Well, it was a tough weekend. After insurance giant AIG hinted that it might be heading for bankruptcy, investment bank Lehman Bros. went ahead and filed Chapter 11. Merrill Lynch grabbed at a $50 billion takeover from Bank of America, which is already regretting its takeover of the nation’s largest mortgage lender [Countrywide]. Stocks fell worldwide on Monday even after intervention from the Fed promising eased restrictions on emergency funds.

It’s not difficult to find gloom and doom on Wall Street today over how many jobs in the financial sector are going to be lost. Worse, that concern will in fact translate into a whole lot more jobs lost out in the real world where you and I live. Factories will be closed, inability to finance durable goods orders will exacerbate the problems, and GM is about to go under too. It ain’t even close to over yet, folks. If all you lose is your home, you’ll be among the lucky ones.

I’ll be posting more good information on stretching leftover dollars for those real people being harmed by all this, maybe even have something to say about the fact that there’s no gas in my region right now at all, leaving nothing to ration. Or tell you how I fare on my plan to sell my now-useless diesel ‘vintage’ Mercedes so I can buy a horse (have plenty of grass and kudzu). But in the meantime, best advice – if you’ve got gas – is to head directly to your regional farmer’s market and buy as much rice, other grains, fresh veggies and fruits as you can possibly afford. I’ll talk a bit about how to preserve it through the winter too, since it’s not really that hard.

I will also start posting information about growing some of your own food, even in the winter. There will be lots of links to great sources for information on these strategies too, so please stay tuned. The best advice I can give to people who end up here after searching something on Google because they’re just now joining our Shoestring Budget ranks, is…

Don’t Panic.

All you really have to do is survive. The future is the future, it’ll bring its own problems and opportunities. Right now you just need to “ride it out” in one piece (and all of a piece family-wise). Money’s just paper at this end of real life, you CAN learn to make do on much less of it. And who knows? Once you’re out the other end of the tunnel, you might even find that you can live a much happier, fulfilled and truly shared life without all that much of it. It’s a good lesson to learn. It puts things in perspective, something this modern world could use more of.

Links:

Lehman Brothers collapse stuns global markets
Lehman Files for Bankruptcy, Merrill Sold, AIG Seeks Cash
Wall St.’s Turmoil Sends Stocks Reeling
Credit Crunch: How to Survive the Recession
20 Ways to Live on Almost Nothing
Uninsured? More Ways to Survive

As the ever-rising price of fuel puts a serious dent in consumer budgets (and summertime vacations), it’s a good time for remembering good advice from the past as well as new advice for the present on how to keep your shoestring budget from being hopelessly busted.

1. Mass Transiting
If you live in a city or suburb with access to mass transit, USE IT. The cost of bus, train or subway fare is less than the cost of gasoline plus wear-and-tear on your vehicle for those same miles. Plus, if you can test on the means criteria, you can get subsidy for mass transit to and from work every day.

Plus many cities offer “express” transit from suburban hubs to the inner city (bus main depot and transfer station). This means the bus doesn’t stop every 4 blocks along the way, and you can get to work or home often in about the same time it takes to commute in your car during peak traffic hours (the express buses generally use less congested routes).

2. Carpooling
Carpool to and from work if you can. Big employers often have bulletin boards in the break room where people can request for carpooling, and many metropolitan areas provide relatively ’safe’ long-term parking lots along freeway entrances reserved for carpoolers or express mass transit. This means the people you’re pooling with don’t have to pick everyone up at their homes, but can just pick up and drop off the participants at one location. Regular buses stop at these locations as well, so you can bus to the pick-up and home again.

Carpooling requires out-of-pocket expense just like mass transit does (unless your employer happens to provide the van and gas). It is as cheap or cheaper than driving yourself, as everyone shares the costs. Even if you share a ride with a single co-worker living nearby your costs go down by half.

This requires firm work-scheduling so your participation doesn’t get screwed by your petty tyrant middle-management boss, but many workplaces are beginning to understand that unless they want to give employees a big enough raise to cover transportation inflation, they’d better be accommodating. Some localities offer municipal bulletin boards on the ‘net that allow you to hook up with others who live and work in your area (but not the same place) for carpooling.

3. AC is for Wimps
When you do drive to and from work (even with a pool), turn off the AC. If you don’t live someplace where it’s 80+º at 8 in the morning and 80+º at 5 in the evening, you don’t really need it. Use the interior vents instead to circulate outside air. You’re all sitting down, you can handle less than 80º in comfort with some moving air. Keep the windows up on the highway too. These both reduce drag on the vehicle and its engine.

