Savings Challenge, Week 27: Joining a Meat CSA

Once again, I've allowed myself to fall behind on the Bankrate Weekly Savings Challenges. In fact, after making it through about half of the one-year series, I was thinking of packing it in completely, for three reasons:

1. I'm now working more or less full-time, which gives me less time to update the blog. If I'm only going to post once or twice a week, I'd like to spend those posts talking about my own ecofrugal discoveries rather than responding to Bankrate's challenges, which are often irrelevant to my life.
2. For several weeks, the main challenge page on Bankrate was not working properly in either Google Chrome or Firefox. You could view the list of weekly challenges, but there was no way to click on them and pull up the page for each individual challenge. However, after several complaints in the comment section and a note to Bankrate tech support, that seems to be fixed now.
3. Most problematically, the last couple of challenges have provided me with no new material to write about. Week 25 was about saving money on razors and shaving supplies, a topic I already covered pretty thoroughly back in Week 7; Week 26 was about saving money by doing your own pool maintenance, a subject that never has had, and I'm pretty sure never will have, any relevance to my life whatsoever. 

However, this week's challenge actually sounded new and potentially useful. It's about joining a "meat CSA"—that is, buying your meat directly from the farmer through a yearly subscription plan. And since I only buy free-range meats, which are a lot pricier than the factory-farmed kind, this seems like an idea that might actually offer some real savings for me. So now, instead of dropping the Savings Challenge posts completely, my plan is to keep writing about the challenges that are actually relevant for me and skip over the rest.

And this challenge certainly does sound relevant. Bankrate reporter Laura Dunn, who says she'd never actually heard of a CSA before she began working on this story, says they're a good idea if you "value knowing the original source of your meat" or "like supporting local agriculture and small farms"—both descriptions that definitely apply to me, and to some extent to Brian as well.

The farmer she interviews in the article, Jessica Jens of Windswept Farmstead in Cedar Grove, Wisconsin, says it's "quite honestly, impossible for small farms to ever compete with the 99-cents-a-pound Thanksgiving turkey" available at major supermarkets. (Actually, based on my research on the price of a Thanksgiving dinner four years ago, most stores offer sale prices even lower than that.) However, by selling directly to consumers through a CSA, they can offer a better price than than the supermarkets charge for meat that's humanely raised.

But how much better is it, exactly? Well, Bankrate employee Maria Mancini says she and her husband spent $410 a month, or about $95 a week, for an "omnivore CSA" that provides them with meat, produce, seafood, and eggs. Compared to the $100 a week they used to spend on groceries, they're saving around $5 a week (though Dunn says this is only a savings of $60 a year, suggesting that the CSA only runs for a period of 12 weeks every year). This is a small savings for the Mancinis, but it would be no savings at all for us, as we currently spend only $264 per month on groceries (and that's for everything, not just the fresh produce).

Another problem: with a CSA, you don't get to choose what food you receive every week. A blogger quoted in the article says that her Iowa CSA provides meat at $1 to $2 less per pound than meat that's "hormone-free and grass fed" at the grocery store, but she also says that throughout the year, they get an assortment of cuts of beef, pork, chicken, and lamb. Now, I've never much cared for beef, and I positively dislike lamb—so $1 to $2 less per pound is no bargain for something I wouldn't really want to buy in the first place. Prices for this kind of meat in the store, at least in our area, start at around $7 a pound—so with the CSA, I'd be paying $5 to $6 per pound for meat I wouldn't actually enjoy eating.

A final problem is that CSAs that provide meat aren't exactly easy to find. Dunn says she was unable to locate one in her area, though she did find a "buying club" with meat shares that can be purchased at lower-than-retail prices (though actually, the prices looked pretty comparable to what you pay in stores around here, and you have to buy anywhere from 8 to 40 pounds at a time to get them). When I checked the Jersey Fresh website for CSAs in my area, I found none that include meats or eggs in either Middlesex County or adjacent Mercer and Monmouth Counties. I found one farm in Somerset County, Dogwood Farms, that offers meat shares; it charges $250 for a "regular share" of 5-7 pounds of meat each month from November through March, which can include chicken, pork, beef, and lamb. But for us, this would be impractical for several reasons:

1. The whole share includes roughly 30 pounds of meat, which means the price works out to roughly $8.33 per pound. That's more than we currently spend on any of the meats we currently buy. 
2. Some of the 30 pounds would be beef and lamb, which, as I've said, I don't like and wouldn't usually buy.
3. If we had to pick up a whole month's supply of meat at a time, most of it would have to go in the freezer. Right now, we have only a small fridge freezer that's pretty well stuffed; to take advantage of the CSA, we'd have to buy a chest freezer. That would add an additional $200 or so to the cost of our first share, not counting the cost of electricity to power it—and we'd also have to find a place to keep it, which is easier said than done in our house.
4. Five to seven pounds is significantly more meat than we'd normally eat in a month—and eating it more often probably wouldn't be a good idea, since eating meat more than one or two days in a row tends to disagree with me. Of course, if we bought a freezer, we could spread that five months' supply over as long as a year, maybe, but since it costs more per pound than we'd normally pay, it still wouldn't be a good value. 
5. Last but not least, we'd have to drive out once a month to Hillsborough to pick up our share. That's about an hour round-trip, and it's in a direction we don't normally go, so we wouldn't be able to combine it with any other errands.

So all in all, it looks like a meat CSA just wouldn't be a good value for us—which is pretty much the same conclusion we've already reached about regular produce CSAs. We're better off sticking to places we shop now for for good deals on free-range meats: Trader Joe's for chicken legs ($2 a pound) and the Amish market for smoked meats, such as bacon, hot dogs, and kielbasa sausage, ranging from $5 to $6 a pound. And we can continue to keep an eye out at our local supermarkets to see if any new free-range offerings show up there at a good price.

Savings Challenge, Week 24: Pay Your Credit Card Bill Every Week

I'm still working my way through a small backlog of Bankrate Savings Challenges. Last week's is "Pay your credit card bill every week," and if you don't particularly see the point of that, well, I didn't either. Reporter Jeanine Skowronski, however, swears it has several benefits:

1. It "helps me stay on budget" and "ensure I don't rack up an uncontrollable balance." The idea is that, when she pays her bill weekly, she sees how much money she's already spent and how much she has left in the bank. That way she can avoid making any purchase that she doesn't have the money to cover. Which is a good thing, I guess, if you're in the habit of buying things without thinking about whether you can really afford them. But I don't spend carelessly, so I'm not in any danger of going overboard with frivolous purchases...and for necessary but unexpected expenses, I have a healthy cash cushion in the bank. So this particular benefit is of no benefit to me.
2. It lets her keep an eye on her statements and spot inaccurate or fraudulent charges. She points, for example, to a $40 purchase she made which was double-billed, which would have cost her $40 if she hadn't noticed the error. Which is, again, a good thing...but is she implying that she wouldn't have spotted this error if she had waited until the end of the month to pay her bill? Because I always make a point of going over my bills before I pay them each month (which, as I've noted, is the reason I don't use automatic bill payment), and that works fine for me. 
3. It helps her credit rating. This is the first benefit she's mentioned that actually applies to me as well. As she explains it, your credit rating is based on your "most recent statement balance" for each debt you owe—so if you happen to rack up a particularly high bill one month, even if you pay it off immediately, as far as the record is concerned, you're still carrying around a couple thousand dollars in debt. So it's true that paying off my credit card weekly instead of monthly might nudge my credit rating up a bit. But that's not a particularly strong argument with me, for two reasons: first, if your credit score is already in the "excellent" range (750 and up), then a few extra points don't really make any practical difference; and second, the only thing you really need a good credit score for is to borrow more money, which isn't something we expect to have any need to do in the foreseeable future. Skowronski claims that excellent credit can also help you qualify for better rates on cellphone or insurance plans, but I've never been offered any such deal.
4. Skowronski's final argument is that, if you carry a balance on your credit card bill, then you'll pay it off faster if you pay weekly, because interest won't accumulate as fast. Once again, a valid point, but one that doesn't apply at all to me, or to Skowronski herself.

So the bottom line here appears to be that, if you're a person who has had any problems with credit in the past—problems that have left you with a balance to pay off, or a habit of careless spending that you're still trying to kick, or  a less-than-stellar credit rating that you want to rebuild—then paying your bill monthly, instead of weekly, is a relatively easy way to deal with these problems. But if you're already in fine shape, thank you, then all this tip will do for you is create more paperwork, because you'll have four monthly payments to enter in your checkbook instead of one.

