Money Crashers: 7 Ways to Reduce Prescription Drug Costs Regardless of Health Insurance

Here's the companion piece I promised you to my earlier article on affording health care without insurance. This one focuses on the cost of prescription drugs, which often aren't covered even for people with insurance. In 2018, nearly 30% of American adults didn’t take their medications as prescribed because of the cost, and about 30% of them say their condition got worse as a result. My article covers better ways to save, including generic drugs, samples, price comparison sites, charitable pharmacies, state aid programs, and drug discount cards.

7 Ways to Reduce Prescription Drug Costs Regardless of Health Insurance

Money Crashers: Where to Buy Cheap School Uniforms for Kids and Save Money

I realize that school has already started for most parents, so this article is coming a bit late. And for many parents, it may be irrelevant, since most public schools don't have uniforms, and those that do may not be requiring them for remote learning. But for anyone who is currently worrying about how to send the kids back to school in the required dress while money is so tight, this new Money Crashers article is for you. It covers a variety of shopping strategies to find school-uniform-appropriate attire — both secondhand and new — at a price that won't break the bank. (And, for those whose kids don't wear school uniforms, I've got another new piece on clothes shopping for kids in general that should be coming out soon. I'll keep you posted.)

Where to Buy Cheap School Uniforms for Kids and Save Money

Ecofrugality in the time of COVID, part 2

Today, my weekly "The Goods" newsletter from Vox contained this headline: "Do you really have to wash your mask after every use? Short answer: Yes." This puzzled me, because as far as I know, there's really no evidence to support this particular piece of advice. Think about it for a minute: If you're outside, maintaining a six-foot distance from other people, then there should be no way for their germs to get onto your mask — even onto the outside surface of it — in any detectable amount. Even if you're in a store and coming within six feet of other people, as long as they're all wearing masks too — which, by law, they have to be here in New Jersey — then their germs shouldn't be getting onto your mask.

Even if there's still a tiny, theoretical risk that germs could somehow get onto your mask just from briefly passing someone else on the street, that risk is no greater for your mask than for the rest of your clothes. Yet no one is suggesting that you have to immediately take off and wash all your clothes after coming inside and then wash your hands and change into clean clothes, lest the germs from your clothes somehow get onto your hands and from there into your body. This kind of precaution makes sense if you're a doctor who's been in contact with sick people all day, but I haven't heard anyone advocating it for ordinary people just going out for a walk or a trip to the store. So why is it necessary for masks?

On top of that, based on what we now know about the virus, it seems that COVID isn't likely to spread through contact with objects at all. The CDC website now says, "The primary and most important mode of transmission for COVID-19 is through close contact from person-to-person," and while it adds that "it may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes," I'm not aware of any evidence that the virus actually does spread this way.

In fact, according to one idea floated last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, one benefit of masks could actually be that they don't block out every single virus. The authors speculated that wearing masks that screen out some, but not all, viral particles could allow people to become inoculated against the virus through low-dose exposure, increasing the chances that their immune system will learn to recognize it without their actually needing to be exposed to enough of it to make them sick. Granted, this hypothesis hasn't been and probably can't be tested, but if it's right, it would mean that being hyper-sensitive about washing masks after every use is not only unnecessary but counterproductive.

Even the Vox article itself conceded that, since surface transmission isn't common, "The recommendation to wash your mask comes out of an abundance of caution." And yet the headline sends exactly the opposite message: You must, yes MUST, wash your mask EVERY SINGLE TIME you use it. And you must not touch it at all while wearing it. And when removing it, you must touch only the ear loops, not the surface. And you must immediately wash your hands afterwards. And you mustn't wear that mask again until it's been washed — and oh, by the way, a mask will only remain effective for about 50 washings, or 100 if it's air-dried. After that, you have to buy a new one.

Reading this article really pissed me off, and at first I wasn't sure why. I mean, sure, what they're recommending may be unnecessary, but is it really harmful? How can "an abundance of caution" be a bad thing?

Thinking it over, I discovered the main thing that bothers me about this: It's anti-ecofrugal.