4. Drive Slower
Drive 55 on the highway rather than 70 (or more). The bad old double-nickel does consume a lot less gas.

5. Limit Acceleration
Unless you’re merging into at-speed traffic, watch your acceleration and braking. Acceleration consumes the most gasoline, and quick-braking (unless necessary) shifts the burden to acceleration later. When you see a need to slow down, take your foot off the gas. Slow braking often helps you avoid having to stop altogether, or accelerate fast (such as at stoplights).

6. Cruise Control
On the highway, use your cruise control. It saves quite a bit of gas and reduces heavy acceleration as well as heavy breaking.

7. Hot Gas
Don’t buy hot gasoline. Purchase your fuel during cooler times of the morning or evening, you’ll get more for the bucks. Always pay attention to the sign price, you can save up to 5¢ per gallon just by buying across the street instead.

8. Buy Less
Don’t “top off” your tank, it’s a waste of gas. Plus, less weight equals better mileage. If you fill up, stop at the first click and don’t keep pumping. If you’ve a 15-gallon tank and need just 10 for the week, only buy 10 gallons during the week. Park in the shade when you can, as heat will expand the gas in your tank. If you can’t park in the shade and don’t want to use the AC (less gas mileage), open your car doors or windows for awhile to let the heat out before driving off.

9. Don’t Be Idle
Limit your idling. You must idle at stoplights, but not in the drive-through at Taco Bell or bank. If it’s going to take more than a minute to conduct your drive-through business, turn off the ignition and restart when you’re done.

10. Get Some Exercise
If you live within a mile of your work, walk or ride your bike. You’ll get good exercise (and only slightly wet when it’s raining if you’ve a raincoat, galoshes and umbrella) and not use any gas at all. A bicycle can be reasonably ridden 5 miles to work in a reasonable amount of time, especially if you have to ride through town (lots of stoplights) or have a particularly lovely road between here and there.

11. Have Some Fun
If you live 5-20 miles from your work and can’t regularly carpool or ride mass transit, consider purchasing a motor scooter. There are some really nice ones on offer these days, can be had for not too much money if you can justify the costs, and often get 75-120 miles per gallon of gas. Plus, they’re fun!

12. Move On
You could consider moving closer to your work or getting a job closer to home. Of course, this presumes that you are job-secure enough to make it worth your while to sell your house at a loss and buy another, and/or employable enough to get a well-paid job anywhere, even in a recession-to-depression economy. In which case you can probably afford to drive yourself to and from work all by your lonesome and wouldn’t have to consider these options.

Once you’ve figured out a way to save on gas and car expenses getting to and from work every day, consider how you can save on other trips in your vehicle…

13. Keep a List
Get a dry-erase board and put it up somewhere right near the ‘fridge. Whenever someone in your family notes that some regular foodstuff or extra (paper towels, toilet paper, shampoo, facial soap, whatever) is running low or you’re out, they can write it down. Then make your list before you go to the store. This will avoid frequent ‘hops’ to the store at odd times just to pick up an item or two.

14. Shopping Day
Plan your meals weekly. This means sitting down and figuring out what your family will have for breakfast, lunch and dinner for a full 7 days. Will that box of cereal last that long? Have you enough ingredients for eggplant parmesan as well as burritos and Spanish rice? If everyone takes their lunches (saves lots of money!) to work and school, make sure you’ve got all the ingredients for everyone every day for the week. This means keeping the kids from eating the “Lunchables” for snacks at home, so also make sure you’ve after-school snacks in stock as well. If you only go to the grocery store once a week, you’ll not be wasting half a tank of gas during the week ‘hopping’ to the store.

15. Group Shopping Day
If you plan ahead, you can do all your grocery store shopping and general running-around errands on Saturday. If you’re sociable, you can probably find a neighbor or two who will think your plan is brilliant, and who will plan ahead too. That way you can share the Saturday run-around duties, as well as vehicle and gasoline costs. Plus, you’ll only have to do the driving once every two or three weeks!

A psychological issue I’ve found with this planning ahead stuff is that some people fool themselves into believing they’re NOT spending much money if they drive to the store once a day to pick up an item or two or three, instead of going once a week and spending what can amount to $200 at a time. It’s a quirk of numbers that should be examined closely for all factors including gasoline, because in the end, that daily trip for this-n-that can add $100 to that weekly expenditure.

