Never throw away anything that comes out of your printer.  Put it in a box labeled “scratch paper.” You can use the blank back of an entire sheet as scratch paper, or cut them up into squares and with some double-sided tape.  There you go, makeshift notebooks and post-its!

When getting an iced drink at a coffee shop, bring your empty cup home, wash immediately, and store.  These can serve as the perfect cups for parties, beer pong, fooling your friends by making homemade coffee and telling them you brought them some Starbucks, or every day use like jars (as mentioned in a previous post).

Cardboard boxes, in all shapes and sizes.  They can be used to wrap presents in (and always bring a laugh, especially when wrapped in a Count Chocula box), for storage, to prevent you from getting dirty when going under your car to fix it, to slide down outdoor cardboard slides, making awesome forts, etc etc.

Shopping bags.  They can be used to line your personal waste baskets.  They’re great for throwing away stuff when spring cleaning.  They’re awesome lunch boxes and people won’t make fun of you for not having a proper box because people buy lunch at grocery stores all the time.  They can also be used to make awesome plastic soldier parachutes, and for transporting food to your next Pot Luck BBQ.

The possibilities are endless.  Get creative, have fun, be random, save lots of money.

Happy material improvisation!

Now that I have successfully taken you on an absurd tangent, let’s get down to the details of this idea for saving money.  It will require a bit of ingenuity, a bit of planning, and a bit of organizational skills to truly take advantage of its potential.  To give you a sense of what I’m talking about, let’s look at something quite normal: the daily newspaper.  Having taken engineer courses in the past that stressed rapid prototyping, I have learned that everyday materials can be used in amazing ways that they were never meant to be used for.  Take the newspaper that you get in your front lawn every day.  It usually comes in a plastic bag to prevent the paper from getting wet in case it rains or the sprinklers come on or a dog comes along and decides to mark its territory.  Once you’re done with reading the newspaper, save it in a box or something (you don’t have to save every single paper and you should replace the oldest papers after a while if they aren’t used, but it’s good to keep a nice little stockpile of them).  Along with saving the paper, make sure you save that plastic bag, especially if you have a dog!

The plastic bags that newspapers come in serve as the perfect poop bags.  You can go to a pet store and buy a set of plastic poop bags, but that will cost you an arm and a leg, and they’re nothing special.  Newspapers, on the other side, are incredibly versatile.  You can use them as gift wrap paper if your friends have a good sense of humor.  They can also be used as packing paper instead of foam peanuts; they’re great for covering your floors when you decide to paint your walls; and they’re absolutely fantastic for cleaning windows.  Just grab some windex, the Sunday paper, and you’re golden.  Plus, when cleaning, you will always have something to entertain you when you get bored or need a break.

So look around you, take your every day material possessions, and try to come up with unorthodox uses for them.  It’s fun to think about, to improvise, and to save tons of money without even intending to.

Happy newspaper plastic bag poop scooping…and other things!

You can get great products like blu-ray players, Netflix receivers like the Roku box, stereos with iPod/iPhone jacks, car radio station receivers that work with your iPod/iPhone, or a ton of other similar products.  Or, you can go the substantially more inexpensive route and upgrade to these new technologies through your old technologies and some wires.

If you have an HD television and a laptop that came out in the last 2 or 3 years, then you will most likely have an HDMI port on both of your devices.  All you need is an HDMI cable (which has audio and video in one cord), which cost as little as $10, and you’re set to begin browsing the web and stream through sites like Hulu and Netflix with the click of a button.  If you don’t have this exact set up, I would just drop by your local electronics store and find the right converters and adapters that will work with your system.  It is usually pretty easy to find and drastically cheaper than any of the boxed products I already mentioned.

The same works for your audio devices.  Thankfully, car companies are becoming smarter and are finally including simple digital audio ports along with the typical CD player.  This allows you to buy an incredibly cheap ($5) audio cable (the ones with the light green cap) and hook it up to your iPod/iPhone.  Along the same lines, with an even older technology, I ended up buying a simple cable that connects to an iPod/iPhone jack and splits into an audio out/audio in (red and white) cable that I was able to hook up to my friends broken 15 year old stereo system.  He can now take advantage of the great speakers it was hooked up to and listen to his entire music library.

Happy electronics window shopping!

Seeds can be expensive, but are pretty essential to the process, so there’s not much room to get around that.  But pots are definitely a space where a bit of time and ingenuity can take you a long way in terms of savings.  Normal pots can be ridiculously expensive, especially as plants begin to outgrow them and start demanding bigger, more robust pots.  How does my friend get around this?  Two things: plastic soda bottles and steel cans.

