Money Crashers: Four new articles

Four more of my articles have just popped up on Money Crashers. They're not particularly connected to ecofrugality, but they might have some interest to some of you.

The first piece is for you if you've never had a 401(k) plan — or if you have one but don't really understand how it works. It explains the tax benefits of a 401(k), its limitations, and the advantages and disadvantages of using it for your investments. (Spoiler: Yes, you should definitely invest some money in a 401(k) if you have one, and no, you definitely shouldn't do all your investing this way.)

What Is a 401(k) Plan and How Does It Work? – Limits, Rules & Benefits

The second piece is about something pretty much everyone has these days: a credit report. And if you have a credit report, you could have errors on it that you don't know about. In a In a 2012 study, about 1 out of 4 Americans found inaccuracies on their credit report that could affect their credit scores. Luckily, most of the affected consumers were able to correct the errors and improve their scores as a result. Here's what you need to know about how credit report errors occur, how they can hurt you, and how to fix them.

How to Fix Errors on Your Credit Report for Free

Many families look to health care sharing ministries (HCSMs), such as Medi-Share, as an affordable alternative to traditional health insurance. HCSMs work on the same principle as insurance, collecting premiums ("shares") from all members and using the money to pay for the health care costs of those who need help. But make no mistake: HCSMs aren't insurance, and they don't offer the same benefits. This piece explores how HCSMs work, what they cost, how they differ from a regular insurance plan, their pros and cons, and when they can be worthwhile. (Spoiler alert: if there's any way at all you can afford a real insurance policy, choose that instead.)

Health Care Sharing Ministries: A Good Alternative to Health Insurance?

And now for something completely different: Academy Award parties. Many movie lovers delight in throwing Hollywood-style Oscar night parties, complete with real red carpets, signature cocktails, and lavish swag bags for guests. But what if you don't happen to have a Hollywood-style budget? No worries: just substitute planning and creativity for money. This article explains how to plan a truly fabulous Oscar extravaganza on a budget, including Oscar-worthy invitations, glam decorations, red-carpet attire, fabulous food and drink, award-related party games, and your own fabulous swag bags.

How to Throw an Oscar Viewing Party on a Budget  

The best way to make coffee

One of my birthday presents this year was a new AeroPress coffee maker. I had put this item on my gift wish list because I was intrigued by its versatility. You can use it to make either regular-strength or espresso-strength coffee, and you can make either one, two, or three cups' worth at a time. And since I can't remember the last time I needed to make coffee for more people than that at once, I thought the AeroPress could potentially take the place of all the coffee-making apparatus in my cabinet: my big 10-cup drip machine, my single-cup pour-over cone, the filters for both, and the little moka pot I use for espresso. And on top of that, it was reputed to make a pretty darn good cup of joe.

Having tried it several times now, I can report that the AeroPress does everything it claims. It does indeed brew up a very good cup of coffee: rich, not too bitter, and free from sediment. (And I haven't even tried using it in cold brew mode yet, which could potentially be even better.) It's also very easy to use and very easy to clean. But what struck me most about it, after a week of use, is that it's probably the most ecofrugal way to brew coffee.

The method I've been relying on most for my everyday coffee was my little pour-over cone. It's quite simple to use, with minimal equipment, but it does require the use of disposable filters. True, they go into the compost bin (used grounds and all) rather than to the landfill, but they still require resources to produce. And of course, they're not free to buy either. The last box I bought was from Trader Joe's and cost $2.00 for 100 unbleached filters (size 2), so that's 2 cents apiece — not a lot, but it adds marginally to the cost of each cup of coffee. And the filters take up additional space in the cabinet.

I could, of course, eliminate the cost and the waste of paper filters by using a reusable filter made of cloth or metal. I even tried it for a while, but I quickly gave up on it because it was such a hassle to clean the grounds out of the filter. Even after I'd dumped the contents out into the compost bin, there was still quite a large volume of wet coffee grounds clinging to the cloth filter, and I had to run water through it for at least 30 seconds to get the thing clean. So whatever resources I saved by not using the paper filters were offset, maybe completely, by the amount of water it took to wash it. Not to mention all the grounds that ended up going down the drain, which probably weren't the best thing for the plumbing.