When you make plans with the kids to see a movie or do some other worthy and fun thing on the weekend, you can consider proximity. Share rides to the mall with other families in your neighborhood. Do Dollar Movie & Pizza Night on Friday instead of Saturday. Sign up for a video/DVD rental service, have the kids invite their friends, cook up some popcorn and have sodas on hand, arrange the chairs and hold “movie night” at your house! I’ve found it fun to do all-day (or all-night) spectaculars – all the Rocky movies, all the Star Wars movies, all the Arnold movies… whatever you like. One right after another with intermissions. For the all-nighters I put the eldest in charge of snacks and programming, move the equipment to the garage or basement, throw in lots of pillows and blankets, let them have a fine sleep-over.

The best bet for the cash-strapped or just the thrifty person is either to garage your vehicle or share the costs with others. The money you save might pay for this month’s grocery price-hikes! And remember to buy local whenever you can, particularly produce in-season. You can go to the area farmer’s market BEFORE going to the grocery store that week, and any neighbors you share the ride with will learn what’s cool about farmer’s markets.

The cost of living won’t be going down, even though our incomes may not be going up. If you’ve good ideas for saving money in these areas, please contribute in the comments, there may be some truly great ones out there!

Useful Links:

FTC: Saving Money at the Gas Pump
Edmunds: Gas-Buying Strategies
How to Save Money on Gas
43 Gas-Saving Tips

The market news reports that consumer spending is up again this month. The problem is that this is not as a sign of possible economic recovery from the deepening recession we find ourselves in. It’s a reflection of the fact that people must spend more on basics like fuel and food – prices for both rising much faster than regular people can keep up with – thus must spend less on all that consumer junk our capitalistic system expects us to buy with our overrated “disposable income.”

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you’re like me – I have no “disposable income” because all the income we have must go to simply pay for the necessities of life, and there’s hardly enough even cutting corners. Food, clothing, shelter, transportation, utilities. I have previously posted about the clothing thing, as I haven’t actually purchased new clothing for at least a decade. Used clothing is good enough – even suits and formal clothing – though I don’t dress up much. But the mortgage is what it is. Gas prices are what they are, they cannot be bargained down. And as the price of fuel rises, so does the cost of food and electricity. Thus more of our money must be spent on necessities, even if we never had any left over for junk in the first place!

It’s spring, my tiller should come back from the shop Saturday, and all my garden terraces will be put into production this season. Of course that also means I must purchase seed and starts that I haven’t grown in flats, but all that will pay off as the food comes in. Spinach, lettuce, collards, kale and peas are all up, the asparagus (a perennial) is coming in rushes, and the strawberries will ripen if the nights ever stop dipping into the 30s.

Even if you live in a cramped apartment, you can grow a few tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers in pots on the patio or porch. Buy into a CSA for fresh produce as your share of a local farmer’s crops, or plan a weekly visit to your area farmer’s market and buy fresh produce in bulk. That supports local farmers, lets you get to know the people who can keep you from starving, and saves real money over the whole supermarket system where locally grown tomatoes compete with tomatoes grown in Mexico or Guatemala and they all cost way too much.

A series in the Washington Post examines the issues in depth and is worth a read. The final installment appeared today (May 1) and deals with the American consumer’s issues. Clipping, Scrimping, Saving takes a look at how people are coping with the rising price of food.

There are some good hints and resources in the Post series. But there is another issue that people who really are having trouble making ends meet must consider as even more important. The diet for poor people in this country consists of worse than junk. We all saw the class divisions during the Katrina crisis, and understand that the shape of poverty in America is obese. I know it’s hard to think that people are actually hungry who weigh twice or three times what a healthy person weighs, but it’s true. They’re hungry for real food, but limited to eating worse-than-garbage.

We could be smug and say that rising food prices might cure that obesity epidemic, but it won’t. The fake grain paste and high fructose corn syrup diet is designed to pack on pounds even as it starves the body of necessary nutrients and energy. The result is crippling obesity, diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and a host of cancers. It’s a “killing diet,” not a basic level of necessary nourishment.

Given the even worse health care crisis in this country, we who live on shoestring budgets cannot afford to get fat and unhealthy. If the best thing I could offer my readers is the advice to pay attention to nourishment – buy fresh food, I offer it now. Sam’s Club and coupon-cutting will save you money on junk food, but it won’t help you stay healthy and fit. Do not be fooled – take the time and trouble to seek out healthy food, don’t give in to cheap obesity.

Links and Resources:

WP: Global Food Crisis Series
NYT: As Jobs Vanish and Prices Rise
Food Crisis Hits America
Disappearing Amber Waves of Grain
Where Every Meal Is a Sacrifice