If You Must Resort to the Indignity of Using a Coupon—and You Must—First Ask Yourself WWBD? (What Would Bogie Do?)
After several weeks of saving more than $100, I was on a roll. My family was saving money, readers liked the columns, and I’d managed to keep raccoon off the menu. But things suddenly turned discouraging when I turned my budget-cutting efforts to the Funny Money family’s entertainment expenses. I was supposed to be cutting my spending there by $100 in Week 7, but all I wanted to do was spend more. Adding it up, it didn’t look like Mrs. Funny Money and I were having much fun to cut in the first place.
Movies, concerts, and especially dining out are some of the first things any personal finance expert will tell you to cut when things get tight—and it makes sense. If you don’t have an adequate emergency fund, are carrying credit card debt, or aren’t saving for retirement, you need to cut back on the good times now to avoid bad times later. And if you’ve seen your income drop or lost a job, it’s even more important.
But first, you need to be having some fun to cut back on.
As I scanned our list of entertainment spending, a few things were missing: limos, fine restaurants, concerts, plays, nightclubs, and—more importantly—baby-sitters. In their place was the local sports pub, diner, gym, and, seventh on the list, McDonald’s. All exceedingly family friendly, and all places we regularly took my boy. But entertaining Li’l Money left his parents with li’l fun.
Now don’t get me wrong: there’s no fun like family fun. Visiting the pool at the gym put such a smile on my boy’s face that I’d play in an ABBA cover band for tips before I’d cut the gym membership from the budget. And a family movie or breakfast out at the start of the weekend was likewise worthwhile. But out of $366 a month in entertainment spending, just one-sixth went to date nights for Mr. and Mrs. Funny Money—and that was in a good month. Instead of whispering sweet nothings into my money honey’s ear over crepes suzette, I was shouting above the din at the Burger King playground.
Look: if every meal out comes with a toy, it’s time to rethink how the fun funds are spent. It was clearly time for us not only to cut out casual drive-bys at the drive-through but also to reallocate our entertainment expenses to movies released by a studio other than Disney. Our move to Michigan came only a few years after Li’l Money arrived, and his mother and I hadn’t completely made the mental switch from being a childless couple with two incomes and nights and weekends off to being the kinds of people who spend an entire weekend sleeping, eating, shopping, and cleaning without ever changing out of our sweatpants.
Mrs. Funny Money’s schedule of working Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday nights didn’t help either. On these evenings I’d make dinner and leave a plate out for her. Then, as she slept in the next morning, I’d check to see if she had eaten. The whole thing was about as romantic as leaving cookies out for Santa Claus.
Cutting our spending on entertainment while at the same time finding more ways to get the planets that rule our schedules and budget to align for more date nights was going to be a challenge. But looking over what our finances said about the state of our romantic life led me to one simple conclusion: when it came to dining out, it was time to give chicken fingers the finger.
Dining out
Since we are parents of a grade-schooler, most of our entertainment spending revolves around movies and eating out. Family fun was mostly Cub Scout activities for the boy, family get-togethers in the park next to the lake, and the odd trip to a museum, science center, or anything with a train. Vacations are a separate category where the expense is covered by additional savings or freelance income, so I don’t make it part of the budget. Instead, it’s an “extra” that needs to be covered with “extra” money, not the regular household income from paychecks.
Economizing on movies was easy. We switched to earlier weekend show times that were cheaper and signed up for a discount card that rewarded us with free popcorn or beverages after so many films. Mrs. Funny Money and I also trimmed our movie viewing to take advantage of our cable offerings or library DVDs. Our criterion became whether a film was “big-screen worthy” or would lose too much in translation from a movie theater to the TV screen. That means we go out to see Lincoln and Life of Pi but wait for Bachelorette to show up on cable (and then, I hope, find something else to do). Since the gym that we joined for pool privileges offers a parents’ night out deal once a month, we can score cheap babysitting ($20) and a movie at reasonable rates.
That just left eating out as the big nut to crack.
Freeing up cash
There’s an old saying that, whatever you want in life, you can get it cheap, easy, or good, but you can’t have all three. That’s certainly true with eating out. We were getting a lot of drive-through or pick-up food that certainly was easy but probably not good (or at least healthy). And, once I added up all the quick hits at $8 here and $3 there, I saw that it wasn’t all that cheap, either.
The reason was our overall lack of preparation when it came to shopping and menu planning, and our failure to coordinate Li’l Money’s dinner with his parents’ habit of not eating their own evening meal until at least 9 p.m. If there was nothing in the fridge or freezer and nobody felt like running to the grocery store, the default was to pick up something from a casual restaurant or fast-food joint. Instead of getting something fun for our money, we were just plugging holes in the weekly menu.
