Welcome to the February 1, 2008 edition of Carnival of Everything Finance.
We had over 120 really good articles submitted for this edition. Unfortunately I could not include all of them.
Earning Money
Matthew Paulson presents What to Do When You C…

Vary Up Your Menu - Most people who try to eat cheaply do really well for a week eating the same crap - like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (or Tip Dude’s Harlem “sammiches”), or ramen noodles. Then the next week they get so fed up eating the same bland synthetic garbage that they splurge on a real lunch three days out of the week. There, you’ve just blown your budget.

That’s a great point! Amazingly, my husband does just fine with the same sandwich and yogurt lunches day after day. I’m the one who eats dinner leftovers.

But my circumstances are different than most worker bees… I live about a mile away from work and therefore get to go home for lunch. When I do have to eat at the office, I bring frozen dinners.

Tip Dude has consistently found that when the fully-allocated costs of buying the ingredients, storing the ingredients, and dealing with the rotten-but-unused ingredients is much higher than buying pizza at $2-$3 a slice. It’s the economy of scale in pizza making. Did you factor in the cost of energy used to power the oven when you made the pizza? Cost of operating the freezer? Cost of detergent used to clean the cooking utensils? For example, did you know that a small freezer cost about 36 cents per day to run? When you buy a slice of pizza, these ‘hidden’ costs are shared over many many people who visit the same pizza hole-in-the-wall, and the result is that even after considering the profit motive, you may still have a cheaper pizza.