I am trying to gain more control over my diet, while also compiling more easy (preferably really easy) yet tasty recipes. First up is making my own lunch. I think it’s important when brown-bagging to make it tasty and attractive, so you don’t actually feel like your depriving yourself. Don’t just slap a sliver of cheap meat on some Wonderbread. Instead, you should take advantage that you are making the meal yourself. Put anchovies on the thing if you want.

In order to minimize the overall prep time, I bought all the ingredients at our usual grocery store (Safeway) during our usual shopping trip. Prices are actual prices, I bought regardless of if it was on sale or not. I also took into account the inevitable bit of extra waste from perishable ingredients like wilted lettuce or moldy bread, by including total package costs.

Shopping List

Sandwich
$2.50 for 1 loaf of 12-grain Oroweat bread (18 slices)
$5.25 for 3/4 lb of Black Forest Ham, thinly shaved from deli*
$1.75 for 1/4 pound of pepper jack cheese, thinly sliced
$1.75 for 1 large tomato, cut into 10 thin slices
$1.49 for 1 head of iceberg lettuce
$0.25 (est.) for pantry item Honey Mustard (1 bottle is $2.25)
—————-
$12.99 total, $2.60 per day

* You could buy smaller amounts of different meats like turkey breast, if you wanted to mix it up. When I feel like eating vegetarian, I buy a tub of hummus instead of meat.

** If you bought things on sale, or actually shopped around, you can probably reduce these prices by 20-40%.

Snack
This is estimated at $.30 cents per day. You could make it less by buying in bulk and packaging yourself, but the savings started getting small so I just went for simplicity. Examples:

$0.27 for single-serving assorted potato/tortilla chips ($6.49/24 bags)
$0.30 for baby carrots (split a 1 pound bag 5 ways, $1.50/lb)
$0.42 for a 100-calorie-pack of crackers. ($2.50/6 bag box)

Drink
Tap water is free, but I like drinking a Diet Coke for both leaving a sweet aftertaste and the extra bit of caffeine. If I didn’t already buy it previously on sale, this would have cost $.50 per can.

Preparation and Time Spent
Not much prep for the sandwiches. I just had to cut the tomato, peel off the lettuce, and then portion everything out into 10 reusable plastic containers (2 per weekday). I have one container for the bread, and one container for all the wet ingredients. I put a dab of mustard in between the ham and cheese. The separation keeps the bread from being soggy before eating. If I’m not lazy I toast the bread.

Packing all the materials for the entire week took less than half an hour. Actual photo of final product at the top of this post. Doesn’t it look like something worth eating for lunch?

Total Cost
The sandwich and snack combo costs a little under $3. This is actually more than I thought it would cost, although I think it’s relatively healthy when I eat it with carrot sticks (which I usually do with a dab of fat-free salad dressing). If eating out for lunch would have cost $6 per day, then that half hour on Sunday saved me $3 x 5 days = $15. $30 an hour post-tax is like earning $60 an hour pre-tax, so that’s pretty good. On top of that, I have the power to eat healthier and control what I consume.

Sure, if I consciously chose to work an extra 2 hours a month to “pay” for eating out, I could use my time that way instead. But if I’m honest with myself, lunch-making just takes a half hour that would have been spent goofing around on the internet before bed.

Clever Dudette has more frugal lunch ideas. Do you have your own tasty buy convenient lunch routines? For next week, I am thinking of making it the Fried Rice edition.

A popular theory states that something is not worth doing if it makes you less that your hourly wage. For example, if you make $30 an hour and you can hire someone to mow your lawn for $20 an hour, you should go ahead and pay for the service. As someone who is earning more and yet trying to combat lifestyle inflation, I’ve been struggling with this idea. According to this rule, all of a sudden I can start paying people to do all kinds of stuff for me. Laundry. Cooking. Cleaning. Or can I?

Thought #1: What Is Your Real Hourly Wage?