Cans are pretty simple.  As soon as you’re done with whatever food/paint/varnish was packaged in it, all you have to do is make a hole or lots of tiny holes in the bottom of the can, put it on top of something that can function as a plate (to catch excess water), and then fill it up with your gardening essentials (dirt, seeds, and sunlight).  He has also been experimenting with 20oz beer cans, implementing the same technique.  Plastic soda bottles are pretty simple too.  After finishing your sparkling deliciousness, punch a hole in the bottle cap, slice the plastic bottle in half and flip the top part into the bottom.  The cool thing about this design is that it gives your plants more access to sunlight, the top portion works as the pot, the bottom portion as the catch, and plastic bottles come in a huge variety of different sizes.

Again, the materials may be a bit unsightly, especially if you have a ton of plants, but this can be taken care of pretty easily.  Take your can or soda bottles, your old paint brushes and acrylics, and paint some awesome pictures on the surfaces.  And voila!  There you have it, art and green stuff.

Happy creative gardening!

I ended up buying a student version of Solidworks (a 3D modeling engineering drafting design program) that ended up costing me $150.  Sounds like a lot of money for a piece of legitimate software?  Well, the full version of the same exact software (of course with a couple of little extra perks) costs around $6000.  Absurd savings.  All you have to do is convince one of your college acquaintances (or maybe even sign up for a class at a community college, if you can’t deal with the moral dubiousness of the venture) to make the purchase for you.  The way I see it, the companies are getting more business that they would not have received because $6000 is beyond the means of most people.

There are two ways of making these purchases.  Either you go to a campus bookstore and have your friend purchase it with their student ID, or you visit one of several websites that can be found with a simple Google search and send the company proper proof of your student status.

There are a couple of tiny little issues with making purchases like these.  First of all, you will typically be purchasing a license for this software that will expire in a year or more.  This is usually never an issue for me because these technologies turn around so quickly that after your time expires, you’ll most likely want to purchase the newest available version.  The other problem is that, unlike most other software, you will only be able to install it on one machine.  So if you need this program in your laptop and desktop and you want to give it to the rest of your family, it won’t be possible.  Otherwise, the software usually contains all of the features available in the full version, and the savings are remarkable.

Happy feeling like a cheap college student!

As soon as you have separated all of your purchases into these categories and subcategories, the savings can commence.  Whenever you go shopping, whether it’s for groceries or for other essential items like clothing, take what you put under “utility” and look for great deals on those items.  Clothing that can go under utility can be thought of your everyday items like socks and perhaps underwear.  When you see a great deal of any of these things, force yourself to make a massive bulk purchase.  You will always need socks, and you will most likely have the same style for a very long time.

The great thing about this tactic is that even if it is not super essential for your to save a ton of money, it will free up a large quantity of money that you can end up using for more fun purchases that you would have felt guilty about making at some other time. You can even go further, if you are so inclined, and buy fashion (which tends to be a “want”) in bulk.  For example, if you see a style of polo that you really like, and it comes in 5 different colors, you can make a bulk purchase of this item and still have several different looks.  Think about it, you most likely already have a very specific distinct style, so who cares if you have a rainbow selection of the same polo shirt.  So you wear polo shirts, no one will second guess you.

Happy utilitarian purchasing!

So now that I have glorified this amazing meal, I will talk about how you can get the best out of your sandwich and save at the same time.  Subway is usually the first thing that comes to mind when anyone ever mentions sandwiches, especially with their recent incredibly successful $5 footlong deal.  I have to admit, I love a good meatball sandwich at Subway, and a footlong of that is pretty filling, but for the most part, despite the low price, you’re not really getting the most bang for your buck.

There are all sorts of other options for sandwiches that are both cheap, very filling, and incredibly delicious.  My favorites are those found at the deli’s at high end super markets.  Places like Andronico’s, Whole Foods, and other little local markets like JJ&F and A.G. Ferrari (in Palo Alto, CA).  Despite being inside of a high end market, their sandwich prices are typically around $6-$7.  For that price, you usually get absolute flexibility over the contents of your sandwich, they are much more filling than Subway, you get incredibly high quality and rare imported meat and cheese choices, very fresh ingredients, and artisan breads.  Just the other day I went to Andronico’s and had a Sopresatta, Fra Mani Salami, and Prosciutto sandwich on focaccia with tomato, avocado, and Havarti cheese for only $6.99.  The sandwich was so fantastic and so filling that I ended up only eating half, and saving the other half for later.  So if you think about it, I got my fill for only $3.00.  Savings!