Consider: if you have to wear a fresh mask every time you go out (not to mention putting on a fresh one if yours gets wet from rain, sweat, or exhaled moisture), then you have two choices. First, you can wear disposable masks, which use up more resources and create more waste than cloth ones. Or, second, you can have a large enough supply of reusable masks to wear a fresh one (or two) every day between loads of laundry. This, in turn, means you either have to buy your masks by the dozen or wash your clothes every couple of days, doing smaller loads if necessary, to ensure you always have a clean one. And even if you have a different mask for every day of the week, you'll still need to invest in new ones after a year, since they're no good after 50 washings. No matter what you choose, you have to spend more money and use more resources than if you simply had two or three masks and wore the same one until it got dirty.

And here's the thing: I would still be willing to do all this, even though it goes against my environmental instincts, if there were clear evidence that, by doing so, I would be helping to contain the virus. In that case, I would see it as a worthwhile sacrifice, much like not seeing my friends in person for months and not touching anyone outside my family and crossing the street every time I come near another person on the sidewalk. But in fact, there is no clear evidence that this abundantly cautious behavior makes a difference. Wearing masks absolutely makes a difference. But there's no evidence that requiring fresh masks every time makes more of a difference than reusing the same mask.

And this is just one way out of many that ecofrugal behaviors are being actively discouraged, if not outright banned, during this pandemic for little or no benefit. I still can't take my reusable cup to Starbucks (though I could if I lived in Europe, Africa, or the Middle East); I have to take a single-use cup that can never be recycled. I still can't take a reusable bag to Trader Joe's; every time I shop there, I have to take one or more of their paper bags, which are even worse for the environment than single-use plastic ones. Despite the increasing evidence that COVID does not spread through contact with objects, businesses are continuing to require practices that are bad for the environment and unlikely to have any effect on health — focusing even more on them than on practices that do actually help, like limiting the number of customers in the store at a time.

Moreover, the cost to the environment isn't the only problem these strict policies create. For example, much as I dislike the added cost of buying more masks and doing more laundry, I can at least afford it. But there are many people, even in this wealthy nation, who can't easily afford it, especially with unemployment as high as it is now. For these people, these strict guidelines are a serious hardship — one that could make them less willing to wear masks at all. After all, if the only right way to wear a mask is to wear a clean one every time you leave the house, and to keep it on continuously until you return home, and to avoid touching it at all, and to change it (while somehow not touching it) any time it gets wet, and to take it off as soon as you get home and then wash your hands immediately, then if there's any single one of those rules you can't comply with, you're liable to think, "Well, wearing a mask is just impossible for me." By trying to get Americans to adhere to the strictest possible guidelines "out of an abundance of caution," these doctors may actually be making us all less safe by reducing compliance.

Let me be absolutely clear about this: I am not taking an extreme libertarian stance against all steps people, businesses, and governments are taking to contain the virus. I am absolutely for any measures to do so that truly are supported by the science, such as wearing masks, maintaining physical distance, and contact tracing. What I can't get behind is imposing rules that have no science behind them, that reduce the chances people will comply with the rules that do have science behind them, and that waste money and natural resources in the process.

Money Crashers: How to Get Affordable Medical Care Without Health Insurance

Ten years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, there are still over 27.5 million Americans without health insurance. Some of them are trapped in the coverage gap caused when states refused to expand their Medicaid programs, making it impossible to get an insurance subsidy if your income is too low (because that makes tons of sense). Others have been caught by the family glitch that shuts spouses and children out of subsidies as long as the primary earner in the family has access to affordable coverage for themselves. And some probably could afford insurance, but weighing the cost, they've decided to take their chances going without it.

For all these folks, all health-care costs are out-of-pocket costs. Many of them rely on the emergency room as their primary source of care, since ERs must treat all patients regardless of their ability to pay. However, that doesn't stop them from sending a bill — and it'll be a big one, since the ER is just about the most expensive place possible to get treatment.

So, for anything that isn't a true emergency, it makes much more sense to look for other alternatives first. There are many cheaper sources of care for people without insurance, including free and low-cost health clinics, retail clinics, direct primary care, telemedicine, and urgent care centers. And these folks can sometimes lower their bills still more through medical discount plans, health-care sharing ministries, or clinical trials.

Yes, our health-care system remains broken. But until we can find a way to fix it, at least you can try to avoid letting it break you.

