Easy Household Money Saving Tips

Yeah for guest posts! Below is a guest post from contributor Jenny Fogel.

Here are a few simple tips my husband and I use to save money–these wind up being a lot of fun in the process!

1) Meal Planning: Take time each weekend to plan out the meals for the next week–I mean, plan them in detail. Figure out what main portions, what sides, and what desserts you’ll have (and corresponding ingredients) for each meal that you eat at home and then make your grocery list accordingly. Buy only what you know you’ll use that week–it’s cut our grocery bill by 1/3 each month and cuts WAY down on wasted food.

2) Home Haircuts: I know it sounds daunting, but it’s really very easy to do. All you need is a decent set of clippers and a pair of haircutting-quality scissors (go to any beauty supply store for them). I started cutting my husband’s hair a couple of years ago, and now I have it down to a science. I use clippers for the sides and back of his hair and scissors for the top. I cut my own now as well, which is a little bit trickier, but definitely doable as well. It saves us $15/ month for my husband’s hair and $40 every six weeks for my hair. If you’re interested, contact me and I’ll send you detailed instructions on how to do it–most clipper sets also come with video instructions and you can find a number of online ‘tutorials.’

3) Babysitting swaps: Find another couple with kids and work out a schedule where one weekend you watch their kids (and your own) while they go out and the next weekend they watch yours and so on. For babies, all you need is a pack and play so the kids can go to sleep there if necessary and for older kids, sleeping bags or bed-sharing will suffice! Saves a TON of money on babysitting, which is now routinely at least $10/hour. It’s also great social interaction for the kids and just a fun way to live out the ‘takes a village’ theory.

How do you save money, time, effort, or give back? Send your ideas to the author - gdavis(at)passionforvalue.com.

Backing up your computer online with Mozy

If you have a passion for value, you should consider backing up your files online with a service like Mozy. Computer Crash

Backing up the files from your computer is one of those things you don’t think about until it’s too late - and then you feel stupid for not thinking about it sooner. So here’s a friendly nudge - think about it. If you’ve never had a traumatic computer crash yourself, chances are you know someone who has. If you don’t know someone who has, you probably just don’t know anyone. My very own laptop (an IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad) crashed twice in the first 2 years I owned it (thank heavens for the 3-year warranty). And by crashed, I mean the hard drive literally broke in half. Fortunately, a good friend had convinced me to start backing up my computer prior to my first crash, so while the crashes were inconvenient, they were certainly not devastating.

The good news is that there are a some fairly easy, cheap ways to back up your computer. When I first started to back up my computer, I bought an external hard drive on Amazon. (FYI - I like to buy electronics on Amazon because I find their reviews to be quite helpful and the prices to be competitive). You can pretty much pay whatever you want for an external hard drive, and price seems to be largely a factor of hard drive size and brand. If you go the external hard drive route, make sure you buy a drive that’s big enough to last you at least a year. With media files (music, pictures, video, etc.) getting bigger, better, and more ubiquitous all the time, you might find your storage requirements increasing faster that you originally expected - so think ahead. To give you an idea of pricing - a well-rated 500GB on Amazon costs $76 (Iomega Prestige). This might sound like more space than you’d ever use - but you might be surprised.

Another option for backing up your computer is with an online service, like Mozy.com. Online backup services have a key advantage over an external hard drive - a remote location. That is, if you were to become the victim of something like theft, flood, or fire, and your external hard drive were located in the same vicinity as your computer, you could easily lose your computer AND your backup. But with an online service, your backup is securely stored in a far-off location. As with external hard drives, you can pretty much pay whatever you want for online storage - but I chose Mozy because it seemed like the best value. PCMag.com reviewed “The Best Online Backup Services” in April 2008, and Mozy got pretty good reviews. The one gripe they had with Mozy was its usability. But I figured that Mozy had probably made some usability improvements in the year since that review was published. As for price, Mozy’s price is hard to beat at $4.95/month for unlimited storage. Yes, I said unlimited storage. This is another benefit of online vs. external hard drives - an online service will never become obsolete.

