But sometimes we find ourselves in a place where we do not have that luxury.  My family hasn’t yet arrived at NeoFrugal, we’re still at forced frugal.  And the truth is that buying stuff at Wal-Mart is very often cheaper than buying it somewhere else.  This is particularly true for Wal-Mart’s house Great Value brand.  When buying the Great Value product instead of the name-brand product equals the difference between having enough food for four days rather than just three days, you do what you need to do.

Buying the cheapest alternative can be eye-opening, and products end up falling into one of four categories.

Because when you’re financially strapped you tend towards buying the basics, anyway, it turns out that quite a few Great Value products are indistinguishable from their name-brand counterparts.  All-purpose flour, sugar, salt, and butter are the items that jump out at me as products that I am not ever again likely to pay any extra for a brand-name.  Gelatin desserts and fruit juices all pass my taste tests, and perhaps more importantly, those of my kids.  The breakfast cereals we normally eat (the analogs to Rice Krispies and Grape-Nuts) are, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same products as their more expensive counterparts.

There are some products that don’t stand up quite as well, but are passable in a pinch.  We like the taste of Jif chunky peanut butter, and other peanut butters, including Great Value, just aren’t the same.  The GV peanut butter wafers with chocolate coating snacks simply do not have the same texture as Little Debbie’s Nutty Bars.  The blend of tea in the tea bags is not as tasty as Tetley or Luzianne.  When there is any leeway in the budget at all, even now we tend towards the higher-priced products we prefer.

Every so often, you run into a product that is simply inferior.  The things Great Value puts into boxes beside the Pop Tarts are basically inedible: medicinal tasting filling in a bland, dry-to-crumbling excuse for a pastry shell.  The garlic and lime salsa is difficult to tolerate, much less enjoy.

A rare treat is the GV product we actually prefer to the name brand.  GV’s heavy whipped cream aerosol can provides a denser, creamier whipped cream than Reddi-Whip.  The black bean and corn salsa, in stark contrast to the garlic and lime variety, is very tasty.

Of course, there’s a certain amount of personal preference in this… my wife can’t tell any difference at all between, for instance, the whipped creams and the tea bags, largely because they simply aren’t as vital a part of her diet as they are mine.  The real value in our Great Value experiment has been the opportunity to to widen our horizons beyond the choices advertising has taught us, and judge the product behind the label.  Sometimes the “cheap stuff” really is just as good or better.

First, the comics.  I learned to read from comics, still enjoy reading for relaxation (although these days it’s graphic novels from the library rather than monthlies from a shop), and have two sons that are already keen on comics.  I guess the easiest way to explain my thinking about the process is to go over the categories I’ve come up with.

JRT – Just Recycle These.  I actively collected comics for more than twenty-five years, and worked at comic stores for almost ten years.  I picked up a lot of comics along the way.  After decades of collecting as curating the collection, there’s the back half of that last box… comics that are so bad that they simply don’t go anywhere in a collection.  Whether because they’re badly written and drawn, or shoddily produced, or offensively violent or pornographic or political… or whether it’s some copies of Reagan’s Raiders #1-3 that  legitimately qualify as “all of the above,” there’s some stuff that the most sensible thing to do is reduce it to its component atoms and start from scratch.

25B – When I was a kid in the seventies and new comics were 25 cents, comic stores always had a “nickle box” to dig through.  When I was a teenager in the eighties and new comics were $1, comic stores always had a “quarter box” to dig through.  When I was running a comic shop in the nineties and new comics were $2.50, we always had a “dollar box” for people to dig through.  I recently went to see my buddy Richard at his shop, and new comics are $4… and he’s got a bunch of “quarter boxes” downstairs to dig through.  Not sure what that tells us, other than explain why the box of stuff I don’t care about keeping and don’t think can sell individually for enough to justify the effort the 25-cent Bin.

eBB – eBay Bound.  Books are sets of books that I think will definitely sell at ninety-nine cents or higher.  Some may go for much more than that, but the point is I want them to sell if I’m going to the trouble of listing them.

