365 Ways to Live Cheap (15 page)
187. W
ATCH
L
ESS
T
ELEVISION
According to the South Dakota Department of Health, the average adult watches television for 31.5 hours a week. That’s a lot of time lost, but it’s also expensive; the average cable/satellite bill runs around $50 a month. That’s not all. The average television uses about 75 watts of energy and the average cable box uses 15 watts. That means in an average year, television usage eats up $15 worth of energy, too. And we’re not even including the cost of buying the television. Even more problematic is that television is laden with commercials encouraging you to buy more stuff, both during the commercial breaks and via product placements in the programs themselves. Do yourself a favor and cut back on television viewing. You’ll not only cut back on your energy use (saving money), but you’ll also find yourself having more time to do the things you wish you had time to do, like talking to a relative or an old friend or taking care of an unfinished household task. Turn the television off and you’ll have time to turn some of your life back on.
C
HEAP
T
ACTIC
$
FOR
G
ROCERIES AND
S
UPPLIES
189 Go Grocery Shopping Once a Week at Most
190 Eat Before You Go Grocery Shopping
191 Plan Your Meals Using the Grocery Store Flyer
192 Make a Grocery List Before You Go
193 Get Comfortable with Cooking
194 Avoid Frozen and Prepackaged Meals
195 Make Recipes with Inexpensive Base Ingredients
200 Cook in Advance and Freeze Complete Meals
201 Prepare Extra Batches of Other Meals
202 Master the Art of the Slow Cooker
203 Cut Down on Coffee, Soft Drinks, and Bottled Water
204 Look into Joining a Community-Supported Agriculture Group
206 Buy Generic Brand Products
207 Try a More Value-Oriented Grocery Store
208 Master the Concept of Cost per Use
209 Get Maximum Use out of Supplies Like Baking Soda and Vinegar
188. D
ON
’T E
AT
O
UT AS
O
FTEN
Eating out on a regular basis can get very expensive. Aside from low-end fast food, there’s almost no meal you can eat outside the home that’s not far more expensive than a virtually identical dish you can prepare at home. You can usually prepare it much faster and with healthier ingredients. The only way to get good at this, and to really reap the cost benefits of eating at home, is to do it all the time. Reduce eating out (and ordering delivery or take-out) to special occasions only and start busting out the pots and pans more often. Not only will your wallet thank you, but your taste buds will, too. As you gain more practice at cooking, your dishes will become more delicious.
189. G
O
G
ROCERY
S
HOPPING
O
NCE A
W
EEK
A
T
M
OST
Think about your average grocery store trip. You wind up buying mostly stuff you need, but a few odd and unexpected items always wind up in your cart. You’ve usually got enough fortitude to keep the items to a minimum, but they wind up in there each trip. The simplest way to curtail those extra items, and to save on gas and time as well, is to get into a routine of going to the grocery store less often. You should go once a week at most. Not only will you save time and gas this way, but you’ll also cut down on the number of extras you dump into the cart.
190. E
AT
B
EFORE
Y
OU
G
O
G
ROCERY
S
HOPPING
One of the most dangerous expenses in the grocery store is the impulse buy, and impulse buys are often directly caused by hunger. When you’re in a grocery store and you’re feeling hungry, many more items are going to look tasty to you and are thus much more likely to sneak their way into your cart. There’s a simple way to suppress this grocery shopping impulse: Eat a small meal just before you leave to go grocery shopping. That way you’re not hungry, but you’re also not bogged down with a heavy meal in your stomach. This will allow you to keep your energy up and get finished with shopping quickly, but not be tempted to throw extras into your cart just because you’re hungry and impulsive.
191. P
LAN
Y
OUR
M
EALS
U
SING THE
G
ROCERY
S
TORE
F
LYER
Another effective way to manage those weekly grocery store trips is to start off with a plan for what you’ll eat in the coming week. The cheapest way to get started is to pull out the flyer from your local grocery store (often included in community flyers or in the Sunday paper) and see which items are being sold very cheaply to get you in the door. Identify a handful of these, then use them to plan your meals for the week by using those items as the core ingredients in most if not all of your dishes. For example, if you notice that chicken is discounted highly, as is broccoli, look for dishes that utilize both and plan one or two of them for the week. Not only does this reduce your cost, but it also encourages diverse meals when you base your meals on what’s on sale instead of eating the same old tired thing you buy on every grocery trip.