In my current setup, I am actually using both an external hard drive AND an online service (Mozy) - mostly because I already owned the external hard drive. I’m using my 320GB hard drive to store all of my large media files (music, photo, video), so that I can use the storage space on my laptop for Program Files and documents. I’m also taking a backup of my laptop to my external hard drive. Then I set up my Mozy account to back up everything from my external hard drive (which includes the back up of my laptop). So… I think I’m covered in case of fire, theft, or Armageddon.

Money-Saving Tip:

If you decide to use Mozy (or another web service) - run a quick Google search for “Mozy promotional codes” to get a discount! I saved 20% off my purchase by using this link.

How do you save money, time, effort, or give back? Send your ideas to the author - gdavis(at)passionforvalue.com.

Changing your oil less frequently

If you have a passion for value, you should reconsider how often you get your oil changed. Changing Oil

If you’re like many Americans, you probably follow the oil change rule of thumb that recommends changing your oil every 3000 miles or 3 months, whichever comes first. But is this really necessary? The answer is no!

The 3000 mile/3 month rule is a favorite of (you guessed it) companies who perform oil changes! Here’s an excerpt straight from Jiffy Lube’s website - “Refer to your manufacturer’s recommendation for when your engine’s oil should be changed, but a good rule of thumb is every three months or 3,000 miles.” Now Jiffy Lube is the self-proclaimed “pioneer of the oil change industry”. They’re located in Houston, TX - my hometown, which also happens to be the center of the U.S. oil industry. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but I think it’s safe to say that Jiffy Lube might have a vested interest in encouraging consumers to change their oil more frequently than is necessary.

I took Jiffy Lube’s better piece of advice and referred to my car manufacturer’s recommendation on the desired frequency of oil changes. I drive a 2005 Honda CR-V, and I easily found this information in the car’s user manual (under the Maintenance Schedule section). The first thing to note is that Honda recommends different service schedules for cars operated under “normal” and “severe” driving conditions. It recommends following the “severe conditions” schedule if you drive mainly under “severe” conditions such as extremely hot or cold temperatures, lots of stop-and-go traffic, etc. Since I live in Massachusetts I fell into this category. But get this - even under severe driving conditions Honda’s recommendation for oil changes was every 5000 miles or 6 months (whichever comes first) - well below Jiffy Lube’s rule of thumb. For normal driving conditions, Honda recommends oil changes only every 10,000 miles or 1 year!!!

Now let’s be honest - at $25 each oil changes don’t exactly break the bank. But when you consider the cumulative costs of multiple oil changes over time, the time you spend going to the service station, and the environmental costs of all that wasted oil, the notion of less frequent oil changes becomes much more appealing.

I’m thinking that Jiffy Lube is actually counting on you NOT reading your car’s user manual (which is probably a safe bet for most people). But now that you’ve been painlessly enlightened, take a few minutes and check your car’s manual - you’ll save time, save money, save effort, and give back all at once!

How do you save money, time, effort, or give back? Send your ideas to the author - gdavis(at)passionforvalue.com.

Finding Cheap Books at Half Price Books

If you’re just plain cheap, you might relate to this…

When I was in middle school young I used to buy books at a discount book-store chain called Half Price Books. The pricing at Half Price Books is actually as simple as it sounds - half off the cover price. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I discovered a whole slew of books written by Louis L’Amour (a prolific and popular Western fiction writer). Most of the books were printed in the 1950-60’s, and had cover prices of $0.25-$0.50!! For those of you that need help with the math, that means that the Half Price Books price was $0.13-$0.25 per book. I burned many summer days ripping through a good portion of L’Amour’s 89 novels (did I mention he was prolific?). And as you cheapskates can relate, half the fun of reading the books was knowing what a great deal I got!

Check out this page to see if there’s a Half Price Books in your area that you can mine for some good, cheap reading. Of course, you shouldn’t forget about free books at libraries!

Placing a Value on the Environment

If you have a passion for value, you might be interested in learning more about this leading edge research on placing a value on the environment.

These days, most people agree that it’s a “good thing” to preserve the world’s rainforests, or that we “should” try to stop the polar ice caps from melting. But every day we (the world) make decisions to cut down more trees or contribute to climate change. Why the disparity? One reason is because it’s difficult to weigh the “good thing” ideal against cash on the table. Take an example where a local farmer in Brazil needs more land to expand his subsistence farm. In his moment of need, he looks at the land as an asset that can produce real, tangible value for him (food). The value to him is clear and one-sided, and the decision is obvious.

