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?

Happy Thursday! I love Thursdays for a lot of reasons: I enjoy teaching my class at Seton Hall, it feels like I’m sliding into the weekend home plate, and they serve pizza at school so I don’t have to make my kids’ lunches. One less rush in the morning rush.

I have something totally funky going on with the comments function on this blog. Rest assured, experts who understand this stuff are looking into it. In the meantime, I’m receiving some really thoughtful comments and questions from readers by email, so I thought I’d give them their own post. Sorry about the comments thing – while we fix it, you can send your feedback directly to me at laura at laurarowley dot com. 

From Ruth, on the “Move Your Money Campaign” post: My husband and I have been moving our money out of big banks since 2007.  Before we married we had accounts with Wachovia, BofA, and Umbrella. The BofA account went first due to lack of local ATMs and bank locations. Then we learned that Wachovia was being taken over by Wells Fargo. We each had Wells Fargo accounts during college and the bank was extremely unhelpful with a tendency to place fees on anything. We closed that account immediately. As for Umbrella, its brick and mortar bank failed recently and was taken over by the FDIC.  So now we are in the process of closing that account.

All of this money has been transferred into a Morton Community Bank account. The bank has limited branch offices, just one per city generally, but offers 2% on checking with full reimbursement of any ATM fees. The online banking isn’t as slick as BofA, but it works and there is always a person on the other end of the line if you have trouble (like locking yourself out of your account). The bank appears to be thriving as it has expanded recently by acquiring other local FDIC closed banks.

We also have an account at the local credit union because it offered a great interest rate on refinances. We lowered our monthly payment by $700. That savings made moving our mortgage from Countrywide well worth while.

Nothing in our world should ever be “too big to fail.”  If something has grown so large that it threatens the existence of itself and/or others, then it is time to cut it down for survival reasons.  We all know what happened to the dinosaurs when their environment changed. The big banks are dinosaurs and our economic environment is changing. We’re better off not allowing them to take our money with them.  Regulation would be the best thing for the banks, but I doubt that it will happen. Congress likes to keep those individuals who have the majority of “cash on hand” happy.

Hey Ruth: Thanks for the comment. I moved my checking account too, from a national bank to a local one that pays 3.26% interest on checking and reimburses ATM fees if you jump through some hoops (10 debits, direct deposits, statements by email, etc.) I had the same experience — the online banking is functional but definitely not as slick as the big banks — but I am always able to get a real person on the phone to help. Enjoy the interest!

From Joe, on the post “Do Rich People Get the Money & Happiness Connection?“: I read with interest your column on whether or not rich people get the money and happiness connection.  I’m not sure they can.  Of late I’ve given quite a bit of thought to what will define happiness for me, next in my life.  I tend to think of things I would like to do, things that I enjoy and also how I will earn a living.  Like many others I’ve tried to figure out if I can make the two align.  It wasn’t until I read your blog today that I was reminded that money doesn’t have to be the key part of that equation.

I was child number 6 of 7 and grew up in very modest surroundings.  In retrospect we didn’t have much, but most of the people around us didn’t, so I wasn’t that aware of it until I went to school.  I have early memories of not being able to afford to do the things other kids were doing as early as fourth of fifth grade.  By high school I was keenly aware of it.  I took out loans to go to a private college where the income gap was even more noticeable.  I always worked.  But I had an awful lot of fun and made some of the best friends in my life there.

I’ve been very fortunate and now earn a comfortable living.  I don’t consider myself rich and still don’t indulge in many of the luxuries my peers do.  But somewhere along the line making money became very important to me and perhaps more an end in itself than I’d like to admit.  Perhaps I’ve started to see living a lifestyle as synonymous with my happiness, even though I have life experience to tell me it isn”t so.

Anyway, I’ve rambled on for a few paragraphs here and am not sure I’ve arrived at a point.  Just wanted to drop a note to say thanks for your post, it’s given me food for thought.

Hey Joe:  I have definitely found myself focused more on making money as I get older if only because it can be so helpful in facilitating goals like nurturing your kids (i.e., saving for college). The problem is if I think too much about money, I start to do things like take on too much work so I can save more for college — which ultimately results in my spending less time with my kids (and violates the underlying value I was trying to achieve, which was nurturing my kids).  I have to occasionally step back and think about my larger intentions in my work, and make sure they still align with my values and the sense of purpose for my life.  Thanks for your note. I appreciate your perspective.

