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.

Update: I tracked down the scam artists that I wrote about below and reported on their activities in this Yahoo!Finance column.

Twice in the last month or so I’ve received a call from a recorded voice that says, “This is your last chance to lower your credit card interest rates! Press one to lower your rate now.” Since I always pay off my cards in full, and the caller doesn’t identify the financial services company, I sensed a scam. Twice I have pressed “1″ on the phone and gotten a live voice; when I said, “Can you identify the company you are from and give me your phone number?” I was immediately disconnected on both occasions. When I called back the number on the caller ID, a recording said the number was unassigned.

Next time I’ll try a little subtlety to keep them talking, and report them to the Federal Trade Commission. I didn’t find this particular scam under the FTC’s list of “credit and loan phone scams,” but it could have been any number of things, such as identity theft or a credit consolidation scam, in which the firm offers to negotiate with your creditors. You pay the consolidation company, which never pays your creditors and disappears with your check. 

Amid the recession, scams are multiplying. The FTC received 1.2 million consumer complaints in 2008. Identity theft accounted for one in four of those complaints. Watch out for work-at-home scams and foreclosure rescue scams, among others. For a primer on recognizing and reporting phone fraud, click here. 

In the meantime, here’s that segment I did on the Weekend Today Show about some legitimate websites that can help you learn about and better manage your finances.

Back in February I wrote a piece about Fighting Off Your Financial Demons, which looked at ways to deal with the sense of panic everyone is feeling these days. Financial planner Kevin McKinley advised readers to tune out the “money porn” television channels. I thought that was a pretty funny way to reference some of the market play-by-play stations that we gravitate to in times of financial crisis (and exuberance).

But then there is the video below from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which may be one of the most hilarious pieces ever done on business news coverage. Take a look, it will cheer you up. (It’s a long segment, but worth every minute!)

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.