But what if the same farmer had a real-money counter-offer from someone who valued the biodiversity of the land (for example)? And what if the biodiversity of the land were actually valued more highly than the value of the food the farmer could raise by converting the land to farm-land? Then the farmer has a real decision to make, and in a rational world the farmer would choose to take the payout for the biodiversity and would preserve the land for that purpose.

I recently attended a conference call titled “The Dollars and Sense of Valuing Natural Ecosystems” sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund . The World Wildlife Fund has formed a joint venture with The Nature Conservancy and Stanford University called the Natural Capital Project, and together they have been working on the exact problem I described above. The goal of the project is to make clear the economic benefits of nature, and they do this by examining what they call Ecosystem Services. Ecosystem Services are services provided by the natural world that provide support for life, and they include clean drinking and irrigation water, pollination of plants, agriculture, timber and non-timber forest products, flood and erosion mitigation, hydropower, carbon sequestration, and cultural/aesthetic value (okay we don’t really need this last one to sustain life, but it sure makes life richer!).

While the Natural Capital Project works to quantify the value of Ecosystem Services, they’re also building tools to put their research into practice in the real world. One such tool is called InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Tradeoffs), which helps map the value of ecosystem services within a given geographic area. A real-life example of how InVEST has been used comes from the mountains of Tanzania, where a cloud forest watershed provides clean water to half of Tanzanians, as well as other ecosystem services such as hydropower, carbon storage, and medicinal plants. These forests are in danger as agriculture creeps up the mountain slopes. The questions is - what’s the value of the forest’s ecosystem services vs. it’s other potential uses (i.e. agriculture)? InVEST provided a value-map of the forest, highlighting the highest value parts of the forest in terms of Ecosystem Services. Meanwhile, the World Wildlife Fund and CARE (a poverty-relief organization), were able to convince Coca-Cola and the Dar es Salaam municipal government to invest in a fund to preserve the clean water supply provided by the forest. The maps provided by the InVEST tool will help guide the use of those funds to the highest impact projects. Everybody wins! Pretty cool, huh?

Learn More

Natural Capital Project - www.naturalcapitalproject.org
The Ecosystem Marketplace - www.ecosystemmarketplace.org: Seeks to become the world’s leading source of information on markets and payment schemes for ecosystem services.
Office of Ecosystem Services and Markets: Read the press release for the creation of the new USDA office (created December 2008).
World Wildlife Fund - www.worldwildlife.org
The Nature Conservancy - www.nature.org
Woods Institute for the Environment - www.woods.standford.edu
The Corporate Ecosystem Services Review (ESR) is a structured methodology for corporate managers to proactively develop strategies for managing business risks and opportunities arising from their company’s dependence and impact on ecosystems.
‘Ecosystem Services: A guide for decision makers.’ Presents various methods that use ecosystem services to enable decision makers to link ecosystem services and economic development.

How do you save money, time, effort, or give back? Send your ideas to the author - gdavis(at)passionforvalue.com.

Owning (and using) a library card

Geisel Library at UCSD If you have a passion for value, you should definitely own - and use - a library card.

If you had to guess, would you say that more people or fewer people are visiting libraries today than they were 5 years ago? Would it surprise you if I told you library visits are actually trending upward? Well, I was certainly surprised when I read recently that library visits went up by 10% from 2002 to 2006, and circulation of materials rose by 9% (see how your local library is doing here). What?!? I thought the days of paper were over. Aren’t books a thing of the past in this Internet age? Apparently not. Of course, books aren’t the only reason that libraries are a very valuable resource. Here’s a short list of some of the valuable things libraries have to offer…