SMM – See My Man.  These are the nice books whose times have come.  I’m going to sell these through Richard for as much as possible, with more patience than the rest.

FTK – For The Kids.  Like I say, I learned to read from comics, and Scott appears on the way to following in my footsteps.  The fact that the kids like Star Wars and The Simpsons and Spider-man and Batman… basically, everything I liked… means that there’s a good hunk of comics that are still more valuable to us in comic form rather than liquidated.

CDH – These are the books someone is going to have to pry out of my Cold Dead Hands.

The toy inventory has similar categories to the comics: some I’m just keeping, some are reserved for the kids.  If we’re getting rid of it, it’ll either be a higher-end thing through Richard or be on eBay.  The Atari Computers present an interesting problem: there are several that need to go but that are worth something significant… enough that I’m willing to wait awhile for a decent return on them.  But there’s no local Richard dealing in Atari Computers.  I’m not certain what my best market for selling the Ataris might be.

Almost every bit of the music and recording equipment is staying here, to be used in my studio, the family entertainment center, or the kids’ set-up.  Scott and Ralf have both already show interest and talent in music.  Whatever we might be able to get for the old equipment is not worth what we’ll get by putting that stuff to use ourselves.

With CDs and DVDs, there are a few that might be worth something, I’ll be checking with Gene about higher-end individual items… then, again, if I believe they’ll sell at the ninety-nine cent mark, onto eBay they go.  Depending on how many are left, I may trade some for an iPod (although I’d kinda like to hear from someone who has completed the process already, before I jump).

So that’s the thinking behind my neofrugal clear-the-house plan.  Next comes the actual clearing-of-the-house part…

First, part of what I mean by neofrugal is being more aware of the consequences of spending… making spending choices based on not only price and quality, but also culture, ethics, and morality.  The BP debacle prompted heather to rethink her spending and other habits with an eye towards minimizing her oil footprint.  The amount of oil burned by Americans is staggering, and our dependence on it puts much of our economy at risk and largely in the hands of increasingly hostile and destructive companies and regimes.  The list of action steps heather provides is great start on considering larger concerns when making what might seem like insignificant choices.

The other part I liked was the recognition of the fickle nature of motivation, and a great technique for making the most of it while it’s around.  As heather and Steve Pavlina before her recognize, the best way to make a lifestyle change is to change the environment to make the old ways more difficult to fall back and the new ways easier to implement.  While she was motivated, she figured out changes to make to her environment now to improve her ability to stick to new choices later.  This is the same kind of thing I’ve been trying do at jeffjewell.net with Franklinism: create the structure to enable new habits.

So, anyway, nice article that got my attention for a couple reasons.

I want my children to understand the relationship of money and saving and value.
I want to get the most out of our family entertainment/recreation/vacation budget.
I want all members of my family to understand their values and respect our values.
I want my children to value experiences more than materials.
I want my children to get as much as possible from their education.

Neofrugal Food

I want to avoid harmful chemicals in my food.
I want to support local food production.
I want to eat a greater variety of fresh food… with my kids.
I want to lower my food costs.
I want to improve my health through diet.

Neofrugal Finances

I want to waste less.
I want to earn more.
I want to make the most of what I’ve got.
I want to give back.

A quick list of the things I’m visualizing in NeoFrugal Notebook.  Although when this started, I had a more traditional “save money” slant in mind, I’m coming around to the idea that the real key to NeoFrugal is understanding what value means to you as an individual and as a family.  One of my favorite bloggers, Trent at The Simple Dollar, has mentioned more than once about spending on what truly makes you happy, and saving on the rest; again, you have to have the insight to know what truly makes you happy.  In a song from, wow, must be fourteen or so years ago now, I wrote “your passions turn to clutter there in front of your eyes,” revealing the underlying issues I’ve had of identifying what was really important to me.

Off we go trying to fix that.

