We all know the standard money-saving tips that are now all over the media. Clip coupons, drive less, shop sales. But small areas you probably never thought about can save nickels and dimes that build up into dollars. These are easy, painless ways to put some extra jingle in your pocket.

1. Print your own greeting cards. I regularly receive unsolicited cards and envelopes from charities. Some have beautiful wildlife or outdoor scenes. I print my own greeting inside using my computer and send them to young grandchildren, nieces, and nephews for birthdays and holidays.
2. Don’t use drive-through windows—save gas. If you simply must go get fast food or coffee, park your car and walk inside rather than idling in a long line. But eating at home is cheaper and healthier.
3. Check your car insurance rates. You might qualify for a senior discount, a multi-car discount, or one based on low mileage driven. If your car is older, consider dropping some of the bells-and-whistles coverage.
4. If you won’t be driving for a month or more (foot in a cast; around-the-world cruise, snowbirding with your other car), call your agent and temporarily suspend coverage on the unused car.
5. Review your homeowner’s insurance. I recently refinanced to a lower mortgage rate and discovered the automatic inflation factor in my policy had my home valued at 50% over its appraised value. I asked the insurance company to re-inspect it, and I saved $100 per year with a more reasonable coverage limit.
6. Wash out and reuse plastic food storage bags. Swish around warm water with a couple drops of dish liquid inside, rinse, and let them dry on the handles of your knife block.
7. Don’t buy trash bags. Use bags from grocery or department stores. If you recycle as much as is allowed, you shouldn’t need giant trash bags. Setting out huge bags that are half-empty is like tossing a handful of change in your trash each week.
8. Try a less expensive brand of an old standby product you have automatically used for years: store-brand paper towels, the other brand of gelatin, different coffee, a substitute laundry detergent. You might find you can’t tell any difference from the other product—or the new one might be better. Continued purchases could save you money in the future.

When it comes right down to it, most things in life are a trade-off of time and money. Most of us today pay others (save time) to do things we could do ourselves (save money). At one extreme, none of us wants to grow our own cotton, spin the thread, weave the fabric, cut the cloth, and sew our own clothing. ’Way back when, our ancestors did just that. At the other extreme, few of us have servants to lay out our clothes, draw our bath, and fill our sherry glass. Most of us are somewhere between these two polar opposites. And in between lay the opportunities for savings.

Simple example: eating out. We are all perfectly capable of fixing our own food (save money). Now that we’re retired, we have plenty of time to do that, but at least a couple times a week, we pay others to do that (save time). It takes time to prepare a meal: plan, shop, cook, serve, clean up. If we don’t think we have the time, we pay others for their time.

In the kitchen, you can save money by buying in bulk and repacking into meal-sized or recipe-sized portions (save money). You can buy whole chickens and cut them up yourself. Dice and chop your own vegetables and fruits, rather than buying cored, peeled pineapple in a plastic container or cantaloupe in tidy little cubes (save time). Frozen chopped onions are convenient, but you can buy three pounds of fresh onions and dice your own for the same cost as a 12-oz. bag of pre-diced.

Another example: personal grooming. How about haircuts? We all go to someone else to cut our hair (save time). We could do it ourselves, but, good grief, how would we look!? If you had been cutting your own hair since you were 20 (save money), you’d probably look just fine. It’s not too late to learn. If you are talented with your hands (sewing, drawing, woodcarving, decorating cakes), you can probably do a passable job of haircutting.

Hair coloring to hide our emerging gray? We can do that at home (save money), but many of us hire someone else to do it (save time).

Nail care takes only an emery board, a nail clipper, and a bottle of polish at home (save money). At a salon, it takes at least $30 for someone to do that for us (save time).

Simple auto care is a time vs. money area. We can fill our own tanks, check our own tire pressure, and change our own oil (save money). Rotating tires is a long and dirty job and most of us pay someone else to do that (save time), but as retirees, we have the time, if we want to spend it.

Yard care is a familiar time vs. money area. Of course, we can mow our own lawns, rake our own leaves, and trim our own shrubs (save money). It’s good exercise for us and we can make sure the work meets our own picky standards. But many of us hire someone to do that (save time), whether it is a neighborhood teenager or a professional lawn service.