This really had more to do with the grocery category that came later in my budget-cutting experiment, but once again it demonstrates how letting one budget category get out of control can slop over to disrupt others. In the same way that planning the week’s cooking, meals, and grocery shopping cuts down on personal spending for lunch during the week, it also reins in the urge to throw away your entertainment money by grabbing ready-made grub just because you’re irritable and hungry and you don’t know what to cook.
Once again, this is where switching your discretionary spending to cash can help out. As with the personal spending described in the last chapter, we decided to switch our entertainment spending to a cash-only system. The allotment for our entertainment expenses goes into a special envelope after each payday, and that’s it until the next check arrives. If we forget to grab cash and put a meal out on a debit or credit card, the cash gets removed later and deposited to cover the bill. When the money’s gone, you either have to find some other cash (if I’ve worked at home for a day and saved on the after-school babysitting, for example, then some cash is freed up) or you go without.
This not only sets a limit on spending but it also dampens the urge to spend spontaneously without thinking. If Li’l Money was agitating in the back seat for chicken from the drive-through and I hadn’t picked up a few bucks from the entertainment envelope before we left home, I faced three choices. I either swipe the debit card and remember to move enough cash to cover the expense to the bank deposit envelope, use my own personal spending cash, or convince the boy to wait for some healthier air-popped popcorn and juice when we got home.
Remembering to transfer cash was just enough hassle that I’d get home and forget, which continued the problem of overspending on fast food. Using my own cash, I found, motivated me to more often remember to reimburse myself, and, if I didn’t, it forced me to cut back on my own spending, leaving the cash in the entertainment envelope untouched. The best strategy, of course, was to substitute something the kid likes at home and, I hope, teach him a valuable lesson in deferring gratification, or at least give him plenty of material to chew over with his future therapist.
I’ll add that seeing the cash pile up in the entertainment envelope turned out to be the biggest motivator of all. I was slightly thrilled when, after getting cash from a paycheck, I’d go to refresh the entertainment envelope and find cash leftover from the previous two weeks. I’d stealthily count up the leftover bills, compare it to the cost of a night out and a sitter, and see how much more we needed. That gap was enough to make sure that Mrs. Funny Money and I remembered to set aside coupons from the newspaper ad inserts for the casual restaurants we’d hit with Li’l Money, and to recall which ones let kids eat free on which days.
The system worked well enough that I also switched the baby-sitting payments to cash. First, it made it easier to balance the checking account, instead of having multiple checks for $25 or $36 floating around to a half dozen different sitters, who might cash them only sporadically. More important, it motivated me to get home on time or even early so that the baby-sitting envelope would accumulate its own buildup of cash that could be reallocated to a date night. I even picked up some colorful expanding cardboard envelopes and broke out the label maker. I resisted the urge to start clipping out pictures of fancy dinners and dancing couples clad in ball gowns and tuxedos to decoupage the envelopes, lest the whole thing start to look like some thirteen-year-old girl’s Pinterest board. Although I might still cave and tape on a color photo of a juicy rib eye and a well-chilled martini.
Clearly, if paying with cash causes a physical reaction akin to pain as we saw in chapter 7, saving cash must have an equal and opposite effect, just like in physics, right? Well, according to a University of Minnesota study, the soothing power of greenbacks isn’t just psychological. Actually handling cash can ease the sting of physical pain, emotional discomfort, or personal slights. The study had subjects count out paper or money, then dip their hands into scalding water. The subjects who handled the money reported feeling less pain.1
Which gives me an idea. Now when Li’l Money starts up his whining when we bypass McDonald’s, I know just what do. While he quiets downs as soon as he gets a snack at home, the same doesn’t always apply to Daddy’s jangled nerves and headache. Now I can just rub the extra entertainment cash against my temples.
Making ends meet
C’mere. Over here. Listen closely. Guys, I am going to tell you how to drive a woman crazy in fewer than ten words, and I do not mean, “Not now, honey, the game is on.” Ladies, I must warn you that this all-powerful technique is the kind of potent aphrodisiac that will cause your husband to view you as a combination of Rachael Ray and Jessica Rabbit in yoga pants.
Whatever your gender, I am trusting that you will use the power of what I am about to reveal only for good and not for evil, such as getting out of your turn to chaperone the Cub Scout sleep-away.
