-hour. First Energy charges me 7.36 cents. So the cost to me to run that 100 watt bulb is 7.36 cents.

Okay, so that number doesn’t seem to warrant too much freaking out.

Checking out my house

I did a quick check on my house, to see what lights get left on most often. Those are: The living room, the kitchen, basement. Just to be fair, I gave decided to estimate the hours that the lights were on when no one was using them. That time was about two hours per day.
This is how it worked out:

So, this tells me that if I fret and run around the house turning off lights, I stand to save less than two bucks. If I relax about the lights, I get to settle down a bit, and it only costs me two bucks.

Replacing my lights with CFLs

Compact Flourescent Lights are dropping in price every day. Now, whenever a bulb burns out, I replace it with a CFL. I decided to do a little calculating to see how much this transition saved me over the course of a month.

My house is small. We only have about three rooms being lit at once, and then, only for an average of about 5 hours per day. That number will rise in the winter, but not much. So, let’s see how much it costs me to light my house, assuming those numbers, as opposed to incandescent lighting.

The trick with CFLs is they give you two wattage ratings. One, the wattage rating for the power they use, and the other, the equivalent incandescent wattage. In each room, we have two 26 watt bulbs (100 incandescent watts each) and one 15 watt (60 incandescent watts) bulb. This gives me 260 incandescent watts for the cost of 67 watts.

So, here’s how much it costs to light my house either way, assuming 3 rooms, 260 incandescent watts, 5 hours/day, and 30 days:

So, the total savings for each month is $6.41.

Now, if you are in a similar situation, but have not made the transition to CFL yet, you can assume the lights will cost you about $3.20 each. In this case, each month, the cost of two bulbs will be saved. So, in my case, I recouped the cost of the bulbs in five months.

Is it worth it?

From what I understand, all bulbs will be switching to CFL soon, so we will not have a choice. But yes, it seems to be worth it. In order to get an equivalent light, you spend about a quarter of the cost in electricity.

As for shutting off every light in the house as and following people around to do so, no, it’s not worth it. Now that the usage has dropped by three fourths, it is really not worth it.

Now, my electric bill is still about $100 dollars a month. This might justify me buying the Kill A Watt EZ Electricity Usage Monitor to track down the culprit, but at this point, it’s not a good idea for me to be spending money. I have a suspicion it’s the cable box, the tivo, the tv, or some major appliance.
So, remember that wish list , and if I get one, I promise to teach you all how to find what is killing your electric bill.

For years, I have driven past the sign for the local bulk food store. Every time I see the sign go by, I vow to stop in one day. The inception of this website was a push to get me to finally step in to my local bulk food store, The Food Dock

Bulk food stores buy staples (and an assortment of other goodies) by the truckload, and break the quantities down, and sell them in plain plastic bags. This allows them to sell staples at a much lower cost to you.

Some examples of the pricing include:

• Flour – 55 cents a pound. So, a ten pound bag is only $5.50. If you want to save even more, you can buy a 50 pound bag for $18, or 36 cents a pound. Compare this to about $7 for the same amount of flour at the grocery store.
• Spices – Spices vary, but none of them are more than $1 for a baby food jar full (about an ounce). At the grocery store, the same spices sell for anywhere between five and eight dollars.
• Baking yeast – If you decide to start baking your own bread, the first thing you should do is drop the idea of baking with packaged yeast. The cost of such yeast is about $3.05 per ounce. A full pound of baking yeast goes for $3.47 at bulk food stores.
• Baking needs – While I am not familiar with the prices of baking supplies, they offer the same discounts on anything else you would need for baking, including: corn meal, baking chocolate, baking powder and soda, etc.
• Health products – Dried fruit, Wheat germ, flax seed, and all the other health products are available for similar discounts and packaging.

Some things to remember:

• Since bulk food stores don’t have the same dollar power as bigger stores, you need to keep an the store hours and plan accordingly. They are usually open 9-5, but check beforehand to make sure.
• Before you buy a truckload of something perishable, make sure you can use it up before it goes bad. Per pound pricing is usually the same no matter what quantity you buy, and several quantities are available, so you can buy what you need, and still cash in on the savings.

If you live in my area (Ashland, OH), you can try the following places. Otherwise, check your phone book for more info, then go out and explore!

• The Food Dock 479 Township Road 1275 Ashland, OH 44805 419-281-3084.
• The Hayesville Corn Crib – 4 E Main St Hayesville, OH 44838 (419) 368-7500.
  The Corn Crib also sells lunch meat and cheese at great prices.

If you decide to go adventuring into the world of bulk food stores, let me know..

• One loaf of sandwich bread for $2.89
• One loaf of sourdough bread for $4.99

In retrospect, this sounds like a good deal of money.

Since I like to cook/bake, i decided to find out how much it would cost to bake artisan bread myself. Today, I am going to look at sourdough bread. This isn’t the simplest bread to make, but it will demonstrate pretty quickly if there are any cost savings.
I am not going to give a full rundown on the art and science of sourdough, but I will point you to a few sites that contain tons of great information:

• The Yankee Gardener – This is the recipe I usually make, just because it has the first sponging step, and you can actually see something happening.
• Sourdough Home – These guys have a sourdough recipe that taste just like back home (California).
• Fast Track Sourdough – Read this site for a great primer on sourdough.

If you should get interested in pursuing this further, let me know, and I will make arrangements to get your a starter.

One other thing to mention is that I am pricing this out based on picking up flour from my local bulk food supplier. In the future, I will give you more detail on how these work. Suffice it to day that I bought ten pounds of flour at 55 cents a pound. Here is the price per cup of flour calculation that I will use for all future calculations. Hopefully, the price of flour will not fluctuate enough to render this calculation dated very soon.

• One cup of flour weighs four ounces, while not exact, this is pretty close.
• There are 4 cups of flour in a pound of flour.
• A cup of flour costs about 14 cents. This shall be our hallowed number.
• If you buy flour in a 50lb sack, you can get it for 36 cents a pound!

*Note that the asterisks denote that these items should be in any well stocked kitchen (more about this in a new article). The costs for these are negligible.

This recipe makes two loaves of bread, so the effective cost of baking bread is about 63 cents a loaf plus a few cents for gas to heat the oven.

So, does baking your own bread pay off? let’s look at the pros and cons:

Pros

• Eight loaves of home made bread costs as much as 1 loaf of store bought bread.
• Home made bread tastes much better than store bought bread.
• Home made bread is much healthier than store bought bread.

Cons

• Unless you have a dough hook and heavy mixer, it takes alot of work to knead this recipe.
• To make a loaf of this bread, you will need to plan ahead. Start the recipe the night before, and you will have bread by dinner the next day.
• You will need to maintain your starter. This takes about ten minutes a week or so, but you have to do it.

So, for me, it turns out that baking my own bread is well worth the cost. Let me know what you decide.