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Jamie writes in:
What cookbooks do you recommend for someone who is just starting out on their own?
I’ve made no secret over the years that I love cookbooks, to the point that family and friends often just find interesting cookbooks (particularly ones focused on more obscure topics) to give to me as a gift. Earlier this year, in fact, I had a friend text me a picture of several cookbooks she bought for me for $0.50 apiece at a yard sale where the person had a ton of cookbooks; she went through and found some unusual ones that she thought I’d like. It took $3.50 to put a huge smile on my face.
Part of the reason that I love cookbooks so much is that I love making food items and beverage items at home. I love being able to customize them and make them the way I want, from the ingredients I want. It saves a ton of money and often results in much better food.
There are times when I’ll devote whole weekend days to making foodstuffs, but most of the time, I’m really practical with cooking. I have three kids that are in upper elementary and middle school, which means that our life schedules are entering a phase where simply having a family dinner together can be like threading a needle sometimes. I want to be able to make low-cost home-cooked meals, sometimes in very small timeframes, so that we can eat dinner together as often as possible.
What this means is that several times a week, if you peek in our house, you’ll see me or Sarah in the kitchen with a cookbook flopped open on the table as we attempt to prepare some meal. Maybe it’s me on the weekend trying to figure out how to make some strange fermented food, or on a weeknight trying to put together a casserole that can be on the table at precisely 5:45 so that we have time to eat and our two oldest ones can be on their way to practices by 6:15. Maybe you’ll see Sarah loading something in the slow cooker in the morning or trying to bake a cake on a Saturday afternoon.
I enjoy using cookbooks. I enjoy sitting down and just reading them, looking for new ideas and techniques. I enjoy having them around for reference, too.
The question that is really being asked here is this: what cookbooks do I consider to be the essential ones on my shelf, particularly ones that are useful for someone relatively new to preparing food at home?
I went through our cookbook collection and came up with a handful.
It’s worth noting that when I’m discussing these cookbooks, I strongly encourage you to check them out from the library rather than just buying them. Borrow these for a few weeks, read through some of the material in them, and try using them for a few recipes and techniques. Decide for yourself if this book works for you or not. Then, if it does click, look for it on discount. You’d be surprised how many of these can be found at used bookstores, for example, or at library book sales.
First, however, let me talk a bit about how I chose these.
There are really four things I look for in a cookbook.
First of all, it needs to have a technique focus. I shouldn’t be in a situation where I read a recipe and wonder, “How on earth do I do this?” If it’s a new technique that isn’t a super-common one, there should be a technique section in that cookbook or enough of an explanation right there that I’m not lost. Techniques are the key. I don’t mind it if I don’t quite understand the technique from reading it, but it should be named and identified clearly enough that I can turn to Youtube for more visual instruction, as it can be hard to describe some techniques with words and pictures. Tell me enough and show me enough that I can either figure it out with just that book or I can figure it out with a Youtube search.
Second, the recipes need to have at least something of a low cost focus with reasonably accessible ingredients. A cookbook that contains lots of ingredients that I can’t find within a twenty mile radius of my home is not very useful to me. I need to be able to find almost all ingredients in the cookbook at local grocery stores and food co-ops and ethnic groceries. There are several of these around here, but some cookbooks end up talking about things that you can seemingly only find if you know a monk in rural Indonesia, and that’s basically useless to me. The ingredients for the average recipe in the book shouldn’t cost me a lot.
Third: at least some of the recipes need to be reasonably quick or reasonably hands-free. I like having some cookbooks and some recipes that are very time and focus and effort intensive, but a good reference cookbook for general use should have a lot of quicker recipes that people can actually prepare on a weeknight evening.
Another thing: it needs to be able to physically lay flat on a table. If a cookbook can’t do this, I’m frustrated with it. This isn’t an absolute do-or-die rule, but I have passed on cookbooks that couldn’t lay flat on a table. This is important because I often have them in the kitchen, open on a table before me, and I don’t want to deal with cookbooks that won’t stay open. Spiral binding is good, as are most thick hardbacks. Paperbacks and some thin hardbacks are often terrible (but not always).
It’s worth noting that the list below is only a selection of our overall cookbook collection. We have a lot of cookbooks we’ve collected over the years and I’ve found value in all of them, but they’re not all ones I would directly recommend for someone aiming to have a few good general purpose cookbooks for a frugally-minded kitchen. They’re either incredibly focused (like Egg by Michael Ruhlman, which is more than 200 pages of incredible detail on various ways to prepare eggs) or loaded with complex recipes that I wouldn’t really recommend to someone who wasn’t at least somewhat adept in a home kitchen.
Here are a bunch of cookbooks that I recommend for any frugally minded home kitchen, even for people completely new to home food preparation.