Most home repairs are simple enough to do ourselves (save money). Need to fix a leaky faucet? Spend time on the Internet to find all the information you need. Brand new faucets come with do-it-yourself instructions (save money). You can paint walls, fix a light switch, replace a doorknob, scrub your deck, and unclog a toilet. Or you can pay someone else to do those things (save time).

If you are serious about sticking to your budget, you should be serious about investing your time to save your money.

Your water bill is likely not a major worry for you. Other utility bills are much higher and water is a necessity, after all. In today’s economy, however, all bills are fair game for reduction and water bills can be cut with little effort. Besides cash, you’ll be helping to conserve water and save the planet.

1. Water consumption peaks in the summertime, as do your water bills. Watering the landscape is the biggest use of water, and even if you want to keep your lawn and garden green, you can increase efficiency and save water while doing that. Water during the early morning hours, when overall water usage is low. Temperatures are lower and winds are generally calm, so more water will end up on your plants and less will evaporate into the atmosphere. Water deeply and less often.
2. Use a rain barrel to save water for your garden. You can buy a commercial container or make your own. A spigot in the bottom of the barrel simplifies draining its contents. Consider mini-rain barrels inside. Think about the water that runs down the drain as you wait for it to get hot in the shower or the kitchen sink. Save that water and use it to water indoor or outdoor plants.
3. Use a broom, not a hose, to clean your driveway, sidewalk, garage floor, and deck.
4. Fill a pan or bowl with water to clean a few small items in the kitchen sink, whether dishes or vegetables, rather than letting the water run to wash them. Along the same lines, turn off the water while you brush your teeth.
5. Repair leaks in faucets or toilets. In addition to being annoying, they can waste hundreds of gallons of water a year. If you can hear a toilet “running,” call a plumber, even if you can’t see the leak.
6. Be sure all your faucets have aerators, the little screen-like devices that screw into the end of the spout to improve the spray. They increase efficiency, reducing the volume of water you need to wash up, and they cost almost nothing.
7. Skip rinsing your dishes before you load them into the dishwasher. Studies have shown that the dishes get just as clean when you load them directly from the table, so pre-rinsing only wastes water unnecessarily. Wash only full loads of dishes, as well.
8. Buy a water-saving showerhead for every shower in your house. New ones use a fraction of the water of older ones and still deliver a great-feeling shower. And take shorter showers, while we’re on the topic. If you have a family member who regularly drains the hot water heater with marathon showers, either set a timer or rap on the door to roust the water-waster.
9. Replace your old toilets with new low-flush or dual-flush models. Manufacturers have worked out the kinks and new toilets now deliver truly efficient flushing in addition to water savings. That might sound like an expensive way to save water, but it pays off in the long run.
10. Finally, don’t buy bottled water. Many of the brands are just tap water from a different city, and the cost is outrageous. If you have a refrigerator that dispenses water, it is probably already filtered at least as well as the water in the bottle. If your refrigerator doesn’t dispense water and you are concerned about water quality, buy a filter pitcher. But chances are that your own city water is as good as or better than what you buy in a bottle.

As we get older, it seems our medicine cabinets collect more drugs: potions, creams, pills, capsules, liquids, you name it. These prescriptions are expensive, even with good insurance and Medicare, so make yourself D-R-U-G S-M-A-R-T with these tips for managing your meds.

D: Different drugs within the same class often have considerably different costs. Manufacturers would like you to think that only your exact, specific drug will work for your condition, but that is not always the case. True, different people react in different ways, but you might be able to substitute a less expensive drug for your condition, such as a standard that has been around for years rather than a new formulation just released.

R: Raise the issue of cost, both for new prescriptions and for those you currently take. Your doctor probably doesn’t know what kind of insurance you have or whether you must be concerned about drug costs. With some pharmaceuticals today costing $100 for a single pill, you don’t have to be embarrassed to ask.