Savings Challenge, Week 23: Use Air Conditioning Efficiently

We're just coming off a short but severe heat wave, with the heat index peaking at over 100 for several days in a row. Most of our neighbors, I suspect, spent most of that time inside with the air conditioning cranked up...and paid a tidy sum for the privilege. Bankrate reporter Sheyna Steiner, who leads off the Bankrate savings challenge for week 23 with the confession that "air conditioning reigns" in her house all summer, routinely pays about $30 more for electricity during the summer months than she does in the wintertime. (She posts a graph of her electric bills for the past 14 months that shows her bill in dollars, her usage in kilowatt-hours, and the average temperature, and you can clearly see how her usage ticks steadily upward as summer temperatures rise.)

To see if she could keep this cost down, Steiner decided to "crank up" the temperature in her house all the way to—wait for it—78 degrees. She claimed she couldn't go any higher than this during the day because of her three dogs, even though the American Kennel Club says dogs only "begin to show signs of overheating when the air temperature is between 81 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit." Steiner was irked to find, after suffering through a whole month of sleeping in a 78-degree house, that turning up the thermostat by a whopping 2 degrees in June had only saved her $4 over what she'd spent in May...and she'd actually spent $17 more than she had the previous June. (The average monthly high temperature, according to her graph, was exactly the same both years.)

Well, I hate to break it to this lady, but at our house, we have actually gone through entire summers without using the air conditioner at all. This summer, we have used it exactly once, on a sultry July day when our window fans running at full blast were unable to drop the indoor air temperature below 90 degrees by bedtime. So we spent that night camped out on the futon in the office with the window AC running on low and the cats amusing themselves by running back and forth over us all night. And just that one night (plus a couple of hours during the day) reminded us how costly air conditioning really is; our electric usage in July jumped to a whopping 421 kilowatt-hours, compared to 294 the previous year. 

So how do we manage to get through most of the summer without AC? Well, our main tool is electric fans, of which we have a wide assortment:

• A tiny desk fan mounted on a stand made of scrap wood (to replace its original clip-on mount) that sits by my side as I work, pointed straight at my head, and keeps me tolerably cool throughout the day.
• A huge, powerful, and noisy floor fan, which Brian puts in the kitchen window atop a small, portable bookshelf to drive hot air out of the house and pull cool air in through the other windows. By doing this in the evening, we can manage to get the indoor temperature down to a tolerable level for sleep, and then we set it up again in the morning to pull in as much cool air as possible before the outdoor temperature gets too high. The only problem with this strategy is that we sometimes have to switch everything off in a hurry when the cool air we're pulling in becomes laced with marijuana smoke from next door. 
• A dual window fan that we keep in the bedroom to pull cool air in during the night. Brian shuts it off and pulls down the shade when he gets up around 5am to pee, so the light won't come into the room and wake me up too early. Since this fan can switch from intake to exhaust, we've also tried using it in the office to blow air out on the upwind end of the house when our neighbor is smoking, while pulling cool air in from the windows on the mostly smoke-free other end. This is better than nothing, but it just can't generate as much airflow as the big floor fan.
• Another desk fan that sits on a small end table at the foot of our bed, pointed straight at us as we sleep, to help cool us directly during the night. For a while, we were moving this one between the bedroom and the living room so we could also use it to cool ourselves while we sit on the couch to watch TV in the evening, but eventually we decided to splurge and spend 15 bucks on a duplicate fan for the living room, so now we don't have to keep moving it back and forth.
• A ceiling fan in the kitchen, which runs whenever we're in that room to keep us cool as we eat...and sometimes when we're not, just to help keep air circulating through the house.

These fans, combined with a few other tricks I outlined in an earlier post, are usually enough to keep us tolerably comfortable even on the hottest summer days. However, tolerably comfortable isn't exactly the same thing as comfortable, so I was intrigued to see an article titled "Stay Cool Naturally" in this month's issue of Mother Earth News. Unfortunately, most of the tips of offered on staying cool without AC were things I'd already tried, such as:

• Acclimatize yourself to the heat. The article says that the more time you spend in an air-conditioned environment, the harder you'll find it to adjust to normal summer temperatures. This is fine for me, since I don't have AC at home to get used to anyway, though not so great for Brian, who has to work every day in an air-conditioned office. However, I draw the line at going out in the blazing hot midday sun just so it will feel cooler inside when I come home. I've been taking my walk during the relatively cool morning hours, and during the heat wave, even that was enough to exhaust me. The house felt cooler compared to the outside, but I sure didn't, and it took me about an hour of sitting in front of a fan chugging cold water to feel close to normal again.
• Cool yourself with water. Even on the hottest days, I can't stand an ice-cold shower, but I have been adjusting the taps to a mix with more cold than hot. I've also tried the technique of soaking a cloth in cold water and draping it around my neck, but it doesn't seem to help much, and it's really not practical to do while sleeping.
• Use swamp coolers. Evaporative coolers, or swamp coolers, send a stream of air over water, which is supposed to pull heat out of the air as the water evaporates. Unfortunately, that only works in a climate where the water can evaporate, and with the humidity around here at over 75 percent, this technique doesn't work too well. 

The only new tips I saw that looked potentially useful were in the "Readers' Tips" section. One reader recommends soaking your feet in a tub of cool water, which he says "can cool you off for hours." Another suggests freezing a bottle of water—he recommends salt water, since it freezes at a lower temperature—and putting it in front of your fan to add an extra chill to the air it sends your way. So when the next heat wave hits, maybe I'll try pulling out one of those tricks before I consider another expensive bout of AC use.

Savings Challenge, Weeks 21-22: Basic Needs

There seems to be something wrong with the main webpage for the Bankrate Savings Challenge. When I view it in either Chrome or Firefox, I can't click on the links for the individual weekly challenges. I finally got it to work in Safari, so now I can view the last two challenges and post my responses. If you're also having difficulty viewing the page, try clicking on the links below to go directly to each week's challenge.

Week 21: Try Meal Replacements

This isn't so much a challenge as a hypothetical question: could you save money by replacing some or all of your meals with a liquid meal replacement called Soylent? Unlike liquid "supplements" like Ensure or Slim-Fast, this fairly new produce is classified as a food by the FDA and is guaranteed to provide all the nutrients your body needs.

Claes Bell, the Bankrate reporter who was brave enough to try this stuff for an entire week, reacted to it pretty much like Paul Hogan's character in the movie Crocodile Dundee: "You can live on it, but it tastes like sh--." He says the flavor and texture are "reminiscent of Ovaltine, but flavored with Splenda and sidewalk chalk instead of chocolate," and when he consumes it, "my stomach realizes it's been filled with some kind of nutrients, but it also knows the substance it's been asked to accept isn't food, per se." After a day or two on it, he says, he began to feel a sense of dread every time he started to feel hungry and realized that the only way to get rid of that hunger was to force down more of this vile stuff. He concludes that eating this stuff for the rest of his life would probably be better than an immediate, painless death, but "I'd have to think about it."

The worst part of all, however, was that when he did the math, he found that a diet of Soylent actually costs more than real food. A month's supply of Soylent for one person costs $255 a month; his family of four, by contrast, spends $600 a month on meals, including "the bill for our organic produce buying club, trips to Publix and an occasional meal out." Even if you assume he personally consumes 1/3 of this food rather than just 1/4, his share is still only $200—about 20 percent less than the stuff he found barely preferable to starvation. And since Brian and I spend only $300 a month on food (at home and at restaurants) for the two of us, it clearly wouldn't save us anything, either.

Bell points out that compared to other convenience foods, such as fast-food meals and frozen dinners, Soylent actually is somewhat cheaper. So for people who are always in a rush, keeping a stock of this stuff on hand for those times when there's no time to cook might be a money-saver. However, some of the items on his list—such as frozen meals from Lean Cuisine and Marie Callender's—cost only slightly more than the Soylent, and presumably they taste a lot better. And since you can usually get these frozen dinners for less than their full price by combining sales and coupons, it's unlikely the Soylent would really save you anything at all. Moreover, there are other convenience foods, like canned soup or macaroni and cheese, that cost significantly less per serving than Soylent does, and while you wouldn't want to eat these at every meal, at least eating them occasionally isn't an ordeal.

So frankly, I don't think it's even worth trying this challenge. Even if I succeeded in choking this stuff down, it wouldn't save me any money, so what's the point?

Week 22: Get Rid of Your Security System

Since I don't have a home security system and never have had one, this looks like another one of those challenges that couldn't possibly be a money-saver for me. But as it turns out, the Bankrate reporter who did the investigation, Laura Dunn, is in the same boat. So she opted instead to find out "what alternatives exist for keeping my home safe without adding a new category to my monthly budget."