Other methods of brewing coffee have similar problems. A French press uses no paper filters, but requires just as much water (and work) to clean. An automatic drip machine uses even bigger paper filters and requires a significant amount of water (and work) to clean all the parts of the pot itself and the drip apparatus. They also waste the coffee itself if you brew a whole potful and only three people take any. And of course, the increasingly popular single-cup brewers, most notably the Keurig, produce a ludicrous amount of waste. According to the Story of Stuff project, the number of single-use K-cups trashed to date could circle the globe more than 10 times.

The AeroPress isn't zero-waste, but it's pretty close. It does have a filter, but only a tiny one, a flat disk just 2.5 inches in diameter. These "micro-filters" cost $5 for a package of 350 — only 1.4 cents each — and the amount of space they take up in the cabinet is negligible. And best of all, they make it incredibly easy to clean the press. When I finish brewing a cup of coffee, I just remove the filter cap, position the chamber over my little bathroom compost bin, and ram the plunger home. This ejects filter and grounds together into the bin, and all I have to do is rinse off any grounds clinging to the plunger. Then the whole gadget can go into the dish drainer to dry, and it's ready for its next use.

All in all, this coffee maker seems make the best possible use of limited resources compared to other methods. It saves paper by using such tiny filters. It saves both water and time by reducing the need for cleaning. It also saves time by brewing up a cup of good coffee faster than any other method I've tried. It saves cabinet space by replacing three different coffee gadgets with one. It saves energy by brewing coffee with water below the boiling temperature (ideally around 175°F, though to be honest, I usually just guesstimate it), so I don't have to bring the kettle to a full boil. And all of this, of course, saves money.

Please note, I am not trying to shill for AeroPress here. I was not paid anything to write this post (like they'd waste the money on a blog as tiny as this one, anyway), and I'm not trying to convince anyone who already has a coffee brewing method they like to switch. Indeed, I'd be delighted if you'd share your experience in the comments and tell me why you think your favorite method is superior. I don't promise to be convinced, however, because I'm pretty darn pleased with my new coffee maker — and with all the extra space I have now in my cabinet.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 7: The Final Lesson Learned

During this week of vegan eating, one thing that hasn't posed much problem for me is snacking. My usual afternoon snack of a bowl of popcorn (with olive oil and salt) and a cup of cocoa (made with almond milk) required no changes to make it vegan, so I've been able to enjoy it every day with no disruptions.

Last night, however, we went over to a friend's place for some RPGs. Normally, whoever is hosting the game for that evening provides munchies for the group, but I knew that I couldn't count on the snacks being vegan-friendly, so I made a point of bringing along some salted nuts for myself (and others) to nosh on. But all the same, it was a little frustrating not being able to enjoy any of the other treats that were available, like caramel peanut clusters or M&Ms. (I did find the tail end of a bag of veggie chips, which I did not scruple to polish off.)

So I'll call this my Fifth Lesson learned from my week of vegan eating: If you go out anywhere, make sure to bring some snacks you can eat. Don't count on your host to provide them for you. This will probably be my Last Lesson Learned, since we have only one dinner left to go, and it's going to be roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes with scrambled tofu. We've had this meal before, though I didn't blog about it at the time, and it doesn't pose any real challenges.