192. M
AKE A
G
ROCERY
L
IST
B
EFORE
Y
OU
G
O
Once you have the meal plan ready, make a list of all of the ingredients you’ll need for those dishes that you don’t have on hand and any other staples you might need in a pinch. Take this to the store with you and use it. That means focus on nothing but gathering the items on the list and getting them into the cart. With a focused list like this, you know everything you need is on the list, thus you don’t have to wander down the aisles or through the produce section hoping to stumble upon an idea for a meal to prepare. Everything you need is on that list. This not only saves you time in the store, but it also greatly reduces impulse buying.
193. G
ET
C
OMFORTABLE WITH
C
OOKING
One major challenge that keeps many people out of the kitchen is a fear of cooking. The easiest way to get comfortable with cooking is just to try it, starting with simple recipes. You don’t have to match the latest amazing creation you saw on television. Just try beating some eggs and a dash of milk with a spoon and cooking it in a pan over medium heat, scraping the eggs away from the side until it tastes right. With only ten minutes, three eggs, and a pinch of salt, you have a delicious meal for just thirty cents or so. When you start with simple recipes and do them over and over again, you start mastering the little techniques, and eventually the things that seemed impossible before may not seem so hard—eventually they may even seem easy. The biggest step, though, is the first one. Get out there in your kitchen and try something.
194. A
VOID
F
ROZEN AND
P
REPACKAGED
M
EALS
On the surface, these seem like good deals—complete meals for just a few dollars! But once you read the ingredient list, then open up the package and see what you actually get for your dollar, it becomes a pretty poor deal, indeed. You should cut frozen and prepackaged meals out of your buying habits. If you like the convenience of just pulling a meal out of the freezer, popping it in the microwave, and chowing down, prepare a bunch of individual frozen meals in advance, like handmade frozen burritos and the like. Your cost per item will drop and the food will be healthier, too.
195. M
AKE
R
ECIPES WITH
I
NEXPENSIVE
B
ASE
I
NGREDIENTS
One quick way to start saving serious money in the kitchen is by learning how to cook inexpensive staple foods very well. Learn the art of preparing beans and bean dishes, for starters, and focus on other inexpensive staple foods: fresh vegetables and fruit in season, eggs, pasta, tuna, and oatmeal are all inexpensive places to start. Coupled with a strong assortment of basic spices, you have the backbone of many wonderful meals just with those basic items in various combinations— fresh fruit in oatmeal, pasta with tuna, pasta with tuna and fresh vegetables, beans with fresh vegetables, beans with eggs, and so on. If you learn to master these basic staples in the kitchen, it’ll be much easier to move on to more advanced recipes—and you’ll save a ton of money as you learn.
196. S
TART A
G
ARDEN
If you have a bit of space where you live to break ground, gardening can be an extremely cost-effective hobby and can be as good as putting money in your pocket. You have to make some up-front investments— the cost of seeds and starter plants, the cost of a hoe or other equipment to break ground, and the time investment needed to tend to your plants—but you’ll earn a nice harvest at the end of the summer. You’ll have spent a lot of time in the garden on a very frugal activity, time you might have spent elsewhere engaging in expensive hobbies. In some fruitful seasons, you’ll more than break even with the value of the produce you grow, and you have the freedom to grow the foods that you like. Don’t have space? Try starting a window garden or a box garden. You can grow a small amount of food in one of these in even the tightest of spaces.
197. L
EARN TO
L
OVE
L
EFTOVERS
Many people turn up their nose at the idea of leftovers. The mere thought of reheating food originally prepared a day or two before convinces many that the food will be bland and rubbery, not worth eating. This assumption sadly results in a lot of good, quality food hitting the trash can before its time. The truth is that with a little bit of careful planning, leftovers can be a delicious and highly inexpensive meal. Some ideas:
Add additional spices that you have on hand to leftovers just before you serve them. This will create a fresh snap to the flavor of the food.
Use the leftovers as the basis for a second meal. For example, take leftover spaghetti and sauce, chop up the spaghetti, put it in a bread loaf pan, sprinkle some mozzarella cheese on the top, and bake it in the oven. Or take the leftover chicken breasts from the grill, dice them, and add them to a rice and vegetable skillet meal.
Freeze the leftovers. This especially works well if you’ve made a large batch of soup and have plenty left over. Freeze it in portion-sized containers.