If I were to make a single cookbook recommendation for anyone who is starting to cook at home, it would be How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, hands down. It works as a tutorial on how to cook at home, starting with extremely basic recipes and techniques that I would trust my nine year old to do and building from there. It also works as a pretty robust reference for basic techniques and recipes for a lot of things you might cook at home. The recipes are simple to follow and just work, plus any techniques are explained extremely well. I turn to this by default when I’m figuring out the basics of making something at home; there’s a decent chance that anything I can think of that isn’t really esoteric is probably discussed in this book. The ingredients are never unusual or hard to find and the recipes are almost always a breeze to follow. There’s almost nothing else I could ask for in terms of a single cookbook for the beginning and intermediate home cook.
How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is basically the same cookbook with the sections on meats removed and replaced with additional material for preparing plant-based meals. Our family mostly eats vegetarian for health reasons, so this one has actually seen more use over the last few years than the original.
Our copy of The Joy of Cooking looks like it has been beat to death. It has a handmade paper “dust cover” on it because the cover was actually partially burnt while in use. It has spills on it in several places. Some of the index pages are unreadable.
How did it get into that state? It was used – hard.
I would describe The Joy of Cooking as being a similar combination of techniques and recipes as How to Cook Everything, but with a step up in complexity and with a rather quirky tone in places. While there is definitely a lot of overlap in content between the two books, The Joy of Cooking definitely gets into more complex recipes and techniques and covers some things that How to Cook Everything doesn’t touch. It also tends to make some more assumptions of the reader, assuming you know a lot of basic techniques in the kitchen. It’s not overwhelming, but it’s a good “next step” after How to Cook Everything.
I tend to use How to Cook Everything for a quick reference for basic weeknight meals or weekend lunches. I turn to The Joy of Cooking for weekend meals when I’m trying to make something amazing, or when a weeknight meal isn’t turning out like I want. The Rombauer/Becker clan usually has the answers I need.
Much as how The Joy of Cooking is a great “next step” all-around cookbook complement to How to Cook Everything, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is a great “next step” all-around cookbook for vegetarian food to How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. In fact, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is probably my most referred-to cookbook over the last few years as my family has transitioned slowly to an almost entirely vegetarian diet.
Again, what makes this book excel is the strong focus on technique, the clear explanations of everything, and the wide range of topics in a single volume. There are a ton of techniques and recipes and ideas and variations and “what to do with this ingredient” jammed into this book, and thus it functions as my default for figuring out what to do with a bunch of excess radishes (for example). While I find that How to Cook Everything Vegetarian is more accessible for quick weeknight meals, The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone is invaluable for weekend cooking when I have more time.
If you’re a vegetarian (or nearly so) and at least somewhat experienced in the kitchen, this is the best single volume to have, in my opinion.
Ratio is probably the most unexpected choice on this list as it is probably the least like a traditional cookbook, but I felt strongly compelled to include it here because it’s done so much to help mold how I actually cook frugally in my kitchen.
The idea behind Ratio is that almost everything you prepare in a kitchen is essentially just a proportional mix of a few things by weight. For example, pancake batter is a ratio of 2 parts liquid, 1 part egg, 1/2 part butter, and 2 parts flour. You can then vary these as you like – use whatever flour you want, use a variety of liquids for the liquid part (milk, yogurt, and so on), use butter alternatives for the butter, and so on.
Basically, the entire book is a framework to encourage you to experiment in the kitchen. It gives you a bunch of principles to stick with, then basically says “Go try this.” There are a few bits and pieces that hold your hand, but much of the rest of the book is just general frameworks and a few tips here and there.
This book gave me the courage to experiment in the kitchen, and to understand that even if something doesn’t turn out as you imagine, it’s usually good if the ingredients are good and you learn something, too. More than anything else I’ve ever read, it made me feel unafraid to try new ingredients and just start throwing together meals from the pantry in a pinch. Yeah, some of the things I’ve made have been weird and a few have been downright bad, but most have been quite good, a few have been amazing and well worth repeating, and it has eliminated most of my kitchen fears of “I can’t do this” or “This will be disastrous.” I still refer to it all the time for some starting points and ideas.
The entire purpose of this book is to present a variety of tasty and fairly healthy recipes trimmed down to the lowest cost possible, hence the subtitle “Eat Well on $4/Day.”
This is the best single cookbook I’ve seen if your focus is on keeping your food costs as low as possible. Most of the recipes are very simple and straightforward, which means that this book is really good for someone who is new to cooking at home.
I often turn to this one during times when we’re trying to really trim our food costs and “get back to the basics” for a while. I also use it as a nice parallel to Ratio, because this book does a great job of pointing to inexpensive ingredients that work well together that I can plug into some of the ratios from the other book. In other words, Good and Cheap serves wonderfully as a jumping off point if you’re wanting to keep costs low but want to start experimenting more and building confidence in the kitchen.
This one is available as a free PDF, but I have the nice compact print version on my shelf.
This is the reference book when it comes to leftovers. How do you store leftovers? How do you cook to maximize the utility of leftovers? How do you deal with texture changes? What are good ways to remix a ton of different common leftovers? That’s what this book addresses, and it does it very well.
This book is usually the first place I turn to when I have some leftovers from a meal and don’t know what to do with them, or I have a ton of a particular ingredient that’s going to go bad and I want to have some ideas of what to do with all of this if I cook all of it.
This leads directly into a book on a similar topic…
This is the best single book I’ve found on meal prepping and preparing parts of meals in advance. I use it as a reference whenever I’m doing a big meal prep or I want to try to prepare something new for freezing.
To be clear, meal prepping means that you’re making a complete meal in advance and freezing it at a mostly-finished point so that it can easily be pulled from the freezer and popped in the oven to finish cooking. This means that, for example, you could make a few pans of lasagna on a lazy Sunday afternoon, then just finish cooking it in the oven on a busy Thursday evening, giving you a great home-cooked meal.
There are so many little useful tips in this book. It’s just full of little things that have refined what I’m doing whenever I’m making meals in advance. For example, the realization that I should put scrambled eggs in the fridge when making breakfast burritos and then pull them out to assemble the burritos cold is genius, because the eggs will “sweat” during this process and if you use a cloth or a paper towel to absorb that “sweat,” your actual breakfast burritos won’t be nearly as “wet” when you cook them later, turning them from soggy messes into deliciousness.
While we’re looking at America’s Test Kitchen offerings…
Let’s start with the obvious question: where is “Slow Cooker Revolution Volume 1”? The reason I don’t rely on that one is that most of the recipes in it require a lot of steps, and that’s the very thing I don’t want when making meals with the slow cooker. For me, almost all of the time, the slow cooker is a tool of convenience, so I don’t want complex recipes that require a lot of steps.
On the other hand, Slow Cooker Revolution Volume 2 and Healthy Slow Cooker Revolution really nail what I want from a slow cooker reference book. It explains strategies for cooking lots of different types of things in the slow cooker and offers a bunch of simple recipes for actually preparing things.
These two books are my default reference for things to do with the slow cooker, which we use frequently during busy parts of the year.
This is probably the most “off the beaten path” book on this list, but I’ve used my copy so much that I feel like I almost have to include it here. It became a portal for me into a world of fermented foods, homemade condiments, spice mixes, and all kinds of homemade foodstuffs, and it’s still the best one-volume coverage of those topics I’ve found.
If you’re interested in taking your home food preparation to the next level and making a lot of the basic ingredients for meals for yourself – sauces, condiments, spice mixes, and so forth – from very basic ingredients, this is a great starting point and reference. While this can definitely save you a little money and can definitely result in some tastier dishes, this is probably not a great time investment unless you’re really into this as a hobby.
To close, I want to repeat what I said earlier in the article: use the library for these books! Don’t just go out and buy them! See if your local library has a copy, take it home, go through it, and try some of the recipes and techniques for yourself. See if it clicks for you. If it does, then, and only then, look for a copy of the cookbook, preferably a used one.
That being said, these books are really the core pieces of my cookbook library and the ones I continually turn to. I have quite a few other cookbooks that focus in on narrow topics, like the aforementioned Egg, several books on fermentation, a book about sous vide cooking, and so on, but these are the ones I rely on for a wide variety of low-cost home cooking strategies. I hope you’ll find some of them to be useful, too.
Good luck!
The post Eleven Cookbooks I Keep on My Shelf – And Why appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Recently, my family and I attended the Iowa State Fair, as is something of an annual tradition for us. We go for a lot of reasons: the flood of presidential candidates that speak at the Fair every year, the interesting demonstrations, the free concerts (of which there seem to be three or four going on at all times somewhere on the fairgrounds), the art shows, the horticulture displays, and many other odds and ends.
One large building on the fairgrounds, the Varied Industries building, is absolutely chock full of booths of various kinds. Some of them promote businesses, but many of them are reserved for state universities and various state agencies. There’s a booth for the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, and University of Northern Iowa. There are booths for seemingly endless state offices and functions. There’s a booth for Iowa Public Television. There’s a booth for the Iowa Democratic Party and the Iowa Republican Party. You get the idea.
Many of these booths have various items you can pick up as you walk by, and one of the most common booth freebies is a pen that’s usually emblazoned with the contact information of the organization involved.
As we went through the building and walked by tons of booths, my son made the astute observation that I wasn’t picking up many of the free pens. It’s not exactly a secret that I love writing down my thoughts by hand and that I love finding a bargain, so why wasn’t I grabbing all of these free pens?
The answer is pretty simple. Most free pens don’t do their job very well. They’re usually really poorly made and often won’t write when you try to get them to write. You have to shake them or scribble a bunch to get the ink flowing. Furthermore, a lot of cheap pens will have “ink explosions” if you keep them in your pocket, as I like to do. I’ve had pants just ruined by explosions of black ink in the pocket.
That’s the catch: free isn’t always free.
Those “free” pens come with a number of costs. For starters, they eat up time that a good pen wouldn’t. Often, when I use a cheap pen, I have to invest time just to get the ink flowing, by scribbling or shaking the pen. Sometimes, that first attempt at writing will result in a big ink blotch on the page, which often adds more time and difficulty to the situation.
Also, cheap freebie pens are much more likely to leak at a moment when you don’t want them to leak, and that adds up to another time cost and often a money cost. As I noted, I’ve had clothes ruined by cheap pens leaking unexpectedly. I’ve had huge ink blotches appear on documents that I had to re-print or spend time to replace.
A good, reliable pen doesn’t have any of those additional costs. It writes when you need it to, saving time. It doesn’t bleed all over documents, saving more time. It doesn’t ruin clothing or paper, saving money. It just does the job, and does it well.
Thus, I don’t even bother with a free pen or a super cheap pen. The additional costs that come along with it – the time lost to making it work right and cleaning up the messes, the money lost to ink leaks – drastically exceed, at least for me, the cost of buying a $1 pen that won’t have any of those problems, like a Pilot G-2 or a Uniball Signo 207. I’m not even talking about a higher end fancy pen, just a great bang-for-the-buck low end pen.
Sure, I picked up a few freebie pens, the ones that seemed like they were of reasonable quality and wrote as soon as I clicked them. However, I don’t use them for everyday use. I keep those in a drawer and give them to guests at home if they’re needed and I usually just tell them to keep them. I might toss one or two in a game box so that there’s a pen available to add up the score at the end.
This brings me to another factor: everyday use. If I used a pen maybe once a week, didn’t carry one in my pocket, and didn’t rely on them multiple times a day, then I probably wouldn’t care as much. Scribbling to get the ink flowing once a week is forgettable; scribbling like that ten times a day is frustrating. Having a pen leak on a document once a year isn’t a big deal; having a pen leak in your notebook once a week is a problem, and having it ever leak in your pocket is a big problem.
Here’s the big picture: “free” isn’t always the best bargain if it comes with hidden costs. A free pen clearly has some hidden costs, and thus if you use pens all the time, you’re better off paying a reasonable amount for a good pen and avoiding those hidden costs than using the “free” pen and paying those hidden costs.
A big part of frugality is figuring out those hidden costs. A trash bag that you can only fill up halfway has a hidden cost. A trash bag that leaks all over the floor has a hidden cost. Bars of soap that basically disintegrate on the soap shelf have a hidden cost. Cheap deodorant that doesn’t keep your arm pits dry has a hidden cost – you’re going to be applying lots of it and you still might stink. An early failure of an item, particularly one you rely on, is definitely a hidden cost.
You have to take into account those hidden costs when finding the true best value when buying an item. Often, it is not the item with the absolute lowest price that ends up being the true best value, because it’s often the item with the absolute lowest price that comes with a lot of hidden costs, while something a little more expensive avoids those hidden costs.
That’s the story with the free pens at the state fair. If you want a pen, you’re not going to get any cheaper than “free.” The problem is that they come with hidden costs, and if those hidden costs add up to a dollar’s worth of frustration or lost time or damaged documents or ink on your pants, then it wasn’t worth it. “Free” is too much to pay for a pen that has more than a dollar’s worth of hidden costs on average, and a cheap pen usually does, particularly if you’re a frequent and heavy pen user.
This is why I won’t buy a no-name paring knife at the dollar store, for example. It might have the lowest sticker price, but I feel pretty confident that such a paring knife is going to be packing a lot of hidden costs. It’s probably not going to keep any sort of sharpness over time; it might even be dull coming out of the package. The handle is probably poorly made, bordering on dangerous (I’ve had a blade come out of the handle of a super cheap knife before). It’s going to add up to a lot of extra time with any job you’re doing with it, particularly after several uses, and there’s a higher risk of injury, too. That’s a steep hidden cost; sure, I’m not paying as much for the knife, but if I actually use it, I’m going to be paying that extra cost. I’m simply better off doing the research and finding a good “bang for the buck” knife that doesn’t have those hidden costs.
Obviously, this means that you’re probably paying a little more up front when buying things. You’re not using the free pens from the state fair; you’re actually buying them. You’re not using the dollar store paring knife; you’re buying a somewhat more expensive one (like this $8 one) that doesn’t have the hidden costs of frustration and time and potential injury.
Buying the cheapest solution for a problem is often like going into debt. You’re not paying nearly as much up front, but you’re kicking the actual costs down the road. You’ll pay for that decision every time you use it, whether it’s scribbling trying to get ink to flow or cutting yourself due to the cheap blade or smelling atrocious because of the cheap deodorant.
The lesson of the free pen is this: do your homework, know the hidden costs, and find the actual best “bang for the buck” item instead of the one with the lowest sticker price. Sometimes, the one with the lowest sticker price will be the best “bang for the buck” item, but that’s far from a guarantee; in fact, it happens seldom enough that you shouldn’t rely on that happening and you’re better off doing a little homework.
How do you do the “homework” and figure out what’s worthwhile? I read reviews from trusted sources about everything. I rely on Consumer Reports for a lot of things and on specialty sources like The Pen Addict when looking at specific niche items. I tend to rely only on sources where people are putting their reputation on the line; Consumer Reports gets egg on their face if they botch a review, and The Pen Addict loses significant reputation if their recommendations are out of whack.
I usually look for their “bang for the buck” or “entry level” recommendations when I’m not sure what to get. If I really know the ins and outs of an item, I can narrow that down a little more, but I mostly save that for daily use items.
In the end, I’ve learned the hard way that “free” is usually not a bargain and you’re better off paying a little more for the good “bang for the buck” item than just grabbing the cheapest one. Those hidden costs will get you every time. That’s the true lesson of the free pens from the state fair.
Good luck.
The post The “Free” Pen Problem appeared first on The Simple Dollar.
Dear S.,
Bankruptcy has an apocalyptic effect on your credit, as you’re probably aware. It’s not uncommon to see your credit scores drop by 200 points or more.
Yes, making on-time mortgage and car payments will help boost your score gradually.
But I’m not so concerned about the hit your credit is about to take. What gnaws at me is that it sounds like you’re only worried about saving money and having cash on hand during the 24 months your lawyer estimates it will take you to rebuild your credit.
Saving money and keeping a healthy stash of cash on hand aren’t goals you save for that post-bankruptcy period when credit is really hard to access. They’re lifelong habits we all need to establish — but let’s get back to that after we talk about what happens when you file bankruptcy.
Your credit card debt will typically be discharged by bankruptcy. But even if you have a zero balance on a card, there’s a good chance your credit card company will cancel the card when it learns you file bankruptcy. Why?
Basically, a bankruptcy cancels all your contracts, including your credit card agreements. Without a contract, your credit card company can’t require you to pay back the money you charge, so it sees you as a high risk for defaulting.
So yes, it is especially important to save money now if you can, knowing that there’s a good chance you won’t be able to use a credit card in an emergency for at least a while. If you have any savings, talk to your attorney about whether your state’s laws allow you to exempt some savings from bankruptcy proceedings.
As for the impact on your credit: A Chapter 7 bankruptcy stays on your credit reports for 10 years after the date you file; a Chapter 13 drops off after seven years.
But the effect is most severe in the first year or two after bankruptcy. Your credit score can rebound long before the bankruptcy record disappears from your reports. Many people see improvements within a year or two, so the 24-month timeline your lawyer suggests sounds reasonable.
Opening a new credit card and paying off the balance in full each month will typically help, as will making on-time payments on all your accounts. After your bankruptcy is discharged — which usually takes three or four months for Chapter 7 and three to five years for Chapter 13 — you can start applying for credit again, but don’t be surprised if you’re denied at first.
There’s a good chance that you’ll need to start with a secured card, a type of credit card that requires you to put down a security deposit and use that as credit.
But now is not the time to be thinking about credit cards. Your top priority is to make a budget — one in which your income exceeds your expenses and you have a category earmarked for saving. Make a plan you can stick to long after you’ve re-established credit.
I think you’re in a good position to do this: You have enough income to pay for your monthly expenses, and it sounds like you’ll be able to keep your home and car in bankruptcy. You don’t need credit to survive.
When used correctly, bankruptcy can give you a clean slate. If you replace the patterns that got you into debt with healthy new habits, like spending less money and saving each month, you will get through this — and your finances will be so much stronger.
Robin Hartill is a senior editor at The Penny Hoarder and the voice behind Dear Penny. Send your questions about debt to AskPenny@thepennyhoarder.com.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
You’ve heard a million ways to trick yourself into saving: A vision board. A good-old-fashioned piggy bank. Or one of those apps that lets you save a little at a time. By the end of the year, you have a whole $20 saved up.
Yeehaw. Try not to spend it all in one place.
But we talked to one guy with a different story. In just nine months, Samuel Demeny was able to save $1,250 — without even thinking about it.
His method? Banking with Chime.
Chime is a free online bank that gives you two easy ways to save your money.
First, if you’re looking to save big — or bigger — it gives you the option to put 10% of your direct-deposit paycheck into savings. That means each time you get paid, you’ll save a chunk of money automatically. What you don’t see, you don’t miss, right?
Second, if you want to start smaller, Chime has a round-up option that’ll bump your debit-card purchases up to the nearest dollar and save the spare change. It’s basically a digital piggy bank. You’ll be surprised how quickly several cents here and there add up.
Using these tools, Demeny saved $1,250 in just nine months. That’s enough to buy a new MacBook. Book a flight to Europe. Boost your emergency savings. Buy four shares of Netflix stock.
Demeny and his boyfriend, though, planned to use the money to help fund their cross-country move to Seattle — instead of charging expenses to credit cards.
“We can pay for a lot of things up front, because we both use Chime, and the money’s saved,” Demeny said.
Opening a Chime bank account takes five minutes, and you get access to its checking and savings accounts — and those awesome automatic savings features.
Yup… you can go ahead and toss out that vision board now ’cause saving money just got a lot easier.
This was originally published on The Penny Hoarder, which helps millions of readers worldwide earn and save money by sharing unique job opportunities, personal stories, freebies and more. The Inc. 5000 ranked The Penny Hoarder as the fastest-growing private media company in the U.S. in 2017.
We are undergoing a renovation project on our home. We need to borrow some money to help fund the project and would like to do this on a 0% credit card. Which one would you recommend?
The cheapest option would be a credit card offering a 0% interest term on purchases, whereby if you repay in full before the promotional period ends there is no interest or fees to pay.
The longest 0% duration at the time of writing is with Barclaycard Platinum and MBNA (both 27 months). But please note you must make at least the minimum repayment each month otherwise you will forfeit the 0% offer.
You are not restricted to making a single purchase but are free to make as many purchases as you need as long as you remain within your credit limit – just remember once you take the card out, the clock starts ticking.
So, for example, if you made a purchase three months after receiving your card you would only have 24 months remaining at 0% on the amount of that particular purchase.
If you need the money for a builder who doesn’t accept credit card payments then look for a credit card that offers a 0% money transfer facility – it’s similar to a 0% balance transfer but enables you to transfer the money from the card into your bank account rather than to repay another card.
The latest Virgin Money deal offers 0% on money transfers for 20 months, but beware there is a fee of 4% payable on the sum transferred. Again, please note you must make at least the minimum repayment each month or you will forfeit the 0% offer.
One of the most common types of questions I get from readers for the Reader Mailbag is product recommendations. People are thinking about making a significant purchase or are rethinking an ordinary purchase they make frequently and they want to know whether I’ve done the research myself on that type of product and what I’ve concluded.
What I usually do with questions like this is limit them to one or two per mailbag and then directly answer reader questions that go beyond that (provided I’m not completely swamped, of course). This means that there are a lot of specific recommendations that readers have asked for that simply didn’t make it into the mailbag.
Today, I want to fix that. Here are a bunch of specific product types that readers have requested (or that I did a bunch of homework on myself and wanted to share) and my recommendations for a specific product to buy in that category.
Before we get started, though, let’s talk about my basis for making recommendations.
There are a few main things that I think about when deciding on any purchase.
First of all, I’m price conscious. This should be obvious, of course. I don’t assume that the more expensive item is better. Rather, I generally seek out the best “bang for the buck,” and that’s often among the lower priced options.
Second, it has to reliably and effectively do the job I want it to do. In other words, it needs to do the tasks I want it to do without lots of extra steps or extra effort, and it needs to do that job consistently every time. I want minimal maintenance and minimal steps when using the product, and I absolutely don’t want failure. This means that there are often some low-end versions of products that I skip over.
Third, if I’m unsure, I tend to rely on the store brand or on the “Best Buy” recommended in Consumer Reports. That usually provides a starting point for purchases. If I find that there’s something lacking in that purchase – which is rare – I’ll move on and try something else based on the above two principles.
Finally, if I’m buying a non-consumable item that’s new to me, I virtually always try to buy it used and as inexpensively as possible. This allows me to figure out whether it’s something I’ll use regularly and what features I personally need in such an item. This isn’t always possible, but if you’re willing to poke around secondhand stores and local buy/sell/trade groups and ask your friends, this often does the trick. It saves me from spending a lot on an item that might not do exactly what I’m hoping or might not click with me like I’m imagining.
Here are a whole bunch of different product categories, along with my recommendations for each of them. Most of these came from reader questions; a few were due to my own recent explorations.
I generally buy whatever I can find on sale. For example, right now I’m using Duke Cannon soap, which are these giant bars of soap that I was able to buy for $1 each from a store that was going out of business. I bought several of them. I wouldn’t pay the normal retail price for them – they’re pretty expensive per bar – but for $1, they last for a long time.
When I use liquid bath soap, I put it in a pump bottle. This is because the lids on most liquid bath soaps seem to dispense way more soap than I need. Spending a minute or so pouring the liquid soap into a large pump bottle and then keeping the pump bottle in the shower means that I can dispense soap by the pump, getting a much smaller amount that actually does the job rather than watching a bunch of the liquid soap go down the drain. If for some reason a pump bottle isn’t an option for you, then I would lean toward bar soaps, as they seem to get a lot more uses per dollar than liquid soap that’s excessively dispensed.
I’ve only bought one kind of bath that I hated, and I don’t even have to mention it here because it’s no longer sold anywhere in the world as far as I can tell from some internet research. No need to disparage a company that discontinued a bad product and kept the ones that do the job.
The best bang-for-the-buck coffee I’ve found is Eight O’Clock Coffee, original, whole bean. That’s what I’ll grab by default whenever I need coffee and there’s a bean grinder available to me. When I make coffee, I take about one cup of whole beans, grind them on a coarse setting, and then put them in a cold brew coffee maker with four cups of water and sit it in the fridge overnight. I can then heat up the coffee in the morning if I want (I usually prefer it cold, though).
Since the question will inevitably be asked, we use a coffee bean grinder we received as a gift years ago that doesn’t seem to be made any more. If I were to buy one, I would go with the KRUPS Pro burr grinder if I had to have an electric one, or I’d get the manual Whereamoz burr grinder that’s done by hand but quite a bit cheaper. I do not recommend a blade grinder for coffee beans as the blades cause friction that can burn the beans, as I’ve experienced in the past. Blade grinders are definitely cheaper, but it’s not worth the burnt-tasting coffee. The KRUPS model is the least expensive good quality electric burr grinder I’ve seen, and it was recommended to me by a coffee-loving friend who was suggesting a great entry-level grinder.
