It occurs to me that spending less on certain items, such as flour tortillas, seems asinine compared to the cost of many other things in life. Dropping the tortilla price from $0.25 to $0.08 each doesn’t sound like a very high ROI, so why would I focus on this sort of thing?
This actually represents a more difficult challenge that has perplexed me for years. I’ve never had a payment for a luxury car because luxury cars are simply not things that I value, so I have a hard time not thinking people are stupid when they pay $700 per month for one [I know. I know. Some people have the money. That’s fine. It’s not wrong]. That being said, some people probably think I’m insane for sometimes spending over $100 on books in any given month. There’s a natural discordance between all of us, reflecting different personalities, value systems, and spending patterns, and there is rarely any one approach that represents the “correct” way to do things.
So…what’s the real value of reducing tortilla prices from $0.25 to $0.08? If that’s what it means to save money on groceries, are we just wasting time in Poverty Spirit Land, driving the price of everything down just so we can award ourselves for our “virtue”?
There are two things that sink your budget: spending money on high-priced items, and spending money on low-priced items. I’m saying this tongue-in-cheek, but also, it’s true. Some people waste the most money on several high-priced things, and others waste the most on buying a multitude of low-priced things. Most of use live in-between. Personally, I like to think I’ve done really well with money by taking a structural approach, where I avoid buying big ticket items that cost way beyond their sticker price. But, I’ve been a little less successful conquering small spends, at least to the point that I realize this spending could be greatly improved. What I simply cannot fully wrap my mind around is that hardly anybody excels in all directions: we all have weaknesses, and then we all have things we get exceptional value from. But what does it mean if we save a ton of money in one area, while practically saving nothing in another?
My general philosophical contention is that “wise spending” is a function of reducing waste and maximizing value. It is not as simple as a dollar amount. In whatever you do, reducing waste is a good thing, even if the product of that reduction is small compared to your overall spending. Or so I think. From the perspective of food, we all need food, from now until death; few things have a greater effect on the amount of time we must exchange to live than that which is spent on food. One-off savings often barely hold a candle to our monthly patterns of spending. Yeah, I got a great TV stand for about $80 (total) compared to $300, which seems like a fantastic deal, and it was, but that was 5+ years ago, and it really means very little when I’m overspending by $100 every month on groceries. That doesn’t mean we should ignore those deals when we happen upon them, but again, habitual spending has the greater effect.
Consider also my candy bar example. $3.78. One candy bar. Versus a giant homemade cookie for (in theory) $0.50. We’re not just talking savings, we’re also talking about long-term exposure to weird chemicals that aren’t really supposed to be in our bodies. And that’s just one food item out of hundreds. Multiply that by 10 and now we’re looking at $37.80 versus $5. Now we can start to see how the price of groceries can add up. It’s not necessarily a poverty spirit thing, it’s a “not paying an insane amount of money to poison yourself” sort of thing. Now, the candy bar is an easy example for the sake of illustration, but most supermarket breads are loaded with strange ingredients, too, so I strongly prefer to make my own. If a loaf costs $5, that’s the amount I could pay for 5 pounds of flour, making 3 or 4 loaves. Again, maybe that’s not your thing, and that’s fine, but we all eat, and we all have to eat from now until death, so those savings are relevant for as long as you live. It’s worth your time.
Quality footwear in the modern age is somewhere between $60-150+, and I probably need new shoes every year or two. Your feet are important, so if you have the money, try to buy shoes that are good for your feet. But imagine for a second, just imagine, that you can save $100 every month on groceries. Think of the ways that can be reinvested into your life. It could be that pair of shoes you need each year, it could be paying the restaurant bill for all of your friends, it could be any number of things, but if you steward it well, and if you can “lock it in” as the simple result of how you spend money on food, it’s there, every single month for the rest of your life. That doesn’t mean you won’t need to use it for something important that you’d rather not spend it on, but at least you could look at how you live your life and not think, “Dang, what a waste”.
And see, if you think that cooking your own food is too time consuming, maybe it is, and maybe you need a different strategy for approaching what and how you cook. I use thrift store bread machines. There will likely come a day when I buy one new, but one was like $10 and the other $20. I had to replace one of the seals, and I need to replace that one again, so that’s an extra $50 over 6 years, but you dump some ingredients in the pan and push a few buttons, and two hours later the bread is ready. You think I want to spend my time kneading dough? Fuck no! So, there’s a variety of learning curves, but I think they are often worth learning, and that’s where I feel inspired because most of this stuff is not rocket science, and once you get a decent system in place, you don’t need to try any harder. I think it was Jacob Fisker who said that in the time it takes to drive to a fast food restaurant and return home, you can basically cook most meals. Now, I’m not trying to be a jerk – every now and then I get fast food – but I think there’s a very real principle in this that we often miss.
I sat down with all of my grocery receipts from January and was shocked to realized that very few items stood out as being egregious. Yeah, there was a whack of those frozen meals I really enjoy which came out to $42 total, but it seems like a lot of what drove my spending up so high was a plethora of $5 items, cheap enough to think they wouldn’t matter, but expensive enough that I only bought a few of each kind. I did try quite a number of frozen burritos, just to see what I thought, and I think that added up quite a bit. Did I get my value’s worth? I don’t really think so. $2.80 for a steak burrito sounds good, but it was basically a tortilla ($0.25), a cube of steak shredded into tiny bits, cheese, and some kind of hot sauce, and I half suspect that if you could make the same thing in the same proportions, it would only cost $1. Over ten meals, well…your wallet might start to feel it. $28 versus $10. Another one was an egg and cheese burrito I paid $5 for. It was good, but again…tortilla, egg, cheese. I paid $5 for that? See why I’m so focused on learning how to make my own tortillas, and why I’m kind of eager to save money on them? [We’ll see if it actually happens, though. If I can’t find a good system, I think I can live with $0.25 per tortilla]
(Speaking of, damn, I forgot to mention cheese in my last post. My roommate shreds his own and I kind of wish I did the same, but the last time I bought a large block of cheese, it started molding before I could finish the whole thing. To be fair, when shredded cheese goes on sale 2 for 1, it’s extremely difficult to beat price-wise, but it would not at all surprise me if there were some serious gains to be had long-term by simply shredding your own blocks of cheese)
It’s a new month and I’m watching what I spend much more closely. I still wrestle with what is the best way to approach savings in some areas in life knowing there will be excesses in others, but my very un-sophisticated place-holder opinion is that these things still add up, and you may as well establish habits and systems that work in your favor.
For what it’s worth, I had 4 slices of fancy provolone left from last week, so I bought those meat balls again (still on sale $10 for a package of 6, with sauce, VERY clean ingredients), baked my own delicious but aesthetically ‘mid’ hoagie buns (2 parts all purpose flour to 1 part whole wheat), and portioned things out such that each hoagie bun could fit 1.5 meatballs and one slice of cheese. Granted, I ate two when I should have stopped at one (ha! the persistent struggle), but it means I ultimately dropped the price down really far, for a fairly small investment making those hoagie buns. It’s maybe not the sort of “make-everyday” kind of meal, but they are pretty darn good, and if you can make a quality meal for less than $5 (these came out to be roughly less than $4), I think that’s pretty decent.