Food failures: worth the financial hit?
Saving Pennies or Dollars is a new semi-regular series on The Simple Dollar, inspired by a concerning frugal tactics that might not really save that much money. I鈥檓 going to take some of the scenarios described by the readers there and try to break down the numbers to see if the savings is really worth the time invested.
Liora said, I made my own soy yogurt for a little while, but a lot of batches failed, which was a waste of money and the batches did not come out consistently. While it looked like an easy process that would save us a lot of money (my husband eats this at least once a day), it was not worth my time and it got more expensive then the store-bought.
Liora鈥檚 experience matches my own with regards to some of the challenge of making things at home for the primary purpose of saving money. Almost anything you make at home is fraught with some degree of risk, particularly when the process of making that item is a new one.
For example, in the past. The batch that you see in the post was quite successful. Two earlier trial runs failed, mostly because I didn鈥檛 really understand what I was doing. In fact, part of my motivation for writing that post was to try to make sure that others who try to make their own laundry soap don鈥檛 fail in doing so due to the simple things that I erred on.
In the case of the laundry soap, messing up a few batches wasn鈥檛 a big deal. Since my cost per load with my homemade soap was only about 10% of the cost of Tide, I could mess up quite a few batches while learning and still be able to save money overall.
On the other hand, if you鈥檙e making homemade yogurt as Liora is, if you mess up a few batches, you鈥檙e going to quickly be on the losing side of the equation. The closer the cost of your ingredients is to the cost of just buying the end product at the store, the smaller your margin of error is.
This comes from experience as well 鈥� we鈥檝e . Homemade yogurt is really one of my wife鈥檚 pet projects 鈥� I鈥檝e merely served as assistant on a few batches. However, although we鈥檝e had many successful batches, we had several failed batches early on. Again, it mostly boiled down to figuring out the best procedure.
It took a lot of batches of yogurt to get back to a situation where we鈥檙e saving money on the yogurt after those failed batches. In fact, depending on the equipment calculations, we might not even be there at this point.
It鈥檚 because of these experiences that I would suggest two specific guidelines for deciding whether or not you should make things for yourself.
First, do you use this item frequently and consistently? We live in a house with five people, so we certainly use the laundry soap in sufficient quantitites.
On the other hand, yogurt is not necessarily something we use in great quantitites. We certainly eat it if it鈥檚 available, but it鈥檚 not something we have a need (or near-need) to use again and again.
Second, is there a large gap between the price of making it and the price of simply buying it? With laundry soap, there鈥檚 a large gap between the price of making it and the price of simply buying it. With yogurt, that gap doesn鈥檛 really exist.
If you have a large gap, then it鈥檚 not a big deal if a batch doesn鈥檛 turn out as you would like. If the gap is small, however, an errant batch can result in a net loss.
There鈥檚 also something of a third factor: do you enjoy the process of making whatever it is you鈥檙e making? I personally enjoy making new things, particularly during the learning phase. The simple act of figuring out how to do something new brings additional joy into my life, so I consider this an added value when making something with the theoretical purpose of saving money.
Making stuff yourself usually saves dollars, but when you鈥檙e learning, you can easily knock it down to pennies or even to a loss. Is it worth it to get over that learning curve hump? It depends on you, your situation, and what you value.
