I found a brilliant article at Freakonomics today written by Stephen J. Dubner, whom I have never personally battled in a game of croquet. (In case you were wondering.) Stephen has also never attended a single one of my Petroleum Man Burnings, which does disappoint me some. But I digress.

The article has a great story about making ice cream and how, at the end of the process, the ingredients cost $12 and the ice cream didn't turn out well. Once you factor in labor costs, electricity and gas for cooking and traveling to the store, you can see he probably really took a bath.

Of course, you have to decide if you were trying to make ice cream to save money, or were you trying to make ice cream because of other quality intangibles: it brought the family together in a shared experience, you created lasting memories of the crappy ice cream you made, perhaps you learned through the process how to make better ice cream the next time.

So on the one hand you have all of the financial considerations, and on the other - the intangibles.

I was thinking about this exact thing because of the price of gasoline, food, energy, etc. My thought was, "How can I cut down our expenses by doing more and spending less?" My first idea was "couponing." I read somewhere that aggressive coupon usage can save you $600 dollars from your yearly food bill*.

BUT. Is that a good deal? Let's say that managing the coupons (hunting them down, clipping them, organizing them, hunting down the right products at the store, using the coupons - the whole process) add 5 hours a week and will therefore save you $11.53* That means you basically have a coupon job that is paying you $2.30/hr. At this point, does it make much sense? If I can earn $50/hr doing design consulting work then this would seem like robbing from my family.

At least, that's the conclusion that seemed inescapable.

But then I realized that people who do the coupon thing probably get more out of it than the merely the savings. They derive a certain pleasure and sense of accomplishment (which is perfectly deserved) and that should be calculated into any decision like this.

I guess I'm still not sure how to apply any of this. I doubt I'll be calling someone every-time something breaks or need fixed or sanded or glued or nailed, molded, or painted. But I wonder how much one should think about these decisions.

Is there something you do to save money that maybe doesn't save money but you also just love doing it? I'd be thrilled to hear of any examples out there. I would have someone blog for me but that would be an added expense with very little return, unless the person got very popular and wrote a series of witty Disney Travel Books, in which case I would mostly be happy for him. Just after I would have pounded him to jelly with my laptop.

Any couponers out there? Or anyone out there either do-it-themselves with a great rationale, or hire someone else to do it for them with an even better rationale. I'd love to hear! If you don't want to leave a comment, email me at carl@carlschaad.com or leave a note in a message not to publish it. Thanks!

*I suspect my numbers are way off, both in terms of what couponing can save when done correctly, and how much time is involved in doing it correctly. So if you double the amount saved in a year to $1200, and increase your time to 7 hours, you're still only making $14/hr. Good, but not the $50 I'm looking for. Of course, the $14 is tax-free and the $50 isn't, so it's more like $14 vs $30. Still better but not doable.