Thus, I can now recap all my Lessons Learned from this vegan challenge:

• Lesson 1: Read all labels. Animal products can be hiding where you least expect them, and if you really want to be a full vegan, you need to check everywhere.
• Lesson 2: The food is the easy part. Animal products are also in personal care products, in clothing, maybe in auto parts for all I know. So this is sort of a corollary to Lesson 1: check all labels on everything, not just food.
• Lesson 3: It's easier to be vegan at home than on the go. Being a vegan when dining out requires planning — checking restaurant locations and menus to find a place that will serve something you can eat.
• Lesson 4: The best vegan recipes (most of the time) are the naturally vegan ones. You can make decent vegan-friendly food with meat, dairy, or egg substitutes, but it's even easier and cheaper to make vegan-as-vegan food that doesn't require them.
• Lesson 5: Be prepared to feed yourself. Wherever you go, bring vegan snacks, because you can't count on anyone else to provide them.

All of which, I have to say, leads me to a conclusion that wasn't exactly the one I was expecting. I thought maybe after a week of eating vegan, I would discover that it's actually pretty easy to do, and perhaps I should try sticking with it a little longer. But my conclusion is actually just the opposite: being a true, 100 percent vegan, even in 2020, is kind of a pain in the butt. Checking every label and every restaurant menu in minute detail, scouring your closet and your medicine chest for hidden animal products, having to say no to snacks at a friend's house if you can't see the exact recipe or ingredient list — this isn't a job for wusses! If vegans really do have superpowers, they have to work for them.

So, my real Final Lesson Learned from this week as a (near) vegan: I don't really want to be a vegan 24/7. I don't want to give up my wool socks or my honey-aloe face wash, or to have to decline all food outside of my home unless I can scan the ingredient list in minute detail. I want to be able to eat a piece of milk chocolate if someone offers it to me, or even share a scoop of real ice cream with my husband.

And fortunately, I can do that while still keeping my food-based carbon footprint pretty darn low. Instead of a full-throttle vegan diet, I'm going to stick to my regular low-carbon diet:

• No beef, lamb, or pork, in the home or out of it;
• No dairy products at home, but no obsessing over them when eating out (and no worrying about minute amounts of dairy-derived ingredients in an otherwise vegan product);
• Fish and free-range chicken on rare occasions, maybe once or twice a month at most;
• Free-range eggs at home no more than a few times per week, and no worrying about whether there are non-free-range eggs in something I'm offered to eat away from home; and
• Honey is fair game.

With these rules, I can feel reasonably comfortable with role in global warming (not perfect, but more part of the solution than part of the problem), without having to worry myself to pieces every day about accidentally eating an egg white.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 6: The best way to vegan

The last two days of my week-long vegan challenge have been not just uneventful, but rather enjoyable. As planned, Brian made Sesame Tofu for dinner on Monday and Pasta Romesco on Tuesday, both of which are favorites of ours — not just favorite vegan dishes, but favorite dishes full stop. And both of them made enough leftovers for the next day's lunch, so I've had two full days of delicious vegan food.

Both of these dishes fit the first of the three types of vegan food I identified on Monday: they're vegan dishes that were made to be vegan, with no changes or substitutions. A lot of our other vegan food favorites — like Brian's Eggplant and String Beans in Garlic Sauce and my favorite soup, Pasta Fagioli — also fall into this category. And this got me wondering: are these vegan-as-vegan dishes, in general, the best?

It's not that we don't like any foods in the other categories. Both of us, for instance, like our chili with Gimme Lean beef more than any chili we've tried with real ground beef, and also more than any "non carne" chili we've tried with just beans. But we've also had some attempts to veganize recipes that were real duds, like our heavy tofumpkin pie and gluey oat milk cocoa. On the whole, it seems like the safest, surest way to find a vegan dish we really like is to pick one that started out vegan, rather than being converted.

It's also, in most cases, the cheapest way. Consider the dinners we've cooked so far this week. The most expensive of the lot was clearly the butternut squash and sage pizza, which used $4.56 worth of homemade vegan mozzarella. (The rest of the ingredients cost less than a dollar, but only because the squash and the sage were home-grown.) By contrast, the sesame tofu, a naturally vegetarian recipe, only cost about $3 for the entire meal (which provided both dinner and lunch for two). And the one vegan product I bought specifically to "take the place" of meat, the seitan, cost $4.69 for the package (though we've only used a quarter of it so far) and didn't even make a significant difference to the flavor of the dish. It probably would have been just as good as a straight-up veggie pot pie — vegan as vegan.