A real home security system, Dunn found, would cost about $350 a year. That price includes a home alarm system, a security camera, and batteries for the camera. Getting a dog for protection—say, a nice Labrador retriever—would add another $750 a year, and the dog would also require a lot more "maintenance" than the alarm system. Of course, a dog also provides more intangible benefits, like companionship, but if security is your concern, this is an expensive way to get it.

Dunn also talked to a police captain about what she could do to keep her home safer without investing in this kind of pricey system. He recommended a few low-cost strategies to make her house look less "inviting" to thieves, including:

• trimming shrubbery to get rid of hiding spots;
• getting better lighting;
• being on good terms with neighbors, so they'll keep an eye on your place; and
• investing in a fake security camera (provided it looks convincing enough to fool a thief during a quick drive-by) and a fake "Beware of Dog" sign (without the dog to back it up).

Dunn found she could get herself a fake camera, with batteries, and a plastic "Beware of Dog" sign for about $40 total on Amazon.com, saving about $300 over the cost of a real alarm system in the first year alone. In theory, I could do the same, but to be honest, I've never seen the need. Our street is pretty busy and pretty well lit, even at night; I don't see any way a burglar could approach our house from the street without being spotted. And even if they did break in, we really don't have much of anything that's worth stealing: no jewelry, no fancy electronics, and a couple of computers that most people would consider obsolete. The biggest risk is that a burglar would leave a door open and let the cats out.

So, once again, I don't think it's worth investing any money at all in improved security. However, if getting rid of those huge overgrown shrubs in front of our house will make us safer, I'm happy to do that, since (a) it's free and (b) I've been wanting to get rid of them for years as it is.

Savings Challenge, Weeks 19-20: Clean and pretty

Once again, the Bankrate 52-week savings challenge has served up two challenges in a row that are already quite familiar to me. The first one deals with DIY cleaning products, the second with DIY hair care—two things that I've been doing for years. But, for the sake of argument, let's go through them:

Week 19: Make your own cleaning products

The Bankrate reporter who tried this challenge, Laura Dunn, decided to try homemade versions of three specific cleaning products: laundry booster, oven cleaner, and carpet stain remover. This struck me as a bit odd, since these are three products that I use very seldom, if at all. It seemed to me that the best way to save money on cleaning products would be to try a DIY version of an all-purpose cleaner that you use every day.

Her choice might still make sense if Laura Dunn uses these products a lot more often than I do, but based on her experience with the laundry booster, it appears that this was a product she'd actually never tried before. Basically, she just took a friend's advice to add vinegar to the wash cycle when doing laundry to "kill any bacteria" that could be causing "the smell you may have detected in your towels." Dunn was impressed with the result, because her towels came out "very fresh-smelling" and "decidedly softer than usual"—and at $2.48 per gallon, she figures the vinegar costs her only 4 cents per load. Which is all very well, but it's still an extra 4 cents per load, not a savings. Dunn tries to argue that this trick is actually saving her money by extending the life of her towels; in fact, she goes so far as to suppose that the vinegar treatment is actually doubling their lifespan, thus saving her $150 on a set of towels every five years—but she gives no reason at all for this supposition, and no one who commented on the article offered any evidence to back up the claim. Given that I have towels I've been using for 15 years and I've never added vinegar to the rinse cycle, I'm a little skeptical. (I also can't honestly say that I've ever found my towels to smell bad when they've just been washed, so it would make no sense for me to spend an extra 4 cents per load to deal with a complete non-problem.)

The other two DIY products Dunn tried were even less successful. The DIY oven cleaner, a paste of baking soda and water, worked fine, but Dunn calculated that it cost about 56 cents per use, while a bottle of Easy-Off costs maybe 50 cents per use. She thought this was only a worthwhile tip for people who prefer eco-friendly products. Personally, I'd say that baking soda has one other advantage: it's something most of us always have in the house. So if you decide after a cooking debacle that you really need to clean that oven, you don't have to run out and buy a bottle of a product that can only do one job and will probably take years to use up. (We've owned this house for seven years, and I don't think we've cleaned the oven more than once—and it doesn't look particularly dirty inside.)

As for the DIY carpet cleaner, made from a mixture of dish soap, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide, it ended up bleaching Dunn's carpet, and she had to buy a commercial stain remover to undo the damage—which, she notes, cost less than the homemade stuff. Personally, I wouldn't use anything with hydrogen peroxide on any kind of fabric unless it was already solid white—but then, I also wouldn't try this recipe in the first place, since our house doesn't have any carpets. We have a few area rugs, but we've never yet had to remove a stain from one, so there's really no way we could save much money with a DIY carpet cleaner.

So on the whole, Dunn's success rate with DIY cleaners was pretty unimpressive and unlikely to inspire her readers to try them. Which is a pity, because if she'd tried DIY versions of common, everyday cleaners—like good old vinegar and water—she could probably have achieved some much more impressive savings. I use this old standby on practically everything—bathroom, kitchen, floors, windows—and I haven't bought any sort of commercial surface cleaner in years. It's not tough enough for scrubbing the tub, but I do that with a "dish wand" dispenser filled with a mixture of half dish soap and half vinegar, and it works better than any commercial product I've tried. And for anything vinegar can't handle, there's baking soda.

The one thing I can't seem to do with either vinegar or baking soda, or a combination of the two, is removing the faint brown stain our walnut cat litter has left on the inside of our white toilet bowl. I may eventually have to resort to nasty, toxic chlorine bleach for that one.

Week 20: Be your own hairstylist

Bankrate reporter Crissinda Ponder says it costs her $60-$70 to have her hair straightened and styled, and keeping it that way all the time would mean shelling out that amount every other week. So she cut her salon visits back to "a handful" per year with the help of tutorial videos from YouTube. She embeds one such video that shows how to create "super cute summer curls," and the results certainly are as advertised, but alas, it's specifically for African-kinky hair, so it won't work for me.

Now, I can't really say how much I save each year by styling my own hair, because it's been so many years since anyone else did it for me. The last time I had a professional haircut, I think, was when my sister treated me to a session with her posh Boston stylist as a wedding present. I came out of the salon feeling not at all like myself, and I ended up stopping in the restroom and sprinkling water on my blown-out curls to bring them back to normal.

After that, I came to the resolution that I wasn't going to bother with professional hair care anymore. I had never, not once in my life, come out of a hair salon feeling like I looked better than when I went in, and my recent experience had convinced me that going to a pricier salon wouldn't make any difference in that regard. If I just trimmed my own hair at home, maybe it would never look really great, but at least I wouldn't have to pay someone to make me less happy with it.

After several years of trial and error, I now have a simple routine that I'm pretty happy with. It's basically a simplified version of the Curly Girl Method: I wet my hair thoroughly in the shower, then wrap it in a microfiber towel to soak up excess moisture while I do my exercises, and then I comb in some plain old VO5 conditioner and let it air dry. Once it's completely dry, I can fluff the curls up to an appropriate volume. And when then look like they're getting too long or too uneven, I just trim a bit off here or there until it looks right. The results may not look "professional"—but I'm happier with them than I've ever been with a professional cut.


So that's two more challenges that pose no real challenge for me. Perhaps next week's, which has to do with meal replacement shakes, will prove more interesting.

Savings Challenge, Weeks 17-18: Saving at work

Before I tackle the two latest challenges from the Bankrate 52-week savings challenge, I'd like to report on the final results of the Week 15 challenge, which was to eat only local, seasonal produce. As I noted last Sunday, this challenge ended up being a bit complicated, because the week during which we ate local didn't run neatly from Sunday to Sunday. In fact, even after I shifted the timing of the local-produce week to start and end on Tuesday evening, we didn't synch up with it perfectly, because Brian ended up eating a banana on Tuesday. So while we certainly ate exclusively local produce for at least seven days, they weren't seven consecutive days.

Even if we didn't stick to the letter of the challenge, however, we certainly managed to adhere to the spirit of it. We ate, during the course of the week, the entire contents of the CSA box we picked up on Sunday, plus about three pints of blueberries from the local farmers' market, plus a wide variety of produce from our own garden. In addition to our new kasha salad recipe, we made:

• A stir-fry using our home-grown snap peas, scallions, and garlic, plus some local organic mushrooms from the Whole Earth Center.

• Skillet chicken and rhubarb with our own home-grown rhubarb, scallions, and oregano and garlic scapes from the CSA box, accompanied by a salad of CSA lettuce. 

• Brian's classic rhubarb pie, for a party we attended that weekend...so we enjoyed our home-grown rhubarb in both sweet and savory fashion.