How to Get Affordable Medical Care Without Health Insurance

Meat alternative experiments (one miss, one hit)

In our mostly meat-and-dairy-free life, there are a couple of animal products that Brian and I still miss. We're doing pretty well with our almond milk, homemade vegan mozzarella, and coconut whipped cream, but we haven't found a decent substitute for the humanely farmed kielbasa that we used to pick up from Smokers' Deli at the Pennsylvania Dutch Farmers' Market. It was both delicious and convenient, since we could keep a pound or two in the freezer and just fry up a couple of links along with a potato and some frozen veggies when we had no other dinner ideas. But although there are various plant-based sausages on the market, none of them quite fit the bill. Beyond Meat doesn't make a Polish sausage, only Italian and bratwurst; Field Roast's smoked apple sage was okay for flavor but didn't have the right consistency, and it came with too much plastic packaging. The only one specifically billed as a Polish sausage was Tofurkey's, and it wasn't right either flavor- or texture-wise.

So, since we'd had good luck making our own version of a vegan cheese when the store-bought ones let us down, we decided to try the same with sausage. A recipe that billed itself as "The World's Best Vegan Sausages" didn't look too complicated, and all the ingredients were either in our pantry already or easy to get. The only one we had trouble over was "pork sausage seasoning," which wasn't sold under that name in any local supermarket. Eventually we ended up Googling it and found that the main seasonings in a Polish sausage are salt, garlic, and marjoram, so that's what Brian used: 1 teaspoon of salt, 1/4 teaspoon of marjoram, and one extra clove of garlic.

Since Brian was already used to making bread, making the "dough" for a half batch of these sausages wasn't too hard. It was just a matter of blending everything together, kneading it briefly, and dividing it up into four portions. He rolled these up into "vaguely sausage-shaped pieces," wrapped them in strips of aluminum foil, and steamed them. Then he let them chill overnight and fried up four of them in a pan for the next night's dinner.

As you can see, these looked not  unlike meat sausages, even if their shape was a bit wonky. And their flavor, too, wasn't altogether off the mark. It didn't have the meaty savor of a genuine pork sausage, but the blend of spices was about right, which was more than we could say for any of the store-bought alternatives we'd tried. But the texture was another story. They didn't have the firm outer skin I'm used to encountering with a sausage, but that wasn't a deal breaker; the big problem was that they were far too dry. A good sausage should be juicy, and these virtually fat-free vegan links had no juice in them at all. They were firm and didn't fall apart when cooked like some of their competitors, but they just didn't feel good to chew. I only reluctantly finished my link, and Brian ended up having to eat both the leftovers. So, if this truly is the world's best vegan sausage, it appears that the world will have to wait a while for one that's truly satisfying.

Fortunately, this disappointment was balanced out by another discovery in the world of vegan meat substitutes that appears to have much greater potential. I learned about it, ironically, on the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken blog, since it actually does taste like a reasonable facsimile of chicken. It's called Butler Soy Curls.

Brian and I had already tried a soy-based product called texturized vegetable protein, or TVP, that made a reasonable substitute for ground meat in any highly flavored dish. TVP has no real flavor of its own, but it has a satisfying chew that gives chili or spaghetti sauce the appropriate texture. At first I thought these soy curls were just another name for TVP, but they turn out to be a completely different creation. According to Bon Appetit, TVP is made from defatted soybean flour, while soy curls are made from the whole soybean and contain all of its fiber and the healthy fats. So, not only are they less processed, which I consider a Good Thing in general, they're also more filling.

The only problem with soy curls? They're really, really hard to find. None of our local stores carry them, not even Whole Foods. And if you're not willing to buy from Amazon, as I'm not, the only places to find them online are the manufacturer, which has a minimum order of six bags (three pounds dry, which makes nine pounds cooked), or obscure sites like Country Life that charge a reasonable price for the curls themselves, but a bundle for shipping.

Since this was our first experience with the product and we weren't sure how we'd like it, we weren't willing to buy three pounds at once. Eventually I found some at Azure Standard, where we've shopped before for bulk cocoa. We didn't happen to need any of that, but we were able to make the shipping a tad more reasonable by purchasing some flax seeds at the same time (thus saving ourselves a trip down to the Whole Earth Center).

The recipe I'd first seen on It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken was for jerk soy curls, a flavor that didn't particularly interest me. So I did a little searching and found an interesting-looking recipe for Vegan Crispy Soy Curls that looked like a good one to start with. We'd previously tried making orange tofu as an alternative to orange chicken and found it uninspiring; perhaps the new product would do better.