So I'm going to tentatively label this my Fourth Lesson Learned from this vegan eating challenge: the best vegan recipes, in general, are the ones that are vegan by nature. Converting a meat-based or cheese-based recipe to vegan form can still be satisfying, but it probably won't be as tasty, as easy, or as cheap — in short, as ecofrugal — as a dish that's plant-based simply because everything it calls for is a plant.

In accordance with this view, Brian is currently cooking up a butternut squash and barley recipe from our new vegan cookbook. The only ingredients in it are hulled barley, butternut squash, raisins, apple juice, and ground cloves. Nothing, in short, that had to be altered in any way to make the recipe vegan. It's perfectly simple, and I think it can hardly fail to be satisfying.

Money Crashers: Save an Extra $1,000 in Just One Month

One of the presents I gave myself for my birthday was to cash in a bunch of the survey rewards that had been piling up in my accounts with MyPoints, Toluna, and Life Fun & Everything. I've been taking these surveys in my spare time for years, earning maybe 25 or 50 cents for each one I complete, which isn't much — but I've done a lot of them in that time, and I haven't made a point of cashing in the points regularly, so it had gotten to the point where I had over $1,000 in unused rewards just sitting there. So I traded in some of them for Starbucks and Barnes and Noble gift cards, as well as two Visa gift cards that I can use to pay for the new Critical Role book when it comes out this spring, plus another game from the store where we're buying it. Happy birthday to me!

The point of this is that even the little things you to to make more money, or to save more money, really can make a difference in the long term. And if you do enough of them at once, they can make a difference even in the short term.

That's the moral of my new article on Money Crashers, "8 Ideas to Make & Save an Extra $1,000 Fast (in Just One Month)." It's a lesson a lot of Americans could use, because according to a 2018 Bankrate survey, less than 40% of Americans actually have enough in savings to cover even a $1,000 unexpected expense. If the unexpected happens (as it tends to do), they have no choice but to borrow — and then they have to pay interest on that debt every month, making their budget even tighter and making saving even harder.

My article offers some suggestions on how to break this Catch-22. I suggest a variety of strategies —such as cutting unnecessary expenses, negotiating monthly bills, shopping rewards, side gigs, and loan refinancing — that people can combine to get themselves to that $1,000 goal in one month or less. It's not a huge financial cushion, but for many Americans, it could mean the difference between getting by and falling behind.

Thrift Week, Day 5: The restaurant dilemma

Yesterday, Brian had the day off from work for Martin Luther King Day. He ended up working from home for most of the day anyway, but we did take a break in the middle of the day to head out into the cold for a walk. I proposed the Penstock Coffee Roasters coffee shop on Third Avenue (formerly known as OQ) as a destination, since (a) it wasn't too far away and (b) it would be a pleasant place to settle down for a game of cards after braving the cold wind outside. In the back of my head, also, was the fact that (c) this local establishment would definitely have some dairy-free selections beyond plain black coffee, so I wouldn't have to stress about my vegan challenge when ordering.

However, when we got there, we discovered that a lot of other people had apparently had the same great idea. The place was packed, and with no room to sit down for a drink, there wasn't much point in sticking around. Rather than continue to fight against the wind all the way to the Dunkin Donuts (which also has almond milk, but lacks the congenial atmosphere), we turned around and headed home. Along the way, we passed a couple of other eateries that were open, such as the new bubble tea place on Raritan, and considered going in, but without being able to peruse the menu ahead of time, I just wasn't sure I'd be able to get anything without milk. Heading straight home and fixing a cup of cocoa seemed like the surest way to get a hot drink that would fit my new, temporary vegan lifestyle.