My daughter left her cell phone in the back pocket of her jeans recently, and it went through both the washer and the dryer. (I realized something was up when I heard the thump-thump-thump in the dryer.) I assumed the phone was ruined, and suggested she start saving up for a new one. Silly me. Her friends at school told her to come home and put the phone in a bag of rice. My response: “Sure, and then go outside and wave it over your head and bawk like a chicken?” (Fans of “Dick Van Dyke” will get that reference.)

In any case, it worked. We opened up the phone and buried the battery and the cellphone in a plastic bag containing about one cup of rice for three days. We checked it after two days and the phone worked but the texting didn’t; that third day in rice revived the text function. Apparently the rice soaks up the moisture in the phone. (I did a subsequent search for “wet cellphone” it returned more than a million hits — so I appear to be the last person on earth to know this money-saving trick.)

Got any weird tips to rescue one of your belongings from a similar mishap? Comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley dot com.

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.

My fifth grader was out of school last Thursday and Friday. Because of  concerns over the H1N1 virus, there’s a new rule: A student with a fever has to stay home for 24 hours after the fever subsides.  So she picked up a book — the next installment in the Pendragon series, a huge hit with her friends — and read. And read. And read. And when the weekend came, she continued to read, and finished the book by Sunday afternoon.

All of my kids are reading more this fall, because we eliminated the cable television back in August. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of cable or simply academic maturity, but one of my kids advanced to the highest level in three of her core courses, and started the quarter with a brand new schedule (and class sizes of just 15 students. Hurray!) My youngest has not nagged me to buy her something she saw advertised in two months, and that was something that used to happen on a daily basis.

The games we have in the closet — Boggle, Mancala, Monopoly – are no longer gathering dust. We talk more. We laugh more. They listen better. The dog is loving the extra attention.

Television is a gigantic time suck. A recent news article noted that kids age 2 to 5 are now watching 32 hours of television a week, according to Nielsen. Kids age 6 to 11 are watching abotu 28 hours a week. Those figures are the highest since 2001.

It’s not that we’re Luddites; we get the news from the internet, and movies on Netflix. And I do miss the ability to veg a little with the TV on before bed. (I’m re-reading Chekhov’s short stories instead.) There’s a new sense of control, of proactive choice in terms of the media we consume. And my oldest shocked me the other day when she said, “I really don’t miss the TV.”  Music to a mother’s ears.

Would love to hear your experiences about life with and without television. Comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley dot com.

The Nashua Telegraph of New Hampshire has a humdinger of a court story this morning. (I love local papers, and am hoping the internet will eventually help them thrive rather than killing them. Really, when would I have read The Nashua Telegraph in print?) Anyway, one Meredith Moore-Flores, 31, divorced mother of four, was sentenced to one to five years in state prison for stealing $62,000 from her employer.

Moore-Flores confessed to skimming the funds from Insight Technologies by filing bogus expense reports. (She also claimed to be a student at a local college to score tuition reimbursement.) Assistant Rockingham County Attorney Amy Connolly, the Telegraph noted, said Moore-Flores had been involved in similar schemes at two previous employers in Massachusetts, and was making $1,000 a month restitution to one of them.

Moore-Flores told the judge that she has a “spending addiction” for which she is now receiving therapy.  According to the Nashua Telegraph, Moore-Flores said: “It isn’t just about spending money you don’t have or maxing out your credit cards. It’s an attempt to buy happiness … and push aside feelings of self-doubt.”

"Confessions of a Shopaholic" looked at the lighter side of spending addiction.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,  researchers Abhishek Srivastava, Edwin Locke and Kathryn Bartol asked more than 250 graduate students and 145 entrepreneurs how important financial success was versus their other goals, and what their motives were for making money. The researchers offered alternatives such as security, the ability to donate to charity or pursue leisure activities.

Among respondents who placed a heavy emphasis on materialism, the prime reasons offered were social comparison (“To have a house and car that are better than those of my neighbor”), seeking power, showing off,  and overcoming self-doubt (“To prove that I am not as dumb as some people assumed.”) The researchers found a negative relationship between the importance of money and subjective well-being because of the motives driving acquisitive behaviors. (Interestingly,  Moore-Flores was also an entrepreneur who owned a consignment shop.)

