And this has nothing to do with building your downline or firing your boss to make 5k per week! (Insert intended sarcasm toward the end of that last sentence).

Some people in our neighborhood are actually doing something that’s helping them save significantly on their dinner bill and help them save time in the process.

Dinner groups.

Julie and I joined one recently and last night was our first experience picking up the dinner from our friends and enjoying (every bite of) it. Julie loved the fact that she didn’t need to prepare dinner (she was able to do a ton of other things on Her List) and I loved the fact that Julie loved it.

How does a dinner group work?
You find three other families nearby to participate. Each family is assigned a day of the week (excluding Friday and the weekend). When your assigned day comes, you prepare enough dinner to feed your family and the three others. The other families come by to pick up their dinner and you’re done.

On the other three nights of the week, you simply go over to the assigned family’s house and pick up your dinner.

There are variations on the idea. You can do only main dishes and worry about sides on your own. You can do one dish and one side, you could add dessert… we’re actually only doing it on Wednesdays at the moment — so every fourth Wednesday Julie prepares a meal. On the other three Wednesdays, we receive a meal.

At first I thought we were doing this because of our recent belt tightening, but it’s bigger than that.

Monetary Benefits of Dinner Groups
When you’re making “bulk” dishes, you don’t end up with leftover (sometimes wasted ingredients). You don’t need to go to the grocery store nearly as often. You simply spend less on groceries. It’s phenomenal.

Consider the fact that if you make yourself aware of deals at the grocery store, you can really capitalize on savings by purchasing that sale item in bulk. Plan your meal around the sales and you’ll save even more.

Other Benefits of Dinner Groups
Instead of saving time by purchasing pre-made meals or eating out (both more expensive and not nearly as healthy), you’re still saving time, but enjoying excellent food. Can you imagine what other things you could accomplish if you needed to make dinner three fewer times each week?

The time it takes to make four main dishes instead of one is marginal. You quickly scale and your efficiency is there almost immediately.

Another benefit is that you can grow closer to your neighbors/friends who are participating. You’ll see them more frequently and will build a stronger, more meaningful relationship.

A Few Tips Regarding Dinner Groups
Make a great meal when it’s your turn. Our first meal last night was phenomenal and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The great part about cooking less is that when you do cook, you can pull out all the stops. A fancy ingredient that you wouldn’t normally use for just one meal now becomes easily justified because you’re making four times the normal amount.

Also, on the flip side, make sure you create a dinner group with families that have similar tastes/food standards. By that I mean, if you’re not the biggest fan of fried food, you may not want to organize with families that love it :)

It helps to find families of similar size, though it’s not required. You simply make enough to feed the largest family and smaller families will have a few more leftovers they can take as lunch.

Communicate well with the group. Be selective about your feedback and remember the golden rule :)

If you’re single, dinner groups make even more sense, since you’re likely to forgo cooking for just a single person, resulting in paying more for food that’s not nearly as healthy.

Dinner Groups: A Conclusion
They work. They’ll save you money. They’ll save you time. Give it a shot and please share any experiences you may have had with dinner groups in the past!

For those of you that have read The Wallet for a while, you’re probably well aware of the fact that Julie and I don’t own a TV. Neither of us owned one when we were single, and when we married, we just decided not to purchase one (we were busy…and needed a car).

About four months into our marriage, somebody felt bad for us and actually left an old TV, VCR, and even some VHS movies on our doorstep as a surprise. After I burned an entire Saturday afternoon watching The Abyss (with all of the commercial breaks, as this was before Tivo), we knew we had to be rid of the TV. Julie ended up selling it to someone we worked with and we went out for Chinese food.

(We would have refused the TV and returned it to whomever had been so generous, but to this day they remain anonymous!)

At any rate, since we didn’t purchase season tickets to the BYU football games this year (remember, we’re tightening the belt until launch), I’m having a very strong desire to finally purchase a TV — just for football season!

Sports are the only thing that keep people from ditching cable completely, I know that.

But do you know what’s kind of squelched my desire? Tangential purchases. Sure, a TV isn’t that expensive, but then we need the monthly cable cost…and I know I don’t want to watch commercials, so I’d need a DVR or Tivo…and then we’d need a piece of furniture on which to place the TV…and since BYU doesn’t show on ESPN every week, I’d need to make sure our cable package showed The Mountain (what, you’ve never heard of that channel?)…

At the beginning of the summer I purchased a very, very sweet Weber gas grill. It is a phenomenal grill. I love it. But I’ve needed to be very careful about the other purchases that creep in as a result of the grill purchase (a manly apron, some grilling books, a grilling tool set perhaps…a grill cover, etc.).

Most every purchase of significance comes with tangential purchases attached. The BMW? Premium gasoline. The golf clubs? Don’t even get me started there (it ends with a golf simulator in your basement).

