MSNBC did an interesting piece on new research that examined where people shop for groceries and their obesity levels. The study followed 2,000 Seattle-area shoppers between December 2008 and March 2009. Conclusion: The thinnest people spend the most money on food. Just 4 percent of Whole Foods shoppers were obese, compared with 38 percent of shoppers at Albertsons.

At Whole Foods, an average market basket of food cost between $370 and $420; the same basket of food at Albertson’s cost between $225 and $280.

Lead researcher Adam Drewnowski, a University of Washington epidemiology professor who studies obesity and social class, says it’s all about money: People who have the ability to pay $6 for a pound of radicchio are more able to afford health diets than consumers who buy $1.88 packs of pizza rolls to feed their kids.

“If people wanted a diet to be cheap, they went to one supermarket,” Drewnowski told MSNBC. “If they wanted their diet to be healthy, they went to another supermarket and spent more.” Just 15 percent of shoppers chose a gocery store based on its proximity to their home — the rest focused on either price or quality. “Deep down, obesity is really an economic issue,” Drewnowski said.

I’m somewhat skeptical — maybe because I never shop at Whole Wallet, and no one in my family is obese. I think obesity is a function of lack of education about which foods are healthy and which are crap; lack of time to read up on nutrition, plan and prepare healthy homemade meals, and get some exercise; and lack of discipline, because let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to order a pizza and watch TV at the end of the work day than to grill vegetables and go for an invigorating walk.

For me, the money issue is more closely link to the time issue. Consider two-parent households that have the wherewithal for one person to stay home or work part-time; that person can focus on creating a healthy environment – growing vegetables, shopping, cooking, and supervising kids so they spend more time running around outside than surfing YouTube.

But creating healthy menus for a family on a budget? Not that hard. For breakfast, we serve oatmeal, eggs, whole grain breads, and fruit;  for school lunches, I buy bagged salad on sale for $2, rinse, and toss into a Tupperware container with some raisins, sliced almonds and grilled chicken from last night’s dinner; add a piece of fruit in season and a granola bar, and voila – meals for three kids for less than $2 a person. (Yes I know it’s cheaper to buy the head of lettuce, but it’s too crazy in the mornings to be shredding the stuff.)

Tonight for dinner we’re grilling beef shiskabob with red, yellow and green peppers, onions, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and yellow squash over rice. Dinner for a family of five for $16, or $3.20 a head — nutritious, delicious and cheaper than fast food.

We base menus on what’s in season and what’s on sale, use the store’s loyalty card, occasionally clip coupons and make the most of leftovers. I get produce at the farmer’s market between June and October. (You can find one near you on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Web site.) And I shop at a warehouse club for the basics like skim milk, orange juice, whole wheat bread and bananas. 

Are you able to maintain a healthy diet on a budget? What’s your best tip?

I’ll be talking about money and happiness live tonight on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “At Issue with Ben Merens” from 5 to 6pm CST/6 to 7 pm EST.

This week’s Yahoo!Finance column looks at the trend in tracking and analyzing personal behavior, with, of course, a focus on spending and saving. I report on new research that examines characteristics and motivations shared by people who plan ahead and track their spending.

One study I had hoped to include didn’t fit the column length, so I’m featuring it here. Researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology, Cornell University and Maastricht University examined the tracking habits of grocery shoppers in two Atlanta stores, one in a middle-income neighborhood and one in area with a 36 percent poverty rate, in February 2009.

Some 90 percent of low-income participants indicated that they track their spending as they shop, with 35 percent using hand-held calculators; for middle-income shoppers, the numbers were 80 percent and 17 percent respectively, according to the study, published in the Journal of Marketing in March.

“Even though people say groceries are not a big part of the budget – 12 to 13 percent on average — among low-income people that percentage goes up very quickly,” says co-author Koert van Ittersum, Georgia Tech associate marketing professor. “When it becomes critical to keep track of spending, people become innovative and find a way to do it.”

