DIY skin and hair care

One thing I find frustrating about trying to live an ecofrugal life is finding personal care products that meet my standards. If price were all I cared about, I could wash my face with any mild cleanser and get pretty good results. But since I also want the products I use to be nontoxic and cruelty-free, I have to read the label on every product looking for ones without parabens and animal testing. The few products on the shelf that fit those criteria can cost ten bucks or more for a bottle—and more annoying still, they often come not in bottles but in tubes. Not only are these non-recyclable, it's pretty much impossible to squeeze all the product out of the tube before discarding it, so you have to toss as much as half an ounce—maybe sixty cents' worth—of your pricey product.

At one point last year, I got frustrated enough over this that I decided to try making my own face wash. I went hunting online for some recipes that weren't too complicated to make and didn't call for any ingredients that were too expensive or hard to find, and I eventually hit on one at Live Simply with only three ingredients: four parts honey, one part olive oil, and four parts aloe vera gel, which I happened to have on hand already because I'd tried it (unsuccessfully) as a hair product. All I had to do was mix the ingredients together and find a container to put them in. I used the bottle from my previous face wash (actually an organic baby wash that I'd been able to pick up cheap because it was discontinued) and applied it with a little manual face scrubber from Sephora.

And lo and behold, it actually worked. In fact, this simple combination of ingredients did a better job of keeping my skin clean and soft than any pricey product I'd shelled out for in the past. The annoying acne-like bumps that had sent me to two different dermatologists over a five-year period, and which still hadn't really gone away even when I started diligently applying two different topical treatments for rosacea morning and evening, vanished almost completely. And each half-cup batch was costing me only 76 cents. All with no animal testing (the honey is an animal product, but the bees don't suffer) and no weird ingredients. I'd found the perfect ecofrugal skin product!

I was so happy with the way this turned out that I thought I'd see if I could manage to pull off the same trick with hair care. I've tried all sorts of products in my hair—cheap shampoos, expensive shampoos, cheap conditioners, expensive conditioners, leave-in conditioners, pomades, hot oil treatments, and various DIY alternatives—and never found a hair care regimen that I was completely happy with. For the past few years, I'd been getting more or less acceptable results by skipping shampoo completely and relying on OGX Coconut Curls conditioner as a co-wash, conditioner, and leave-in all in one, but it wasn't completely ideal; I had to apply quite a lot of it post-shower to tame the frizz, and it left a lot of build-up on my scalp. So I started hunting for some DIY conditioner recipes that might do the trick better, using the same criteria I'd applied for the face wash: a simple recipe with no pricey or hard-to-find ingredients.

Well, this turned out to be kind of a tall order. When I searched for "homemade conditioner," most sources recommended an apple cider vinegar rinse, which I'd already tried with no success whatever, and which obviously wouldn't work as a styling product. When I tried "DIY leave-in conditioner," most sources suggested just taking "your favorite conditioner" and mixing it with water (and maybe a little olive oil) in a spray bottle. Not a bad idea, but not helpful if what you're looking for is an alternative to "your favorite conditioner." An "easy" recipe from Oh, The Things We'll Make! called for an emulsifier called BTMS that you can't just buy at the drugstore, and that I wasn't about to order a whole bunch of just to test out a conditioner recipe that might not even work for me. And a collection of 10 Homemade Hair Conditioners Using Ingredients From Your Kitchen featured only deep-conditioning treatments that you leave on for several minutes and rinse—nothing that could double as a co-wash or a leave-in.

Eventually, I came across this page with 14 Homemade Leave-In Conditioner Recipes specifically for natural curls, of which one—the "Honey Butter Balm"—looked simple enough to be worth a try. It called for only four ingredients, two of which (coconut oil and honey) I already had. I thought I could safely leave out the few drops of lavender oil, which seemed to be just for scent, so all I needed to buy was some pure shea butter. After a bit of searching, I found a 6-ounce container of this at Sally Beauty for about seven bucks—not too bad if I could get six batches of conditioner out of it.