1. First, roughly estimate your hourly wage. If you work 40 hours per week, a quick way to estimate your hourly wage is to take your annual income, remove the trailing three zeros, and divide by two. For example, if you make $100,000 per year, then you make $50 per hour. A person earning $20,000 per year = $10 per hour. If you are using gross income then you’ll end up with gross hourly age.
2. Take taxes into account. If you earn $50 per hour gross, that might be only $35 per hour net. Someone earning less at around $10 per hour gross will probably be earning more like $8 per hour net. Try this net paycheck estimator or look at your paystub.
3. Be realistic with hours. Do you really only work 40 hours per week? If not, adjust accordingly. Now add in your commute time, the time it takes to get ready each morning, the time it takes to decompress after each day. Your job takes up a lot more hours than you might think.

Now, what is your final per-hour wage? If I made $50k per year, but worked 50 hours per week plus 1 hour total each day for commuting + getting ready, with filing single and taking standard deductions, I’d be down to around $13.50 an hour. Paying someone to do the lawn for $20 an hour is not longer a mathematically prudent idea.

Thought #2: Are you salaried?
The premise of the argument implies that you can simply work instead to cover certain expenses. Hire the maid for $20 a hour, the landscaper for $30 an hour, restaurant food at $20 per hour – hey you make $40 an hour so who cares? Work in your office, and make up the difference and then some. But many of us are salaried workers. If we work 40, 50, 80 hours a week, we won’t earn any more money.

In other words, this only works if you can at the same time make more money elsewhere. Someone who works in their own business or does consulting has much more freedom in this regard. I don’t know if I’m that good at time management to pull this off, though.

Thought #3: Will you always be making as much?
I’ve come to see regard frugality as a habit, which can take years to form. Getting used to paying for everything to be done for you is going to hurt if you want to retire early. If you get used to a higher cost of living, you’ll need a much larger nest egg to generate more income. Living a simple and frugal life now will help make the same life an enjoyable one down the road.

In addition, by doing things yourself you may be learning a skill that can also pay off when you can’t justify paying for it anymore. Gardening and growing your own food is a skill. Cooking is a skill. Performing your own car maintenance. Doing your own home repairs. And so on.

Not Just Math
Obviously, if there are activities which you prefer not doing, or can simply be done by someone else for a fraction of the cost, it can definitely be worth it to outsource. Childcare is a common example, although some do it for the socialization. Besides cost and skill development, I would also adjust for personal taste.

For one, we are considering putting in our own hardwood floors in our new place instead of paying for installation. It will probably take us a lot longer than professionals to put it in. Although we’d be saving at least $10,000 in labor costs, and we’d probably earn more in our regular jobs if calculated on an hourly basis. But I will be learning a lot about home remodeling during this project, it will be a nice respite from staring at a computer screen all day, and it will be personally satisfying.

On the other hand, I hate driving in traffic. I learn nothing from doing it more. If I had access to good public transportation, I would totally pay for it. Similarly, driving around for an hour to save $10 on an item is not going to be worth it to me. However, I love bargain shopping online, and I might research for hours on the best model and price on a $99 item. But I can do that while in my pajamas at odd hours.

Are there some frugal activities that you no longer do after your income increased?

Now that we have our own home and backyard patio, we decided to buy our first propane grill and invite some people over. We had to schedule a convenient time to have my father-in-law come drive down with us since he has a truck, so we had pretty much decided to just buy whatever was cheap and in stock. No hours of research this time! Although some of our serious grilling friends told us to buy a high quality $400+ model, which is probably good advice, we really just wanted something simple to start out with. If we grilled often enough, then later we could upgrade to something that would last a long time.

We had our eye on a $199 Brinkmann grill with some decent BTU, grill space, and also shelf space. But when we got there, they were cleaned out except for one last box that was definitely a previous return. The box was opened, slightly ripped, and had the words “Returned – Missing Parts, Send to Dept #18577” scrawled on the side with permanent marker. It had no special price tag.

All the other sub-$300 cheap grills were also sold out, even after spending 20 minutes searching through all the racks and the help of a Home Depot employee. Even neighboring stores were sold out. The next-cheapest one was $319 for a basic Weber grill, but we decided against it due to price and lack of shelf space.