Interestingly, the study also reinforced the necessity of real data – especially for people on tight budgets. Researchers found that people most motivated to save money are most likely to mess up their mental tracking. Here’s how they figured that out: In the lab, one group of participants was promised a cash reward, with the amount dependent on how accurately they determined the cost of 19 grocery items flashed on a screen. A second group was asked to estimate the grocery bill with no reward.

The cash-motivated group would start by trying to add exact numbers in their heads and give up after the third or fourth item, Ittersum explains. “In the end budget shoppers are more likely to overspend. As a result of trying so hard, they messed up, and their final estimate turned out to be worse than people casually asked to estimate the price of the items,” he says. “Humans are not wired to process three-digit numbers on 19 products — we can’t pull it off. If you need to be accurate because you can’t overspend, bringing a calculator is the best way to do that.

“Information is power and the more you know, the more you can make more informed decisions,” he contiues. “Depending on how important those decisions are, it might be important to track certain behaviors.”

I would argument is that as long as the tools and analysis are so readily available, everyone should track their spending, because small decisions snowball into life-changing scenarios over time. “Not many people end up in debt overnight — it’s accumulation of many small decisions that end up causing a whole lot of trouble,” says Ittersum.

BusinessWeek recently ran a story called “Nine Ways Spending Changes in Retirement.” A professor interviewed in the story suggested that retirees “estimate that you will be spending anywhere from 100 to 110 percent of your working budget if you are planning to have an active lifestyle.”

That frankly makes no sense to me unless the retirees in question have no children. Many of the costs my husband and I incur relate to the raising and nurturing of our three kids:  College savings. Private school tuition. Enrichment Activities. Clothing. Food. Orthodontist. Five airline tickets for the family vacation.  When I look at my spending categories in Mvelopes.com, the online software I use (and the site where I write a column), nearly every category has some connection to children.

And I have daughters. My siblings tell me that their teen boys devour groceries. One of my sisters and one brother each had a son go off to college this past fall; they both remarked over Thanksgiving that the milk went sour for the first time before it could be finished, because there was one less person drinking it. That’s a phenomenon that’s probably rippling through their household expenses: water, power, gasoline for the car… the list goes on and on.

Granted, your kids could move out and you could suddenly replace those expenses with extensive travel, or expensive health care issues. But financial planners I talk to tell me that people who are savers and conservative spenders rarely change their style in retirement.

Is the professor right? Do you think you’ll need the same income in retirement? Or would you eliminate whole categories of spending when the kids leave the nest? Comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley dot com.

Editor’s Note: Please welcome Alix, a writer and married mom of three kids (ages 6, 4 and six weeks!) who will be guest-posting for the blog on a regular basis. I met Alix when she moved to New Jersey from Washington D.C. She’s a sharp, thoughtful freelance writer who’s spend the last 15 years covering health care, the arts, education and the environment. When she moved to Jersey she decided to clean up her act, environmentally speaking, and spent the last year figuring out how to reduce, reuse, recycle — and save money. She’ll show you how going green can be easy and cheap – and she’ll chronicle her eco-exploits – and other adventures in saving money — here.

When it comes to your groceries, it’s easy to excuse yourself from “going green” by saying it’s too expensive. Just look at the price of organic food. Still, there are good reasons to go for it and you can start by “cross-shopping” — the way you might buy a dress at Target and splurge on the accessories at a department store. In other words, you do not need to buy organic everything. I sure don’t. Certain produce, milk, chicken and meat always get the bump up to organic. A few tips:

-Organic milk always costs more, but shop around—Target offers a good price, I‘ve noticed, and the Whole Foods 365 brand is not certified organic but the milk has no antibiotics.

-The criteria to earn a “Certified USDA Organic” label can exclude produce that is grown without chemicals or pesticides. Find a farmers’ market near you to buy local, and ask the sellers how the food was grown. Produce that has a thick peel — bananas, citrus fruits and avocados — offers some natural protection against pesticides.

We love farmers markets!

