Dear reader, I know that you, like many others, have been hard hit by this recession. Heck, after feeding your family, you may only have $400,000 left over. Well, you’re in luck! Since the recession began, many blogs have begun posting money-saving tips. Did you know that you can make a home-cooked meal for under $15? Or that you can do this crazy thing called stretching a chicken rather than eat it all in one night? Who knew?* All over the internet, tips and tricks are popping up. Buy what’s on sale! Buy in season! Don’t buy pre-packaged meals! Cook at home!
Unfortunately, how blogs expect people to act after the recession hit is how we already lived beforehand. Where do you cut back when you go from poor to poorer?
Here are some tips for those of you who fall into the wasteland between people who qualify for food stamps and secretly middle-class people who’ve romanticized the idea of poverty.
1. Don’t eat meat
Your mother probably won’t like this one. If you tell her it’s what you’re doing, she might come visit and feed you meat for four days straight, after which you’ll notice that your nails have stopped breaking and your hair looks nice and shiny. (Note: Advice not guaranteed to work with all mothers. If mother is not Chinese, proceed at own risk.)
2. Drastically reduce fruit consumption
You can nearly cut your grocery bill in half by limiting fruit consumption to one serving a day. The food pyramid recommends 3-5 servings of fruit or vegetables, right? Certain vegetables are much cheaper than fruit. (Remind me again– is iceberg lettuce a vegetable or a packing material?)
3. Stop eating whole grains
Whole grains cost more than refined grains and take longer to cook; by eating food products made with generic white flour, you can save on both your grocery and utility bills!
Help! I followed your advice, and all I did was get fat and/or scurvy!
Congratulations. You’ve qualified for membership in the not-very-exclusive club of the Actually Poor.
Ok, ok. My point has been made. Here are some actual money-saving tips that won’t lead to malnutrition but don’t require you to patronize (get patronized by?) Whole Foods.
Money-Saving Substitutions
-A cheap replacement for butter:
The next time you buy a chicken (i.e., the next time the price dips to $0.79/pound), don’t remove the fat before cooking. Afterward, skim off some of the cooking juices and refrigerate them. The saturated fat will rise to the top and solidify, while the unsaturated fat/bone goo/stuff you shouldn’t try too hard to identify will sink to the bottom and make, er, chicken jell-O. The saturated fat will be the color of butter and have the consistency of butter you’ve already softened in the microwave. The best part is that because you were going to throw it out anyway, it’s essentially free. I haven’t tried it in desserts, but it’s great for savory dishes.
Or, you know, you could just buy margarine.
-A cheap replacement for bouillon cubes
The aforementioned chicken jell-O.
-A cheap emetic
The aforementioned chicken jell-O.
-A cheap replacement for cleaning solutions
You can use vinegar to clean pretty much everything. Well, not metal, extremely lipophilic substances, or The Worst Kitchen Counter in the World, which isn’t designed to stand up to contact with acids, bases, water, oils, heat, cold, or the gentle breath of the mayfly. Don’t buy the special “cleaning vinegar” sold in the “green” section, which includes a 200% dumb yuppie tax. Instead, buy the gallon-sized jugs of white vinegar from the grocery section, which range in price from $2 to $4.
You can use vinegar to replace:
-All-purpose cleaners
Dilute the vinegar with water. Various sites will insist upon various concentrations, but no one really knows what concentration is best, so just dilute it until it no longer stings your hands. Some internet-approved recipes require you to mix it with baking soda. The authors of these recipes are to be roundly mocked and encouraged to make massive quantities of their special cleaning solutions near their newly installed cherry-wood floors.
-Hardwood floor cleaners
That last sentence was not meant to imply that you can’t clean hardwood floors with vinegar, only that you must first dilute it and take care in wringing out your cleaning cloth. This cleaning regimen will remove years of dull, caked-on Pine-Sol residue and make your floors nice and shiny. In the short term, at least. The expensive hardwood floor cleaner industry insists that years and years of cleaning with even very dilute amounts of vinegar will ruin your floors. I’ve never lived in one house long enough to see if this is true, but I contend that if you expect your floors to look fantastic after years and years of cleaning with anything, you probably preserve your designer sofas with museum-quality dust covers and make your children sit on plastic folding chairs instead. I hope you enjoy the impeccable upholstery at the nursing home in which they inevitably stash you.
-Fabric softeners
A cup or so of white vinegar in the rinse cycle will serve the same purpose as fabric softener, although unfortunately, it will not produce that comforting, old-timey acetaldehyde-and-benzene scent. If you find that you’re breathing too well and are in need of a little bronchoconstriction, or perhaps you’ve grown tired of your boring old DNA and would like to change it up a little, by all means stick with conventional fabric softeners.
-Hair Conditioner
A vinegar rinse will make your hair soft and shiny but also involve a lot of screaming “Ahh! My eyes! My eyes!”
-Deodorant
Dab some vinegar under your arms in place of traditional deodorant. This seems to work fine for me, but Dr. Unexploited claims that my sweat tends not to smell, anyway. On the other hand, there are too many compelling reasons for a husband not to say, “Wife, you smell faintly of zoo” for me to take his word for it.
-Drano
To fail to unclog a drain, pour a sizable clump of baking soda down it, chase it with copious amounts of vinegar, and immediately cover both the drain and the little overflow hole. Presumably, the gust of CO2 this reaction produces will force the clog through the pipe. This doesn’t really work, but neither, in my experience, does Drano, and this is a significantly cheaper way to do precisely nothing.
*You can actually make the first meal for $4 and the second string of 22 meals for about $20 with this one simple tip: don’t shop at Whole Foods.