I remember when I heard that the Junior/Senior prom tickets were $35 a pop. I was floored. Little did I know that the $70 for tickets was just a drop in the bucket: dinner, car, corsage, tux, pictures…

Porter’s now playing flag football. Guess who needed to bring corn-filled treats to the game last Saturday ($15 later)? That’s a tangential purchase.

I suppose the bigger the purchase, the greater danger you have with these tangential purchases. Think about your house for a moment…

I think I made my point :)

Trent over at TheSimpleDollar wrote a fantastic, concise, tactical post all about substitutions that will save you money (and as I looked at the list, none of them required any more work than what you’re currently doing except perhaps a smidge more with foregoing paper towels).

At any rate, you should definitely check this out and implement at least two of them this weekend.

I fully intended to write a completely different money saving tip for today, but on my way into the office, I had a complete change of direction.

Taylor and I just chatted about my proposed topic. I usually don’t run topics by him beforehand, but wanted to with this one because it seems a bit more sensitive than most other topics.

I’ll also readily admit that this is not your “typical” savings tip. Today I want to talk about choosing a healthier (and with that, much cheaper) lifestyle.

As the health care debate rages on (a debate which I completely want to avoid here on this blog), health costs are high on everyone’s list of concerns. I’m concerned about it. Who isn’t? I suppose since my thoughts have been (almost forced) there with the incessant debate, I began thinking about our health and how it impacts our financial bottom line.

In doing a bit of research, I found a very interesting article over at the Wall Street Journal:

“Obese people spent 42% more than people of normal weight on medical costs in 2006, a difference of $1,429, the study found. Prescription drugs accounted for much of the increase.”

A difference of $1,400 in one year alone?

Wow.

And not to sound calloused or harsh, but we should all take a hard look at ourselves and ask us if we’re living a healthy lifestyle. Statistics tell us that 30% of us are obese, and another 30% of us are overweight. This leads to diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, etc.

While I don’t agree with how we determine obesity at the moment (I feel like the body mass index is flawed and overly-simplifies things), I think we can all take a good look at ourselves and see if there isn’t something we should be doing to make our bodies a bit healthier.

$1,400 per year! And with health costs only supposed to rise…what will that obesity-related number look like in another decade?

So…for this savings tip, I wanted to leave you with some very actionable ToDos that you may consider. I’m no fitness expert, so you can just chalk these up to a friendly reminder with a dose of common sense.

1) Order water at restaurants (avoid the calories, and save money to boot).

2) Park far away from the store entrance (you’ll always find a spot).

3) Bring your lunch to work. I don’t want to begin listing the calorie-dense, nutrient-less foods available at fast-food/quickie restaurants that are more expensive and are downright bad for you… just bring your lunch to work.

4) Here’s something I’ve been doing to conquer my 7:00 pm case of the I-feel-like-eating-dessert-right-now episodes: Drink twelves ounces of water. That usually fills me up enough to forget about my craving.

5) Find an accountability partner. Report to each other every Friday about how you did with your exercise, eating, etc. (I recommend Friday only to recommend a set day each week, not Friday in particular).

There you have it. Five very simple tips. #1 saves you money. #3 saves you money. #4 saves you money.

And on top of that, you’ll be healthier. According to everything I read in preparation for this, that’s going to save you a bundle now, and in the future.

(Photo: ebruli)

If you’ve been on the YNAB site for only a few minutes you’ve probably already become familiar with Rule One of the YNAB Way: Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck.

Basically what we want you to do is to take the money you earn this month and spend it/save it next month.

In a prior savings tip I wrote about using an ING High-Yield Online Savings Account (HYOSA people are calling them now — I love acronyms as well) for your Rainy Day Funds (Rule Three). We’ve been using one fantastically well to save for Christmas this year. It should be merry.

However, today I’d like to answer a question I receive from quite a few people regarding the Rule One Buffer (your ‘Buffer’ is the the money you earn in January that will be used in February…earned in March that you’ll use in April, etc.):

Do you ever keep your Buffer somewhere else so you’ll earn interest?

To be honest, I never have. There are a few reasons:

1) It’s a pain to have to move money back and forth. Even if I automate it, I still have to kind of have it in the back of my end.

2) There are two extra transactions I need to record in YNAB. Granted, they’re just transfers, but I try and minimize transactions overall.

3) The Buffer serves to help me if I have an overage (Rule Four). I can basically “borrow” from that money until the next month when YNAB forces me to pay it back.

However, a few Savings Tips readers pointed to ING’s Electric Orange account and I decided to give it a good look.

What is ING’s Electric Orange Account?