Mixing up the ingredients proved more difficult than I expected. The shea butter was very thick and hard to scoop out of the jar, and it took quite a lot of heating and stirring to get it to combine with the coconut oil and honey. And when I finally got it all mixed and put it in a little tub and chilled it to re-solidify it, as the recipe suggested, the honey dropped out of the suspension and formed a thin layer on the bottom of the container. So I had to stir it in by hand before I could use it.

Sadly, after all that trouble, this did not prove to be the ultimate conditioning solution I'd been looking for. The mixture was still very thick, and while you might think this would just mean a little goes a long way, getting it to go a long way wasn't so easy. By means of rubbing it between my hands and mixing it with water, I finally managed to get my damp hair coated in the stuff, and I actually did feel like it produced pretty enviable curls—but the next day, my hair was limp and bedraggled, completely weighed down by this heavy mixture. Worse still, my regular co-washing routine didn't seem to be enough to get this goop out of my hair again. I had to resort to my husband's shampoo, which I normally shun because it's far too drying, and I still wasn't convinced I'd managed to get my hair quite clean again.

I'm still wondering if there's some way I might be able to put this stuff to use. Maybe if I use only a teeny tiny bit of it, I might be able to get those fabulous curls I enjoyed on my first day without the bad side effects—but how to spread such a teeny tiny bit across my hair is, I will confess, a mystery. So for now, it's back to my old commercial conditioner.

However, I'm not giving up entirely on the idea of finding a DIY solution. This collection of 10 Best Homemade Conditioners For Curly Hair, for instance, includes a three-ingredient conditioner—lemon juice, olive oil, and coconut milk—that could conceivably be worth a try. When I tried straight coconut milk as a leave-in, the results were disappointing, leaving my hair limp and greasy, but it's possible the lemon juice could mitigate that. And if that doesn't work, there's always this flaxseed gel from Naturally Curly. We have all the ingredients for both of these, so even if they don't work, they won't cost too much to try.

Money Crashers: 15 Healthy Food Substitutions to Save Money in Your Home Recipes

In my most recent Recipe of the Month post, I noted that Brian had made a few alterations to the recipe "as usual," such as using plain white rice in place of arborio rice and red onion for shallot. We quite often make simple substitutions like this when we don't happen to have all the ingredients a recipe calls for, and we don't want to run out and buy them because (a) it's too much bother, (b) they're too expensive, and/or (c) we're not sure we'd use them again. We've also been known to swap out ingredients (such as  veggie stock in place of chicken stock) to make a recipe vegetarian, or to make it vegan or gluten-free if we want to feed it to a friend who's on one of these special diets.

Substitutions like this save us time, save us money, and make our cooking healthier. And in my latest Money Crashers article, I've written about how they can do the same for you. I explain all the various reasons you might want to replace an ingredient in a recipe, then offer handy substitutions for 15 common ingredients. You'll find such time-honored replacements as cocoa plus oil for baking chocolate, or milk plus vinegar for buttermilk, as well as newer-fangled ones like aquafaba (bean water) or chia seeds in place of eggs.

15 Healthy Food Substitutions to Save Money in Your Home Recipes

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: First Sowing

This year, for a change, we did not have snow on the alleged first day of spring. In fact, it was quite pleasant out, though not really warm enough to ditch our winter coats altogether. So this weekend, we were able to get started in earnest on our garden.

We've started all our seedlings at this point. The parsley and leeks are pretty tall already, and the tomato and pepper plants are just starting to poke their wee leaves out of the dirt. (The scallions you see in the front of the picture weren't started from seed; they're the chopped off ends of some scallions we bought at the store that Brian put in a cup of water to regenerate. When the weather's warm enough, they'll go in the ground with the ones we're growing from seed.) The first crop to get planted directly in the ground, the snap peas, wasn't technically scheduled to go in until Tuesday, but with the weather warming up, we thought it would do no harm to get them started a couple of days early.