U: Use a pill splitter if your doctor says it’s OK in your case. Much of the cost of some medications is in the individual tablet rather than in the strength. You might be able to purchase twice the dosage for little more than your current prescription, split each pill, and reduce medicine costs by nearly half.

G: Generics are sensible substitutes for many brand-name medicines. Thousands of drugstores and grocery pharmacies now offer 30-day supplies of generics for $4 or 90-day supplies for $10. Both your doctor and your pharmacist can tell you if there is a generic version of the drug you take.

S: Samples your doctor offers free are tempting and can be welcome, but manufacturers supply those to sell prescriptions. Be sure that specific drug is the best one for your condition.

M: Make sure you tell your physician about ALL the medications you are taking, including such simple things as daily multivitamins, fish oil capsules, and herbal supplements. If you have to see a specialist for a new illness or problem that has come up, take a written list of all your prescriptions and supplements with you. Possibilities for drug interactions increase as your list of meds grows, so don’t take chances on trying to remember everything you take.

A: Ask why you need another drug if your doctor prescribes one. Ask if that is the best drug and if it is FDA-approved for your specific condition. Some drugs are prescribed for conditions or age groups other than those for which it was originally formulated, based on anecdotal evidence that it sometimes helps for this other purpose. If this turns out to be the case with your new med, ask for evidence that it is effective in your case.

R: Remember to tell your doctor about any side effects you have from any of your medicines, especially from new prescriptions. Even though drugs are tested extensively on hundreds of thousands of people, a variety of adverse side effects accompanies each medication. Perhaps only 2% of the population experiences this side effect, but if you are one of the 2%, the side effect can seriously deter your recovery.

T: Take all of your prescribed drug, and take it correctly. If it is temporary, such as an antibiotic for a sore throat, don’t stop taking the drug halfway through because you begin to feel better. Some of those nasty little fellows remain in your body, even after you feel better, and they continue to grow. This is one way antibiotic-resistant bacteria appear. They are wounded but not killed by the medicine, so they recover and become stronger when the drug is stopped. Medicines you take regularly are equally important. Your condition won’t be well controlled if you don’t take the correct amount of the drug.

Prime options for finding used items are garage sales, yard sales, tag sales, or whatever your region has named this tradition. In some areas, schools, churches, or charities sponsor annual sales where bargains are the name of the game. In our town, neighborhood associations hold annual or semi-annual sales on the same weekend each year. Watch the papers and lawn signs and you’ll soon be able to track the best ones.

The biggest advantage of garage sales is that people want to clean out their homes and they just want to get rid of their “junk,” often at ridiculously cheap prices. Except for grandchildren’s clothes, garage sales may not be the best source for clothing. Items there are often outdated and well worn, but if you’re careful, you can find current styles the owner has outgrown, whether now too large or too small.

On the other hand, home accessories and decorating items, as well as an endless array of gadgets and tools can be found at garage sales. Sellers who redecorate want to get rid of the old look and they put their treasures out on the tables for you to scoop up. Tag sales are great places to find virtually new exercise equipment that, for the owner, turned out to be hasty purchases. The size might not have fit the owner, the workout might have been the wrong kind, or the seller just got tired of the routine. Much of this type of equipment is at rock-bottom prices.

Annual sales sponsored by organizations have the advantage of gathering merchandise from many different homes, so there is a large variety of items from which to choose. Those who donate to sales at private schools or at large churches often have a finer lifestyle than the rest of us, and the pricey items they discard are beautiful and in excellent condition. Sales like these can even be considered a splurge for those of us on a budget. Here we can find items we would never dream of buying at retail, but that are affordable at these charity sales.

Of course, there is a downside to garage and tag sales. First, you nearly always must pay cash. Most individuals won’t take checks or credit cards. Second, all items, of course, are “as is.” If it doesn’t work, if it fades, if it breaks, you have no recourse. Next, if you shop individual sales, you might have to do a lot of driving to find what you want, or you might not find the item at all. (It never hurts to ask.) The combined sales, such as those held by homes associations, have the advantage of a large number of sales concentrated in a limited area. You can park your car once and walk to several different sales. The church and charity sales are much larger than any single homeowner could have, and the wide selection of merchandise offers much greater opportunity to find just the right thing.