NeoFrugal Notebook exists for a couple of reasons.  The primary reason is that I feel my life and education poorly prepared me to own and operate money, and I’m not content with the result, and I want my kids to be better prepared than I was.  So this weblog exists as an owner’s manual, or operating instructions, for money.  I also discovered, as I began to rebuild from the fallout of my lack of fiduciary skillz, that much of your success and happiness comes from just knowing your definition of success and happiness.  So NeoFrugal is also about understanding your real values and how your decisions support or erode those values.

Currently, I foresee Family, Food, and Finances as likely categories.  We’re currently homeschooling a six-year old; there’s a three-year-old boy behind him and a three-month-old girl behind him.  My wife and I are making a concerted effort to improve our family diet.  We’re starting over financially due to our own decisions and preparations.  NeoFrugal Notebook is a document of what we try, learn, and experience while overhauling our concepts of money and value.

That’s not where we are, yet.

I’m working for a big company again, with the regular paycheck that entails, but we’ve still got some ground to make up from the past couple of months.  Our personal austerity program is still in effect… although I am admittedly eyeing our competing shovel-ready spending programs.  It’s time to look at the cutbacks and see what is to be added back in.

We made a lot of choices and changes to make it through, some better than others.  I’ve made a few notes on why the methods may or may not be a part of neofrugal.

Home and vehicle maintenance

When it’s not clear whether you can afford gas, you’re probably not going to get the oil changed.  It’s never really a conscious decision to put off maintenance, it’s a cumulative effect of looking at the money pile each week and maintenance funds simply not being there.  You let things slide, make do, hope it’ll hang together until the pile grows.  Obviously this is extreme frugal; frugal taken to a ridiculous conclusion.  It was necessary, I’m glad the necessity is passing, and routine maintenance on vehicles, systems, and appliances is clearly a neofrugal value.

Vehicle expense

We were a two-car family, but have been operating with one vehicle for several months.  Although we had little choice in the matter (if you neglect your vehicle maintenance long enough, this decision will eventually make itself), there are benefits to acting like a one-car family even if you don’t have to.  Having only one car forced us to plan ahead better: instead of being able to run out to the store or a drive-thru if we ran out of something to home, we had lists and minimal regular shopping trips; reducing gas, time, and impulse spending opportunities.  We’re definitely going to get a second vehicle running, but we’re keeping the attitude that less driving is best.

Landline phone, cable tv, trash pickup, internet

For a while, we simply cut every service we possibly could.  The internet has already made its comeback, landline and cable, not so much.  Cutting the landline was completely painless, and the library made cable surprisingly easy to do without, even before the return of the internet brought streaming tv back into our lives.  The local waste management center (I guess they’re not “dumps” anymore) is not far away, just off the main loop we already use for grocery, department store, bank runs.  We did find that it was a true hardship for us to do without an internet connection at home… even though we both had internet at work and at plenty of local free access points.

Restaurants, brand names, processed foods

Cutting out restaurants and drive-thrus was hard, but made a huge difference in our food budget.  We will certainly be adding restaurants back to our routine, Suzy and I are both foodies, but it’s clear there will be some changes in the frequency of particular destinations.  I’ve been in it too long to do it anymore: I just can’t bring myself to pay the premium at big chain restaurants.  Most of the places we really like to go are the proverbial mom and pop operations.

With very few exceptions, we have found generic and store brand products to be equal quality as name brands.  Sometimes a difference is not one of quality, but one of relatively small variations of flavors and textures; we actually prefer the non-name brand product, on occasion.

We’ve also been buying less processed items, more staples.  This has made avoiding brand names easier, too, as well as being generally cheaper, healthier, and better.

We didn’t have any choice when we cut these expenses, even though we’d come to think of them as basic parts of our lives.  The lean times have helped us look at expenses from the other direction, to examine what we really get from the purchase, and if it’s worth it compared to the other possibilities.

