Pinch A Penny Quotes

Education, travel, culture—this is what any pennies pinched should be used for, never flashy cars, loud logos, or personal maintenance.

The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.

Why bother pinching pennies when the dollars had fled long ago?

We pinch pennies on small items, yet we blow dollars on big ones. Our frugality is thereby largely wasted. We spend hours surfing the web to save $50 on a $150 pair of shoes. Yet we forgo a few hours’ search to save a couple of hundred dollars on a $20,000 car. These findings are important because they demonstrate how people routinely violate economists’ standard “rational” models of human behavior.

It's interesting that penny-pinching is an accepted defense for toxic food habits, when frugality so rarely rules other consumer domains. The majority of Americans buy bottled drinking water, for example, even though water runs from the faucets at home for a fraction of the cost, and government quality standards are stricter for tap water than for bottled. At any income level, we can be relied upon for categorically unnecessary purchases: portable-earplug music instead of the radio; extra-fast Internet for leisure use; heavy vehicles to transport light loads; name-brand clothing instead of plainer gear. "Economizing," as applied to clothing, generally means looking for discount name brands instead of wearing last year's clothes again. The dread of rearing unfashionable children is understandable. But as a priority, "makes me look cool" has passed up "keeps arteries functional" and left the kids huffing and puffing (fashionably) in the dust.

My grandpa used to tell my dad, “Son, it’s not the money you make, it’s the money you hold on to.” Make yourself a budget. Live within your means. Pack your lunch. Pinch pennies. Save as much as you can. Get the education you need for as cheap as you can get it. The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture. Saying no to takeout, $ 4 lattes, and that shiny new computer when the old one still works fine.

I’ve been pinching our pennies so tightly that Abraham Lincoln’s face is imprinted on my fingers.

Can you believe it? Here's a 15-year-old girl pinching pennies to buy strainers and whetstones and tempura pots when all the girls in school are getting huge allowances and buying beautiful dresses and shoes. Don't you feel sorry for me?

Standard DNA is shot through the oil industry, as are Standard’s dominant traits: a penchant for pinching pennies, an eagerness to devour and expand, a mistrust and even hatred of government regulation, a vaguely delusional sense of higher calling, and a wary respect for innovation. Worth keeping these traits in mind, because they’ve gone on to shape the modern world. They still function as a character sketch—or maybe a psychological profile—of the richest, most powerful, and most destructive industry on the globe.

Whether to speak or not: the question that comes up again when you think you’ve said too much, again. Another clutch of nouns, a fistful: look how they pick them over, the shoppers for words, pinching here and there to see if they’re bruised yet. Verbs are no better, they wind them up, let them go, scrabbling over the table, wind them up again too tight and the spring breaks. You can’t take another poem of spring, not with the wound-up vowels, not with the bruised word green in it, not yours, not with ants crawling all over it, not this infestation. It’s a market, flyspecked; how do you wash a language? There’s the beginning of a bad smell, you can hear the growls, something’s being eaten, once too often. Your mouth feels rotted. Why involve yourself? You’d do better to sit off to the side, on the sidewalk under the awning, hands over your mouth, your ears, your eyes, with a cup in front of you into which people will or will not drop pennies. They think you can’t talk, they’re sorry for you, but. But you’re waiting for the word, the one that will finally be right. A compound, the generation of life, mud and light.

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure.

There are no tarts in there, Charles. They were much too expensive, and Mr. Jenkins would not be reasonable. I told him I would buy a whole dozen, but he would not reduce the price by so much as a penny, so I refused to buy even one-on principle. Do you know,” she confided with a chuckle, “last week when he saw me coming into his shop he hid behind the flour sacks?” “He’s a coward!” Charles said, grinning, for it was a known fact among tradesmen and shopkeepers that Elizabeth Cameron pinched a shilling until it squeaked, and that when it came to bargaining for price-which it always did with her-they rarely came out the winner. Her intellect, not her beauty, was her greatest asset in these transactions, for she could not only add and multiply in her head, but she was so sweetly reasonable, and so inventive when she listed her reasons for expecting a better price, that she either wore out her opponents or confused them into agreeing with her

The best available apples-to-apples comparison of inflation-adjusted earnings shows what the typical fully employed man earned back in the 1970s and what that same fully employed man earns today. The picture isn’t pretty. As the GDP has doubled and almost doubled again, as corporations have piled up record profits, as the country has gotten wealthier, and as the number of billionaires has exploded, the average man working full-time today earns about what the average man earned back in 1970. Nearly half a century has gone by, and the guy right in the middle of the pack is making about what his granddad did. The second punch that’s landed on families is expenses. If costs had stayed the same over the past few decades, families would be okay—or, at least, they would be in about the same position as they were thirty-five years ago. Not advancing but not falling behind, either. But that didn’t happen. Total costs are up, way up. True, families have cut back on some kinds of expenses. Today, the average family spends less on food (including eating out), less on clothing, less on appliances, and less on furniture than a comparable family did back in 1971. In other words, families have been pretty careful about their day-to-day spending, but it hasn’t saved them. The problem is that the other expenses—the big, fixed expenses—have shot through the roof and blown apart the family budget. Adjusted for inflation, families today spend more on transportation, more on housing, and more on health insurance. And for all those families with small children and no one at home during the day, the cost of childcare has doubled, doubled again, and doubled once more. Families have pinched pennies on groceries and clothing, but these big, recurring expenses have blown them right over a financial cliff.