We made only minor modifications to this recipe. We used all orange juice, since that was what we had, rather than a combination of orange and tangerine, and simple syrup in place of agave, and Brian also threw in some broccoli. And the resulting sauce was...not bad, but not extraordinary. The soy curls themselves, however, were remarkable. Soaked in liquid, dredged in flour, and then pan-fried, they had almost exactly the same texture you'd expect from chicken prepared the same way. And if the flavor wasn't the same, underneath all the sauce you could hardly tell the difference. We suspected that if we were to feed this to one of our most ardently carnivorous friends without telling him what was in it, he would never be the wiser.

We also learned from this recipe that soy curls — or, to be more exact, soy strips — aren't made exclusively by Butler. The blogger said she had purchased hers at "my local Asian market," which surprised me, since my previous searches hadn't turned them up anywhere in our area. However, upon further research, I found that the term "soy curls" is a trademarked name for Butler's product; the more generic "soy strips" are available from various sources. So we may not actually have to go back to the Internet for more of these when we run out our first 8-ounce bag.

The way we're going through these things, that won't take long to happen. We've already tried the soy curls in chili, using the broken pieces that had accumulated at the bottom of the bag, and found that it produced a texture nearly as satisfying as our beloved — and now mostly unavailable — Gimme Lean Beef. And It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken has posted a second recipe featuring them, this one with a lemon-garlic sauce, that looks well worth trying. We don't know if they can ever take the place of chicken in our beloved chicken and rhubarb, or succeed where seitan failed in a pot pie, but there's only one way to find out!

Money Crashers: How to Live Like the Invisible Rich

Five years ago, I came across an article about "the invisible rich": the millionaires who don't look like most people's idea of a millionaire, the ones who have accumulated their millions largely by not living the way people expect millionaires to live. I compared my lifestyle against the nine secrets of the invisible rich covered in the article, as outlined in Stanley and Danko's The Millionaire Next Door, and was pleased to find that my lifestyle scored eight out of nine on the millionaire-next-door (MND) scale.

Well, a few years later, I reread that post, and it occurred to me that there was probably enough material here for a Money Crashers article. It took a couple of years for it to make it to publication, but fortunately, the advice about how to live like the invisible rich is pretty much timeless. So here, none the worse for wear, is the article — complete with info about MNDs' work, their home life, what they do and don't spend money on, and how copying their lifestyle could potentially make you a Millionaire Next Door to your neighbors one day.

How to Live Like the Invisible Rich & Become ‘The Millionaire Next Door’

Money Crashers: 18 Sustainable Fashion Brands for Recycled or Ethical Clothing

Back in April, Money Crashers published an article of mine on building a green, sustainable wardrobe on a budget. This article was one of a pair, split off from an earlier piece on sustainable fashion I'd written back in 2010. It covered the basics of what makes fashion sustainable (including fabric choices and treatment of workers) and some general tips on how to afford it (research brands, understand labels, focus on investment pieces, shop sales, and buy secondhand for the ultimate one-two punch of eco-friendliness and affordability). The second piece, which covered specific sustainable brands, was supposed to follow shortly.

And so it did, if by "shortly" you mean "within five months." Here it is at last, covering both affordable green brands (defined as those that sell most items for $100 or less, though they're significantly pricier than fast fashion) and "splurge-worthy" brands that might find a place in your closet with just one or two fabulous pieces.

A personal confession: I don't personally have any pieces from any of these brands in my closet. I do most of my sustainable shopping at thrift stores, and while I would not be averse to investing $100 or more on a piece that was really built to last, it has to be a piece that I really love and will wear often. And sadly, none of these brands quite ticked that box for me. Some (mostly the footwear brands) don't have anything in my size; some don't fit my style; some don't include any pieces with features that are must-haves for me, like pockets on pants. And while a few of them have some pieces I like, I just don't need any of them at the moment — and buying stuff you don't need isn't exactly sustainable.

So, for the time being, I'll stick with my closet full of thrift-store buys. But when I'm ready for my next new pair of jeans, I'll know where to shop.

18 Sustainable Fashion Brands for Recycled or Ethical Clothing