• An omelette of local organic mushrooms, with a salad of home-grown lettuce.

• For the other potluck party we attended over the weekend, the cold sesame noodles from The Clueless Vegetarian, with home-grown scallions, local carrots from the farmers' market, and, in the dressing, one of our new walking onions (a gift from a fellow gardener who had more than she needed) that Brian dug up specially for the occasion.

So, what with the CSA box, our garden, and a few extras from the farmers' market, we managed to put together enough meals for not only a week's worth of dinners, but also sufficient leftovers for a week's worth of lunches...even if, as I say, the week wasn't exactly seven days in a row.

And that brings me quite neatly to the next Bankrate savings challenge:

Week 17: Take your lunch to work

The Bankrate reporter covering this challenge, Mark Hamrick, leads off his story with a pardonable boast (disguised as a "confession") about how he likes to cook, and how he always prepares his own lunch to take to work. Yet on the second page of the article, he posts his grocery list for the week, and it turns out that his "homemade" lunches actually consist of a salad plus a "frozen food entree," such as Amy's or Lean Cuisine, costing anywhere from $2 to $3.79. This, plus the salad veggies, works out to somewhere between $3 and $5 per day.

If you compare this to a cost of a restaurant meal, I guess it's pretty good, but Brian and I—as we learned from last year's Reverse SNAP Challenge—eat on a budget of about $7.66 a day for all our meals. For both of us. The cost of his "frugal" lunch, all by itself, would feed one of us for a whole day.

Hamrick notes that "some days," he can "save a couple of bucks or so more by eating leftovers (from a previous dinner) for lunch." But what Hamrick does once in a while as an extra cost-saving measure is pretty much our normal M.O., as I noted in this earlier Bankrate challenge about using up leftovers. So not only do Brian and I take our lunch to work nearly every day (or in my case, since I work from home, take myself to the lunch that's is waiting in the fridge), we also don't have to do any additional cooking or shopping for said lunch. All we have to do is dish out some leftovers into a microwaveable container and add a piece of fruit on the side. In the unusual event that we don't have any dinner leftovers, we usually go with a peanut-butter sandwich (remember those?) for Brian, and maybe a scrambled egg or a can of soup for me.

Week 18: Ride your bike to work

The folks at Bankrate apparently thought that while they were on the topic of saving money at work, they might as well discuss another way to save on the cost of getting to and from work. Reporter Claes Bell says that making the shift from driving to biking to work has been "a game changer" for him (or possibly her...I can't quite tell from the name), saving about $129 a month. However, that's because the switch to biking meant that he and his wife could downsize from two cars to one, saving on gas, insurance, and maintenance. Most of the savings came from eliminating the second car, not from driving fewer miles.

For me and Brian, since we were already a one-car family before Brian took up biking to work, the savings are a lot smaller. I calculated last year that Brian's bicycle commute probably saved us about $89 a year—less than the Bells saved in just one month. However, it would still be well worth doing even if the savings came to nothing at all, because (a) it's good exercise, enabling Brian to maintain his boyish figure—or more accurately, to acquire the boyish figure he never had as a boy—and (b) he finds riding his bike through the park a much, much less stressful start to the day than driving in New Jersey traffic.

So that's two more weekly challenges that are actually no challenge for us, because ha ha, we're doing them already. Admittedly, we're not saving nearly as much with the bicycle commute as Claes Bell, but then, we're doing a lot better with the brown-bag lunches than Mark Hamrick, so I guess it balances out.

Gardeners' Holidays 2015: Cornucopia

Well, here it is, the official first day of summer (although the weather has been summery for nearly a month now), and we are celebrating with a box of goodies from the CSA that Brian's coworker was nice enough to let us pick up in her absence. Her subscription entitles her to a half-bushel share rather than a full bushel, so this morning we picked up a small box containing:

• 1 head of red leaf lettuce
• 1 smallish head of cabbage
• 1 bunch of arugula
• 1 bunch of some other leafy greens that we aren't sure about—maybe some sort of chard?
• 2 zucchini
• 2 small cucumbers
• 3 garlic scapes
• 1 half-pint of blueberries

This bounty will be the foundation of our local produce challenge, the only one of the recent Bankrate savings challenges I've seen fit to try out for a full week. The veggies, eked out by what's in our garden right now, should be more than sufficient to get us through the week, but that one little cup of blueberries definitely isn't going to be enough fruit. The plums on our trees aren't ready to eat yet; although some of them are starting to turn red and fall off the trees, they're still rock-hard and no bigger than a large grape. And today Brian tasted one and confirmed that it was really, really sour—though at least it had an identifiable plum flavor.

So, in order to get through the week eating only seasonal, local produce, we'll have to find some other source of local fruit. We could probably find something bearing the "Jersey Fresh" label at the supermarket, but as I noted last week, New Jersey fruit isn't necessarily more sustainable than something shipped from California unless it's organic as well. So I'll have to pick and choose based on what I know to be sustainable. I feel pretty confident about buying local blueberries, because I know that they're really, really easy to grow in New Jersey; my parents had a hedge of blueberry bushes when I was growing up, and we could go out there every weekend and pick them by the quart. So if I can't find any local, organic peaches or nectarines, I guess I can always stick to blueberries for the rest of the week.

Ironically, with all this wealth of veggies in the fridge to choose from, we're not actually going to be cooking anything at all tonight, because we're having dinner with my parents. But that's okay as far as the challenge goes, because my dad told me he's planning to make pasta with grilled veggies and chicken—and the veggies in question are fresh from his own garden, which is definitely local and organic. And if there's any chance he won't have enough, we can always bring him one of our zucchini as a Father's Day gift. (Our zucchini plants are already starting to produce their first little tender fruits, so there's basically no risk that we'll run short during the week.)

I'll try to fill you in on the local produce challenge as it unfolds, and if I can't get to it during the week, I'll at least give you an update on the outcome next weekend. Until then, happy summer!

Savings Challenge, Weeks 11-16

Since I started working for Money Crashers, I haven't had much time during the week to update this blog, and as a result, I've fallen seriously behind with the Bankrate Savings Challenges. The last one I posted was over a month ago, and since then, six new weekly challenges have popped up on the challenge's main page. I don't really have time to post six separate entries to get caught up, and anyway, I doubt I could get a full blog post out of each challenge, since most of them (as usual) aren't really relevant for us. So instead, here's a catchup post, in which I'll run through the six new challenges and what I have to say about them—whether that's taking the challenge in full or just explaining why it doesn't work for us.

Week 11: Bid on hotel rooms to save big

This challenge is all about using Priceline, along with a few other travel sites, to name your own price for a hotel room. Doug Whiteman, the reporter covering this challenge, leads off with the remark, "The idea that some people would spend hundreds of dollars per night on a hotel room has always seemed crazy to me." I'm certainly in agreement with him there, but I'd take it even further: for me, in most cases, it's crazy to stay in hotels at all.

That's because Brian and I don't really like to travel for its own sake. As a rule, we travel for only two reasons: to visit family and friends (in which case we stay with them), or for the occasional work-related trip (in which case it goes on the expense account). The last time we stayed in a hotel, as far as I can recall, was when we went with my parents to visit my sister for Hanukkah in 2012—and on that occasion, they picked up the tab in exchange for having us do the driving. The last time we actually paid to stay at a hotel, as far as I can recall, was on our honeymoon nearly eleven years ago.

Obviously, if you're a person who does like to travel, this strategy won't work for you, and you're better off with Mr. Whiteman's. (My favorite financial writer, Andrew Tobias, also loves it, saying "Many is the time I've stayed in a $300 hotel room for $89.") But skipping hotels completely works fine for us.

Week 12: Conserve gas by carpooling to work

This tip is obviously useless for me, since I work entirely from home (you know, cranking out those articles for Money Crashers) and I don't use a drop of gas walking from my bedroom to the office. Brian doesn't really do it either, because his workplace is only four miles away, and most of his coworkers live farther away than that. Instead, he saves gas in the warmer months (and very occasionally in the wintertime) by riding his bike to work. He finds this method of commuting much more enjoyable than driving, and it helps him maintain his boyish figure (or rather, acquire one, since he's in much better shape now than he was as a boy).

Occasionally, Brian will get a ride home with a coworker (for instance, if he rode his bike to work and then it started raining), or give a ride to one whose car has broken down. But since he doesn't regularly drive to work, forming a regular carpool isn't really an option.

