Savvy Spending

By Jennifer Hopfinger
March 16, 2009 01:47 PM

Good old-fashioned penny-pinching seems like the smartest financial strategy these days, and Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine has devoted its March cover story to that rudimentary topic. Sure, business magazines have dedicated big features to budget management before, but this article, entitled “Save $50 a Day,” gets to the nitty-gritty. The magazine sought ways to shave household costs in every way possible.

Only a few very small graphics - a piggy bank, a grocery cart, movie ticket stubs - grace the cover, which sets an appropriate tone for an article about creating a more Spartan lifestyle. Instead of communicating through images, the cover spells out the gist of the feature in plain text: “We searched for big gains - with little pain - and sliced food bills by $2,794, found $4,643 in savings at home, discovered leisure for $3,801 less, cut $3,537 in fees from your finances, and shaved costs by $3,475 for travel. (And it all adds up to $18,250 per year!)”

So how do they do it? They break up the household budget into several sections - credit cards and banking, grocery shopping and restaurant dining, transportation, investing costs, utility bills, and entertainment and travel - and pepper each area with tips. A lot it is no-brainer stuff - things like signing up for overdraft protection to avoid bounced check fees, using a discount broker, buying a fuel efficient car, and giving up your pricey morning latte - although there are some suggestions the average reader might not have considered.

Much of the piece reads like a laundry list - useful but not real engaging - until you get to the part about how three people actually applied some of this advice and racked up some major savings - nowhere near the $18,000 per year touted on the cover, but four to five figures nonetheless.

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism