This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. First, right off the bat, I apologize for the strong green color of the meal in this post. Ratatouille is typically pretty colorful, but the…

Monique writes in with a heartfelt observation: The biggest reason I can’t bring myself to actually buy generics when I’m in the store is that I feel cheap and poor when I buy the white labeled knockoffs. I don’t like feeling like that. I like saving money, but when…

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. One of the biggest challenges I have with writing recipe posts is the fact that Sarah and I often “riff” on recipes. In other words,…

Several readers have written to me requesting information on saving seeds from their garden, which is an awesome frugal practice. Fall is just starting to tiptoe into the picture here in Iowa, and for us that means that the gardening season is starting to wind up. This year was…

I’ve long been an advocate of using coupons at the grocery store. I often clip coupons for toiletries and household products and, when there are opportunities, for some food items like organic milk (I had a great coupon for this a while back). I’ve also used coupons for bigger…

Today, let’s do something a little different. I’m going to list 48 things I’ve learned about myself and the world around me that I only discovered thanks to frugality. 1. I really like sun tea. 2. The patience and effort in teaching yourself something new is incredibly rewarding when…

This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen. Most of the meals I’ve shown so far in this series are perfect dinners. But what about the humble mid-day meal, where you just want…

In my opinion, the single best bargain in a grocery store is the one pound bag of dried beans. The amount of nutrition and protein that can be had from a pound of dried beans is amazing, plus the flavor of the beans far surpasses the flavor of canned…

This past weekend, I attended GenCon 2010, a gaming convention in Indianapolis, IN, with a group of several friends. I had been saving up to attend this convention for a while, and that savings consisted largely of money saved in the way I described this morning : making lots…

Yesterday, I had a wonderful conversation with an Associated Press reporter who was writing a story about teaching children how to be frugal. The discussion wound around through several topics, eventually coming back to the idea that many people (like, for example, Ramit ) do not like frugality because…