-Use coupons. Mambosprouts.com focuses specifically on healthy, natural and organic coupons — just click and print. Organic producers including Stonyfield Farm, Annie’s Homegrown and Earthbound Farms offer coupons on their own websites. You can find some of these brands, and other organics, in bulk at Costco.

-Spend more on organics by spending less on those individual snack-sized portions. According to research from the University of Florida, packaging makes up one-third of all waste generated. Per-ounce, single-servings can be 50 percent more expensive, and generate twice the waste as products packaged in bulk. You can save more than $50 a year by avoiding single-serving food items, the study found.  Buy reusable containers and then purchase cheaply in bulk.

-Eat less meat. This is good for your body and good for the planet. Even Paul McCartney is advocating No Meat Mondays. A huge source of global warming is all the cows in our country, and waste runoff from the giant chicken farms near the Chesapeake Bay is poisoning the water. Alternative proteins are not only better for you and the planet, they are cheaper! Grains like quinoa, spelt, faro; any sort of bean; nuts, eggs—all of these are excellent sources of protein and much less expensive than meat. For recipes, check out the blog of Amanda Louden, a holistic nutrition educator in California and mom of two, who posts her recipes online at www.mydailydiner.com.

-Grow a garden! The cleanest tomatoes will always be the ones you grow in your backyard. Sites such as www.backyardgardener.com show you how to grow your own produce.

Finally, walk into the store with your canvas reusable bags in hand, ready to drop in your cart for checkout. I’m not going to try to sell you on the $0.10 per bag savings some stores offer. This is purely an altruistic move on your part. I will say that canvas or reusable bags are sturdier than paper or plastic so you will grow to prefer them. It’s a tough habit to start, however. So many times I was at the checkout with a cart full of groceries when I realized all my reusable bags were still in the kitchen. So I put the bags in my car. The frustration and aggravation at the checkout is considerably heightened when the bags are in the parking lot of the supermarket. Eventually I got into the swing of it, and now it’s a habit.

If you have ideas to save green while you shop green, comment here or send them to laura at laurarowley.com.

I co-hosted a Blogger Briefing this week on behalf of Kodak for a group of influential mom bloggers. I shared some savings tips (see previous post) and then asked for their ideas. As I expected, they had some terrific ones. Here are just a few quick highlights:

-Heather from LittleMissKnowItAll.com suggested dumping Netflix or other movie-by-mail services in favor of RedBox, where you can get first-run movies for $1 a night. (There are 12,000 locations, including one right in front of my local grocery store, so I’m planning to give it a try.) Heather adds that RedBox often promotes codes online for a free movie to get consumers to try the service, so do a Yahoo search (or check her site for the codes).

-Nicole from Mom Trends, whose blog focuses on style, just redecorated a nursery by throwing a bright splash of color on just one wall (requiring one can of paint rather than three) and using wall decals rather than expensive wallpaper. She also recommends repurposing artwork — the most expensive part of framing is the frame and the glass, she points out. Remove a tired print, buy a new mat and frame pictures of the kids.

-Nicole also recommends finding a food co-op in your area to save on groceries; she belongs to one of the nation’s largest — the Park Slope Food Co-op, which has 14,000 members. You have to volunteer a few hours a month, but Nicole says the savings are worth it! To search for a co-op near you, click here.

-Amy from Selfishmom.com says giving an allowance to her four- and seven-year-old saves money. The kids know that certain treats — such as the ice cream from the truck jingling its way up the street — have to be paid for out of their personal stash. (I’ve also found giving kids control of their own purse strings also cuts down on the “Mom, can I have….” every time you walk into Target.)

-Marcy of The Glamorous Life Association is a big fan of bartering. She trades advertising on her blog for kids’ services, getting a 50 percent discount on her son’s Tae Kwon Do class and free entertainment for one of her kid’s birthday parties. “They were thrilled with the trade,” she says. “It never hurts to ask!”