It’s an online-only checking account, plain and simple. I’ve had my same checking account for about nine years and have been hard pressed to switch. A few benefits with the ING Electric Orange account have really started to tug at me:

1) I can earn interest on my Buffer money. Now I don’t need to worry about those problems I mentioned above. The money sitting there has an interest rate that’s about 20x better than I currently get at Wells Fargo. (If you keep $50k+ in there the rate actually bests most online savings accounts.

2) I don’t need to pay ATM fees. For Julie’s birthday we went to Melting Pot (I don’t recommend it, by the way, except maybe for dessert). I don’t carry cash on me — it’s something I need to change, I know. At any rate, I didn’t have any cash and we used the valet parking because it was a lot cheaper than the rip-off garages everywhere else. So…I was stuck without cash. I jogged over to a random bank across the street and pulled cash out of their ATM – $3 fee. Lame.

According to ING, if I had been using their Electric Orange account, they would’ve covered the fee for me (I suppose they can, since they don’t have any physical branches…WAY less overhead…).

My first thought is…yeah, but which ATMs? I did a quick check and found there are three qualifying ATMs on my way from the office home (and it’s a 7-minute commute by scooter). It just needs to be on the Allpoint network. Fair enough.

3) Free bill pay. Wells Fargo charges for their bill pay service. I don’t know if your bank does. I think if I have some absurdly high balance with them then they wave the fee. Bill pay is a weaker benefit for me, since I usually set up online payments at each vendor for automatic pulling. However, lately I’ve been wanting to reign in the information that’s floating around out there about us, so it may not be a bad idea to have just one place keeping all of the sensitive data. Point ING Electric.

4) Write checks online. Save on postage. Julie and I don’t write a ton of checks, but it’s enough to dislike doing it. With ING Electric Orange you simply enter the payee information (name, address, etc.) and ING sends the check on your behalf. I save half a buck on postage/envelopes. Nice.

5) Electric checks. This one, at first glance, sounds a lot like Paypal — which I like. It turns out this is basically just an interface to input your friends’ routing/account #s and the you can send them money (they need to enter their routing/account # to receive it as part of a security check). This isn’t as slick as Paypal, but it does go from bank account directly to bank account, so that’s a big plus. I wouldn’t say this benefit has nearly the pulling power as the others listed previously.

6) A Mastercard debit card. This is hardly an extra perk. Every checking account offers this now.

7) Tight integration with your ING HYOSA. Money transferred from one to the other is instantaneous. This is fantastic if you like to maximize every penny you have earning interest.

The Savings Monetized (Sort of)

If your average checking account balance is $6,000 (not at all unusual for a YNAB Budgeter following Rule One), you’ll earn $30 per year in interest (at the time of this writing). Yeah, that’s not much, but it’s worth it.

Assuming you write and send four checks per month, you’ll save an additional $24/year on postage/envelope costs (roughly).

If you ever get nailed with ATM fees (I’ve been stuck w/o cash and a Wells Fargo nearby twice this year), you’ll save there again. For my own calculation, I tacked on four ATM visits at an average of $2.50 a pop – another $10/year savings.

Time. Ah, how do you monetize time saved? I’m not sure. If I save 20 minutes each month because I don’t have to write checks by hand, stuff the envelope, and mail them…that’s 240 minutes each year..4 hours..$400. That’s how I calculate time savings at least :)

A Few Other Fine Print Bonuses

Usually the fine print is where you’re nailed, so I read all of it. I was pleased to find this little nugget:

You pay interest if your balance drops below zero and you use your Overdraft Line of Credit. Unlike traditional banks, Electric Orange does not charge a fee to use your overdraft, and there’s no fee to sign up. If you use it, you will only pay interest on the amount you borrow.

We’ve overdrafted once in our life using YNAB. I think it had something to do with transferring money…I can’t remember exactly why. I think we had thousands sitting in another account and it was supposed to be in the checking account or something..and the IRS cashed our tax check. Yeah. I blame it on the IRS.

So anyway, for some people, you get nailed with a $30 overdraft hit every single time you run a charge when you’re in overdraft mode. You’ve got to stop overdrafting, but it’s also nice to not be hit $30 every time.

Also, the other day a babysitter of ours said she’d lost our $20 check for babysitting. I looked up what Wells Fargo charges for a stop payment on a check…$35. ING charges $25. (We didn’t do the stop payment, by the way).

I Just Re-Read This. It Sounds Like an Advertisement

Yeah, let me give you a downside. There aren’t any brick and mortar banks to visit in connection with this account. My plan is to keep my original checking account but not really use it for anything — just link it with my ING Electric Orange account.

Sorry this sounds like an advertisement. The Electric Orange account isn’t a completely new product. It’s been out for several months now. I wanted to wait a while before I checked it out to see what others have said about it. So far I haven’t heard any negative reports.

At the end of the day, this is about saving money. You’ll save on checks, postage, envelopes, time, atm fees, and overdraft fees. You’ll also earn some interest. It seems like something at least worth checking out.