Money-Saving Tips..............Arion

Money-Saving Tips

While answering a question for Desert Lotus, I offered some money saving tips, and tohught it might make an interesting post:

1) One of the biggest expenditures is food. Fancy stores like Whole Foods offer organic produce and snappy-looking foods for premium prices. But you don't have to get that stuff to eat well. One way that my fiancée and I cut costs is by shopping smart. We avoid the premium stores and instead go to bargain places like Grocery Outlet or FoodMaxx. Their products are perfectly good, and much cheaper than Safeway.

2) Cooking can also save a ton of money. The last time I went shopping, I saw a guy with a shopping cart filled with frozen boxes of pre-buttered bread called Texas Toast, and a bunch of frozen pizzas . I added up all the money in my head and felt sad. He could have made pizza and garlic bread at home for way less than he was paying to get it pre-made. My fiancée and I spend every evening making our dinner together! It's fun, and it's so easy! I've got a collection of about fifty cookbooks, and once a week we pick out what we're going to make, and from that menu we also know what to buy. So much money is saved by not buying processed foods it's amazing. My last grocery bill totaled only $70!

3) Learn your vegetables! When I gave up eating meat last fall (for weight-loss purposes) I started learning a lot about vegetables and fruits. There are all kinds of things that are regularly overlooked like parsnips or collard greens that are perfectly edible and can be bought for small change. Squash is a great entree which can be purchased for next to nothing and is very good eating. One of my favorite foods now is lentils! A pot of lentils cooked with dried red peppers, garlic and tomatoes can feed us for 3 - 4 days and can be made for less than $10.00.

4) Avoid soft drinks. Canned drinks routinely cost a couple of bucks and they are so unhealthy it's not even funny. Carbonated water turns your bones to dried wood, and the amount of sugar in just one drink can run as high as fourteen teaspoonfuls! I drink nothing but water or tea. A trick from my college days is to get a transparent plastic pitcher (cost: $3.00) and fill it with a few teabags and then leave it out in the sun in the morning. By day's end, it's sun-tea, packed with Vitamin D. One pitcher-full can last me all week. By using a thermos, you can bring iced water or tea with you anywhere you go.

5) Go to the library for your entertainment. Not just books, but DVDs and music can be acquired for free. My fiancée and I are regulars there. We've cut our cable bill and still enjoy quality videos, and read the newest books for nothing.

6) One of the things my fiancee introduced me to is used clothing. Yeah, I know it sounds horrible, but it's actually a lot of fun. There's a big thrift store chain called Savers. We go there several times a year. I've picked up some wonderful pinstripe shirts to wear to work, and my students have told me that I'm a "snappy dresser". I also got a great-looking black jacket which research told me retails for $125. My cost? Only $15.00! I've also picked up summer shorts and dress pants for next to nothing. The stuff is perfectly clean and unstained.

7) Garage sales and flea markets offer unheard of treasures. One woman I know has decorated her whole house with second-hand items. She has lounge chairs, garden ornaments, and hanging plants in her garden; ornate wood furniture in her house from the 1940s, and an old New York City park bench on her front porch. All of it was picked up for pennies on the dollar at flea markets. Remember: just because it's secondhand doesn't mean it's second-rate!

8) Reuse and re-purpose. Back when I was running my own business, I had two printers and a fax machine that were constantly eating paper. I also noticed that 90% of what I was printing was not correspondence; in other words, I didn't need to use real printer paper. So what I started doing was using things like advertising circulars that had one blank side. I also picked up several reams of old bills of lading from a liquidation sale and used that to print on. I saved a couple thousand dollars a year.

9) I run an online business, and for a long time when I got a customer's order I would print an extra copy for my files. Then I thought: why waste the paper? So, I started saving the order as a virtual record and storing it on my memory. My filing cabinet is a lot lighter, and I save paper.

10) One of my favorite new websites is the Internet Archive, https://archive.org/index.php. It's filled to bursting with books, videos, audio, and completely free. Now, when I go grocery shopping, I use the archive to call up a radio show from the 1930s on my iPhone. The supermarkets are filled with screaming kids and hideous muzak. But on my ear-buds I can listen to Dragnet, The Phantom, or any number of informational podcasts.

Saving money need not be dull nights of clipping coupons or looking for sales. It's easy and fun!

I avoid the malls and retail shops and everything is just fine.

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