The Simple Dollar (11 page)

In truth, a daily routine is surprisingly malleable. Most of the time, it only takes a single month of daily repetition to establish a new routine as a normal behavior. By simply pledging to use a different morning routine every day for a month, the desire to go to the coffee shop each morning slipped away quite easily.

Another major factor that made this routine easy to shed is that I realized that the part of the coffee shop I valued was nostalgic. I enjoyed that fleeting sense that I was still in touch with the earlier experiences that I valued so much. In truth, though, that experience lived on inside of me and with the relationships with people in my life. By putting time into re-establishing those relationships and simply enjoying my memories, I found the real value of those coffee shop visits without throwing down $7 a day.

A third factor is that, by visiting the coffee shop each day, the visits no longer seemed special and enjoyable. Instead, they seemed ordinary. Visits to that coffee shop were no longer a treat—they were just part of my morning routine, carried on without much conscious thought or pleasure.

Today, I visit a coffee shop perhaps once every two or three months. Those visits are quite enjoyable, as I’m able to enjoy the specialness of the moment. It feels like a real treat instead of just another tired routine. Yet, in the mornings when I used to stop at the coffee shop, I no longer feel the need. I have the great memories of my younger years and strong relationships with the people I care about from those days. Instead, I have a new morning routine, one that keeps my wallet in my pocket and my future clearly in mind.

What routines do you hold to without question? Do you have daily money leaks in your life that seem almost unchangeable? Step back for a moment and ask yourself
why
you’re spending this money each day. Are
you getting personal value each day out of this routine? Or are you merely running on nostalgia and dreams? Is there perhaps a better routine you could utilize—like working on relationships with others instead of spending money?

If you genuinely find value in a routine, by all means, keep that routine. Some routines do make our lives better. However, I’ve found that the things that we often consider to be beyond question are often the things that are hurting us the most and are the very things that we truly benefit from changing.

One constant regular drain on our wallet comes in the form of food. We are constantly bombarded with food options: dining out, fast food, convenient boxed meals, and so on. With this wide variety of choices—and with many of them being really convenient—it’s not surprising that we often overspend on our food options.

One important thing to remember when it comes to food choices and saving money is that
unhealthy foods have a big long-term cost that you don’t see on the sticker price.
The food on the dollar menu at your local fast food restaurant might seem like a bargain right now, but if you factor in the long-term health costs of regularly eating such food, it’s not. Unhealthy food adversely affects your health, reduces your energy level (which affects your career and your personal activity choices), adversely affects your appearance (also affecting your career and your interpersonal relationships), and, often, doesn’t save you money at all.

In terms of balancing food flavor, quality, personal health, and cost, I find the simple advice of food writer Michael Pollan to be a very useful rule of thumb. In his pro-eating manifesto,
In Defense of Food
, Pollan encourages people to “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
⁶
In that, he encourages people to stick to raw ingredients—the ones found in the produce section and the meat counter of your store—have slightly smaller portions, and to increase their vegetable intake. Each of these choices not only reduces the long-term health cost of food, but often decreases the
immediate
sticker price of food as well.

Here are ten steps toward reducing the overall cost of food in your life without reducing the taste of it:

1. Learn to cook for yourself.
   Many people—my sister-in-law, Vicky, included—argue that cooking meals from scratch is too challenging and takes too much time when compared to other convenient food options. In truth, most food options you prepare yourself are actually surprisingly fast—often faster than the time one spends waiting at a restaurant. In terms of skill, yes, it does take some time to learn how to cook properly. The best way to learn, though, is not to start off tackling coq au vin or something else that’s difficult and time consuming. Start with scrambled eggs or chili—dishes that are very simple to prepare in their basic form. Pick up a cookbook that teaches technique along with the recipes—Mark Bittman’s
   How to Cook
   Everything
   and Irma Rombauer’s
   Joy of Cooking
   are two great options for this. With even a little practice, you’ll find that making a meal for yourself at home isn’t all that time-consuming—and, quite often, the flavors are such that you’ll never want to return to convenience foods.
   
2. Prepare a meal plan and a grocery list each week.
   At our home, Saturday morning usually finds one of us making a list of the meals we intend to eat over the next week, digging through the cupboards to make sure we have all the ingredients, and then making a list of those items we don’t have. This simple process takes about twenty minutes and usually results in a surprisingly short grocery list. At the grocery store, we earn those twenty minutes back by shopping for much less time—instead of wandering from aisle to aisle trying to decide what to get, we just follow that short list. The money we save by avoiding tons of impulse buys is substantial and, in the end, it doesn’t take us any extra time.
   
3. Use a simple price list strategy to figure out which store to shop at.
   One common technique for minimizing grocery costs is the price list. First popularized by Amy Dacyczyn in her
   Tightwad Gazette
   newsletter, a price list is merely a listing of the cost of most of your commonly-purchased items at several different stores. So, for example, you might have a gallon of milk in your price book—next to it, you’d find the price of that gallon at several different stores. This way, you could use that price book to plan which store (or
   stores) to shop at for groceries that week, minimizing your cost.
   Today, with stores constantly shifting food prices and the selection seemingly changing on a daily basis, a price book doesn’t work as well. Instead, I’ve substituted what I call a “price list”—a much simpler method of doing the same thing.
   For a few weeks out of each year, I’ll shop at several different local grocery stores. At each store, I’ll get the price of the 25 items I buy most frequently—bread, milk, eggs, lettuce, and so on. I just do this as part of my weekly shopping trip. After visiting several stores, I go home and add up the cost of the 25 items from each store, giving myself a total cost of buying all those items from each of the local stores. Whichever store has the cheapest total wins my business for the next year or so.
   This simple method helps me to always dig out what the least-expensive store in the area is. Because I update the list annually, I can also keep track of changes in pricing policies of different stores and also identify whether or not a new store is worth shopping at. Doing this once a year saves me about $15 a week in groceries, according to my figures.
   