-As for family vacations, Christine from FromDatestoDiapers just took her six kids to Las Vegas for the week. Rent a unit that has a mini-kitchen, or at least request a microwave, she advises. (Some hotels send them to the room, just as they’d send an extra cot.) Buying cereal and muffins for breakfast and packing snacks while touring saves on the budget; click here for her funny observations on the trip. 

We usually rent a condo and buy groceries on vacation, but Katja from Skimbacolifestyle offered an idea I hadn’t heard before: If you bring food from home, freeze a case of juice boxes and put them in the bottom of the cooler. Her family travels everywhere by car, and she swears this keeps the food in the cooler cold for three days.

Thanks to all the mom bloggers who participated in the briefing for their tips! I would love to hear your tips as well. You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

(Full disclosure: I am the spokesperson for Kodak’s Print & Prosper campaign. However, Kodak did not pay for this post, I just really liked these ideas. M&H.com does not accept payment for posts.)

This week the folks at Kodak asked me to share some savings tips with consumers. (Full Disclosure: I am the spokesperson for Kodak’s Print & Prosper Promotion. However, the company did not pay for this post. M&H.com does not accept payment for posts.) Kodak estimates  that the average consumer spends $180 a year on ink, while its All-in-One printers averaging $70 a year. (Click here to figure out what you’re spending.)

That’s a great illustration of the fact that boosting your savings sometimes means simply patching the small leaks can make a big difference. Take a tour through your home, and you’ll find savings in every room:

Kitchen

The average household spent $2,700 on food purchased away from home in 2007. If you can cut that by one-third by eating at home and bringing leftovers and snacks to work more often, that’s $900 a year. To avoid the take-out trap (and create lunch leftovers):

Plan at least four to five dinners for the week, basing menus on what’s on sale in your store circular (most are available online). Use the store’s loyalty card religiously, and be willing to buy different brands, based on lowest cost.

Register for free at a coupon site such as couponmom.com. It publishes weekly lists by state and store showing the best deals, and whether a coupon is available for an item by listing the circular name — such as “Smart Source” — and its date. Subscribe to the local Sunday paper, pull out the circulars each week, write the date on them and put them in a drawer. When it’s time to shop, clip the relevant coupon and go. You can also easily search for them online, download and print.

Buy ingredients in bulk at a warehouse club. Then double the recipe, freeze the second meal, and set up a meal swap with a friend so you have more menu variety. (You can also get produce cheaper at a warehouse club; I split the giant packages with my friend Kim to avoid spoilage.)

Media Room/Home Office

Americans pay an average of $60 for cable, but only watch 15 channels, according to the Consumers Union. If you pay for premium cable services, call your provider and put the service on “vacation mode.” You’ll still receive basic service but save temporarily on the extras – and get a good sense of whether you miss them. (If you don’t, call the cancellation department and say you’re considering eliminating service altogether – this department has the best deals on hand to keep you as a customer.)

Beware the “vampire” drain of electricity from appliances and electronics in “standby mode” — turned off but still plugged into the wall. One study found standby power consumes 5 percent of electricity and costs $3 billion. Plug items into fuse-protected power strips that don’t suck energy from the wall when turned off.

If you work from home part of the time but don’t have a fax machine, send faxes for free through faxzero.com. The service puts an ad on the cover sheet, and limits customers to two three-page faxes each day. An add-free option: Faxaway charges by the minute, and a typical fax costs less than a quarter (much less than a copy shop like Kinkos). Meanwhile, you can receive faxes for free through k7.net (you have to use it at least once a month to keep your account active).

Bathroom

Water bills can also be cut back 25 to 60 percent just by replacing your old showerheads and faucets with low-flow aerating models for $10 to $20 each. Look for a model that’s 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) or less. The average household spends $474 a year on water, so your savings can be anywhere from about $120 to $285 a year.

Medicine cabinet: Only about one-third of prescription drug purchases are mostly or fully covered by insurance, according to a recent Consumer Reports survey, and prices can vary by as much as $100 for the same drug. Always ask your physician for a generic equivalent, which can cost up to 40 percent less, then shop around. About a dozen states sponsor websites that help you compare prescription prices. Discount stores and warehouse clubs offer the most popular generic drugs for as little as $4 a month.

