Three cool ways to save money

Not a good plan.

Brett Arends, writing in The Wall Street Journal, suggests:

1. Try homemade month.

Say goodbye to the soy chai lattes, burritos, pastas primavera and Overflowing Bucket O' Fries (a genuine bar food item spotted in Boston). Pick a month—any month—and try not eating out at all, for breakfast, lunch or dinner. It's not easy. But these meals add up.

It costs you $10 to get a sandwich at work for lunch. It would cost you $2 in ingredients, and five minutes of time, to make that sandwich at home. Do you earn $96 an hour, after tax? If so, you can ignore the rest of this article. If not, try making the sandwich.

Financial planners say that when new clients audit their household spending for the first time, the biggest shock is usually how much they spend in restaurants—70% of which goes to paying the restaurant's rent and labor costs.

Why do we go out to restaurants that promise "homemade" food?

2. Stop the bleeding.

If you're like a lot of families, you spend $200 or even $300 a month on cellphones, cable or satellite TV and Internet.

Take a scalpel—or an axe—to that budget and see what you can cut. Call your cellular provider and your TV company—cable or satellite—and haggle. Chances are, they will cut you a deal.

Try dumping pay TV altogether and watching movies and TV instead using an online service like Netflix, Amazon or Hulu Plus (partly owned by News Corp., owner of The Wall Street Journal), for less than $10 a month.

If your family spends $200 a month on cellphones and pay TV, that's $2,400 a year. Over the course of 20 years, if you invested that money instead at 4%, you'd have an extra $70,000.

Haggle. Cut.

3. Hold a two-week auction.

Turn your house into Sotheby's for two weeks. Go on eBay.com and Craigslist.com and auction off everything you don't need. The spare cellphone(s) in the kitchen drawer. The second, unused lawn mower. The designer vase you never use.

Everything.

Set yourself a target. Double it. Then see how close you get. Get the entire family involved. Removing clutter is a great stress-buster, as psychologists since Ralph Waldo Emerson have noticed.

This project will raise some free money. A process like this also has a remarkable way of focusing everyone in the family on the true value of a dollar.