There are so many ways to save money on food, I hardly know where to begin! I suppose the least expensive way to eat is to grow and cook your own food. It’s also one of the healthiest habits to acquire.

I grew up with a big garden in the backyard, as I expect many of you did, as well. We grew potatoes, corn, carrots, tomatoes, cabbage, asparagus, rhubarb, peas, green beans, radishes, lettuce, cucumbers, onions, and beets every year. Some years we added squash, kohlrabi, and other vegetables. And Mom always had her strawberry patch—yum! Even as a child, I knew how good homegrown strawberries were. A garden like this is a lot of work. If you have the space and the inclination, gardening is the best way I know to save money on food. I’m not going to outline how to plant or maintain a garden, which is more than an entire website, all on its own. But it’s something you might consider if you want the freshest produce at rock-bottom prices.

Smaller gardens are coming into vogue as people want to live greener and as they become pinched by the economy. Pocket gardens, container gardening, and kitchen gardens are among the many options for gardening on a smaller scale, and these smaller, manageable options appeal to many of us retirees. Early spring is perhaps the best time to enjoy homegrown goodies. Early-season crops like radishes and lettuce are grown, mature, and eaten before it’s time to set out tender annual flowers. Peas yield unmatched sweetness before frosts are over, and help enrich the soil, besides.

When warm weather comes, vegetables can be tucked into your flower beds. Fluffy fern-like carrot tops look wonderful in a border, and you can let beans vine up a fence or trellis. Big pots on your deck or patio can hold a couple tomato plants, or they can overflow with cucumbers. Small pots and window boxes can hold your favorite herbs. We have a spot in our yard where nothing would grow, so we planted the durable perennial, mint. Cabbage, kale, and spinach make good fall crops when most flowers are gone.

Gardening is a great hobby and is good exercise, as well as a thrifty way to get fresh, nutritious vegetables for the least money.

I am just dumbfounded every time I read the statistics on how many meals people eat away from home these days. OK, if they are working, few have the option to come home for lunch. (They could, however, brown-bag lunch from home.) But we’re retired, we don’t have a job anymore, and we have the option to eat 21 meals at home each week. If you’re eating out five or six times a week, cooking at home is something you should consider for saving money.

I know all the excuses: it’s hard to cook for just two people, our neighborhood café has prices so reasonable it’s cheaper than eating at home, we enjoy meeting our friends for a meal, it’s part of our social life, and so on. Let’s address these one by one.

Cooking for two is not hard, but it is different from preparing a meal for a family of growing children or teenagers. It’s an easy adjustment, and you will be amazed how much money you can save by training yourself to cook smaller portions, or by dividing a recipe after you make it and freezing the extras for a later meal.

Eating at home on a regular basis is cheaper than eating out, period. That’s not to say that the occasional restaurant special is not sometimes a very good buy, but day in, day out, it’s less expensive to cook at home, assuming you purchase the correct amount of ingredients in the first place and you don’t throw out leftovers.

Now about the social aspect: If eating out is a big part of your social life, be honest and classify it like that. Consider at least part of your eating out costs to be entertainment rather than food. Eating out is indeed fun—until you step on the scales. With rare exception, restaurant portions are too large, and that’s after you have found a place that doesn’t load your plate with fats and sugars.

Cooking at home is a proven money-saver, and it can be a pound-saver, as well. Fresh, nutritious ingredients taste better and you can control what you put in the recipe. Concentrate on recipes that feature basic, healthy ingredients that are easy to put together. If you choose recipes that freeze well, you can divide the batch into meal-sized portions, freeze, and you have a low-calorie, low-cost, nutritious lunch or dinner that can be ready in five minutes. Of course, you can go the other direction, too, and become a gourmet cook. If you truly enjoy gourmet foods, learning how to prepare them at home can save a bundle over paying restaurant prices.

