Beating Broke

Personal Finance from the Broke Perspective

Ways to Save When Back-to-School Shopping

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After the long days of summer, many parents look forward to their children’s return to school.  Unfortunately, preparing for the return to school often includes a large financial outlay for back to school supplies and clothes.  However, there are several strategies you can employ to limit how much you have to spend.

Back to School Supplies

-In late July, try to obtain your child’s back to school supply list from the school.  Scour the ads for great deals and look at sites like A Full Cup to learn which items you can get for free.  It may take several weeks for all of the items on your child’s list to go on sale, which is why you want to start shopping in late July.  I employed this strategy last year and got all of my son’s school supplies for $12, and I bought extra to give at Christmas too.

glue army-Keep in mind that stores such as Staples, Office Depot and Office Max have a price matching policy.   If you find a lower price at a competitor’s store, bring in the ad, and the store you are shopping at will match the price.  You can save gas by taking advantage of this policy, but beware that most have a 7 to 14 day window for the competitor’s price, and a few stores exclude prices advertised on websites.

-When you can obtain items for free, try to buy more than you need.  Then, if your child runs out of some of the supplies mid-school year, you won’t have to pay full price to buy more.  You can just shop in your supply you got for free.

Back to School Clothing

-Before going out to shop for clothes, first go through your child’s closet to see what clothing they already have that still fits and is in good condition.  Make a list of items and colors so you can look for matching pieces when shopping.

-Check out stores like Once Upon a Child.  They often have new designer clothes for 1/3 to ½ the retail cost.

-Buy on eBay.  Many people list their children’s gently worn clothes on eBay, and you can find many auctions in late July and August.  To make sure you get a good deal, read the description thoroughly.  A good seller should specify how worn the clothes are and any flaws in the clothing.  To make sure you are dealing with a good seller, check their feedback.  It should be 100% positive.  I never buy from a seller with lower than 98% positive feedback.  Also, the more feedback a seller has, the more experienced they are.  Finally, feel free to ask questions about the clothing before you bid on it.  Consider buying several auctions from one seller who combines shipping to save on shipping costs.

-Check out Craigslist.  People often list their children’s clothes for sale and when they are having garage sales.  You probably don’t want to buy all of your children’s clothes used, but you can find some high quality clothing at a fraction of the cost by considering used clothing markets.

-Buy mix and match clothing.  Try to buy 3 to 4 pairs of pants and 5 to 6 shirts that can be interchanged.  This dramatically extends the variety of outfits your child can wear.

-Stagger your buying.  Buy some lightweight fall clothes early in the season, and buy sweaters and warmer clothes later in the fall.  This can help you distribute the money that you spend over a few months.  Wait for seasonal sales such as Columbus Day.  Also, the stores frequently reduce the fall merchandise to make way for the winter items; try to buy more clothes when they are on clearance.

The average American spends $600 on back to school shopping.  You can reduce that amount by half or more by following some of these strategies.  If you take the time to plan ahead and wait for the sales, you can dramatically cut your back-to-school expenses.  Happy frugal shopping!

photo credit: me and the sysop

Opportunity Cost is Bull

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That’s right.  Bull.  All these experts go on and on about calculating the opportunity cost of something and adding that in to your cost analysis when deciding whether you should do something yourself, or hire it out.  Heck, even I have used it before.  But, we’ve all taken it way too far.

Let me ask you this; What is your opportunity cost of reading this post?  Of eating your breakfast this morning?  Not relevant?  Bull, again.  We use it to determine if we should keep cable T.V.  We use it to determine the added cost of our daily commute.  Personally, I’ve used it to validate paying people to do all sorts of things.  Mechanics?  The cost of doing it myself is too great, let them replace those brakes!  Plumbers? I hate doing plumbing.  Let them fix that leak!  We’ve become so obsessed with being frugal and pinching our pennies that we figure out the cost of everything that we do.  If the cost is too high, we should avoid doing it, or do it ourselves, our mantra goes.  But, that isn’t always true! Sometimes, it’s just straight up bull.

We all want to improve our finances.  That’s why we do those calculations.  It’s simple mathematics.  The problem with opportunity cost, however, is that most people assume a 100% efficiency.  I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there is nothing that is 100% efficient.  Not you, me, or anything ever created.  There’s gonna be some loss.  So, yes, I can figure the opportunity cost of my time.  But, it depends on my using that time to be efficiently working on something that will make me money.  The opportunity cost of my time at work is about $25/hour.  But, that doesn’t mean that every hour I sit at home watching T.V. has an opportunity cost of $25/hour.  I can’t stop watching T.V. and replace that time with paid time for work.  They don’t like paying overtime.  Plus, I’m paid on salary, so every extra hour I work at work, reduces the effective hourly pay.  Did you catch that?  Every hour over 40 hours a week that I work reduces my efficiency to earn money.  If I were paid hourly, that might be slightly different.  But, I’d be willing to bet, my employer would still have an aversion to paying overtime and would not allow me to work many more hours over 40.