Before we could put the seeds in, however, we had to prepare the bed for planting, pulling out all the junk from last year and all the weeds that got a head start on our crops. And before we could do that, I had to figure out exactly which bed to prepare, because I hadn't actually gotten around yet to laying out the plots for this year's garden.

Fortunately, my new crop rotation method made this process much easier than it has been in the past. I simply rotated all the beds one place counterclockwise, moving the heavy-feeding tomatoes into the place occupied last year by the nitrogen-fixing peas, while the peas went into the slot where the cucumbers used to be, and so on. Then I also flipped the beds horizontally, so the pepper and zucchini plants wouldn't be at the same end this year as last year, minimizing the risk of disease. Actually, even after rotating and flipping, one of the pepper plants ended up in a spot that also held a pepper plant last year, so this method isn't perfect—but it's much faster than my old approach of treating all the different crops like jigsaw puzzle pieces and trying to fit them into the optimal configuration.

So, having determined that the peas were to go in the right front bed this year, we got to work getting them in the ground. Brian went out and cleared the bed while I was still fiddling with the layout, and then I went out and actually poked the peas into the dirt. We gave the seeds some water, but no fertilizer, since we were a little too pressed for time today to deal with opening up our big compost bin and shoveling out the finished stuff. But we can always add a top-dressing of it later.

We did, however, take one extra precaution to protect our peas as they grow. The last couple of years, we've had some problems with losing our peas to ambitious birds that yank them right out of the soil, either before or right after they've sent up their first shoots. So, to deter them, Brian covered up the spot where the seeds are planted with some row covers he made last year to protect our bean plants from some mysterious critter that kept chomping on them. They're just big arches of chicken wire with bamboo stakes at the bottom to stiffen them, and he was just able to squeeze the two of them into place along the back of the bed where the peas are planted. I imagine this wouldn't stop a really determined bird, but I figure it's kind of like putting The Club on your car when you park it; it makes your car enough extra work to steal that maybe the thieves will pass it over in favor of easier pickings.

Also, as you can see in this picture, Brian didn't clear absolutely everything out of the bed before the peas went in. Those two little blotches of green are a couple of tufts of last year's winter lettuce crop that appear to have successfully overwintered, so unless we get a hard freeze, we should be able to enjoy a couple of early salads this spring. We'll just have to make sure to eat it all up by May 8, when we'll need those spots in the garden to plant beans in. But with luck, by that time we'll have some of this year's spring lettuce crop ready to eat.

We're also keeping a close eye on our plum trees. The branches have buds on them, but so far, the tips of the blossoms aren't visible. As soon as they appear, we'll know it's time to spring into action with our new sprayer and see if we can manage to ward off the brown rot that's destroyed most of our crop the last two years running. Even if it works, we're not out of the woods yet, since we'll still have those thieving squirrels to contend with. But at least we'll have a fighting chance of getting some plums for ourselves.

So what with peas in the ground, seedlings in the southwest window, plum trees and cherry bushes just starting to bud, rhubarb plants just starting to reemerge, and a couple of teeny heads of lettuce peeping out of the ground, I'd say our gardening year is off to a good start. Of course, I'm not about to start counting our tomatoes before they're hatched. But so far, at least, everything looks promising.

Recipe of the Month: Asparagus-Mushroom Risotto

According to the calendar (and the weather report, which is predicting snow flurries later today), spring isn't officially here yet. But signs of it are everywhere. Yesterday, for the first time this year, I was able to hang out a load of laundry...

...and pick a bunch of wildflowers (even if they're supposedly weeds) for the vase in the kitchen.

And on a recent trip to Aldi, we spotted asparagus on sale for just $1.49 a pound. Normally, I like to enjoy each food in its proper season, but I just couldn't pass up a bargain like that. Maybe if I'd felt confident that our asparagus patch would provide us with a good supply of the green stuff in just a month or two, I'd have held out for that, but its performance last year was so disappointing that I can't be sure we'll even get a single meal's worth out of it this year.