Although they serve some purposes well, people increasingly view plastic bags as unnecessary evils. I tend toward the “evils” view, and I use as few as possible. I haven’t bought a trash bag in over five years, maybe ten. Our weekly trash, for two people, fits into one grocery store plastic bag most of the time. I have a stash of plastic grocery bags that will last us for years, saved from the past, when I figured I would find a use for them some day. It simply makes no sense to pay money for bags to hold something that is being thrown away!

And no, I don’t ask for plastic (or paper) bags at the grocery (or drug or discount) store. We have reusable bags in both our cars that we carry into stores. Plastic bags seem to accumulate, nonetheless. The tote bags I use for groceries are too grubby to take into clothing stores, and some items are too large for the tote bags, especially at gift-giving times. We try to avoid accepting a bag anytime, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. These bigger bags are used for extra large items that must go into the trash, such as a broken coffee maker or discards from the garage or workroom.

Dry cleaner bags accumulate, as well. I use these to cover out-of-season clothing, as well as to cover our luggage, which we store under a stairway. I recently donated about 25 dry cleaner bags to a charity organization that was having a sale of used prom/evening dresses. The bags were used for storage, as well as for transporting the dresses home by their new owners.

Dry cleaning bags can be split and used as drop cloths when you paint small items. One unusual purpose that came up was surprising. We purchased a new toaster oven, which came packed in a box with foam braces around it. We flattened the box for recycling, but still had to deal with all the foam pieces. Because they weighed next to nothing, a dry cleaning bag was strong enough to hold them, and they all fit into one giant bag.

Okay, you ask, so what kind of plastic bags do I purchase? I buy zip-top freezer bags. I buy quart, gallon, and 2-gallon sizes. The 2-gallon size is used to pack our clothes when we travel. Much airline luggage is now searched, and I feel much better if I know no one will be pawing through my underwear. Packing outfits together makes dressing easier when you get to your destination. One pair of slacks or shorts plus two t-shirts will usually fit into one bag. I bought two boxes of these bags a few years ago and will probably never have to buy any more.

The quart and gallon sizes are used in the kitchen for the conventional food storage. After they are used, I wash and reuse them. A couple drops of dish liquid and some warm water sloshed around in a bag do a dandy job of cleaning them up. I dry them over the handles sticking out of my knife block.

My freezer holds many of these bags, each containing meal-sized portions. When I buy fish or meat, I divide it into as much as we will eat at one meal and freeze it that way. It stays fresher and has to be thawed only once. When produce, such as berries, is on sale in season, I buy a few extra and freeze them for when prices are double or triple. When I cook a turkey breast, I portion the leftovers into bags labeled for sandwiches, casseroles, or soups. Meal-making is so much simpler when I can pull out exactly the right amount of turkey for a recipe.

Take a look at your use of plastic bags. Can you reduce it? If you don’t already have permanent tote bags for shopping, buy some. Recycle more of your trash rather than stuffing it in a trash bag. Flatten bulky items so they don’t take up so much room in your trash bag. Don’t buy larger bags than you need and fill each one only half full. Buy smaller bags to begin with and save some money.

One last tip: Recycle as many plastic bags as you can. If your morning paper comes in a plastic bag, recycle that with your grocery bags at your local store or discount center.

A huge amount of perfectly good product—whether food, cosmetic, industrial supply, or other—gets pushed into landfills every day simply because people don’t use it up. It’s easier or faster to just toss out the last few drops (or gallons) of a substance than to take a little extra time to use it all by cleaning out the container. As has been pointed out before, most all savings are a tradeoff of time for money. Invest a little time, save a little money. In retirement, our time is easier to come by than our money.

A tablespoon of ketchup or a couple squirts of toothpaste don’t seem like much to toss, but multiply that by how many ketchup bottles and toothpaste tubes you’ve emptied in your life, and you may have dumped a lot of good product. Then consider the number of people in a city or in a nation, and the number of ketchup bottles and toothpaste tubes all those people generate, and all of a sudden, you have a lot of waste!

Cartoons like to make fun of thrifty people who like to save money. But thrifty retirees love to save money! Keep a collection of rubber scrapers in the kitchen to clean the last drop from salad dressing bottles and mustard jars. Just turn the old bottle upside down on top of the new one and leave it there a couple hours until the last drop has been transferred. Even if you mix varieties, you won’t be able to tell the flavor is slightly different.