Here’s how it works: You enter the room and pry her away from Facebook (in the case of a woman) or prod him off the couch (man). Looking him or her intensely in the eye, you reach into your pocket/wallet/bodice/chest waders and withdraw an intriguing slip of paper. Wordlessly, you unfold it and present it to your mate. Maintaining eye contact, and in a low, sultry voice, speak these words: “Weeknight date night. With. A. Coupon.”
Trust me, you’re gonna need either smelling salts or a cigarette.
Whether it’s a Groupon bought online, a coupon clipped from the newspaper (remember: prevents gum disease!), or a two-for-one deal from a your credit card company, nothing perks up the week of a hard-core married couple like the promise of a midweek meal that’s eaten not off the coffee table but from an actual linen tablecloth at a restaurant where the maître d’ sniffs, “Booster seat, monsieur? I do not think I am acquainted with ze term.”
When money’s tight it’s really tempting to zero out your spending on any kind of entertainment, especially eating out. But I simply believe this is unsustainable. If you don’t get a little crazy, you’re gonna go more than a little crazy. It’s better to plan and find the kind of deal that makes you both go “Squeee!” at the thought of rewarding yourself for your budget discipline. Locking down every dime means that eventually something snaps and, when you finally track down your wife somewhere in Vegas, you find her eating caviar off the abs of a Chippendales dancer.
Trust me. Meal planning, shopping for bargains at the grocery store, and learning to love every part of the chicken—except the McNugget!—will be much easier to bear if you get out for a good crab cake once in a while. Otherwise, you become one very crabby cake yourself.
It’s easy to sign up for online deal sites such as Groupon, which will e-mail you specials. Don’t grab every one that comes your way, since that defeats the money-saving aspect of this project, and you’re likely to end up buying deals that expire before you can claim them. At The Detroit News, we have our own similar offer, Deal Chicken, which presents offers from our advertisers, so check to see if your local paper offers it or something similar. Other sites include LivingSocial, Amazon Local, and Travelzoo. Look around on the Web and test out one or two at a time to keep from being overwhelmed. Set up your e-mail so that the offers go to one folder so you can review them without having them clog up your inbox, causing you to miss that important e-mail about your forthcoming Genius Grant (I’m still waiting, MacArthur Foundation. . . .).
Naturally, your weekly newspaper flyers and coupon mailings should be reviewed instead of trashed or thrown in the fireplace, and check Valpak.com, the online site for the outfit that mails out those big packages of coupons. Another very good resource is the ads in the newspaper’s weekend entertainment sections, which usually appear on Friday or Thursday, and the local alternative paper (look between the ads for DUI lawyers). But often the best sources for discounts are companies with which you already do business.
Some of the best dining deals I’ve ever gotten came via my American Express card. During slow times of the year, restaurants would occasionally send out discount cards that knocked as much as $50 off a meal at an upscale steak house, for instance. I can’t predict when these things will show up, but, along with reviewing the offers stuffed in my monthly statement, it makes going through the junk mail more like a scavenger hunt, and if you don’t, you’ll regret it. During a busy period last fall I let the promotional mailings pile up unopened, and when I went through the stack I found two expired promotions for a free entrée at a very upscale joint. I furtively ran them through the shredder before Mrs. Funny Money could find out about the missed opportunity.
Other sources include getting on the mailing (or e-mail) lists of your favorite restaurants, or the ones you want to be your favorite restaurants, and just keeping an eye out when you’re there. Restaurants tend to promote themselves the most to their repeat customers, so, for instance, the most likely spot to see that the Harbor House down the street offers a Saturday-night deal with two entrées for $30 is by stopping by the Harbor House once in a while.
Once you land a dining deal, don’t undo the frugality by going hog-wild on drinks, appetizers, and dessert. Apply your coupon or deal, know what you can afford, and split an appetizer or dessert if you must. A glass of wine apiece or a carafe of the house stuff will be fine with dinner. Plus, you don’t want to linger too long and run up the baby-sitter bill. But, if you’ve saved enough to go whole hog and it’s in your budget, then shoot the moon and tell ’em to bring on the cheese course.
I’ll share this strategy that my parents employed when our family first moved to the suburbs and their fun funds were scarce. My mom set aside a jar for all their quarters. If she had two bits left after grocery shopping or my dad had a few in his pocket at the end of the day, into the jar they went (this was the early 1970s, so maybe use dollar bills today). After enough money had piled up, it was date night for Mom and Dad. This could take a while, so to stretch their bucks and increase the frequency, they skipped cocktails at the restaurant. Now, for an Irish-Catholic couple, you might think this would defeat the whole point of the thing, but Mom was resourceful. Once Dad was all freshened up and she had on her dress and fancy shoes, they left us boys in the basement game room, broke out the booze and mixed nuts, and adjourned to the living room, which in that era, was off-limits to the kids (the velvet ropes my mom hung in the doorway were a subtle reminder). There they’d hold their own discount happy hour before heading to the restaurant.
If you’re using a coupon, be warned that this can be an issue for some people—notably men. The reason is that fussing with scraps of paper seems wimpy, not manly. Try to imagine Bogart using a coupon. Or Paul Newman. John Wayne might have used a coupon, but only to roll a cigarette one-handed on horseback while firing a six-shooter. And don’t even think about Sean Connery’s James Bond using one:
Bond: A dry martini.
Barman: Oui, monsieur.
Bond: Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it until it’s ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?
Barman: Oui, monsieur.
Bond: Err, I say, I have a 30-percent-off Groupon for any mixed drink. Can I still use that?
Not suave. You can just hear Pussy Galore snickering.
Coupons simply go against a guy’s inner big spender, who, instead of unfolding a clipping for $1 off, screams, “Throw down a $50 and tell ’em to keep the change!” Nonetheless, real men can use coupons—we just get someone else to push the paper, preferably a child, a woman, or a Frenchman. Here’s how Bogie would handle it at the end of Casablanca.
Captain Renault: It might be a good idea for you to disappear from Casablanca for a while.
Rick: I could use a trip. But it doesn’t make any difference about our bet. You still owe me ten thousand francs.
Captain Renault: How about a buy-one, get-one-free coupon for appetizers at Bennigan’s!
Rick: Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
So remember: look for deals and clip those coupons, and the cost of a date night won’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.
Pinching pennies so hard that Lincoln gets a headache
You may be broke, but you still gotta have some fun, and cheap fun is the best kind of all. Dining out is going to be tricky, and rare when your finances put you up against the wall, but it is possible.
First, throw out your dinner plans and substitute lunch, which is often less expensive. You may also be able to park the kids at an activity and skip the cost of a sitter. Another bonus is that it’s easier to get reservations and linger at your table than it is during the Saturday-night dinner rush. You’re also more likely to skip expensive drinks or limit yourself to a single glass of wine at lunch. No wine steward rolls out the port cart at noontime. And if you do need to imbibe, see whether it’s a better deal to bring your own bottle of wine and pay the corkage fee at better restaurants. This isn’t an option in my home state of Michigan, because our state liquor control board is run by money-grubbing Puritans. But if you live in a more enlightened locale, call ahead and ask the restaurant what they’ll charge to handle your bottle. Just please don’t bring anything in a box, and, if you do, don’t you dare mention that this was my idea.
Another way to keep your dining bill low is to eat in the off-season. Summer is a slow time for many restaurants, and it can be a big time for bargains. For a few years of my misspent youth, I was the editor overseeing restaurant reviews in Palm Beach. Once the 90-degree days and infestations of love bugs drove the snowbirds back north in May, the finer restaurants trotted out their summer menus. These featured four-star selections at nearly terrestrial prices, often in prix fixe deals that offered an appetizer, salad, entrée, and dessert for one price. The practice is pretty common, so you should find it being offered during whatever the off-season is where you live, too. Check the Friday entertainment section in your newspaper (gum disease!) and watch the online specials, or check with the restaurants themselves. Another potential bargain spot is restaurants in hotels and resorts. They have to remain open, but with a smaller number of guests during the slack season, they often run specials to fill the dining room with locals.
Another tactic comes from my former running buddy in New York City, The Big Man from Brooklyn, who’s now happily ensconced in Florida (where, unlike most city transplants, he doesn’t insist on driving 32 mph in the passing line of the turnpike with his blinker permanently on). The Big Man has become a mystery shopper, which means he gets paid to try out a variety of goods and services, then files a detailed report to aid the company in improving its products and customer service. At first, The Big Man focused on services that he usually paid for, such as oil changes, but he can also score assignments to check out movie theaters, and he’s added some impressively upscale restaurants to his roster. It’s extra work, and most times it still costs him a few bucks in the end, but it’s the perfect way to get some entertainment for nearly free.
“It certainly works if you’ve got three hours and can type and pay attention to details,” The Big Man says. “You’re not saving money if it’s not stuff you have to do. I don’t have to stay in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale or go to Outback Steakhouse, but I do have to get my oil changed, so if I mystery-shop a Jiffy Lube, that’s 40 bucks in my pocket. But I can get dressed up, take my mom out to a fancy steak house, and get a $200 meal for three hours’ worth of work.”