I was losing my taste my the corporate world at about the same time the industry where I worked was hard hit by the post-9/11 recession.  My family had to make some significant life changes, but we persevered with part-timing and freelancing to the point we felt we could make the jump to running our own business full time.  This was around September of last year… approximately three weeks before the economy collapsed.  Again, my family made some significant lifestyle changes to try and persevere, but recently I have returned to working for a large employer.

What all this means (other than I have a pretty lousy sense of timing when it comes to making risky financial decisions) is that I never learned some important lessons about handling money back when it might still do me some good; that a family of four can live for a year, say, 2008, for instance, on less money than a single guy spent on travel, bars and restaurants, movies and concerts, media of types, and collectible toys comics and computers in, say, 1999.  That he term frugal was associated with personal concessions that had to be endured when times were bad.

Now that it appears things are changing (I project the checking account about two months ahead, and we’ve enfrugaled ourselves to such a degree already that only a few weeks of steady employment will catch us up… leaving us in the position of making decisions on where and how to expand our budget for the first time in ages), I’m starting to look at frugality in different ways.  Although there are plenty of better or worse suggestions of what items to add back to our lives, there’s a significant number of items that I just can’t imagine spending money on, anymore.  And I’ve identified some items that are simply so much better than their alledged substitutes that I’d rather just go without them than go with the cheaper option.  Thinking about the future, frugality is becoming a set of choices about what is genuinely important… and a new economy built on new business infrastructures has, at the very least, made fascinating new choices into possibly viable candidates for genuine importance.

NeoFrugal means getting more from your life by reducing waste, understanding your values, and recognizing opportunities.  NeoFrugal isn’t about spending less, it’s about doing more with what you spend.  NeoFrugal isn’t about limiting choices, it’s about making good choices.  NeoFrugal is about looking at your kids and wanting to give them, when it might still do them some good, some of the knowledge you still wish you’d had… back when it might still do you some good.

So that’s the big picture what and why is NeoFrugal.  This weblog will be partly a journal of my new choices, partly the financial instruction manual I always needed, partly a clearinghouse of frugal possibilities, and partly a database of my own experiences of value.  Eventually, the hope is it will be partly a forum for other people considering new frugal possibilities and sharing results and opinions.

Thanks for reading.

I’m quite sure there are people using the term neofrugal to mean something specific: I admit I was shocked to see I could buy the neofrugal.com domain.  But since I could, I feel free to establish my own definition.  For me the new frugality has three aspects: eliminating waste, maximizing value, and enlarging your life.  Eliminating waste is pretty obvious, the most similar to traditional thriftiness.  We’ve all been made aware over the years that some bargains aren’t really bargains, but maximizing value is also beginning to incorporate the notion that some things are worth an extra expense.  Enlarging your life is a concept that will become more clear as we go, but in a nutshell it’s the recognition that “some things are worth an extra expense” for reasons that extend beyond your own life and preferences.

Every week, I will be making three new posts in the NeoFrugal Notebook, each focusing on one aspect of eliminating waste, maximizing value, and enlarging life, in turn.  I’ll also do reader mailbag posts every so often, increasing in frequency should any presupposed reader mail me anything.  There will also be regular posts on various financial projects or processes I’m working through, and links of interesting reading.

Which begs the question of how this is going to be any different from any number of other personal finance blogs out there.  I’ve written professionally in the past.  I’ve confronted some uncomfortable realities of my own situation, have maintained a sense of humor about it, and am willing to dish on myself in the hopes that a bad example can serve as a lesson.  I’m determined to make a set of changes in my own life, and am willing to document methods and techniques that succeed and fail for me.  All of which, it seems, still fails to clearly differentiate me from the herd.

What it’s really going to come down to is whether or not I’m able to reach someone new with my efforts.  I have to make a change in my own financial life, and if I can help someone also make a change in their financial life, so much the better.  I hope my experiences can educate, my struggles can warn, and my successes can inspire.  And I hope you enjoy it.