As you use a tube of toothpaste, roll the end of it and clip it with a binder clip to help keep the paste in the business end of the tube. As you reach the end, use scissors to cut open the tube and dip your toothbrush into what’s left until it’s gone. You will always get an extra week or two of use this way. If you can save one tube a year, that’s about $3.00 in your pocket.

For a plastic bottle of shampoo or conditioner, stand the new one upside down until no more comes out, and then rinse the bottle with a little water to use every drop. Many lotions are too thick to get out that way, so you will have to use a knife to cut the bottle open and scoop out the remaining lotion. Again, what’s left lasts at least two weeks, and best of all, it doesn’t go in the landfill. A leading consumer organization discovered that some glass bottles leave as much as 20% of the product stuck inside. A bottle of lotion can cost from $5 to $50 or more, depending on what lotion you use. If you can salvage that last 20%, it could be worth $10. Now that’s saving money!

The same mindset applies to cleaning products. The few tablespoons in the bottom of a squirt bottle don’t seem like much, but it takes only a few seconds to pour that into the new bottle before you toss the old one. Remember to rinse the empty bottle of liquid laundry detergent before you toss it. There is an extra load of laundry in it for you.

I once painted the inside of both my garage doors with paint left over from the last shade of white on the outside of our house. I could have thrown it out as hazardous waste, but now the inside of the garage looks as good as the outside–for free. A gallon of paint bought new for those doors would have cost around $40, and that is money saved. Even better, the old paint is not in a landfill somewhere, polluting the Earth.

One of my favorite use-that-up techniques is my printing paper. Most of us know to print on both sides of the paper whenever possible, and I print on the back of junk mail when I can. When I retired from the corporate world a few years ago, I brought several years worth of my personal files with me. I now use it for printing paper, and I haven’t ever had to buy paper for my online business. The dates on the “back” of my new pages go back to the early 90s, and I chuckle every time I see them.

To retire on the cheap, get full use of everything you buy. Drain every last drop and use every last crumb. Use that up and save your money!

Communication services have become a major player in many household budgets in the past several years, even for those of us who are retired. How much do you pay–in total–for all that connectivity? If you want to retire on the cheap and root out savings wherever you can find them, this area is ripe for inspection. Chances are you can save yourself a tidy sum each month.

How long ago did you set up your landline phone service? What does it include? Are there options on your bill that you no longer use: conference calling, automatic callback, call blocking, an unused fax line, monthly fee plus per-minute long distance charges? Maybe you use a third-party provider that is no longer the bargain it used to be. Maybe you don’t need a landline at all. Phones are available from satellite and cable providers now, as well as from traditional telephone companies.

What about your cable or satellite bill? How many of those hundreds of channels do you watch more than once or twice a year? Perhaps you can cut back to a lower level of service that offers fewer channels. How, and how often, do you access the Internet? You might need a high-speed connection, but maybe dial-up would serve your habits, instead.

Then there is your cell phone. Do you regularly run over your minutes and pay extra? Or do you pay for more minutes than you ever use? Neither of those options is thrifty. Check your cell phone bills for the past few months and see how many minutes you usually use. See if you can change your cell plan to match those minutes more closely. I rarely use my cell phone and I was paying for hundreds of minutes each month that I never used. I switched to a pay-in-advance plan and saved over $250 a year!

All providers are hungry these days, not only for new customers, but even more, to keep the customers they already have. Call them up and see what they will do for you if you threaten to switch. The representatives who work in the section for service termination are likely to offer you better deals than the representatives you speak to for other purposes. The worst they can do is say no, but you are likely to find they will offer a variety of money-saving options. All-in-one packages can generate savings from $10 to $50 a month or more. Determine in advance which services you use most, which you really need, and which are frills that don’t provide enough advantage to be worth the cost.

Ask for discounts. Surf websites for deals. Check out bundled services. Consider downgrading. Chances are you can save yourself a tidy sum each month.