But then something unexpected happened. Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and television celebrity who did not need the Koch donor network’s money to run, who seemed to have little grasp of the goals of this movement, entered the race. More than that, to get ahead, Trump was able to successfully mock the candidates they had already cowed as “puppets.” And he offered a different economic vision. He loved capitalism, to be sure, but he was not a libertarian by any stretch. Like Bill Clinton before him, he claimed to feel his audience’s pain. He promised to stanch it with curbs on the very agenda the party’s front-runners were promoting: no more free-trade deals that shuttered American factories, no cuts to Social Security or Medicare, and no more penny-pinching while the nation’s infrastructure crumbled. He went so far as to pledge to build a costly wall to stop immigrants from coming to take the jobs U.S. companies offered them because they could hire desperate, rightless workers for less. He said and did a lot more, too, much that was ugly and incendiary. And in November, he shocked the world by winning the Electoral College vote.

Every Day Take Your Daily Doses Black Cumin (Nigella sativa) (¼ tsp) As noted in the Appetite Suppression section, a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized, controlled weight-loss trials found that about a quarter teaspoon of black cumin powder every day appears to reduce body mass index within a span of a couple of months. Note that black cumin is different from regular cumin, for which the dosing is different. (See below.) Garlic Powder (¼ tsp) Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies have found that as little as a daily quarter teaspoon of garlic powder can reduce body fat at a cost of perhaps two cents a day. Ground Ginger (1 tsp) or Cayenne Pepper (½ tsp) Randomized controlled trials have found that ¼ teaspoon to 1½ teaspoons a day of ground ginger significantly decreased body weight for just pennies a day. It can be as easy as stirring the ground spice into a cup of hot water. Note: Ginger may work better in the morning than evening. Chai tea is a tasty way to combine the green tea and ginger tweaks into a single beverage. Alternately, for BAT activation, you can add one raw jalapeño pepper or a half teaspoon of red pepper powder (or, presumably, crushed red pepper flakes) into your daily diet. To help beat the heat, you can very thinly slice or finely chop the jalapeño to reduce its bite to little prickles, or mix the red pepper into soup or the whole-food vegetable smoothie I featured in one of my cooking videos on NutritionFacts.org.4985 Nutritional Yeast (2 tsp) Two teaspoons of baker’s, brewer’s, or nutritional yeast contains roughly the amount of beta 1,3/1,6 glucans found in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials to facilitate weight loss. Cumin (Cuminum cyminum) (½ tsp with lunch and dinner) Overweight women randomized to add a half teaspoon of cumin to their lunches and dinners beat out the control group by four more pounds and an extra inch off their waists. There is also evidence to support the use of the spice saffron, but a pinch a day would cost a dollar, whereas a teaspoon of cumin costs less than ten cents. Green Tea (3 cups) Drink three cups a day between meals (waiting at least an hour after a meal so as to not interfere with iron absorption). During meals, drink water, black coffee, or hibiscus tea mixed 6:1 with lemon verbena, but never exceed three cups of fluid an hour (important given my water preloading advice). Take advantage of the reinforcing effect of caffeine by drinking your green tea along with something healthy you wish you liked more, but don’t consume large amounts of caffeine within six hours of bedtime. Taking your tea without sweetener is best, but if you typically sweeten your tea with honey or sugar, try yacon syrup instead. Stay

Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs (From Voices of Multicultural America)

Gamache dug his hands into the bark, feeling the wood pinch his palm, glad for the pain to concentrate on. His horrible fear, and the terrible betrayal, wasn’t that he’d trip and fall, or even that the wooden blind would tumble to the ground. It was that he’d throw himself over the edge. That was the horror of vertigo. He felt pulled to the edge and over as if an anchor was attached to his leg. Unaided, unthreatened, he would essentially kill himself.

Kate never had any money, but she loved to save it. When she was ninety-three her youngest daughter took her to a dollar store where she found an elevated tray filled with tiny aluminum percolators, one-cuppers. The frank and ethical enterprise attached a notice informing its customers that these percolators did not work. They were only 5 cents, so Kate bought two of them anyway.