4. Use the weekly fliers.
   Many grocery store chains distribute fliers in local newspapers and on their websites describing the special deals the store is offering this week. Use these fliers to your advantage. Each week, as you begin to plan your meals,
   download the flier from your store of choice and use the discounted fresh items—meats and vegetables—as the core of the meals you plan for the week. This way, your grocery list will naturally be full of the items already on sale that week.
   
5. Prepare meals in advance and freeze them.
   For many busy families—my own included—preparing a meal from scratch every single night is difficult. Evenings are often scheduled to the gills, leaving only a short window of opportunity to get a meal on the table. Our solution is simple. On the nights when we have plenty of time to prepare a meal, we partially prepare a second or third or fourth copy of that meal, bringing it to the point that it’s ready to be tossed in the oven. Then, we freeze that prepared meal (or group of meals). If an evening is going to be busy, we get the meal out the night before to allow it to thaw; then we put it in the oven as soon as we get home. Presto—a homemade meal made of inexpensive ingredients ready to go as quickly as we need it.
   
6. Prepare convenience foods in advance and freeze them.
   The flip side of this idea for me happens in the morning when I’ve got an appointment to make. I’m rushing around, trying to get out the door, but I also know how important it is to get a good breakfast inside of me. In the past, I would compromise and stop for some fast food, but that would really add up over time. So I began to apply the same principles as the advance
   meal preparation and made myself an enormous batch of breakfast burritos in advance. Filled with beans, eggs, and salsa, they’re quite tasty—and easy to prepare, too. All I do is grab a frozen one, wrap a paper towel around it, defrost it for two minutes, cook it for another two minutes, and go! One can do the same thing with lunch burritos, sandwiches, and other similar convenience foods. It’s convenient, as healthy as you want to make it, and really inexpensive.
   
7. Chain meals together.
   During the summer, our grill gets a lot of use. I’m constantly grilling vegetables, chicken breasts, steaks, and other such items. Yet, if you took a look at our grill, you’d probably be shocked at the amount of food on it. Whenever I cook anything that could be used as a major ingredient in another dish, I make sure to cook plenty of it. This serves two big advantages. First, it allows us to buy that major ingredient in bulk, thus saving us money. Second, having that key ingredient already cooked and ready to go saves us time in preparing a homemade meal later. So, for example, I might take advantage of a “buy two, get one free” deal on chicken breasts at our preferred grocery store and then cook them all at once, saving the cooked breasts for other dishes (like chicken soup or chicken stew or a salad).
   
8. Don’t fear leftovers.
   Every second or third night, we have a “leftover” night at our home. Our dinner just consists of whatever remains from the dishes served the previous few nights, plus a new
   side dish or two if it seems necessary. Why do this? Food left uneaten is money thrown away. Besides, it’s incredibly easy to add new flavor to leftovers. Just spice it up a bit with fresh ground pepper, salt, or Italian herbs and spices. Another avenue is to simply reconstitute it into a new meal—take a leftover hamburger, break it into small pieces, add some Italian seasoning and some tomato sauce, and you have an incredibly easy meaty pasta sauce.
   
9. Select recipes full of inexpensive staple ingredients.
   Beans and rice are two of my favorite foods. They serve as the backbone for almost any type of cuisine, can be flavored in infinite ways, and are incredibly inexpensive. Focus on making recipes that utilize beans, rice, vegetables in season in your area, and any vegetables you can easily grow. Using such inexpensive ingredients as the backbone of your meal makes the entire meal incredibly inexpensive while still being delicious.
   
10. Break the soda addiction.
    One final food suggestion: if you find yourself drinking soda daily (or more frequently), break the addiction. Train yourself to replace your sodas with water you bottle yourself. If you want more flavor, add a splash of lemon juice or whatever fruit juice you prefer to the water. Not only will this directly eliminate the surprisingly significant daily cost of soda (it can easily add up to $1,000 a year), but it’s one of the easiest things people can do to get their weight under control and their health in a better place.
    

Another area where we all spend money—and where it’s often easy to trim a lot of spending without affecting our quality of life one whit—is with our utility bills. Energy, communication, and cable bills add up to a significant amount of money each month.

Install a programmable thermostat.
A programmable thermostat is a simple device that allows you to schedule rises and falls in the temperature of your home. For example, if you have a programmable thermostat, you can have the air conditioning turn off automatically from ten at night to five in the morning each day (when you’re asleep), as well as from nine in the morning to five in the evening each weekday (when you’re at work). The end result is that your air conditioner runs less, significantly reducing your summer energy bill, and the same effect occurs during the winter with your furnace.

Air seal your home.
Heat constantly leaks into your home (during the summer) and out of your home (during the winter), costing you on your energy bill. Air sealing your home simply means that you locate the worst air leaks in your home—meaning the places where the most heat is lost or gained—and block those leaks using caulking and weatherstripping. This can be done in a weekend afternoon or two and can reduce your heating and cooling bills by as much as 20%.

Improve your insulation.
A well-insulated home can drastically reduce energy costs in both the winter and summer seasons. Many homes are under-insulated, as recommended insulation guidelines have gone up
significantly over the past twenty years. Add into that situation the fact that many homes are under-insulated when constructed and you have a perfect recipe for energy loss in your home. Consider a do-it-yourself home energy audit to find out your current insulation levels and determine whether an upgrade might save you significantly on your energy bills.