Articles on Frugal Living

What will be pulled off the shelves? The impact of the new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act

Recently the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act is making headlines because it required that all products (including clothes) made for children 12 and under be tested for lead

Ready For Extreme Saving? Money Saving Advice For An Extreme Economy

The question has arisen in our household whether I should be saving more. Should we resort to extreme saving measures during this recession? Should an extreme economy require grea

How to get half-price dining from your local TV station.

Did you know that your local TV and radio stations regularly receive gift certificates as “payment” for air time? Believe it or not, retailers and restaurants are actually exchangi

Five Frugality Hacks Straight Out of the Great Depression

During the Great Depression, simple frugality was the only way to get by. There was a saying that everyone lived by: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without." There's a l

Leave Marley in the Movies: Why Buying a Trendy Pet Makes No Sense

Who doesn’t fall in love with the many animals featured in hit movies of today and years past? You may be hard-pressed to find someone who didn’t want to adopt 101 cute spotted dog

Getting it Done at Dollar Tree

While dollar-priced retail chains are nothing new, the Dollar Tree stores in particular have caught my attention as having a few categories of coolness. So what do I find there tha

Book Review: Rich Like Them by Ryan D'Agostino

One summer my mother showed me a series of articles in Money magazine by a reporter named Ryan D'Agostino who knocked on the doors of expensive homes to find out how the occupants

Bouncing Back When There's No "Bounce" Left

We all have our ups and downs. We've all faced some pretty depressing odds and come out on top. But sometimes, it feels like you just can't get ahead, no matter how hard you try

Inside the Shady World of Cheap iTunes Gift Cards

A casual search on eBay led to auctions selling iTunes gift cards for cheap, but is there a darker side to this? Some would say yes.

The Real Value of Forever Stamps

Considering that I pay most bills online, I don’t use a whole lot of postage stamps these days. When I do, however, it almost always involves me digging through piles of paperwork

Recession Journal Part I: 'Fast' Money in the '09

Forget about the fact that it's a recession. What you do now determines where you will be when the graph trends up again. What if you stopped dropping duckets like you dropped weig

The Cost of Full-Time Travel

“How much does it cost to travel full-time as a Professional Hobo?” I am asked this question regularly by readers of my personal website. And while I maintain that the cost of full

Getting Rid of Acne

This is not a complete list of ways to fix problem zits, but rather a few tips that I've picked up along my acne journey that surprised me.

Stop Paying For Cable Television But Keep Up With Your Favorite Shows

Cable and satellite television subscriptions are expensive. Let's face it – are you really watching 352 channels and listening to 50 music stations via your television each month

Lucky trade-offs

I view frugal living as essentially hedonistic: I don't deny myself things. Rather, I spend less on the things I don't care about in order to be able to spend more on the things

The Piggy Bank: A Secret to Simple Saving

When I was a sophomore in college, my dad gave me a piggy bank for Hanukkah. I couldn't figure it out at first — had my dad forgotten that I was all grown up and didn't need a pigg

My Kitchen Could Be a Yeast Farm

The free things in life are few -- but one of them, it turns out, is yeast. It's floating all around you, and getting it out of the air and into your bread is easier than you might

Five More Tips For Eating In Restaurants And Sticking To A Budget

Even if you are working hard to keep your discretionary spending to a minimum, you can still enjoy a restaurant meal once in awhile.

Plan for your wants

Budgets tend to focus on needs--food, shelter, heat, light, transportation, and (of course) taxes. They also provide for wants, but generally the smaller, shorter-term wants--cabl

Waste Not, Want Not: Turning Waste Into Savings

If you can adjust your daily habits in some very minor ways, you can start saving some extra cash each month. Here is a list of ideas you can implement immediately around the house