Week 13: Find the best diaper deals

This obviously isn't a useful tip for a couple with no kids, in diapers or out of them. The only time I've bought diapers in the past couple of years was as a Hanukkah present for my sister, and those were not the disposable kind, but eco-friendly cloth diapers from Charlie Banana. These ain't cheap: a pack of 6 costs at least $114, which means enough diapers to get your kid through to potty training will run you upwards of $450. But that's still significantly less than the $1,912 that frugal-living blogger Squawkfox estimates you'd pay for disposable diapers over the same period. Even if you tack on another $375, as Squawkfox does, for the extra laundry costs, you still save more than a grand by using cloth. And that's just with the first kid; those cloth diapers won't wear out in 30 months, so you can go on to use them again with any future kids. And after that, you can sell the cloth diapers on eBay and recover about half of what you spent on them initially. So unless you can get the price of disposable diapers down to about 8 cents apiece, cloth is bound to be cheaper.

Week 14: Eat local, seasonal produce

Ah, now here at last is a challenge that's right up my alley. Indeed, my whole series of Gardeners' Holidays theme is basically a celebration of local, seasonal produce. However, one thing I learned recently makes me hesitate to take on this challenge: food that's locally grown—say, within a 100-mile radius of your home—doesn't always have the lowest carbon footprint. According to this article from the Worldwatch Institute, the transportation of food from farm to table accounts for only 4 percent of its total carbon emissions. So veggies grown in the fertile soil of California, where they need less fertilizer to flourish, may actually have a lower carbon footprint than veggies grown right here in New Jersey.

The article argues that "production practices"—that is, how food is grown—matters a whole lot more than where it's grown. Organic produce, for instance, has a lower carbon footprint because you can cut out all the emissions associated with producing, transporting, and applying chemicals to fields—and it has other environmental benefits too, like reducing water use and preserving biodiversity. But on the other hand, local produce also has some benefits that can't be measured in terms of carbon equivalents. Buying local makes it possible to know the farmers personally, so you actually know a lot more about how their food is produced than you do when you buy at the supermarket. However, this only works if you're actually shopping at the farmers' market and interacting with the growers directly; if you just pick the apples marked "Jersey Fresh" off the supermarket shelf, it doesn't tell you anything except where they come from.

So if I take on this challenge, I think I'll want to take it one step further. Instead of just choosing food that's local and seasonal, I'll want to make sure it's as sustainable as possible. That means all the food I buy during the weeklong challenge should be either

1. from our own garden,
2. Certified Organic, and/or
3. from a farm I know to be sustainable.

This makes the challenge quite a bit tougher, but fortunately, I have an ace up my sleeve. Brian just notified me this morning that one of his coworkers is going to be away this weekend and has offered us her CSA share. So, between the contents of that box, a trip to the all-organic since we'll be picking that box up on Sunday—which, coincidentally, is also my next Gardeners' Holiday—I'll make that the kicking-off point for a week of local, seasonal, sustainable eating. Once I know what's in the box, as well as what's ready for picking in the garden, I can fill in the gaps with seasonal organic produce from the supermarket. So watch for more news about this challenge on Sunday.

Week 15: Shop around for the best insurance rate

Here's another challenge that I've already done. I posted on the results of my insurance checkup two years ago, when I tried to find better rates on my auto and home insurance but ended up deciding it wasn't worth switching both policies to save $140 a year. This past February, however, I tried it again, and this time I found that we could save $227 a year by switching to a new auto insurer. The higher savings, and the fact that we'd only have to transfer one policy, sold Brian on the deal, and we made the switch—with a promise to our old insurer that we'd check back with them next year and see whether they could convince us to switch back. So it'll be at least another 6 months before I'm ready to check insurance rates again.

Week 16: Set up credit card alerts

This week's story really isn't a challenge at all. Instead, it's a little educational article about four ways to use credit card alerts to save money:

1. Set up payment alerts to let you know when a payment is due, so you never miss a payment and end up owing a late fee. I already receive my bill electronically, so I don't need any additional alerts to remind me to pay it.
2. Use balance alerts and spending alerts to keep track of how much you're charging, so you don't let your bill get out of hand. I keep track of my spending using a much simpler system: a pencil and a sheet of paper tacked to my bulletin board. So when my monthly credit card bill comes, I already know exactly what's going to be on it—and if there's any transaction I don't remember, I can always double-check it against the sheet.
3. Use transaction alerts to warn you about any transaction that looks suspicious, so you'll know if someone else is using your card fraudulently. This, I admit, would be a lot more convenient than the system Citibank uses with one of my cards, which is to cut it off with no warning at all if it's used outside of our home territory—as they did once while we were visiting my in-laws in Indianapolis. Apparently the fact that we'd used that same card to buy gas several times on the way to Indianapolis didn't tip them off that we might actually be there. So after that, we had to call up the company and tell them whenever we were going to be traveling. (Now, we just use a different card.) But if had simply alerted us to the fact that someone was using our card in another state, that wouldn't have been so bad. (Unfortunately, I checked and this isn't actually an available alert with any card we use.)
4. Use alerts to keep track of your rewards, so you know when to cash them in or when to sign up for a new set of spending categories. I already get the alerts to tell me about new spending categories, and I just check the rewards balance whenever I pay the bill, so I don't need to be alerted about it.

And there we are: all up to date. I'll try not to fall this far behind in future, but it may mean making my Bankrate challenge posts little quickies that I can do during the week.

Savings Challenge, Week 10: Eat your leftovers

The Bankrate Weekly Savings Challenge for May 5 is "Learn to love leftovers," yet another of those challenges that doesn't really work for me. I'm sure the Natural Resources Defense Council is right when it claims, as quoted in the intro to the article, that "the average American throws out between $28 and $43 of food per month"; all I can say is that we're not personally contributing any significant amount to that average. At our house, leftovers turn into lunches, and vegetable scraps go into the stock bag for soup. Maybe once a year we'll fish a jar of something unidentifiable out of the back of the fridge and dump it into the compost, but that's about it.

Yet the statistic becomes a little more understandable when you read the rest of the article. Jessica Patel, the reporter covering the challenge, leads off by saying, "There are lots of people out there who don't 'do' leftovers," including her husband. If your attitude toward leftovers is that they are no longer food, but simply waste, then it's hardly surprising if you end up dumping $28 to $43 worth of food straight into the rubbish bin each month.

Of course I'm aware that there are people who just don't know what to "do with" leftovers, because the various frugal-living sites I read are always running articles about how to deal with this "problem." But frankly, it's an attitude I've simply never understood. The way I was raised, what you do with leftovers is eat them—for lunch if you have a small portion left, and for a second dinner if they're a larger portion. If anything, I would say I have the opposite problem: I don't know what to do without leftovers. When there are none in the fridge, I don't know what to eat for lunch.

I suppose normal people—the kind who throw their dinner leftovers in the trash—simply assume that lunch is a meal that's always eaten out. If they're even aware that there is such a thing as a brown-bag lunch, they probably assume that it's the same sandwich, apple, and two cookies they got as kids in elementary school, and they decide that the prospect of eating the same old sorry sandwich day after day is more than they can face. The concept of lunching, as we did last week, on veggie frittata, spinach pasta, and roasted eggplant, simply by taking last night's leftovers to work in a little Rubbermaid container, probably never crosses their minds. And certainly the idea of planning a large dinner specifically for the purpose of creating lunch leftovers would be completely foreign to them.

Now, Jessica Patel, to do her justice, does not fall into this category. She says she'll "often try to make something hearty on a Sunday, then space it out over the next few days." She proudly trots out her baked ziti as an example of how much she saves this way: for $20 worth of ingredients (plus another $2 to $3 for garlic bread), she can make a dinner that feeds her husband, her son, and herself, and have enough left over to make lunch for herself and her son the next day. This, according to her calculations, is a savings of $16, since she would have had to pay that same $22 to buy the ziti dinner for three as take-out, plus $8 apiece for the two lunches at work. That sounds like an impressive savings until you realize that what she's measuring it against is the cost of ordering both dinner and lunch from a restaurant. If you assume that she would have cooked dinner at home on Sunday anyway, then her savings from eating the leftovers is only $7.20—the $16 she would have spent on work lunches minus the $4.40 per serving she actually spent on the ziti. Eating this way wouldn't get her very far on the Reverse SNAP Challenge. But at least she's doing better than her husband, who is presumably shelling out $40 per week at the cafeteria rather than eat the same meal two days running.

Seeking an alternative her husband might be willing to consider, Patel turns for advice to Tawra Kellam of Living on a Dime. Kellam's approach to leftovers is to plan three meals at a time: for instance, making a roast chicken on Monday that she plans to turn into chicken and dumplings on Tuesday and chicken salad on Wednesday. She scoffs at Patel's (and our) method of dealing with leftovers: "With a casserole like that, no one wants to eat it for days at a time." What she recommends instead is to divide the leftover ziti up into individual portions and put them in divided freezer trays, along with individual portions of cooked veggies and dessert, to make "your own homemade TV dinners."

