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Filed under: Food, Saving, Travel

I’ve been thinking for hours about cows. Well, not for hours, but for several minutes at a time, over the course of several hours. I mean, I have a life. Sort of.

In a recent short story in MediaPost, they mentioned that Chick-Fil-A is planning its fourth annual Cow Appreciation Day, which doesn’t get moo-ving (sorry) until July 11. Anyone who shows up in a cow costume gets a free meal, and as it turns out, generally several thousand people usually are game.

And I thought it was interesting, and I wanted to tell people about it, in case they wanted to get ready. After all, it’s not like you can run into any Walgreens or Wal-Mart and grab a cow costume. You kind of have to plan ahead, I imagine.

So I started doing a little research and realized that this is just the tip of the creative iceberg. Every time Chick-Fil-A opens a new stand-alone restaurant (separate from, say, a shopping mall), it gives out free coupons to the first 100 people — 52 coupons for a free combo meal, reasoning that if you use one a week, it’s a year’s worth of free food. And as it turns out, these coupon giveaways result in people standing in line and spending the night to get their chance at free food.

Even more, some people have been making it a habit of doing this more than once. A reporter in Bentonville, Arkansas interviewed three young guys from…

Yielding Wealth | Personal Finance:

With Earth Day today, a lot of people have the environment on their minds. I’ve received several questions of a similar nature since Sunday, so I thought I’d answer the question:

Is it possible to save money while going green? So many environmentally friendly actions seem to cost a lot of money.

This is a valid point. It does seem like every time you turn around being friendly to the environment costs money. But it doesn’t have to. There are some small things you can do every day to save money and the environment, too.

Prepare your own foods. Rather than buying pre-packaged and pre-prepared foods, make more meals at home with fresh ingredients. Web sites like allrecipes.com offer fast and easy dinner ideas. Plus, if you plan your meals you’ll shop with a list, which cuts down on impulse buying.
Grow your own food, or buy local produce. We try to buy local produce when we can, and we have a garden. With food prices inflation, this is an important consideration. After all, if you can grow it yourself — or get it locally instead of paying for transport costs — you’ll save money as well as help the environment.
Cut back on fuel use. Oil prices have hit new records every day for the past four days. This is driving up gasoline costs and starting to hit many a household budget where it hurts. If you can, use public transportation and carpool. Trip consolidation means that you…

Yielding Wealth | Personal Finance:

It’s a good thing summer is on its way. We’ll be planting a garden soon, and that will help us alleviate some of the impact that food prices inflation will have on our household budget.

Right now, the big story is that oil prices hit $114 a barrel yesterday. People are talking about gas prices. And it’s true that gas prices are going to take a toll on many a household budget. They probably already are.

But with the release of the latest inflation data from the Labor Department, it’s apparent that we all need to be mindful of food prices inflation as well. AFP reports on wholesale costs:

“Wholesale costs are rising and the consumer should expect more shocks at the supermarket and the gas station,” said Joel Naroff, the president of Naroff Economic Advisors.

What does this mean for you? It means it’s time to prepare. If you can,  plant a garden. Even a container garden can be helpful in terms of providing fresh, low-cost produce for your table. Try to plan your trips, and consider the types of things you buy. It may be time to cut back on some of the unnecessary items that you purchase each month.

Core inflation takes out food and energy costs, and it shows a very manageable 0.2 percent. But that doesn’t represent reality for most American families. Energy and food are the biggest expenditures — and they have the biggest impact on the household budget.

What are you doing to prepare…

WalletPop:

Filed under: Budgets, Debt, Extracurriculars, Wealth, Relationships, Recession

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading a backlog of newspapers and happened across two articles that addressed the rippling effects of the country’s current economic woes. Although these two stories had almost nothing to do with each other, it seemed to me that, between them, they very eloquently showed how economic problems have a way of affecting everybody.

The first article dealt with food banks in the Bronx. The area’s food banks, food pantries, and soup kitchens provide food to unemployed and lower-income individuals, often on a short-term, emergency basis. These organizations, in turn, receive their food stocks from a combination of personal and corporate gifts. Unfortunately, higher food costs and smaller amounts of disposable income have translated to massive drops in donations. Added to this, the unemployed population is steadily increasing, which means that a smaller and smaller pie is getting divided into more and more pieces.

This problem is, apparently, very widespread. For example, a food bank in Idaho has reported that the number of jobless people that it helps has increased by 10% every month this year. Moreover, these new food bank clients often come from the ranks of the middle and even the upper middle classes; for example, CNN recently reported the story of Patricia Guerrero, who went from having a $70,000 a year job in February to using a food bank in March. While Ms. Guerrero might have had fewer money in savings than most people…