The other awesome thing about getting sandwiches at these places is that they usually give out sandwich cards that you get stamped at every visit for a free sandwich after a certain amount of purchases.  One way to get free sandwiches even quicker is to bring along different friends that don’t usually go to these places.  Why?  Because they don’t really care for the cards, and the staff is usually nice enough to give you a stamp for their purchase.  I can’t even count the number of free sandwiches I’ve gotten in the past.  So drop by one of these places and explore the wonderful world of rare meats and artisan breads.

Happy Sammiching!

As an example, let’s compare the prices of two fairly identical products that are used on a day to day basis and are packaged in different manners: razors.  As a consumer, I have realized that there is always a price for convenience.  The more effort you have to put into some activity, as a rule of thumb, is usually cheaper.  Although that is usually the case, it is not so with razors.  Before continuing, what do you think is cheaper: disposable razors or a razor with interchangeable cartridges?  You may be inclined to say disposable razors because there is an initial upfront cost for the interchangeable razor.  But if we were to take that out of the equation, would that be so?  Think about it, what is cheaper: continually stocking your kitchen with paper plates and cups, or buying a set of glass plates and cups?  Obviously the glass plates are much more expensive upfront, but as time goes on, paper plates and cups becomes much more expensive.

Paper plates and cups are much more convenient because you never have to wash anything, but you pay a huge fee for the convenience.  Disposable razor blades are much more convenient than an interchangeable razor and cartridges because you don’t have to worry about losing the razor and having to pay an extra $10 for a new one.  If you lose a disposable razor blade, oh well, it’s not that expensive.  So by the same logic, disposable razor blades should be much more expensive.  Not so!

To convince you, let’s look at the cost of purchasing six Mach 3 razor blades, which are available as disposable razors and interchangeable ones.  Six disposable razor blades costs roughly $16.  One interchangeable Mach 3 razor (which includes one cartridge), and a pack of 5 cartridges totals $23.  Now let’s take the interchangeable razor out of the equation and let’s compare the price of one cartridge to one disposable razor.  One disposable razor costs roughly $2.66 while one interchangeable cartridge comes to be about $2.80.  There you have it: disposable razors are cheaper and much more convenient.

Happy disposable razor shaving!

The biggest annoyance that comes from owning a piggybank and the main reason most people don’t keep one is the question of how to turn your 10 pounds of coins into dollar bills.  You can go to the bank and get a bunch of coin sleeves for free and spend hours organizing them and then exchange them for dollar bills at your bank, usually for free.  But that takes tons of time and much more effort.  Plus, you’ll rarely end up at an even number, so you can still end up with a ton of coins (sort of like those stray socks you can’t find a pair for when you lose one to the laundry black hole).

However, there is a solution.  I am also willing to bet that you have heard of this wonderful solution.  It’s called Coinstar.  Coinstar has been incredibly successful because it basically takes out all of the hassle of organizing your coins out of the equation.  You just go into your nearest supermarket, dump your jar full of coins in a bin, it all gets counted for you and you receive a voucher that you can redeem for cash.  Obviously, there is a catch that makes this endeavor not really worthwhile: there is a fee to use Coinstar (and it’s like 10%, which is ridiculous).  Now, remember I said that this strategy works best in combination with carrying cash and Starbucks?  Well, you will be happy to know that you can bypass this massive fee and get your money’s worth by reloading your Starbucks Card instead of receiving a voucher.  There are no taxes, no fees, and the process for reloading it only takes a few, simple steps that are explained to you at the machine.  Also, if you are not a coffee addict, there are several other options for gift cards and services you can choose from, that also require no extra fees or taxes.

Happy coffee piggybanking!

Reducing gives the least incentive as it requires a significant amount of time, upfront costs for reducing equipment like compost bins, and most people don’t actually use compost that often.  If gardening is your thing, then it’s a pretty awesome investment that will give you fantastic returns.

Next is Reuse.  I have to admit that this one is my favorite and the one I see most of my savings come from.  My absolute favorite thing to reuse is pasta sauce jars.  If you are just out of college, like me, and you make tons of pasta, like me, and your kitchen is stocked up with essential items: a couple of forks, a couple of spoons, maybe some knives (forks can double up as knives), and like one or two cups, like me; pasta sauce jars are a godsend.  I use them for everything from gardening (as plant pots) to baking (as mixing bowls).  My absolute favorite thing about pasta sauce jars is that they double up as the most perfect (and quirky, in my opinion) drinking glasses.  Something about drinking out of them, kind of like drinking out of a Erlenmeyer flask, makes the liquid inside taste so much better.  So the next time you go make some pasta, keep your jars instead of recycling them, and before you know it, you’ll have a fully stocked eclectic kitchen.

Happy Reusing!