We finally decided to rummage through the open box and see what was in there, and couldn’t find any obvious missing parts. So we asked the employee if we could buy the “open box”. Sure, he said. Can we get a discount? It says it’s missing parts. He replied that he could give us 10% off. I actually thought about taking it, but my father-in-law said that wasn’t worth the hassle. So we asked for more. How about 35% off? He said he couldn’t do that, and that he’d have to find his manager for such a reduction. Yes, please ask! He kindly tried, explained about the missing parts, and the manager approved.

Out the door with a $199 grill for $130 and the full standard return policy, not bad. We went home and assembled it with no problems at all. Either the parts were actually found or the last person simply lied when returning the grill. I’m not expert, but I think it’s a great starter grill for $130. All I know is that steaks taste better outdoors. 🙂

So that’s how we walked in ready to pay full retail price, and yet ended up haggling at a big-box corporate store. While I still wouldn’t try and negotiate for new items at Home Depot, it’s definitely worth a try for “scratch and dent” items you may run across!

Update: Looks like the New York Times has more examples: Even at Megastores, Hagglers Find No Price Is Set in Stone.

I’m sure the foodies already know about this site, but I just learned about it recently so I figured I’d throw it out there for discussion… America’s Test Kitchen is a very popular PBS show that shares carefully tested recipes, review cooking gear, and even taste-test supermarket products. I figured this would fit in with the frugal theme since they can help you get the best value when buying knives, pots, pans, and even olive oil. I would describe it as a food-focused Consumer Reports.

You can access their recent reviews and articles online for free, but you must provide an e-mail and mailing address. They say they won’t sell your e-mail, but they will force you subscribe to their newsletter and try to get you to sign up for a subscription of Cook’s Illustrated. Let’s just say both can be fake, and you can still gain access… Note that many of the older articles are archived into a paid-only area that costs $24.95 annually.

Now, the most expensive models do often end up being rated the best. However, sometimes there is a surprise and the $30 pan matches or beats out the $100 pan. If not, there is usually a model that ranks nearly as well but is also significantly cheaper. Here’s a sampling of articles I found interesting. Note that these direct links will only work after you have logged in.

• Inexpensive Knife Sets. Scroll to the bottom to find their recommendation for how to build your own cheap but high-quality knife set for under $100. They really like the R .H. Forschner by Victorinox brank of knives (the Swiss Army knives people).
• The Little Nonstick Saucepan That Could: “You can spend $100 on a 2-quart nonstick saucepan–but should you?” I’m glad to see my Calphalon pans rated pretty well.
• Inexpensive Dutch Ovens. “Our favorite Dutch ovens cost more than $200. Ouch! Is there a cheaper version that performs almost as well? Yes. It costs $40.” I don’t own one of these, but I like how the Target brand kept up with fancy-pants Le Creuset. 🙂
• Drip Coffee Makers. “Does an Inexpensive Model Have to Feel Cheap?”
• Commuter Coffee Mugs. “We didn’t find perfection, but we came close.”

I can’t wait until Spring and we can grill in our own new backyard. Bobby Flay, watch out!

With the explosion of sites like Flickr, it seems like everyone is an amateur photography nut. I know I’ve talked about getting a SLR and taking a photography classes for oh… a decade?! Well, why not partake in a free online photography class this weekend. Photography 101: 12 Weeks To Better Photos includes everything from a course outline, weekly handouts, “homework” challenges, and a discussion group. I think they are currently in Week 6, although you can still jump in:

Course Outline
Week 1: Aperture Basic Training
Week 2: Advanced Aperture
Week 3: Light
Week 4: Flash
Week 5: Composition & Framing
Week 6: Shooting Indoors
Week 7: Shooting Outdoors
Week 8: On the Go
Week 9: Portraits
Week 10: Landscapes
Week 11: Your Daily Environment
Week 12: Lenses, Filters & Accessories

My current camera is the Canon Powershot S2. It’s not quite a digital SLR and is already a few generations behind with the S5 out now, but it has 12x zoom and plenty of buttons that just plain scare me. Now to find out what happens when I take it off the Auto mode…

Class info found via The Scottish Lamb.