Cartoon economics

Two days in a row last week I caught myself buying coffee with the debit card. Though I usually make my own, I don’t begrudge myself an occasional caffeinated indulgence -- so long as I pay with my allowance money, which, like the song in the old “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoon, comes to “$7.50 once a week.”

I buy the same kind of stuff with my allowance as that kid did: a cheap burrito here, a cold soda there, a comic book or magazine from the library‘s secondhand sales rack. It doesn’t really matter, as long as I stay within my budgetary boundaries. Those few bucks are meant to be spent on frivolous crap, and if I‘ve got a dollar or two left at the end of the week, then I set it aside in case I want to buy more frivolous crap later. (Since I’m attempting to buy all my clothes secondhand this year, I’ve even thought about trying to fund my clothing budget with leftover allowance money.)

This is the nature of the budgetary universe I’ve constructed over the years, a complex yet simple system in which no part is so tiny as to be considered insignificant. My allowance belongs to the cash-based world, where it coexists with the grocery fund, the dining fund, the kid activity fund and other budgetary organisms, each playing its role.

When my childish impulses grab the debit card, they enter the digital world of our budgetary universe, populated by larger creatures with more complicated needs and relationships. Those coffee purchases may not seem like much, a little nibble here and there. But left unchecked, they can throw the whole ecosystem out of alignment.

A nutty fashion trend that could save you money

It’s 29 degrees with wind gusts up to 26 mph as I drop our daughter off at school yesterday, but only one student is wearing a coat. Granted, we’ve arrived early, and there are only a dozen students on the scene. Most, like Rowan, are at least wearing hoodies. But two guys make the long trek from their cars to the entrance in short-sleeved T-shirts, ambling along like they’re walking on the beach. And the kid in the letter jacket? He’s got shorts on.

All winter I’ve been spotting kids in shorts, and it’s not just teenagers, either. At a birthday party Ben attended last weekend, half the preteen boys showed up with their shins exposed. I don’t pretend to understand the cultural confluence at work here. Rebellion surely plays a role, as does youthful confidence that they won’t get stuck outside for very long. The length of their shorts -- made popular by Michigan’s Fab Five, who blew the NCAA tournament before this crop of high school kids was even born -- is another likely factor.

I don’t know what other parents think about this fashion trend, but I say, bring it on. I’ve often suspected it would be cheaper to live in a warmer climate, without heating bills or a winter wardrobe. Those long shorts are a heck of a lot cheaper than blue jeans.

$2 dinners (hold the fine print, please)

I was killing time at the Walmart magazine rack the other day, waiting on the kids to set their spending money on fire -- I mean, find those indispensable items that would give their lives meaning -- when I noticed an article on $2 dinners.

That’s what it said on the cover, anyway. When I flipped open the magazine, though, it turns out the writer was talking about meals that cost $2 per serving. For us, those would be $12 dinners. That’s $84 for seven dinners -- about what I usually spend on all our groceries, including laundry detergent and shampoo and toilet paper, for an entire week.

As it turns out, we had an actual $2 dinner at our house just last night: Baked leftover spaghetti topped with a little mozzarella cheese, leftover banana bread, some iceberg lettuce (I know, I know, but that’s what my husband prefers) and homemade brownies flavored with cocoa powder. I figure the brownies contained about $1 worth of ingredients, and we used about half a head of lettuce (50 cents) and about 50 cents worth of cheese. Everything else had been through another meal previously, and for accounting purposes would have already been “expensed.”

Here are some non-leftover dinners that really do cost $2, with no fine print. They make less-than-ideal glossy magazine photographs, but at least your kids will go off to college knowing what to eat when they're broke:

-- Ramen noodles, a sliced carrot, 1 cup of frozen peas, 1 can of tuna.
-- Baked omelette and toast.
-- Grilled cheese and tomato soup.
-- Peanut butter and jelly pizza. (Make your own crust).
-- Baked potatoes topped with a can of chili beans and a sprinkle of cheese. (Use potatoes from a bag, and you’ll pay just a few cents per potato.)
-- Store-brand macaroni and cheese, store brand green beans and store brand tuna.
-- Tuna noodle casserole, using a homemade white sauce instead of cream of mushroom soup.
-- Homemade pancakes or waffles and homemade syrup, made with one part brown sugar to one part water.
-- Homemade polenta topped with spaghetti sauce or salsa and sprinkled with cheese.
-- Beans and rice

Infiltrating Hilfiger's army

So I've got these two Tommy Hilfiger long-sleeve T-shirts, hand-me-downs from my mom, and they're really comfortable and I like the colors and they don't actually say the designer's name anywhere except the inside label, which deluded me into accepting them in the first place. But I just can't seem to leave the house in this garb. Even if I just need to go to the post office, I invariably wind up changing my shirt first.