This experience led me to formulate my Third Lesson Learned from my week of vegan eating: It's a lot easier to avoid animal products at home than it is on the go. In your own kitchen, you can control not just what you cook, but what you have on hand to cook with, so making a simple substitution like almond milk for dairy milk is no problem. But when you're out and about, you just can't count on every eatery you visit to have these alternatives on hand. If you have time to plan ahead, you can seek out an all-vegan eatery like the one we went to on Friday, or at least consult the menus of nearby restaurants to make sure vegan choices are available. But if you're just hungry and looking for a quick meal, there's no guarantee you'll be able to find it.

This lesson was further reinforced when I checked my email this afternoon and discovered that my email to Baskin-Robbins about my misplaced Birthday Club coupon had not fallen on blind eyeballs. They sent me a terse but polite apology and a coupon that I can cash in for a free scoop any time before February 4. So, in theory, I could go tomorrow or Thursday, while my vegan challenge is still in effect, and try out the vegan flavor at our local branch. (I checked when I was in there to get my Dunkin drink and verified that they have one.)

The problem is, although I managed to get my birthday freebie by being a squeaky wheel, Brian never got his last month. So what I would really like to do is wait until Brian can go to the Baskin-Robbins with me and get a scoop we can share. Now, if we go this weekend, I could still try the vegan flavor, even if my vegan challenge is over by then — but it's a coffee-based flavor, and Brian doesn't like coffee. So I'd have to choose between sticking to my dairy-free guns or sharing with my poor ice-cream-starved husband, and I think the latter is more important to me.

Once again, this brings home the point that it's just not that easy to eat vegan when eating out. Baskin-Robbins is no doubt ahead of the competition in offering a vegan flavor at all, but it still only has one. By contrast, if we wanted to buy nondairy ice cream to eat at home, we could choose from a variety of brands and flavors just at our local supermarket, with still more options available if we were prepared to venture out to a natural-foods store and pay natural-foods-store prices. (They're a lot higher than the Stop & Shop's, but to be fair, still quite a bit less on a per-quart basis than the regular price at Baskin-Robbins.)

All this is making me quite a bit more reluctant to continue my vegan streak beyond vegan week. I've already discovered that I'm not willing to live a 100 percent vegan lifestyle if it means giving up my warm socks; now I'm beginning to think that even 100 percent vegan eating is too much for me if it means I can't share a scoop of ice cream with my husband, or stop at a cafe for a drink on one of his rare days off from work.

Thrift Week 2020, Day 4: Three types of vegan dishes

When I decided to embark on this vegan challenge, I decided I wanted to incorporate a variety of types of vegan food. As Brian put it, there are three major kinds of vegan dishes:

1. Naturally plant-based dishes. These don't contain any animal products, so you don't need to do anything to them to make them vegan. Example: the Pasta Romesco that was our Recipe of the Month last September, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
2. Vegan adaptations. These are dishes that normally contain some kind of animal product, so you make them vegan by leaving it out. Example: You take a recipe for chicken-vegetable stir-fry and simply leave out the chicken. Replacing the chicken with tofu — a different protein source, rather than a straight-up "substitute" for chicken — would also count.
3. Vegan substitutions. These are recipes where the meat, or cheese, or dairy is an integral part of the dish, and simply taking it out wouldn't work. So instead, you deliberately replace it with a plant-based substitute, like the Gimme Lean beef we use in our chili.

Most of the vegan foods we eat fall into categories 1 and 2. So, to make sure we'd also do some of category 3, I purchased a container of seitan on our last trip to the Whole Earth Center. This "wheat meat" is said to make a good substitute for chicken, so I thought we could try it out in one of our favorite chicken recipes and see how well it worked. It would be like a trial run for the vegan seitan tenders I've contemplated making: a way to put this substitution to the test without all the prep work.