Kellam thinks this sounds like a brilliant idea, but personally, I can't see the point. In the first place, Kellam's family isn't eating ziti for "days at a time": three people have it for dinner on Sunday, and then two people have it for lunch on Monday or Tuesday. I've certainly had the experience of getting sick of a particular meal after eating it for several days in a row, but if I liked it when I first had it for dinner, I'm not going to be too tired of it to eat it one more time for lunch. And popping one container of leftovers into the microwave at lunchtime is a lot less work than portioning everything out into those little TV dinner trays. (Besides, if you're not actually planning to eat your meal in front of the TV, why would you want to eat it out of a tray?)

So at our house, we deal with meal leftovers the easy way: just eat them. The only leftovers that actually pose a challenge are leftover ingredients, such as the 1/3 cup of celery I had left after experimenting with tuna-avocado salad, or the five mushrooms we had left after the rest of the package went into a batch of pasta primavera. But fortunately, we have a few standard recipes for dealing with these. A stir-fry can accommodate just about any vegetable, and all you need to round it out is some fish cake or tofu and a batch of rice. The "Fast Frittata" recipe from The Clueless Vegetarian is also a good dumping ground for leftover veggies of any sort. And if neither of these seems appropriate, that's when Brian gets creative and devises a new recipe, like his Hearty Bluefish Chowder, to use up the odds and ends.

So, basically, I don't think Brian and I need any lessons in loving leftovers. But if the folks at Bankrate do, we could probably teach them a trick or two.

April Spending Results

Last month, when Bankrate announced its "no-spend month" challenge, I announced in turn that I would be taking the challenge in a modified form. Instead of skipping all spending on everything other than "necessities" (defined as "gasoline, groceries, rent, utilities, etc.," with that "etc." left as an exercise for the reader), I planned to write down all my expenses and sort them into three categories: clear necessities, clear luxuries, and investment purchases. This last category is for all the things that I didn't absolutely need to buy, because I could survive without them, but that would save me money or otherwise make a clear improvement in my quality of life over the long run.

Now that April is over, I can announce the results of this experiment. I already disclosed my first week's expenses and the categories they fell into, but I think listing all my individual purchases for the whole month would get too tedious, so I'll just give the totals for each category, along with a bit of detail about what went into it.

Necessities: $2,550

Nearly two thirds of this was for our quarterly property taxes, which come due at the end of April. The rest included groceries, gas, personal care items (such as toothbrushes and all the skin care products I bought at the beginning of the month), the monthly premium for our pet insurance, and some basic maintenance for our car and our heating system.

It also included one item I was really annoyed about: a traffic ticket. On our way home from Morris dance practice on Thursday, we got pulled over by a police officer who explained, in the nicest possible way, that our car's registration was expired. This came as a shock to both of us, because we hadn't received any sort of notice from the Motor Vehicle Commission that our registration was up for renewal, and our inspection sticker was good until 2016. But when we checked the registration cards themselves, sure enough, they said that they were only good until February 2015. The cop obviously believed our story, because he said he was going to treat it as a minor violation that wouldn't put any points on Brian's license—but we still ended up paying $56 for the ticket, plus an extra $2 "convenience fee" to renew our registration online so that we wouldn't still be driving around with an expired one. Not to mention that it took me a couple of hours on the Web and on the phone figuring out how to renew it online, since the first thing it asks for is the confirmation code from your registration renewal form—which, of course, we didn't have.

Paying what Dave Ramsay calls "the stupid tax" is annoying enough when you're paying for your own stupidity—for example, if you get the notice to renew your car registration and forget to do it—but having to pay $58 for someone else's stupidity is really, really annoying. But on the whole, taking a whole day to go in to court and contest the ticket would probably have been even more annoying, especially if it didn't work. At least by paying the $58 up front, we could put the whole mess behind us. So I think it's fair to classify it as a necessary expenditure, even if it's one we shouldn't have had to pay.

Luxuries: $74.72

The biggest category here was food. We only ate one meal out (a lunch in Princeton that broke up our day of yard-saling), but we also frittered a way a dollar here and there on sweets: irresistibly priced candy on sale after Easter, a bun from the bakery, dessert and coffee at the Minstrel concert, ice cream with the Morris team after a performance. On top of that, we spent $12.83 on an unusual purchase for us: a bottle of wine from the Rite Aid. Over Christmas vacation, my brother- and sister-in-law had taken us to the New Day Craft Meadery, a place that makes and serves different varieties of cider and mead, and we'd liked some of them quite a bit, so when we spotted this bottle of "honey wine" at the Rite Aid, we decided to splurge. On the whole, though, we didn't like it as much as most of the meads we sampled at New Craft, nor even as much as the $6 port wine Brian buys from Trader Joe's. So this wasn't a particularly worthwhile luxury.

Another luxury category was entertainment. This wasn't a particularly big-ticket item: we spent $7.99 on our Hulu Plus subscription and also made two trips to the Minstrel. As volunteers, we didn't pay the $9 admission fee, but we put $10 each night into the creel as a tip for the performers. The rest of our luxury expenses were kind of miscellaneous: $5 for clothing items (pants from the thrift shop, a sweater and some shoes at a yard sale), $1 for the hurricane lampshade I used to make my cat-safe vase (which I'm pleased to say is still keeping the prying paws at bay), $2 for makeup (concealer, which is just about all I ever use), and $5 for a new cat toy. I debated whether to call that an investment purchase, but I decided since the cats had plenty of toys already, this one was definitely unnecessary. We mostly bought it out of curiosity to see how they respond to catnip. (Answer: quite favorably at first, but they quickly lose interest.)

Investments: $680.91

The bulk of this was for our monthly giving. I ended up classifying it as an investment purchase because it didn't really feel right to call a donation to Doctors Without Borders a necessity, but it clearly wasn't a luxury either. It may seem like a stretch to call it an investment, but not if you think of it as an investment in the future of the world as a whole, rather than just our personal lives.

The next biggest category was home improvement. We spent $130 on a new orbital sander and sandpaper, which Brian plans to use to refinish all the doors throughout the main floor of the house. (One down, nine to go.) This project produces a ridiculous amount of dust, so we also had to invest $6 in a new filter for our Shop-Vac. And we also spent around $4 on some carpet samples for our new DIY cat tree.

Aside from that, it was a little of this and a little of that: a phone we picked up at a yard sale to replace an old one that no longer rings, a bread knife from a yard sale that will serve for cutting bagels and other breads that won't fit in our fiddle-bow knife, a new battery for Brian's watch, his new corded beard trimmer (which we hope will last much longer than the cordless ones), and some cork strips to repair his clarinet. This isn't a necessity, because he doesn't have to play the clarinet in order to survive, but it doesn't quite seem like a luxury either, because our Morris team can't perform if Brian doesn't play the clarinet, and he can't continue to play it without fixing it. So it's not just Brian's hobby, but also my hobby—and my primary form of exercise—that's at stake. I think that's enough to qualify the purchase as an investment rather than a luxury. And anyway, it's only $6.50.

So overall, our spending breaks down as:

As I predicted, our spending on necessities and those hard-to-classify investment purchases dwarfed our spending on luxuries. But even more importantly, all the luxuries that we bought were items we considered carefully and deemed to be worth the price. We didn't have to go out for ice cream with the dance team or buy a bottle of wine, but we decided, upon reflection, that these little luxuries were worth splurging on. So I can say with confidence that while we treat ourselves to the occasional splurge, mindless spending—what the financial fast is designed to combat—is definitely not a problem for us.

Savings Challenge, Week 9: Cutting cellphone costs

This week's topic in the Bankrate 52-Week Savings Challenge is saving on cellphone service. This is apparently a bigger item in most people's budgets than I realized; according to a financial firm cited in the article, "the nationwide average bill is $90 per phone." Another source puts the number even higher, saying the three biggest carriers all charge upwards of $140 a month. That's more than we pay for our home phone, Internet, and cable service combined.

The personal story linked to this challenge is a bit different from the others I've read so far. While most Bankrate reporters are only trying out a given challenge out for the sake of the article, reporter Barbara Whelehan  had a genuine need to trim her budget after a whopping 50 percent drop in household income, and she saw their equally whopping $160 monthly cellphone bill as a likely spot to cut. She'd already managed to negotiate her personal bill with T-Mobile down to $55 a month from $87, so she tried them again and took advantage of a special deal: "two lines with unlimited talk, text, and data for $100 a month." The process of switching was a hassle—not on T-Mobile's end, but getting her husband's former "Ma-Bell company" to unlock his phone—but it ended up cutting their bill by 60 percent.