Rethink grooming products. Americans spend an average of $577 a year on grooming supplies, but many people spend more without getting more bang for their buck. For example, Consumer Reports found a skin cream that sells for $19 in drug stores performed better than one that sells for $176 in department stores. A technical test conducted by Pantene found it performed as well as the top four salon brands. Just switching from salon hair care products to an affordable brand such as Pantene can save $80 a year.

Households spend an average of $1,500 a year on drycleaning, and 65 percent of those clothes are washable, according to Proctor and Gamble research. Wool, cashmere, silk, rayon, polyester and spandex can all be laundered. Assuming you begin to wash just half the clothes you dryclean, that’s $750 a year.

A few tips: Use the delicate or hand wash cycle and cold water, and a gentle fabric care product. Lay wool and cashmere flat to dry; everything else, including cotton and linen, can be thrown in the dryer on a low-heat setting, then pressed. Suits should be hung up immediately, aired out, and spot cleaned with a lint-free cloth. Follow that routine, and you can limit dry cleaning to two to four times a season.

In Every Room: Utilities

A programmable thermostat costs about $30 at the hardware store but can save as much as 25 percent on your energy bills by turning down the heat or air conditioning when you’re away from home or sleeping, according to the Energy Department. For the average utility payer, that works out to about $250 a year. Boost your savings even more by setting your water heater at 120 degrees.

Cell phone plans: The website letstalk.com offers an overview of various plans, and services such as Billshrink.com and Validas.com analyze your cell phone bill for a small fee and show you where to find savings. (Billshrink says its clients save up to $300 a year.) Alternately, use a pre-paid service such as Boost, a division of Sprint, which recently began offering unlimited voice, text and web browsing for $50 a month.

Boosting Income

Finally, layoffs and job insecurity are prompting more people to look for opportunities to make extra cash on the side. Be wary of “work at home” scams. Instead, consider opportunities to sell household items on eBay or Craigslist; virtual call center companies such as Liveops.com, Willow.com, AlpineAccess.com and teamdouble-click.com; and sites such as guru.com, elance.com, and oDesk.com, where you can market accounting, graphic design and other skills on a freelance basis.

Do you have great ideas for saving and boosting income? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

I did a segment on the Weekend Today Show this morning looking at best bets for your finances online. Americans conducted 13.5 billion online searches in January – many of them looking for financial info. The web offers online courses, financial calculators to help you plan, shopping comparison sites and  social networking sites where you can connect with other people about money.

Then I went running with my friend Pam, who said I talk too much with my hands on T.V. (true) and she couldn’t keep up with all the websites I mentioned. So this post is for you, Pam!

Here are the details on the education sites for beginners: First check out the Cooperative Extension System. It brings together the teaching and research of more than 100 universities, and has more than 3,000 county offices. It offers online courses, you can click on your state to get information about classes in your area, and you have the ability to submit financial questions and get an expert response by email. A site with similar features is called Wi$eup from the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau – aimed at Gen X and Gen Y Women.

And finally there’s the OpenCourseWare Consortium — a group of 250 universities around the world that offer dozens of online courses for free, 17 in the U.S., including heavy hitters like Columbia University and MIT. They have advanced courses in economics; I found two basic personal finance courses at the University of California – Riverside and Utah State University.

Then there’s an ocean of financial information sites, if you know how to surf them. Look to the non-profit, ad-free education sites so you can be sure there’s not a bias toward a particular financial product or service. Before using a site, look at the “About” section and check the background and credentials of the people running the site. For instance, the Federal Trade Commission offers good educational resources on its “Consumer Information” tab. The site 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy is sponsored by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants so you know it’s been vetted by professionals.

Yahoo!Finance has calculators and how-to guides, Microsoft Office has free Excel budgeting templates, you can find the best interest rates on savings accounts at www.bankrate.com or www.moneyaisle.com, and then there’s the whole world of coupons.