If you’ve got side projects, like I do, there is a opportunity cost for every hour that I’m not working on them.  Some side projects are extremely easy to figure the cost of.  If I contract out my work on an hourly basis, my cost (for every hour I’m not working that project) is that hourly rate.  But, just like my job, I can’t be 100% efficient at my side project either.  I’ve got to sleep sometime.  (Egads!!!  The opportunity cost of sleep!!!)

The point is this; If you’re going to try and figure the opportunity cost in order to validate a decision, don’t do it blindly.  Realize that you won’t be 100% efficient.  Just because you disconnect the cable T.V. doesn’t mean you’re going to replace all that T.V. watching time with efficient money making time.  Some of it might be spent reading a book.  Or playing with kids.  Or napping. 😉  Each of those may have some benefit to you, but they really don’t have much place in a financial cost analysis.  Sorry, you can’t bill your kids for playtime!

The personal finance world is full of stuff like this.  Mantras and rules-of-thumb that we use like crutches to validate and justify why we do what we do.  It’s like an addiction.  If you truly want to take control of your finances and live a better life, you’ve got to discard those addictions like you would a pack of smokes and begin to analyze what you do with a critical view.  Nothing is worth using in your finances until you’ve tested and proven that it is.

photo credit: zogh

How to Implement a Weekly Menu Plan

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We talked last time about why you should create a menu plan.  Today, we will tackle how to menu plan.  Honestly, there is no correct way to menu plan, but here are some of the most common methods:

Assign a Meal to a Day of the Week

Some people make it very easy on themselves and create a designated meal for each day of the week.  For instance,

  • Monday—Mexican
  • P1640073Tuesday—salad
  • Wednesday—pasta
  • Thursday—pizza
  • Friday—casserole
  • Saturday—leftovers
  • Sundays—soup and sandwich

Then, they just plug in a meal for each day.  Maybe one Monday they will have fajitas, the next Monday they will have tacos, the next quesadillas.  Whatever they eat on Monday is some type of Mexican food.

Make a Menu Plan Once a Month

With this method, you look at your upcoming monthly calendar and plan meals accordingly.  For instance, in my case, my son has tap dance class every Wednesday night.  I know on these nights not to plan anything time intensive.  On Wednesdays, I either choose crock pot meals that allow me to do the prep work in the morning and then require no additional work from me, or I schedule that day as a day to eat leftovers.

Similarly, if you look at the calendar and see that you are taking Uncle Joe out to eat on the 20th and you know he will want to go to a steak house, you probably won’t schedule another beef meal on the 19th or 21st.

This method works great for people who generally dislike menu planning and prefer to get a month’s worth of planning done in one setting.

Choose Your Menu Plan Based on What Is on Sale

Probably the most common method of menu planning is to center your meals around what is on sale at the grocery store.  So, you get your supermarket ads on Sunday and see that ground beef is on sale as well as whole wheat pasta.  Salmon is also on sale.  Maybe you choose to make spaghetti (spaghetti sauce recipe) on Tuesday night, lasagna on Wednesday night and a salmon salad for Friday night, for example.

If you don’t regularly stock up on groceries when they hit rock bottom prices, this is the method of menu planning that will net you the largest savings.

Choose Your Menu Plan Based on What You Have in the Pantry

This is the method that I prefer because I regularly stock up on groceries when they are at rock bottom prices.  Before I make my menu plan for the week, I look at what ingredients I have at home and make a menu centered around those items.  Recently I bought Tilapia on sale, so we will be having a fish meal this week.  I also bought imitation crab meat on sale two weeks ago (prepackaged), so I will be making crab cakes.  However, I don’t want all of my meals for the week to be seafood based.  I see that chicken is on sale for $1.49 a pound, so I plan two chicken meals and also buy some extra chicken to stock up in the freezer.  I also have tomatoes and avocado that need to be used up, so I plan on having taco salad another day.

Final Thoughts on Menu Planning

The most important part of menu planning is choosing the method that works best for you and your family because then you will be most likely to stick with it.  In addition, remember to be flexible with yourself.  If you have a meal planned on Monday that you don’t feel like cooking Monday night, it is okay to jump to Wednesday night’s meal.  It really doesn’t matter which day you prepare which meal as long as you prepare all of the meals within a week’s time so you don’t waste ingredients.

Finally, if you are ready to take the leap to menu planning, one of my favorite free online resources is food.com.  You can easily search for the type of meal that you would like to make and find hundreds of recipes, many of which have been ranked by other users.  I tend to only use recipes that earn 4.5 to 5 stars out of 5.

You may feel as if you don’t have time to meal plan, but often menu planning saves an enormous amount of time.  If you don’t  do it already, I hope you will try it.

photo credit: Emily Barney