Free DVD’s! That’s right, libraries have expanded their collections to include movies. My library system also has a web catalog that I can browse. If I find an item I like, I can request that it be sent to my local branch for pickup. It’s awesome! It’s like Netflix - but free!
Free museum passes! My local library has passes that I can check out that will either get me into various museums for free, or give me a deep discount. Check your library for hidden gems like this.
Free research help! One of a librarian’s main jobs is to help people sort through all of the available resources to find specific information. Trying to do some market research on the cheap - or looking for some hard-to-find information? Give the library a call! Or better yet, use an online resource like www.massanswers.org, a service that connects you with a research librarian for a real-time chat. Throw any question at them, and they’ll help you find the answer.
Free books! According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Americans bought $16.9 billion worth of books last year (FYI - this stat came from a chat I had with a librarian via www.massanswers.org). I’d be willing to bet that 10% of these books will never be read (or will only be read halfway) and 80% are only read once and then shelved (FYI - these stats are totally made up). So why not just check it out from the library for free?
Free audio-books! I’ve never been into audio-books. But if that’s your thing (any truck-drivers reading this blog?), the library’s a great place to go for some good reading listening material.
Databases galore! Think you can find any information you need on the Internet? Guess again. I’ve done a fair amount of do-it-yourself market research in my day (for one start-up idea or another), and some of the most insightful and valuable stuff is “locked up” in proprietary databases - but guess who has the keys? Libraries!
A laundry list of other services including computer/Internet access (and often computer classes), English classes, citizenship classes, book clubs, help with tax prep, help with job search, walk your dog (ok - that last one’s a lie)… !

So if you don’t have a library card - and use it - it’s about time, don’t you think?

How do you save money, time, effort, or give back? Send your ideas to the author - gdavis(at)passionforvalue.com.

Tracking your spending with Mint.com

If you have a passion for value, you should check out Mint.com.

What is Mint.com?

The first place to look for ways to save money is within your own spending habits, and Mint.com can help you out there. Mint.com is a free personal accounting website that helps you keep track of your finances. When you sign up for a Mint.com account, you tell Mint.com where all your other accounts are (credit cards, savings/checking accounts, IRA accounts, auto loans, student loans, etc.), and Mint.com starts to automatically suck in the transaction history to your Mint.com account. If that sounds a little scary, check out the acclaim they’ve received from legitimate press sources like Money, Time, and BusinessWeek.

What are the benefits?

As Mint.com pulls in your transactions, it also automatically categorizes them for you into common budget categories (i.e. Groceries, Entertainment, Shopping, etc.). In a matter of minutes, you have a complete picture of where you spend your money, and how much you spend on what. Didn’t realize that you spend an average of $400/month on eating out? It might be time to start cooking a little more at home! $500 on clothes last month? Oops - maybe it’s time to set up a clothing budget! These are the kinds of conversations you will be having with yourself (or your significant other) once you have a good idea of where all that money goes.

A few other nice things about Mint.com are worth mentioning. 1) Because Mint.com pulls in transactions and balance information from all of your accounts, it’s able to give you a complete picture of your “Net Worth”. Where are your assets, where are your liabilities, and what’s your net balance (i.e. assets minus liabilities)? This is just something that’s good to know. Even more helpful is the “Net Cashflow” calculation which tells you what your cash situation is (cash assets like checking and savings accounts minus cash liabilities like credit cards). Do you have more credit card debt than you can pay off this month? Not a good situation to be in. 2) Mint.com also provides some basic budgeting features. You can set budget amounts for the various categories, and track your spending against your budget. You can even set up an e-mail (or mobile) alert from Mint.com to notify you when you’re over-budget in any of the categories. 3) Along with the over-budget alert, you can set up other e-mail (or mobile) alerts to notify you of such things as low account balances, unusual spending, or if you’re nearing your credit limit on a credit card.

A Final Note

The last thing I’ll mention is that Mint.com makes money by finding ways to save you money and suggesting them to you. This sounds great in principle, but unfortunately I haven’t found their recommendations to be that useful. But the advice is free, and Mint.com claims that 7% of their users have made changes based on their recommendations. Furthermore, they note that the site has identified over $100M in savings for their users since their inception. So apparently somebody out there is finding their recommendations to be valuable - and maybe you will too!

How do you save money, time, effort, or give back? Send your ideas to the author - gdavis(at)passionforvalue.com.

Passion For Value

Save Money. Save Time. Save Effort. Give Back.

Easy Household Money Saving Tips

Backing up your computer online with Mozy

Changing your oil less frequently

Finding Cheap Books at Half Price Books

Owning (and using) a library card

Tracking your spending with Mint.com

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