To do that, The Big Man has signed up with a mystery shopping service and e-mails to volunteer for specific assignments, which are posted each month. He then has a variety of detailed observations he has to report, including specific aspects of his customer experience, such as how long he waited to be greeted, did he notice a manager on hand, and even how his menu was presented at the table. He may have to follow a specific procedure to make the reservation, bring a companion, order a drink at the bar first, note the condition of the restrooms, and order a set number of dishes. And he has to submit all this within about twelve to twenty-four hours after visiting the restaurant.
The Big Man found his mystery shopping company by searching the Web, but watch out for frauds. Any place that requires you to pay money up front should automatically be considered suspect, and definitely check with the Better Business Bureau and search online for complaints before putting up any of your own cash and hoping to be reimbursed. A good place to start is at the Web site of the Mystery Shopping Providers Association North America,2 the trade association representing the “customer experience metrics industry.” The Web site includes a good guide for those who want to become shoppers, and it offers a certification program ($15 or $75), which may or may not help you land more work but is designed, the association says, to train shoppers on what to expect and to offer tips on how to work efficiently. The site also has a full rundown on avoiding scams and notes that real mystery shopping firms don’t ask you to pay them or offer to pay you in advance, which is a scam to stick you with a bad check. You can check legitimate mystery shopping firms at the association’s site and contact them directly.
The one drawback to mystery shopping is that . . . it’s a mystery. That means you’re not telling the staff and eating for free, but instead paying up front and waiting to be reimbursed once you file your report. You’ll need to either float the cash in advance or carry the charge on your credit card. If you use plastic, be disciplined enough to deposit your entire payment to cover the charges. Don’t use the money for other purposes while your card balance swells, since adding debt defeats the idea of saving money.
In many cases, The Big Man notes, what you’re paid won’t cover the entire cost of your purchase, but in that event, he’s warned in advance. He also checks online to see menu prices. A dinner for two at a high-end steak house, for example, runs about $220 with tax, tip, and valet, but he only gets $200 for the review. At other times he has mystery-shopped a Checkers drive-through, a much easier assignment. “That was the cost of a No. 3 combo that I didn’t have to spend, and I didn’t have to have peanut butter for lunch on Tuesday.” A recent assignment to mystery-shop a movie theater offered $7 and covered two tickets and up to $6 for a beverage.
Overall, The Big Man says, “The companies know exactly what they want, and if you’re willing to do it and wait for your money, you can go have a very nice dinner for nearly free.”
Other dining deals include frequent-diner cards, which offer items such as a free entrée or meal for every ten paid meals. The Entertainment.com coupon book (based right in here in Metro Detroit, I’ll note), which is often sold during fund-raisers by schools and other nonprofit groups, can be another source of savings. A coupon for car rentals paid for the price of the book in our case, and there were enough offerings from restaurants we know we like to make it worth the effort to dine on specific days or from limited menus.
The Bottom Line
Goal: $1,000
Week 1—Transportation . . . $41.61
Week 2—Miscellaneous . . . $132.89
Week 3—Utilities . . . $139.39
Week 4—Kid Costs . . . $114.50
Week 5—Work Expenses . . . $90
Week 6—Personal Spending . . . $104
Week 7—Entertainment . . . $108
Total monthly savings . . . $730.39
Left to cut . . . $ 269.61
With our entertainment expenses averaging $85 a week, the bulk of it was for dining out, with $66 a month going to the gym so that Li’l Money could play in the pool. In the last month there had been exactly one grown-ups-only outing, for a whopping $55—not even as much as the gym membership. A few months earlier, it was all fast-food and family dining, with nary a date night in the bunch.
It was clearly not going to hurt anybody in our household (and, in fact, it would make us healthier) to cut back on this category altogether and to direct more of what was left to restaurants that don’t feature sporks. Trimming $25 a week produced monthly savings of about $108 (remember: 52 weeks a year divided by 12 months = 4.3 weeks to each month). The entertainment category was a good candidate for a cash-only envelope spending approach, which not only discourages overly casual spending on casual dining but also encourages stockpiling cash for a big night instead of a Big Mac.
The quest to save can become all about spending less, but you also need to weigh how much you get for your money. In our case, it wasn’t enough. And since we couldn’t add a couple hundred bucks a month for visits to restaurants that don’t hand out crayons when they seat you, we not only needed to spend less, but we also needed to think more about where we did that spending.
I decided we should celebrate our new approach to fun at the Funny Money house and planned a sophisticated night of grown-up amusement. It would be just the kind of adults-only bonding that holds a marriage together.
“Honey,” I said to Mrs. Funny Money, “let’s go out and have some fun tonight.”
“You bet!” she replied, heading for the door. “But if you get home before I do, leave the porch light on.”