After we got it home, Brian started hunting online for asparagus recipes, and he hit on one at Life's Ambrosia for asparagus and mushroom risotto. This was kind of similar to another dish we'd already made several times, the polenta with mushrooms and asparagus from Better Homes and Gardens' Easy Vegetarian Dinners, so he knew this flavor combo worked for us. And since we'd also happened to pick up some mushrooms on sale on that same trip to Aldi, we had nearly everything we needed.

As usual, Brian made a few alterations to the recipe. First, he halved it, so we could save half of our pound of asparagus for later. We didn't have any arborio rice, so he decided to try it with plain old long-grain white rice, and he substituted a quarter-cup of chopped red onion for half a shallot. In addition to the cup and a half of plain sliced button mushrooms, he added a quarter-cup of dried shiitake mushrooms, soaking them in warm water until they softened and then dicing them. (This is what he usually does for the polenta recipe, which calls for a mixture of exotic mushrooms that we're not generally prepared to splurge on.) And rather than waste the cup of water the mushrooms were soaked in, he substituted it for half the vegetable broth the recipe called for. So his version of the recipe ended up looking like this:

Asparagus-Mushroom Risotto

1 tablespoon olive oil, divided

½ pound asparagus, snapped into 1-to-2- inch pieces

1 ½ cups sliced mushrooms

¼ cup dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in warm water until soft, then diced

1 cup water in which the shiitake mushrooms were soaked

1 cup vegetable broth

1/4 teaspoon salt

pinch black pepper

1/2 tablespoon (vegan) butter

1/4 c. red onion, finely chopped

1/2 cup rice (arborio preferred)

1/2 cup dry sherry (or white wine)

1. In a pan or Dutch oven, heat a half tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add mushrooms and saute until they begin to release moisture, then add asparagus and saute until the stems turn bright green. Remove vegetables to a bowl and keep warm.
2. In a separate saucepan, heat broth over medium heat with the mushroom water. Keep hot while preparing risotto.
3. In the same vessel used to cook the mushrooms and asparagus, heat butter and remaining olive oil over medium heat. Once butter melts, stir in onion and cook just until softened. Stir in rice just until it is coated in the butter. Do not brown. Pour in sherry and cook until it is absorbed. Add the hot broth mixture gradually to the rice, one ladle-full at a time, until all of the liquid has been absorbed. 
4. It may be necessary to heat up additional water to add if the broth mixture is not sufficient make the rice soft and creamy. Add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Stir in asparagus and mushrooms. Serve immediately.

This experiment was reasonably successful. Making risotto is a bit of a lengthy process under the best of circumstances, and Brian found that the long-grain rice took up even more liquid than the recipe said the arborio rice would (hence the addition of step 4 in the recipe above). All in all, it took about half an hour to cook. But by the time it was done, it had more or less achieved the tender, creamy texture risotto is supposed to have. And between the asparagus, mushrooms, red onion, and sherry, it was loaded with umami.

 

I suggested that perhaps if we make this dish again, he could try it in the pressure cooker. I've heard this is a great tool for making risotto, because the liquid can't boil off, so it all soaks into the rice like it's supposed to. The rice takes less time to cook, and it's a lot less work, because you don't have to stand there over it constantly ladling more liquid on.

So maybe next time, we could do the rice according to this recipe at Hip Pressure Cooking. We might even spring for some real arborio or short-grain rice to make sure it comes out properly. With this change, the recipe should only take about twenty minutes to make, so it will be a light, savory, and quick meal for spring.

Money Crashers: 9 Passive Income Stream Ideas

One of the things I like about working for Money Crashers is that every month I earn a traffic bonus based on how many views my articles have received. This is for all the articles of mine that are up on the site, not just the ones I've written in the past month or even the past year. It's not a huge amount, but it's the equivalent of at least a full day's pay that I get every month for work I've already done and been paid for once.