The tragedy, of course, is when shopaholics have financial responsibility for people other than themselves.  Moore-Flores’ attorney had asked for minimal jail time because she is the primary caretaker for her kids — ages 8, 6, 4, and 2. As the tearful mother told the judge: “I thought, ‘How did I get to this point in my life? How do I explain this to my children?’ ”

Do you think Moore-Flores should get a minimal sentence or the max? Does a “spending addiction” excuse her behavior?

I write this post with a heavy heart. A few months ago I wrote a Yahoo!Finance column about a couple, Patrick and Suzy, who had been married three years and had just bought a home in Seattle. They decided to wait a year or two before having children while they paid down debt and built up their savings. Last week, while the couple walked their dog in the park, Patrick was killed by a falling tree limb. He was 32.

Patrick felt strongly about preparing fi- nancially for parenthood, while Suzy was ready to get started. When he asked my opinion, I agreed with Patrick that it made sense to wait: They needed both of their salaries to cover the bills, carried some heavy student loan obligations and didn’t know how they would afford daycare. Maybe they could have worked it out. Now we’ll never know.

I am wondering if I led them astray. Patrick was firm in his thinking; a friend reassures me that I was just a “data point” on the couple’s decision-making spectrum. But what if I had suggested they go for it, start a family and figure out the money later? What if I had advised them simply to have faith in themselves and in each other, to be flexible and open to major adjustments that might occur down the road, and jump in with both feet?

After all, my own parents took that approach. Good Irish Catholics, they had eleven children; I was the tenth. It was a different world, of course. My mother stayed home and never had outside help. (She went back to work part-time when the youngest was in first grade.) She made our clothes for a number of years. We thought nothing about sleeping three to a room. My parents never spent a dime on car seats; we all squashed into a station wagon, my brother and I squabbling in the space between the middle and back seats.

If we did “enrichment” it was a sport or activity at school, and it was free. There were no summer camps; we just took off on our bikes in the morning and came home when the streetlights came on. We drove to Michigan exactly twice on vacation when I was a kid. For years we had just one television, with a dozen channels. We spent a lot of Sundays at museums and in forest preserves, playing games and jumping in leaves.

And it worked out, because both my parents labored around the clock for decades, and prayed mightily for divine support. They had no “me” time scheduled into their calendars, and when we were small, their couple time typically involved sitting in the living room after we were all in bed, my dad rubbing my mom’s feet. In the dark, under the covers, we could hear them laughing. They were deeply committed to their child-rearing enterprise, regarding it as their purpose in life. Married 49 years with nary a public quarrel, their faith made all the difference. (My father died in my mother’s arms a week before their 50th wedding anniversary.)

Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it creates lots of options. A lot of parents, myself included, use money to try to get things right with our kids – the right safety devices, the right neighborhood and schools, the right tutoring and enrichment, the right 529 savings plans, the right colleges — so we can launch them on the right path. On the other hand, money should never replace creativity or commitment. My parents had both in spades.

Maybe money is something you should watch out of the corner of your eye when you’re contemplating decisions about life and your purpose on the planet — rather than letting it hover front and center, like a roadblock. Maybe when your heart’s desire is involved, a certain leap of faith is called for, because things can work out. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I wish I had told Patrick that when I had the chance.

Parents will be interested in a story in The New York Times today about Baby Einstein videos. Walt Disney Company is offering a refund of $15.99 each for up to four videos purchased between June 5, 2004 and September 5, 2009. For those who’ve never seen one, Baby Einstein videos feature bright colors, puppets, flashy graphics and classical music. The company, founded in 1997, claimed the products were educational for babies. Disney bought the firm in 2001

But the American Association of Pediatrics recommends that children under age 2 do not spend any time in front of a screen. I wrote about this issue in 2007 when I interviewed Susan Gregory Thomas, author of “Buy Buy Baby,” an excellent expose of the children’s “educational” video and toy business. Some child development experts even suggest there is a connection between early exposure to videos and attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Back in 2006, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over DVDs marketed to babies. As a result, the Times reports, the companies dropped the word “educational” from their marketing materials. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood thought that didn’t go far enough, and last year threatened a class-action suit for unfair and deceptive practices unless Disney offered a refund to all consumers who purchased the video since 2004. That’s now part of a settlement; click here for information on how to get your refund.

