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As you may, possibly, have noticed, the credit crunch is upon us. The world has gone crunchy. And what that means, aside from gloomy news reports, worried-looking bankers, and really cheap holidays to Iceland, is a sudden plague of “five tips to eat frugally in the Crunch” posts.

It’s not like they’ve ever gone away, of course. Has anyone ever seen a “five tips for ways to spend that bit extra on food” post? “Five ways to blow your paycheck on a great meal”? “Five ways to actually spend some money on one of the most intense and universal pleasures available to man”? Nope. In the West, we’re guilty and rather angry about food. We’ll lap up any suggestion of how to spend less money on it, even if the economy’s booming and we’re all driving Lambourghinis with 60" plasma screens in them. But as soon as things get tight? Well hell, large parts of the New Puritan culture were just looking for an excuse to tell us all to eat nothing but oatmeal anyway.

Of course, right now a lot of people probably would like to save some money, and there are some good tips for saving cash without sacrificing pleasure, which I’ll get to next week. But they aren’t the tips that offend me. It’s the plethora of recieved-wisdom clams, usually combining incredible obviousness with an appetite for self-mortification that would have your average flaggelant order backing away and suggesting that hey, everyone needs to get roaring drunk and have inadvisable sex once in a while.

Here are three of these shitty parasitic suggestions that I’d really like to see abandoned somewhere cold and unpleasant:

“Avoid convenient things”

Well, OK, that’s not usually how the tipster phrases it. Instead, you’ll get crap like this, from ZenHabits:

Don’t buy plastic wrap, tin foil, sandwich bags, etc. For everything that you could think of needing – a sandwich baggy, tin foil, or other disposable nonsense – there is a non-disposable alternative. Use tupperware instead.

WHAT? Seriously now, look at the numbers a second. A 20m roll of aluminum foil from Sainsbury’s costs £2.59. I don’t know about anyone else reading this, but I can’t remember the last time I used up a full roll. Even if you’re wrapping food in the stuff every day, it takes, what, a 30cm length maximum to wrap something big, like a lamb shank. Maybe a meter if you’re wrapping a whole roast chicken – and damn, you’re going to need some serious Tupperware for that. So, yes, if you’re wrapping 20 whole chickens in foil every month, you could save £2.59 a month, in exchange for the usual irritations which are exactly why people use foil instead of Tupperware in the first place.

Clingfilm costs £2.45 for 100 meters. I’m not even going there.

This has nothing to do with living cheaper, and everything to do with bog-standard middle-class guilt over anything “disposable”.

“It’s much cheaper if you cook all your meals yourself”

Surely I can’t object to this one? I mean, it IS cheaper, right? And plus, everyone knows that takeaways and ready meals are EVIIIIL.

Well, yes, if you consider your time to be free. It’s also cheaper to wash clothes by hand rather than run a washing machine. It’s cheaper to wash dishes by hand rather than use a dishwasher, but if you try to take my dishwasher away, I will cheerfully economise in return by only stabbing you with the cheap knife.

(I hear similar things from people whose spouses don’t share the same sleep cycle about things like a quiet electric kettle – it’s expensive, but cheaper than the consequences of uxoricide.)

It’s cheaper to cycle to work rather than take the car or public transport, but it’s interesting to note that the only people who do so are people who like cycling.

If you LIKE cooking, then cooking your meals instead of using ready meals or going out is a great two-for-one deal. Not only do you at least in theory save money, but you get to do something you enjoy.

But if you like cooking, what exactly are the odds of your reading a “Five tips” column, seeing this tip, and going “Oh, yeah! That’s what I’ve been missing!”? As opposed to, say, just feeling the tip’s bloody obvious to you, but probably very good for those poor benighted souls who never cook?

Right. Now you’re someone who doesn’t like cooking. It’s a pain. It’s a chore. You’d much rather be drinking/playing games/having sex/watching the sport of your choice/alphabetizing your bookshelves. In that case, you’re not cooking because it’s half an hour minimum of hard, unenjoyable work. And even if you’re on minimum wage, that’s about £3 worth of time.

Does cooking a chilli rather than buying a ready meal one save you £3? Well, a Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference Chilli and Coriander Rice costs £3.09. I’m a big fan of cooking, but even I wouldn’t try to claim that a chilli costs less than 10p to cook. (And for what it’s worth, I can’t see any ingredients on the Sainsburys chilli that make it any more unhealthy than the home-cook version).

Switching to cooking all your meals is NOT a quick cash-saving tip. It’s a major lifestyle choice. If you don’t like cooking, it makes about as much sense to try to cook all your meals as it does to hand-wash all your clothes.

(I’ll be going on about this more next week – there ARE simple cooking tips that can save cash even if you hate cooking, but a blanket “cook more!” isn’t one of them. )

“Save very small amounts of money whilst ruining something you like”

Possibly the stupidest tip I’ve seen (yes, even sillier than “don’t buy foil”) was from a site that I have mercifully forgotten, which advised that its readers could save money by “refreshing the grounds on your coffee”. Yes, once you’ve used your coffee grounds once, simply add a little fresh coffee and use them again! Save $$$$!

Now, I’ll confess I’ve done this from time to time. That’s not because I wanted to save $$$, but because I was being a slovenly bastard. But recommending it routinely? Are you insane?

For starters – no, this doesn’t make the same cup of coffee. It makes shitty coffee. Now, if you don’t mind or actively like the taste, then more power to you. But otherwise, if you actually like coffee, why would you do this to yourself?

Waitrose Columbian coffee beans, a rather nice roast that made the coffee I’m drinking whilst writing this, cost £3.49 per 500g. I’ve just measured, and one measure of coffee for one person’s mug is about 10g of beans. So, that’s 50 cups for £3.49, or 7.6p a cup.

(By the way – if it’s practical, “grind and make your own coffee rather than buying it from Starbucks” is an EXCELLENT cost-saving tip.)

Now, general advice is that once you’re past 5 mugs of coffee a day you’re leaving “I just like the taste” Crescent and entering “If you took it intravenously I’d have more tracks than Victoria Station” Boulevard. So, at absolute maximum, 5 mugs per day, you could save a stonking £5 per month for shittifying literally half the coffee you drink. At a more sane 3 cups a day, you’re talking more like £3 savings per month for screwing up something that clearly gives you pleasure.

That’s not a cost-cutting measure, that’s masochism.

And the same applies to re-using teabags, not buying the one nice steak a week, or even skipping out on the monthly restaurant meal with your spouse. Again, it’s a case of learning the difference between self-flaggelation and optimisation.

So is there no way you can save money?

Of course there is. For starters, you can substitute time for money in a lot of cases – but beyond that, there are tons of practical cost-saving measures you can adopt. (The same Zen Habits article I mentioned earlier also has a few good tips, like “Don’t shop hungry” and “Eat out intelligently by tracking special offers”). The important thing with any useful cost-cutting measure is that it has a benefit that vastly outweights its inconvenience.

But for most people, there are quite a few of these. That sandwich at work you don’t really like. That food you end up throwing away. Programmers will be familiar with the concept of “optimising” a system – not removing features, but just removing the junk that gets in the way and doesn’t provide a benefit. Cost-cutting ideas should do the same thing.

I’ll be putting my lack of money where my mouth is next week, with some, hopefully more useful tips.

But for now, what do you think? Have you gotten annoyed by “Five tips” articles? Do you know any good ones to share? Or do you think some of the tips here have a point?

P.S. Oh, yes.

"Shop at farmer’s markets because they’re cheaper than the supermarkets. "

Oh, come on. That’s just bollocks.