I suppose I should take them to Goodwill, so a bonafide member of Hilfiger's army can claim them. Yet they're so comfy, I can't quite give them up. For now, I've marked their demotion by moving them from one cube in my duct-taped, cardboard-box closet organizer to another. But if I get extra motivated, maybe I'll sew something funky over those Hilfiger stripes -- like the time I "recovered" a Vera Bradley purse I once got as a Christmas gift.

A frontal assault on the grocery termites

I got so wound up yesterday about that expiration-date article in Slate that I forgot to post my Weight Watchers cost-analysis update. And it’s not like I was trying to overlook bad news, either: I dropped another four pounds. That brings my totals to a little less than $60 spent, a little less than 17 pounds lost.

So far, I continue to feel like it’s been worth the expense. Obviously I wish I could just do this on my own -- and I’m getting to the point where I think I could -- but I keep wondering if part of the reason I’m taking this so seriously is because there’s money involved. I always want to make sure I get my money’s worth, ya know? (This isn’t a factor for my mom, and so this whole process has been more of a struggle for her.)

My motivation is probably different than many other people who go to these meetings. Yeah, I want to look and feel better, and I’ve definitely already noticed an energy boost. But the main thing, I think, is that I want to bring my eating habits into alignment with my frugal values. On the one hand, I go to these extreme measures to save money on our grocery bill, but on the other hand my mindless noshing and overgenerous appetite was wasting some of our food supply. It was like having grocery termites -- and they had the gall to set up their command center inside the skull of the family budget nazi.

More notes on experimenting with expiration

I finally got around to reading the Slate.com food writer's article on expiration dates yesterday, after hearing her on NPR. Her findings confirm what I’ve long suspected, that expiration dates are mostly unregulated, highly variable and ridiculously conservative. We’ve got four half gallons of milk in the fridge right now that supposedly “expired” on Sunday. Our record is six days. Not because we‘ve lost our nerve after that point, or encountered stinky milk, but just because we‘ve usually drunk it up by then.

Our family goes through six gallons of milk a week. We should probably get a cow. But in the meantime, scoring short-dated milk is a high priority for us. The kids know to look for the orange stickers some supermarkets put on their most aged cartons. I paid only 65 cents each for the ones in the fridge.

Not everybody’s so desperate to unload old milk, though. At a general store in a village near here, I once found a gallon of milk six days its expiration date that had been marked down only 40 cents -- and because it started out higher to begin with, was only slightly lower than my target price of $2 a gallon. “Those dates don’t mean anything,” the store clerk said, nodding her head toward the back of the store. “He‘s drunk it 10 days past the date, and never had any trouble.” She didn‘t say who “he” was. For all I know, she was talking about her dog.

Nadia Arumugam, the Slate writer, makes a good point that “expiration bacteria” is much less harmful than “unclean” bacteria like e coli or salmonella. I’m still wondering, though, whether the “expiration bacteria” in pasteurized milk is the same as the “expiration bacteria” in raw milk. Can modern milk transform into other delicacies, or has it lost that capability? As the descendant of Swiss cheesemakers (though I believe what they made on my great-grandfather’s farm was more akin to cottage cheese), I intend to find out.

Apple prices trending lower?

In the 15 years that I’ve been tracking grocery prices in our area, my “buy” price on apples has remained consistent: 99 cents a pound. But recently I noticed Aldi has been selling three-pound bags of apples for $2, which comes out to 66 cents a pound. And this week Meijer is advertising three-pound bags of Jonagold and Delicious apples at three for $5, which comes out to $1.66 or $1.67 each, or 56 cents a pound.

If you’re buying bagged apples, by the way, don’t forget to check how many you’re getting per bag. Three-pound bags typically contain 8-10 apples. If you pick up an eight-apple bag, you’ll be paying 21 cents an apple -- whereas if you get a 10-apple bag, you’ll pay 17 cents an apple.