According to the mobile editor at Bankrate, Mike Cetera, Whelehan is getting a "very nice deal" paying just $100 for two phones with unlimited talk, text, and data. However, he says they could have paid even less by going with a "discount carrier" such as Ting, which works on a "pay-what-you-use" basis. Given that Whelehan says she generally uses her phone "to call, text and occasionally scan the news if I'm stuck on the road," this would probably be a good deal for them, as they're currently paying for a lot more plan than they need (at least for her phone). With Ting, according to the carrier's website, an average 2-phone family pays just $42 per month. Republic Wireless, another discount carrier, offers plans with unlimited talk and text (plus data over wi-fi only) for as little as $10 a month.

If Whelehan and her husband were willing to accept some limits on talking and texting as well as data use, they could potentially lower their bill even more by switching to a prepaid plan. Their current carrier, T-Mobile, charges only $3 a month for a bare-bones pay-as-you-go plan that includes 30 minutes of talk or 30 text messages. Additional minutes or messages are billed at 10 cents apiece, and you can tack on a data pass when you need it for $5 per day or $10 per week. Admittedly, this isn't nearly enough phone time for most people, but for users like us, who truly do want a cell phone only for emergencies, it's plenty. We switched to this plan a few months ago, and we've never gone over the 30-minute limit. And since we have only one phone between the two of us, that means our phone bill comes to $3 per month total—not exactly an overpriced luxury that's ripe for budget cuts.

So I guess the moral of the story here may be that the best way of all to cut your cellphone bill is to use the phone less. Keep it down to half an hour, and you can get by with a $3 prepaid plan, whittling your bill to just one-thirtieth of the average. (If, on the other hand, you really need that unlimited talk and text because your cell phone is your primary phone, maybe you should just drop your landline instead.)

Savings Challenge, Week 8: Lawn care (or lack thereof)

Once again, I've fallen behind schedule with the Bankrate 52-Week Savings Challenge. I couldn't find any way to link this week's challenge with last week's to cover them both in one post, so instead I'm going to devote this post to last week's challenge, "Mow Your Own Lawn." Then I'll cover this week's challenge in my next post to get caught up again.

Mowing your own lawn isn't exactly new territory for us: since we bought this house nearly eight years ago, we've been cutting all the grass with a manual push mower. This is only feasible because our "lawn," if you can even dignify it with that name, doesn't cover all that much area: a patch about eight paces by ten in the front and maybe two to three times as much total space in the back. Nonetheless, it's not exactly an easy and pleasant chore. The front yard is a sort of raised, semi-enclosed area that we can only reach by hauling the mower up a flight of steps and over a short wall, and the back yard has a sloped portion that's hard to run the mower up and down. The difficulties are compounded by the fact that our "grass", far from being a smooth carpet of uniform green blades, is a dense, motley assortment of grasses and weeds: clover, chickweed, dandelions, and mugwort, punctuated by thick, mower-resistant tufts of crabgrass.

On top of that, I must confess, we're not too good at following the Bankrate article's advice about mowing frequently to keep the grass healthy. They quote an expert who advises to "Mow grass as needed and not as a scheduled weekly chore," but we're doing well if we get to it once every two weeks. On the plus side, we're great at following all the other tips in the article. It says not to overwater; we never waste water on the lawn at all. It recommends "cutting it high and letting it lie"; we keep the mower blade at its highest setting, and we couldn't bag up the clippings if we wanted to, since our little push mower won't even take a bag. And we avoid the perils of "Fertilizing at the incorrect rate or the incorrect time of year for your type of grass" by eschewing fertilizer altogether.

Nonetheless, our attitude of benign neglect hasn't exactly made our lawn easier to deal with. So what we're trying to do instead is gradually whittle away at the size of the lawn so there will be less of it to mow. Over the past seven years, we've cleared strips of grass from the front yard to make room for creeping phlox and day lilies, as well as adding three plum trees surrounded by islands of mulch. (Side note: They bloomed for the first time this year, so we might actually get to pick a few plums this summer.) In the back yard, we converted formerly grassy areas to beds for our bush cherries and rhubarb, as well as replacing a big swath of lawn with our patio. Yet even so, there's more grass remaining than we'd really like.

We're not prepared to go quite as far as the Bankrate reporter who attempted this challenge, who says that just one sweaty session of mowing her Florida lawn with an electric mower was enough to make her consider swapping out the lawn for "low-maintenance rocks and dirt." What we'd prefer, instead, is a nice, easy-care ground cover that can tolerate being trodden on occasionally. We've considered several alternatives, and we actually had a go at seeding an area in the back yard with Dutch clover, but the results were uninspiring to say the least. However, we had much better luck in the front yard with a single creeping thyme plant, which started out as a circle a few inches and "crept" at surprising speed to encompass several square feet. The Mother-of-Thyme plant we tried last year has also thrived, but on a less impressive scale; after a year, it's still less than a foot across. It's lower and denser than the creeping thyme and would probably look nicer spread across the entire yard, but it would just take too many plants to make that happen. With creeping thyme, by contrast, we could probably start with a dozen strategically spaced plants and have the whole lawn area covered in a couple of years. So if we can succeed in finding the plants at the upcoming Rutgers plant sale, I think it's worth taking the plunge. Even if we can only rustle up enough thyme plants to cover half the yard, that's still half a yard we'll never have to mow again.

Savings Challenge, Week 7: Saving on shaving

I seem to be going through a long dry spell with the Bankrate 52-Week Savings Challenge. Three weeks ago, it was making your own dog food, and we don't have a dog; two weeks ago, it was the financial fast, an idea I'd already considered and deemed unproductive; and last week, it was the spending journal, which I already do routinely and thus couldn't try out for the first time. And now this week, Bankrate reporting Mark Hamrick leads off with "This will be a rare tip aimed at men, so apologies to the ladies," before presenting his recipe for homemade shaving oil.

Now, simply having a challenge that's "aimed at men" wouldn't necessarily make it useless for me, since I happen to be married to one; I could simply make up a batch of the homemade shaving oil for him. The real problem is that, until I saw this challenge today, I'd never even heard of shaving oil, and neither had Brian. Apparently it's something you put on before your shaving cream to get a closer shave with less irritation. But these benefits come with a hefty price tag: according to the article, shaving oil can cost $10 or more per ounce, and that's in addition to whatever you already spend on shaving cream.

Now, if you are already in the habit of buying shaving oil, then making your own could indeed save you a tidy sum of money. Hamrick's recipe uses about $11 worth of basic ingredients (grape seed oil as a base, castor oil as a thickener, and eucalyptus oil for fragrance) to produce around $150 worth of shaving oil. Hamrick estimates that by using it, he's saving at least $200 per year. But the thing is, this implies that he used to be spending upwards of $200 per year on shaving oil. Brian, by contrast, doesn't currently spend one red cent on shaving oil, and neither does any other man I know. So it's hard to see how this tip can really be a money-saver for most men. It might still be worthwhile as a cheap luxury, but adding a luxury item—even a cheap one—to your existing budget is never going to save you money.

So, rather than spending $11 on ingredients to make up a batch of a product we don't currently use, I'm instead going to discuss a few tips of my own that Brian and I actually do use to cut (ha ha) the cost of shaving:

• Clean the blade. I use a cartridge-type razor for shaving my legs, and over time, it gets clogged up with hair, making it much less effective. So I always rinse it carefully after each use, and that helps me go longer on a single blade.
• Reduce rust. I simply dry the blade carefully with a towel to keep it from rusting, but other folks use more extreme remedies, like coating the blade in Vaseline (though I'm not sure how you do that without cutting yourself) or storing it in a cup of oil. Which, come to think of it, would also keep it nicely lubricated, thus serving essentially the same function as a shaving oil.
• Strop the blade. Stropping a blade, as Wikipedia explains, is not exactly the same thing as sharpening it; it doesn't remove chipped or dulled edges, but instead realigns the edge without removing any material. However, it does serve much the same purpose as sharpening: to give you a closer shave with the same old blade. Various sources around the Web recommend stropping your blade with a leather belt, a leather-soled shoe, and even a pair of blue jeans, but by far the easiest method I've seen is to strop the blade against the inside of your own forearm. After all, you always have it handy when you're getting ready to shave, so why climb out of the shower to go get a belt or a piece of denim?
• Skip the shaving cream. I shave in the shower, so i just use my regular body wash. I have to wash with it anyway, so I may as well shave it off my legs instead of just rinsing it off, right? I once tried some shaving cream instead (a visiting friend left a can behind) to see if it gave me an appreciably closer shave, and it didn't, so I see no reason to squeeze one more container into the shower bin.
• Grow a beard. This is Brian's preferred method, though it has less to do with saving money and more to do with (1) how it looks and (2) not having to bother with shaving every day. Unfortunately, he isn't one of those fortunate guys whose beard grows in precisely down to the chin and leaves the neck perfectly clean, so he still ends up having to shave his neck—but most of the time, he just cuts the hair down to short stubble, using his beard trimmer with the guard off. Only when he needs to look extra snazzy does he get out a proper razor—which is to say, borrow mine—and shave completely smooth.