My column today on Yahoo!Finance discusses how to manage volatile income. Long-time readers know I often write from direct experience, and that’s what inspired the story. My spouse and I both work for ourseives, and our household income has fluctuated by as much as 100% from year to year.

Everywhere I look I see households experiencing similar income fluctuations: Someone is laid off, or had their hours cut; someone has to stay home with a sick child or a sick parent; someone ends up unemployed for years because of a structural change in their industry — manufacturing, IT, journalism — and goes from full-time employee to full-time contractor for the same company (with no benefits), or cobbles together a living as a consultant or freelancer. As one reader noted: “From what I see, the line between contract employee and direct employee is blurring more and more.”

I interviewed financial planner Mike Masiello of Rochester, New York, for the story. “What we’re seeing is a ton of very talented electri- cal, mechanical and indus- trial engineers who have (lost jobs) as the manufacturing base dwindles,” he says.  ”The difficulty is there really aren’t positions. One guy I knew had two master’s degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, and was competing for a job against a guy who has two PhDs.”

People with fluctuating incomes have to behave like the biblical Joseph, Masiello says: Store the seven years of bumper crops so you can get through seven years of famine. In good years, overfund retirement savings, and build four to eight months of cash reserves.  Don’t tap home equity, build up credit card debt or cash our retirement savings.

Those are the behaviors of his wealthy clients. “The millionaire-next-doors,” Masiello says (referring to the famous book by Thomas Stanley and William Danko), “are joys to have as clients because they get it. They are not into conspicuous consumption. They have a structured long-term strategy and long-term goals; they know where they are going and have a plan to get there.”

I am a frugal, no-debt kind of person, so I find the lean times fairly easy to manage. (For instance, I just successfully sold an old coffee table on Craigslist. This is not actually a lean time, I just got sick of looking at the thing.) The problem is that while I’m harvesting the bumper crops, I feel richer, and begin to imagine the possibilities — a kitchen renovation, a trip to Paris. The hedonic treadmill is not easily avoided. Managing the psychology around the money is just as critical as managing the money itself.

ah, my dream kitchen

 
I especially liked the advice of Matt Wallert of Thrive.  You need to physically separate the account that your paychecks go into from the account that you use to pay the bills. That way the paychecks can accumulate like water in a reservoir, and you shift over a pre-determined amount each month to cover your expenses. (See the story for more).

Do you have any secrets or insights into managing a fluctuating income? I’d love to hear them.

Last night I watched the 2007 film “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly,” based on the biography of Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle,  suffered a massive stroke at age 42 which resulted in “locked-in syndrome” — he could hear and understand everything around him, but couldn’t move or speak. He was able to communicate only by blinking his left eyelid.

Bauby’s speech therapist develops a way to help him communicate (see photo); he blinks as she reads the letters of the alphabet, spelling out his thoughts letter by letter. When she initially presents him with the system, he blinks the sentence “I want to die.” Eventually he realizes that although he’s locked in, he still has his mind and his imagination, and he decides to write a book about his experience, dictating it to an assistant word by word, by blinking. (In case you haven’t seen the DVD, I won’t reveal the end.)

Despite all I’ve learned about money and happiness, I admit I’ve had moments in which I created my own locked-in syndrome by giving money more power than it deserves. I’ve allowed it to play a role in my choices that was limiting, even paralyzing. At those times, I lost sight of how powerful the mind and the imagination can be.

Bauby, who, at the top of his game, is suddenly deprived of everything — even, as he puts it, the simple pleasure of ruffling his children’s hair — doesn’t allow his circumstances to diminish his spirit. He focuses on what he has, rather than what he’s lost, and forges ahead.

I have a series of stories coming out this Wednesday (Oct. 7) on Savvy Money Moms, a special section on the website www.family.com. One of them looks at the silver lining in the recession. I had the privilege of interviewing a number of families who are suffering financial hardships but found ways to come together, focus on simple pleasures and laughter, and even renew old dreams of doing work they love.  They inspired me, as Bauby’s story did, and reminded me that attitude is a choice, and it costs nothing to be  joyful.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is beautifully directed by artist Julian Schnabel. I watched the film with two of my daughters, and was grateful for the luxury of ruffling their hair.