This is an example of passive income - something many financial experts describe as the key to wealth. Basically, passive income is any earnings that come into your pocket automatically, without your having to work for them every month. In most cases, you have to do some work initially to get them, like I had to work writing all those articles for Money Crashers—but once that work is done, the money just keeps rolling in. And the more passive income streams you have, the more money you can take in each month regardless of how much work you do.

I talked about one form of passive income, earnings from investments, in my article on financial independence. However, there are lots of other ways to generate passive income. You can collect rent for properties you own, royalties for books and other works you've created, or ad revenue from a blog or podcast (one of the most popular sources these days. I've never managed to make any money off this one, because my readership is just too small, and increasing it would most likely mean writing about things that are interesting to a wider audience—and of no interest to me.)

In my latest Money Crashers article, I talk about the benefits of a passive income stream, and about nine possible ways to create one. Some take a lot of work up front, like writing a successful book; others are so easy pretty much anyone can do them, like earning credit card rewards. More work up front typically yields a bigger payoff—but even a little trickle of passive income is better than none at all.

9 Passive Income Stream Ideas & Opportunities to Make Money

Bonus recipe: Sesame Tofu

Brian and I don't order takeout very often, so when we do, we like to get something we can't easily make at home. Our favorite takeout dish is the sesame tofu from Sultan Wok, a local Chinese place. It's chunks of tofu, fried to give it a chewy outer crust, but still soft on the inside, soaked in a tangy-sweet sesame sauce and accompanied by broccoli. Definitely not something we could make for ourselves...

...until Brian went and figured out how.

It started when were out for a walk one Saturday afternoon, and we strolled past the Sultan Wok and caught the scent of the sesame tofu and thought, "Gee, that would be nice for dinner," but for some reason ordering in that day wasn't really an option for us. So Brian went searching for a sesame tofu recipe online and came across this one at Nummy Kitchen that looked about right. He made no substitutions, but in the places where the recipe offered choices, he went with:

• dry sherry
• rice wine vinegar
• a half-and-half mixture of brown and white sugar
• just 1/4 tsp. of chili paste, because I am a spice wimp

Also, while the recipe calls for 2 cups of cornstarch for dredging the tofu, he estimates he used "well less than half" that amount.

His creation didn't look exactly like what we're used to getting from the Sultan Wok. For one thing, his tofu chunks were smaller than Sultan Wok's, which usually took two bites for me to eat. Also, all the components—tofu, sauce, sesame seeds—were in separate containers, so we had to assemble it on the fly, dishing out some tofu and broccoli over a bowl of rice, spooning sauce over that, and sprinkling the sesame seeds on top. This meant we had to guess how much of each ingredient to add to each bowlful, and apparently we didn't guess quite right; we ran out of broccoli on the first night while we still had quite a lot of tofu left, and by the time we'd gone through the remaining tofu, we still had about a third of the sauce left. Brian ended up making another small batch of the tofu just to use it up. So in future, he plans to halve the sauce and tofu when making this recipe while keeping the amount of broccoli the same, in the hope that all three components will come out even. There might still be a bit too much sauce, but too much is better than too little.

Flavor-wise, though, Brian's sesame tofu was pretty close to the original: tangy and sweet, with a sesame crunch. In fact, in some ways, it's better, because having the sauce separate means you can toss the broccoli and rice in it, instead of having it all clinging to the tofu chunks. So the entire dish, not just the tofu, is full of that delicious sesame sauce that made the original one of our favorites.

Brian says the dish wasn't very hard to make, either. It does involve several stages—mixing up the marinade, marinating the tofu, making the sauce dredging the tofu, and frying the cubes in batches—but none of them is particularly hard to do. It takes less than an hour in total, which is less time than he puts into some of other favorite meals (like our standard Indian dinner, which involves making parathas by hand). And the recipe has the added bonus of being completely vegan, which is something we like to do whenever we can, even if we're not trying to make it a way of life.

In sum, this Sesame Tofu is a dish we'll definitely be eating more of at home. And when we order out, well, I guess we'll just have to choose a new favorite—or do it even less often.