So how much do we actually save on shaving this way? Well, the only thing I actually pay for is my razor cartridges, which cost about a dollar apiece, and the pack I'm using now has lasted me for—well, I'm not exactly sure, because I can't remember when I bought it. At least a year, anyway.

As for Brian, he just uses an electric beard trimmer. As I mentioned last week, the rechargeable, cordless models he used to buy always seemed to die after a year or two, their batteries gradually weakening until they could no longer hold enough charge to last through a trim (and there doesn't seem to be any way to replace the battery once this happens). So this time, we decided to invest in a corded model. We couldn't find any reviews for beard trimmers at ConsumerSearch, my usual go-to site, but this report at the Sweethome (a sister site to the technical site the Wirecutter) recommended the Wahl Peanut, which it says is "tough enough to survive a few years at a time in a high-volume shop" and should provide "many years of service" for individual users at home. So we're hoping this $39 investment (which was actually $23.25 out of pocket, because we cashed in some credit card rewards) will be good for five to ten years at least.

So, assuming Brian's trimmer lasts at least five years, and my 8-packs of razor cartridges are lasting me at least one year, that means the annual cost of shaving is, at most, $12.65 for the two of us. Which, coincidentally, is about what we'd have to spend on the ingredients to try out a batch of that "money-saving" homemade shaving oil. So even if those ingredients are good for a whole year's supply of the stuff, adding it to our shaving routine would roughly double its annual cost. Thanks, but no thanks.

[EDIT, 4/26/15: Since writing this article, I decided to try swiping my razor, after I've rinsed and dried it, through the coconut oil I keep in the shower for my skin. I was only thinking that it might help a bit with preventing rust, but I've noticed since I started doing it that I seem to get an appreciably closer shave than I used to, as well. So perhaps there is something to this shaving oil idea, after all. But apparently, you don't need to buy $13 worth of ingredients to get the benefits.]

Savings Challenge, Week 6: Spending journal

Last week, the 52-Week Savings Challenge topic at Bankrate.com was an idea that I'd already considered and rejected as unhelpful. This week, by contrast, the savings challenge is unhelpful to me for exactly the opposite reason: it's something I already do all the time, as a matter of course. The challenge is to "keep a weekly 'spend' journal," meticulously tracking every dollar you spend over the course of the week. Doing this, according to the experts quoted in the article, helps you see exactly where your money is going and where you might be able to cut back. The idea is that once you see how much "that daily Starbucks Frappuccino or sushi lunch" is costing you over a whole week—or, when multiplied by 52, over a whole year—you'll realize that this money could be put to much better use.

According to Michael McCall, one of the experts quoted in the article, this exercise is useful because "most people truly do not know where their money is being spent and the volume." However, I know for a fact that I'm not one of those people, because, as I noted last week, I always track my spending anyway. I started doing this back when Brian and I were courting and used to fly across the country to visit each other. We decided to keep track of all the money we spent on these trips so that we could split the cost evenly between us. Later, when he moved in, we took to doing the same thing with our household expenditures: we kept a list on the refrigerator door on which each of us would jot down anything we'd purchased that the two of us would share. At the end of the month we'd total up what each of us had spent, and whoever had spent less would give the other a check for half the difference. So by the time we got married and started drawing all our funds out of a joint account, we were already in the habit of writing down our expenditures, and we decided to keep it up, only in one column instead of two. This written record proved to be handy for all sorts of things, like:

• Remembering where we'd bought something in case we later wanted to return it—or, by contrast, to find another one that matched
• Working out a budget, because we already knew roughly how much we were spending each month in different categories
• Estimating how much we spend each year and how much we save, so we can track our progress toward financial independence 
• Comparing our spending to that of other households, so we'd know how good a job we were doing of keeping our expenses in check

We have even, once in a while, used the information from this tracking sheet to rein in our spending a bit. For instance, after a couple of months of totting up the cost of our habit of eating out every Thursday night before Morris dance practice, we decided to shift our schedule around on Thursdays, having an early dinner before driving down to Princeton for practice. (This turned out to save us time, too, as the traffic gets lighter after 6:30 pm.) We didn't save as much money this way as Bankrate reporter Jeanine Skowronski (I swear I am not making that name up), who discovered when she took the challenge that she's spending over $4,000 each year on restaurant lunches, bottled water, and Gatorade, but we still made a nice little dent in our monthly food budget.

At this point, however, all those wasteful little habits that were hiding in our spending record have already been ferreted out and fixed. So while it would be quite easy for me to take this week's challenge, just by doing what I'm already doing, it's unlikely I'd learn much from it. So instead, I'm going to to use this week's challenge as an opportunity to take a peek at my results so far for last week's challenge (the "financial fast"). I decided that, rather than buy nothing but "necessities" for a whole month, I would instead track my spending as usual and sort it into three categories: definite necessities, definite luxuries, and sensible investment purchases. (This last category is for things I don't absolutely need, but which will be very useful in the long run.) Here's my spending list for the first week in April, broken down by category:

NECESSITIES: $126.53 (81 percent of spending)

• April 1: bottle of body wash: $5.76 
• bottle of skin lotion: $8.16
• groceries: $12.53
• April 2: facial sponge: $1.92
• cat food: $31.02
• groceries: $7.97
• April 3: OTC medicines: $33.28
• April 6: groceries: $8.37
• April 7: orthotic insoles, vitamin pills: $17.52

LUXURIES: $1.05 (1 percent of spending)

• April 6: candy, $1.05

INVESTMENTS: $27.75 (18 percent of spending)

• April 3, new battery for Brian's watch: $4.50
• April 4, new beard trimmer for Brian: $23.25
• pens: $1.07

As I noted in my previous post, some of these purchases were kind of hard to classify. For instance, should the skin lotion I bought to treat my KP be considered medicine, which would make it a definite necessity, or is it really a cosmetic, which would be a definite luxury? I ended up taking my cue on this from a report on luxury spending covered on the Conversable Economist blog, which classified all "personal care" products as necessities. Thus, I treated all the products I bought last week to help get my KP under control as necessary expenses.

I could have treated Brian's new beard trimmer (bought to replace an old one with a gradually failing battery) as a "personal care" expense as well, but I decided that since it takes the place of a trip to the barber, it really belongs in the category of "apparel and services." The report treated spending in this category as "indeterminate," neither obvious necessity nor obvious luxury. (Wearing clothes of some sort, unless you live in a nudist colony in a very warm climate, is clearly a necessity, but replacing them as often as many people do is clearly not, so it could go either way.) I think it's a good example of an investment purchase, because it's not something we absolutely needed; even if you concede that a neatly trimmed beard is a necessity, the old trimmer was still technically working; it just took all day to charge. But the new one will save him a lot of time and annoyance, and the old one was definitely not long for this world anyhow, so I think it made sense to invest in something more reliable. (Every cordless trimmer he has ever owned, regardless of brand, has died within a couple of years due to battery failure, so this time we just went for a corded model.)

So basically, the only thing on my list that was clearly a luxury item was the marked-down candy I bought at the Rite Aid on Easter Monday. I could have fudged this by calling it a "grocery" item, but I decided that since it wasn't bought at a grocery store, it didn't really count. So my rule for the rest of the month is going to be that all food bought at grocery stores, even sweets, counts as "groceries" and therefore necessities—but food bought anywhere else, including restaurants, coffeehouses, vending machines, and non-food stores, is a luxury.

So far, then, necessities have accounted for most of our spending, while outright luxuries have accounted for only a tiny percentage. Of course, there are still three weeks left in the month, so that may change, but if I were making the call at this point, I'd have to say that we're doing a pretty good job of avoiding unnecessary spending. Which, if you think about it, might just make us living proof that this week's challenge—tracking your expenditures—really works. We've been doing it regularly for over ten years now, and we've got mindless spending pretty much licked.