The seitan was a little bit pricey: $4.69 for a 12-ounce package, which works out to $6.25 per pound. That's more than three times as much as the $1.99 we're used to paying for free-range chicken legs at Trader Joe's, but it's less than the $6.99 we'd pay there for free-range, skinless, boneless chicken breasts, and these ready-cut seitan pieces are at least as easy to work with as those are. So, to make the most use of their convenient form, Brian decided to use some in a recipe we've made and enjoyed before: chicken pot pie.

To adapt this recipe, however, he had to make a few more changes than simply substituting seitan chunks for chicken chunks. The way he used to make this pie was to roast the chicken first and make one meal out of that, then save the pan drippings to make gravy, along with the leftover meat. So he had to figure out how to make a flavorful gravy without these drippings, and how to thicken it without using any milk. And, on top of that, he had to make the pastry for the crust without using butter. So this recipe ended up requring not one, but three substitutions for animal products: the chicken itself, the chicken drippings, the milk, and the butter.

All in all, Brian put enough work into adapting this recipe that I think it should qualify as an entirely new dish, and our first Vegan Recipe of the Month. Here it is in full:

VEGAN SEITAN POT PIE

1. For the filling, dice 2 small potatoes and 3 small carrots, and chop 1 medium leek and 4 oz. mushrooms. Sauté in a pan until softened, then add about 3 oz. seitan, cut into small pieces, and 1/4 tsp. salt.
2. For the gravy, combine 2 Tbsp. flour and 2 Tbsp. water in a small bowl. Melt 1 Tbsp. plant-based butter (Brian used Country Crock) in a pan. Stir in 1 cup vegetable broth (he used 3/4 tsp. Penzey's vegetable soup base dissolved in 1 cup water). Blend in the flour-and-water mixture and stir until thickened.
3. For the crust, make a pastry dough of 1 cup flour, 1/4 tsp. salt, and 5 Tbsp. plus 1 tsp. plant-based butter. (Note: when Brian made this, he was scaling down the recipe from the one he'd used in the past, and he made a math error that resulted in his using only half this amount of the plant butter. The pastry actually tasted fine this way, but it stuck to the pan. So you could probably get away with using less than this full amount. Try 4 Tbsp. to start, and then adjust as needed.) Divide the dough in half and roll it out to make two crusts.
4. Assemble the pie. Line an 8-inch pie plate with the first crust, load in the filling and gravy, and top with the second crust, cutting off the excess pastry and crimping to seal the edges. Bake in a 400°F oven for about 35 minutes.

The finished pie was certainly nice to look at, golden and crisp, and the smell was appetizing. The crust, as I noted, had a bit of a tendency to stick to the pan, but that was almost certainly due to the glitch with the amount of butter, rather than the type of butter used. And even with only half the butter, the texture of it wasn't at all bad — not quite as flaky as Brian's usual butter crust, maybe, but tender and perfectly edible. And Brian reported that the Country Crock Plant Butter, which comes in stick form, was much easier to work with for a pie crust than the stuff we've been using up to now (Earth Balance or Smart Balance, sold in tubs). So we'll probably stick with this stuff in future for pastry purposes.

Once we managed to get it dished up, the pie was not lacking in flavor. The vegan gravy was as rich as all our Penzey's-based soups tend to be, and the vegetables contributed their own flavor as well. However, the seitan didn't really add much to it. In fact, the chunks of seitan in the pie had practically no taste of their own. Their chewiness added texture interest, and the protein in them no doubt made the dish more filling, but taste-wise, you couldn't even really tell they were there. So for our next veggie pot pie experiment, I'm thinking we should either go all the way and whip up a batch of the seitan tenders, which would presumably add more flavor to the mix — or go the other way and make this a type 2 recipe, with just veggies and no meat substitute at all.

We're now halfway through the vegan challenge, and this is probably the most complicated dish we'll make for it. Brian is planning our favorite Sesame Tofu (a type 1 dish) for tonight, and Pasta Romesco (also type 1) for tomorrow night. And for the final night, Thursday, we might actually be able to cruise past the finish line on leftovers.