Money Hacks

Americans spend a mind-boggling $10 billion a year on bottled water products. That’s insane! Much bottled water is simply drawn from municipal water systems, the same as the drinking water from your kitchen sink. And even the water that isn’t drawn from the tap has no added nutritional benefit.

Bottled water is more expensive than gasoline, and costs hundreds of times more than tap water.

I’ll admit that I indulge in bottled water from time-to-time. A case of the stuff from Costco runs about $0.25 a bottle, and these bottles can be reused for a l-o-n-g time. Because I’m trying to cut soda from my diet, I’ve taken up Talking Rain, which is a carbonated water flavored with “natural essences”. I know this is an expensive indulgence, but it’s a good transitional beverage while I wean myself from stuff with sugar.

Maybe a year from now I’ll be able to subsist on only tap water.

Grocist may be one of those hacks that is more trouble than it’s worth. Or it may be the best thing since sliced bread. Here’s how it works:

1. Buy a barcode scanner. Plug it into your computer.
2. Sign up at Grocist.
3. Scan the barcodes of any packages before you discard them.
4. Grocist looks up the product information in the UPC database.
5. This information is used to construct a grocery list.

Whether or not this will save you time and money, it’ll certainly make you the geekiest shopper in the produce deparment! (And how much disposable income must a person have in order to justify the purchase of a barcode scanner?)

[Grocist, via Matt Haughey]

Cheap Eats is a weblog devoted to inexpensive food. The site features recipes, reviews, tips and more. Cheap Eats recipes include cost, instructions, and numerical ratings, as well as witty evaluations of the end product. A recent entry described attempts to make homemade Gatorade. The recipe produced two liters of the stuff for only eighteen cents. The reviewer gave the homemade Gatorade three points out of ten. More successful recipes include:

• Home fried potatoes (8/10)
• Frito pie (8/10 — “I am pretty damn impressed with Frito Pie. I think I’ll do this every Easter.”)
• Ghetto pizza (9/10 — “For me Ghetto Pizza ranks right up there with the best Cheap Eats for people living at home…it is extremely cheap and uses readily available ingredients.”)

Cheap Eats also has restaurant reviews. It has food tips. It discusses using leftovers for lunch. The Cheap Eats hall-of-shame features such atrocities as the world’s most expensive sandwich. There’s an entire section of recipes under $3.