Money Crashers: 9 Places to Find Missing Money

The essence of ecofrugality is avoiding waste. And I think we can all agree that there's nothing more wasteful than leaving money just sitting there—money that belongs to you by right— and not stretching out your hand to take it. It'd be like dropping a $20 bill on the sidewalk and not bothering to bend down and pick it up.

Yet this is, in effect, what many of us are doing by leaving money sitting in state "unclaimed funds" pools. Old bank accounts that we never bothered to close...tax refunds delivered to the wrong address...security deposits we never collected. It's all our own money, just sitting and waiting for us if we know where to look.

Money can go missing in other ways, too. For instance, you could have a savings bond you got once as a gift and forgot to cash in when it matured. Or you could be owed money as part of a class-action lawsuit that you don't even know you're a party to.

In my latest Money Crashers article, I talk about all the different places money can go missing, and how to find it and claim it. I was particularly pleased to see that this piece has already made a real difference for someone; my sister replied to my tweet about it to say, "Because of your tweet, I finally logged onto http://massmoney.com. And now I'm a few weeks away from getting a tiny little extra payday! It is just as delightful as the $10 I found in the pocket of my corduroys and will likely be less wrinkled." (I had no such luck checking the unclaimed funds pool for New Jersey, but I have identified at least one class-action suit that I have a chance to cash in on.)

9 Places to Find Missing Money – How to Search for Unclaimed Funds

Price Check: Costco-nomics

When we finally took the plunge and became Costco members two years ago, I had some lingering doubts about whether our membership would actually be a good deal. I knew it would pay for itself that first year with the savings on Brian's new glasses, but I was less sure whether it would be worth sticking with in the long term.

Well, after a year and a half shopping at Costco, I'm now in a better position to answer that question. I already figured out, after less than a year, that paying extra for the "Executive" membership was not a good value. Fortunately, thanks to the special deal offered by our Costco (which they did honor, even though we never actually got it in writing), we were able to recoup the extra $60 we'd paid for it before downgrading to a regular membership at $60 a year. So at this point, if our Costco membership is saving us at least $60 a year, it's a good deal, and we should stick with it whether we happen to need new glasses or not.

The most obvious perk of our membership is the rewards we get from our Costco credit card (which we still have even after dropping the "Executive" membership). This gives us 2% cash back on all purchases at Costco itself, 3% at restaurants, a whopping 4% on gas, and 1% everywhere else - the same base rate we get with our other rewards cards. Over the last year, all that added up to $57.35.

On the face of it, this looks like nearly enough to pay for our membership all by itself. However, the figure is a little misleading, because if we hadn't been using our Costco card for all that stuff, we would have used one of our other rewards cards, which also pay 1% cash back most of the time. In some categories, at some times, they pay 5% cash back, but whenever that's the case, we use that card rather than the Costco card. So we've never actually lost money by paying with the Costco card; the question is, how much did we really gain?

To answer that question, I consulted the handy rewards summary provided by Citibank, the issuer of the Costco card. According to this, here's where we earned our rewards in 2018:

• 4% On Eligible Gas Worldwide: $34.91. If we'd put this on any other card, we'd have earned 1% cash back, or $8.72, so our card actually saved us $26.18 in this category.
• 3% On Restaurant Purchases Worldwide: $1.26. This doesn't account for all our restaurant purchases over the year; some of them were made on other cards that were temporarily offering 5%, and some were probably put on other cards at 1% by accident. So in all likelihood, we could be getting more out of this benefit than we are, but for 2018, it saved us only $0.84—$1.26 less the $0.42 we'd have saved using a different card.
• 3% On Eligible Travel Purchases Worldwide: $0.00. Spent nothing, got nothing.
• 2% On Costco & Costco.com Purchases: $14.47. Assuming that all the stuff we bought at Costco is stuff we would have bought somewhere else using a different card at 1% cash back, our actual savings on this was $7.24.
• 1% On All Other Purchases: $6.71. This is exactly what we would have earned using any other card, so no savings here.
• Total actual savings for 2018: $34.26.