As for brewing cold brew coffee, I highly recommend this Gourmia cold brew coffee maker, which comes in around $20 and is the one I use (I got mine on sale, but the regular price is quite good). You just put the coarse grounds in the filter insert, add water up to the 32 ounce line, and stick it in the fridge. It takes about ten seconds to clean (at most).
This seemed to be more of a question of what condiments I keep around as staples in the fridge. So, let’s go take a look.
Ketchup, store brand (I can’t tell the difference between it and Heinz)
Mustard, yellow, store brand
Mustard, brown, French’s (we often buy store brand, not sure where we picked this up)
Mustard, brown, Pommery Meaux, which was a gift and is fantastic but I am not paying that much for mustard
Mayonnaise, Hellman’s. I don’t think my local store even has a store brand version of mayo.
Sriracha, Huy Fong (the one with the rooster on the bottle)
Ssam sauce, Momofuku, my wife is addicted to this stuff
Pickles, homemade
Sauerkraut, homemade
Preserved lemon, homemade
I’m not sure what else counts as a condiment.
I hang onto empty condiment squirt bottles. This is because I love making condiment mixes, as described here. When I buy a new bottle of ketchup, for example, I’ll probably use half of it immediately making a new condiment mix to put in the old bottle. Here’s a list of many of the mixes I like; my favorite is “fry sauce.”
I buy whatever’s on sale, usually whenever I notice a three-pack on sale. This is sometimes a warehouse club buy. I don’t have a particular brand preference, as they all seem to do reasonably well. The last bundle I bought was a six pack of Speed Stick Power and those seem to do a really good job (and they were quite cheap).
Again, I usually buy the least expensive bulk option at the store. I find that if you take a few basic steps to keep your dishwasher clean and keep soap scum from building up inside it and on the sprayer heads, most dishwasher detergents do more or less the same job. Right now, it looks like we have a bucket of Finish pods under the sink, likely purchased at a warehouse club by my wife sometime recently.
If I have time, I’ll sometimes make an ice cube tray full of my own homemade dishwashing detergent by mixing together a cup of baking soda, a quarter cup of salt, a couple of drops of liquid dish soap, and enough lemon juice so that it turns into something I can mold when mixed thoroughly. I press this mixture into the wells of an ice cube tray, let it dry out for a couple of days, and then pop them out and keep them in a jar near the dishwasher. These are really cheap to make; the only thing keeping me from doing this all the time is that I simply forget to do it and then I need to run a load and I’m out of them.
A great trick for making any dishwashing detergent work well is to regularly clean out your dishwasher. I do this whenever I notice that there are spots on the dishes when they come out of the dishwasher. I just put a cup of vinegar in a spray bottle along with a bit of lemon juice, then I spray all of it all over the inside of the dishwasher and run an empty load. (I actually mentioned this in a frugal life skills article I posted recently.) This makes all dishwasher detergents work quite well, in my experience.
Many years ago on The Simple Dollar, I noted that I didn’t like using store brand trash bags because I had many experiences in which they ripped out on me during normal use. I found that, back then, if I filled them much more than half full, they would frequently rip out all over my kitchen or entryway floor, and if I was only filling them halfway, I might as well buy the name brand that allowed me to fill them completely, as it put less plastic in the landfill, meant I took out the trash half as often, and the cost for the name brand bags was barely twice as much per bag as the cheap brands.
Since then, I’ve switched back to store brand trash bags, specifically Target’s Up and Up kitchen and yard drawstring trash bags. I’ve tried a few different store brand bags at retailers I have easy access to and these do the best job for the buck.
I should note that, if you’re a Costco member, Kirkland Signature drawstring bags are even more highly recommended. I was able to pick up a bulk box of both kitchen sized and yard sized bags from a Costco once when shopping at one with a friend (and taking some notes for The Simple Dollar along the way) and I found that they did a great job for a very economical price per bag. Unfortunately, I don’t live close enough to a Costco to make this worthwhile.
I generally don’t recommend that people buy a butcher block full of knives for kitchen use. Most people really only need two or three knives in the kitchen – a paring knife, a bread knife, and a chef’s knife will do the trick. Paring knives work well for small things, particularly trimming vegetables and fruit. Chef’s knives work well for cutting larger things, like heads of cabbage or meat, and for chopping. Bread knives work well for, well, cutting bread.
If you’re just buying those three singular knives, the absolute best bang for the buck for those types of knives is Victorinox, on all three counts. The Victorinox chef’s knife is probably the best one I’ve ever used, period, and it’s a fraction of the cost of expensive ones. Their paring knife is amazing and costs less than $8. Their bread knife is excellent and is around $20. You can get those three knives for about $50 and have knives that will last you for many, many years and handle virtually everything you’ll do in a home kitchen.
I would recommend getting a low cost honing steel and honing the chef’s knife and paring knife regularly. This will keep the edge on the blade for a very long time so that it cuts magnificently even many years from now. Here’s a great guide for using a honing steel.
I have this wonderful safety razor that I sometimes use. It’s a Merkur double edged safety razor, for which I have a box of replacement blades. This is a very inexpensive option, as I just replace the blade itself regularly, and the blades cost a penny or two a pop. That’s cheap!
The only problem is that I’ll shave with this a dozen times or so and then I’ll be rushing and I’ll cut myself and start bleeding all over and end up making a huge mess and spending a bunch of time stopping the bleeding and cleaning myself up when I can ill afford it. At that point, I inevitably stick the safety razor back in the closet for several months.
What I typically use is Harry’s subscription razors. I use these in the shower, using my normal shower soap as a “shave cream.” I get my face nice and wet with hot water after washing my hair and using a bit of soap and/or shampoo as shave cream, dive right in with that razor. I have to rinse it a few times in the shower water to get a good shave, but it does the job. I find I need to hone the cartridge after four or five shaves, and then after five or so honings, the cartridge needs to get tossed, so a cartridge usually lasts me a couple of months.
I hone the blades by using a technique called “stropping.” Basically, I take a Harry’s razor with the cartridge in it, pull out an old pair of blue jeans, and then run the razor in the wrong direction down each pant leg ten or so times. That’s enough to get the razor honed so that it works well again. I usually do this when I get out of the shower and put on a pair of old jeans for weekend activities like hiking or working in the yard. I already have the old pair of jeans and I have the razor because I just got out of the shower, so I just do it and it’s done in thirty seconds or so.
So, in terms of “subscribing,” I actually use them at a lower rate than even the slowest rate at which they’ll send me razors. So, I subscribed for a while, then cancelled the subscription and now I have tons and tons of blades that will last me for years.
Aside from an old-fashioned safety razor, which I’m apparently incapable of using without cutting myself badly once a month or so, this is the best “bang for the buck” option I’ve found. You don’t have to “strop” the cartridges if you don’t want, but it does get many, many more uses out of a single cartridge for something that takes maybe 30 seconds every 10 days or so.
The frequent question I’m asked is about shoes for general purpose use – walking, light hiking, occasional sports, and things like that. I’m rarely asked about hardcore athletic shoes or dress shoes.
My current recommendation for the best “bang for the buck” general purpose shoe is the Reebok Royal Astrostorm, which can be found often in the $20-25 range and do a magnificent job for the price. They’re just simple shoes that do the job, and they’re inexpensive enough that you don’t feel bad wearing them out in the mud or in the garden or anything like that. These are the best general purpose $25 shoes I’ve ever seen. I’ve obviously seen better shoes, but they were marginally better at many multiples of the price. These are great for walking on pavement, for low-intensity hiking and trail walking, and for pretty much any non-athletic use you can think of. They won’t pass for dress shoes, but they’re great for everything else, especially at the cost.
I don’t really have a recommendation for women’s shoes, unfortunately. Sarah typically buys “whatever New Balance shoes are on sale” and wears them into oblivion.
Easy. Just buy one that’s available at your local secondhand store. Most secondhand stores seem to have slow cookers, so just go in there and pick one.
What if you want to buy new, though? Maybe you can’t find a used one, or you’re buying one for a gift. My pick is the Crock Pot 6 Quart Manual, which clocks in at under $30 and has a large 6 quart crock that can make a huge amount of soup and pretty much any meal you can think of for a large family.
If you are frequently going to be out of the house and want a slow cooker that can automatically switch to a “keep warm” mode at a certain time (keeping food hot enough to keep bacteria at bay, but not so hot that it keeps cooking and burns), I’d probably suggest the Crock Pot 6 Quart with Timer. The timing mechanism adds $20 to the price, but it can make all the difference when it comes to some busy families.
My recommendation here is to play cellular providers off of each other to get new customer discounts as often as you can. Simply be willing to jump from provider to provider as necessary and sometimes use the threat of jumping to your benefit when talking to a cellular provider at the end of a contract.
If you do that, you can usually get a good phone very inexpensively. My strategy has been to get the previous generation iPhone when hopping around like this, because it’s almost always at a significantly lower price than the newest models, but Apple (thus far) has done a great job of supporting older iPhone models for many years. Then, use that phone until either the device isn’t being actively supported, you need a new device because of damage, or there is some change in your current cell phone agreement. At that point, go look for a new cell phone contract.
Pay-as-you-go phones are a great option if your data and voice needs are pretty low, meaning you don’t rely on having a data connection for work and you mostly only use them for emergencies or low-importance socializing. If the most urgent thing you use your phone for outside of life-or-death emergencies is arranging a meetup with some friends, I generally recommend choosing Ting as your provider and using a phone you already have (as it works with most phones). If you don’t have a phone, get one of their refurbished options.
As you probably observed, I buy a lot of store brands and bulk items, and I tend to really research what the best “bang for the buck” items are on non-consumable purchases. I actually enjoy figuring out the best option for a particular product type.
As always, if you want my input on a specific product, follow me on Facebook and send me a direct message asking about the type of product. I’ll probably share my findings in an upcoming mailbag or in a future post like this one.
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