In January, Yahoo searches for the “Free printable online coupons” rose 3800 percent from the year-ago period. You can go to a more generic site like www.smartsource.com or go right to the manufacturer. For instance, Proctor and Gamble lets you register to have coupons emailed directly to you, and, depending on your grocery store, can even be downloaded electronically right onto your store’s loyalty card. You can also register at major brand like General Mills and get access to coupons that are only available online. So it’s worthwhile to check the sites of the brands you buy most. And if you do buy one and get one free, consider donating the second item to your local food pantry. The need is huge right now.

Finally,  I mentioned two budgeting and social networking sites, www.wesabe.com and www.geezeo.com  – that have social networking spaces where people share ideas about saving, paying down debt and other topics. Since money can be tough to talk about with friends, it’s nice to find a community where you can commiserate — and celebrate when you reach your goal.

What’s your favorite online tool? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

I did the “big shop” yesterday for groceries and discovered that it pays to check your receipts. Before I hit the store, I went to couponmom.com to get my store’s weekly specials and then pulled the relevant coupons out of my coupon drawer (see my other post on how to maximize this site for savings). I sometimes hate putting time and energy into outwitting the grocery store, but it’s like jogging — you’re happy with the results at the end. (And both take about 40 minutes.) 

This week, six different manufacturers were offering cash back for buying multiples of their products. I chose Quaker ($2 back for buying four items), Welches and Dial ($5 back for six items) because those are products I already buy. A purist would add up the cost of the required items and subtract the cash back, then figure out if that’s cheaper than the generic. I didn’t do it, because my kids like these brands. (And I’ve found that the store brand does not always beat the brand name in price, especially when you’re wielding a doubled coupon.)

Anyway, at the checkout I cut my $148 bill to $100 – $35 in loyalty card and coupon savings, and $12 in cash back to apply to my next shopping purchase. Except when I looked through all of the receipts the cashier handed me, there was only a $2 cash back coupon — $10 was missing. I had to go to the customer service desk, where the service rep said computer errors were pretty common. So make sure you’re getting the savings you deserve. Here’s a good piece from the Seattle Times on the topic.

What’s the worst error you’ve encountered in your transactions? You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

An historic election sweep, another market decline of more than 5%, and lots of hard work ahead for the new president. Clusterstock has a nice concise piece summarizing the challenges Barak Obama will face when he takes office. And check out this story today on Reuters looking at how Democrat control could affect the mutual fund industry.

On the personal finance front, intriguing story about the cost of healthy food by Tara Parker-Pope in today’s New York Times. She profiles several people who tried to live on as little as $1 a day, as many people in poor countries do. Not surprisingly, the menu featured lots of oatmeal and peanut butter and jelly.

I discovered yesterday, to my consternation, that a tall skim latte has 100 calories. I’m not a daily Starbucks drinker; I indulge once or twice a month. Anyway, after reading a report that found keeping a food diary can double your weight loss, I decided to write down what I ate, and looked up the calories on Starbucks.com. (I’m not overweight but must be thinner than my sister Mary before our family reunion in August. Hopefully she won’t read this.)

I had this idea in the back of my mind that there are no calories in a tall skim latte, which is absurd, since the skim milk has to count for something. But these are the mental tricks we play when we don’t have a handle on the real numbers.

The process works the same for money as it does for food. Unless you write down exactly what you’re spending your money on, it will be impossible to figure out why you’re not making progress toward your financial goals. Unless you crunch the numbers with a credit card payoff calculator and figure out how much that interest really costs, you’ll continue to run up debt.

See this post for an overview of how to track your spending the old-fashioned way. As my finances grew more complicated, I switched from pencil and paper to online budgeting software. I use Mvelopes, which links to your checking, savings and credit cards, and electronically records all your activity. It shows up in a big transaction folder, and you click and drag each item into the right category: food, rent, clothing, and so on.

I also discovered yesterday that salad really does have almost no calories. And is cheaper, and better for you, than a latte.