That means our total actual rewards from our Costco card came to $34.26—more than half our our $60 membership cost. Not bad, but what about the other half? Did we save enough to cover that as well?

Well, that's a little trickier to figure out, since I unfortunately did not think ahead and save all my receipts from Costco over the past year. However, I have the receipt from our most recent trip, which includes:

• Raisin bran, 14.34 pounds: $21.87. Yes, I know that's a lot of cereal. Brian was stocking up because Costco doesn't always have it, and at this time there's no other store that can meet his target price of $1.60 or less per pound. Buying the equivalent amount of raisin bran at Aldi, the next cheapest option, would have cost us $24.38, so that's a savings of $2.51.
• Birdseed, 80 pounds: $27.98. Man, can those birds eat. Leaving aside the question of whether we're really getting our money's worth in entertainment (for us and for the cats) out of all the seed we stuff into them, the equivalent amount of birdseed at Lowe's would have cost $31.96. Savings: $3.98.
• Organic raisins, 4 pounds: $10.79. (These are one of the few products we always buy organic, due to concerns about pesticide residues. Grapes are part of the EWG's "dirty dozen" list of the most contaminated foods, and drying them concentrates the pesticides still more.) The same volume at Trader Joe's would cost $11.96. Savings: $1.17.
• Walnuts, 3 pounds: $10.89. These would cost $14.97 at Aldi, the next cheapest seller. Savings: $4.08.
• Brussels sprouts, 2 pounds: $4.99. This is actually the same price as Trader Joe's; we just grabbed some since they were handy. Savings: $0.
• Canola oil, 6 quarts: $7.69. Shop-Rite price: $9.00. Savings: $1.31.
• Organic sugar, 10 pounds: $7.99. This is less than half the $17.45 we'd pay at Trader Joe's, and there's less packaging as well. Savings: $9.46.
• Clementines, 5 pounds: $5.49. We only buy these when they're on sale for around this price, so no savings.
• Total savings from this trip: $22.51.

So. on just this one trip to Costco, we saved $22.51 on a total bill of $99.54, meaning we saved about 22% of what we spent. And according to our rewards summary, we spent a total of $723.50 at Costco in 2018 ($14.47 divided by 2%). And that did not include any large, one-time purchases like Brian's new glasses, since we bought those in 2017. (I didn't get new glasses last year, though I think I'll definitely need them this year.)

So if we estimate that we're saving an average of 22% on the goods we buy at Costco, we probably saved around $159.17 on everything we bought in 2018. Add in the $34.26 in credit card rewards, and our card is netting us $193.43 per year—more than three times the cost of our $60 membership.

For us, then, the numbers tell a clear story: our Costco membership is definitely paying for itself, even in years when we don't need new glasses. Your mileage, of course, may vary. If you have a Costco membership, it's probably worth going through this exercise for yourself to get an idea of whether it's a good value for you. But if your situation is like ours—you only buy a few things at Costco, but you save a significant amount on them—it probably will be.

Money Crashers: 7 Government Imposter Scams to Watch Out For

Have you ever gotten one of those calls from someone at the IRS, warning that you owe unpaid taxes and you must pay up at once or risk immediate arrest? Or maybe from the National Sweepstakes Bureau, calling to tell you that you've won a big prize and you'll only have to pay a small fee to collect it?

If you have, then you know by now these calls are bogus. But it's possible you went through at least a few heart-stopping moments, and possibly quite a lot of hassle and expense, to find it out.

If you want to avoid having this happen to you again—or having it happen for the first time, if you've never experienced it—my new Money Crashers article can help. It discusses the ins and outs of various imposter scams, in which fraudsters impersonate government officials to separate you from your money (or, in some cases, your personal data). I outline the most common types of government imposter scams, tips for spotting and avoiding them, and information on how to report the scammers so they can't pull the same tricks on other people.

7 Government Imposter Scams to Watch Out For