Cassani and her team were thrifty, spending no more than necessary to get things done. The £25 million, Cassani knew, wouldn’t last long. She rented office space from BA’s pensions department, “then we begged and borrowed some bashed equipment and sorted a single telephone line. We were able to get the secondhand desks and chairs from another British Airways subsidiary, Air Miles, for almost nothing.”23 Cost containment was paramount: “Between cramped offices, secondhand furniture, no company cars, no free parking, outsourcing and general penny-pinching, we developed an enduring low-cost culture in Go.”24 Following Southwest’s and Ryanair’s analogs, Boeing 737 aircraft would comprise the entire fleet.

Some of the very people who ran McDonnell Douglas into the ground resurrected the same penny-pinching policies that sank their old company. Borrowing a page from another flawed idol, Jack Welch’s General Electric, they executed what today might be called the standard corporate playbook: anti-union, regulation-light, outsourcing-heavy. But pro-handout, at least when it comes to tax breaks and lucrative government contracts.

Take out a sheet of paper and list your last ten major decisions, the ones that really shook things up. Look at your list and ask yourself: Were these all necessary, or were they hand grenades? Look for patterns in the decisions that weren’t necessary. Were you rushing? Micromanaging? Penny-pinching? Then, if you see a pattern emerge, write down your current assassin. Bonus: If you really want to have fun with this, you could always print off a picture of a target and write in “The Supervisor” or “The Speed Demon” or whatever assassin you’re currently facing. Then fold up that target and put it in your wallet or purse and carry it around with you.

As you might recall, I was a penny-pinching guy in my twenties, proud of myself for managing to save up money

Everyone seemed to have more to do than was possible in a forty-hour week. This was by design. “Microsoft’s theory is if it takes two people to do a job, hire one,” Shannon explained. “It’s a stated policy. I’ve seen it in memos. It’s called the N-minus-one policy.” In the abstract, the approach made good sense. For all the complaints about workers lacking initiative, most bosses disliked employees who did too much or broke with tradition or set their own priorities. At Microsoft most managers, finding themselves shorthanded, had no choice but to let their people run away from them. Smaller numbers of people, especially on a huge project such as NT, made communications between teammates easier. And it helped the bottom line. Microsoft earned twenty-five cents on every dollar of sales mainly because it offered hot products in a growing market, but the company also knew how to pinch pennies.

As she assembled the stuffing with ingredients Doris had prepared- a pound of bacon fat scraped to beads, the crumbs of two penny loaves, a small nutmeg grated, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and a little grated lemon peel-

Originals do vary in their attitudes toward risk. Some are skydiving gamblers; others are penny-pinching germophobes. To become original, you have to try something new, which means accepting some measure of risk. But the most successful originals are not the daredevils who leap before they look. They are the ones who reluctantly tiptoe to the edge of a cliff, calculate the rate of descent, triple-check their parachutes, and set up a safety net at the bottom just in case. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker, “Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks—but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.

For many, it's a once-in-a-lifetime, long dreamed-of and longed-saved-for trip. Pennies have been pinched and sacrifices made to make the vacation a reality. All Guests' wallets will be separated from a great deal of money, like trout expertly filleted, but it will be a curious;y painless experience, for all but a few, the trip will be transcendently and sublimely worth every sacrifice and penny.

When it comes to money management, most people live like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. They cower in a shabby trailer, shrilling about “my precious” and how it must be guarded with dear life. Such is the existence of someone consumed by the frugality scam—the belief that obsessive expense reduction, penny-pinching, and experiential deprivation will someday pay off in the opposite: rich life experiences, freedom, and abundance. The frugality scam is like chopping off your head and bragging you’ll never suffer migraines again.

A detail, but telling. Quinn Wentworth, Duke of Walden, had been raised in the slums and was known to pinch a penny until it took a solemn oath never to be spent again. And yet, the man paid good coin for the lilies of the field.

At times like this he likes to think of his life as one big piece of performance art. Not structured enough to be an actual play, it is full of irrationality and minuscule details and can only be viewed from the inside out. Once. By him. If he doesn’t black out. He titles this episode: Pinching pennies and prostitutes—frugal fucking in LA.

Imagine that you spend years and years of your life digging a tunnel. While eating, sleeping, bathing, resting, working, that’s all you think about – your tunnel. That’s all you work on. Your tunnel becomes your life. Your friends, peers and others keep excelling in life, they continue to flourish and progress, while you are chiselling away, one blow at a time, stuck in that tunnel. Your friends move into new houses and buy bigger cars, while you continue to pinch pennies. ‘You remain soiled, hungry, lacking, even poor, but you don’t give up because you believe in your dream. You only have hope that one day you’ll see the other end of this tunnel, but you can’t be sure. You cry, you laugh, you struggle, resist, battle, you feel depressed at times, but you keep pushing, and pushing, and then one day your blow has a different sound. It’s not as full, you feel just a thin layer separating you from the outside. Your heart throbs in anticipation. You hit harder and the hammer-head goes through. ‘And then, light stares at you. Right in your eyes. The light you have been waiting for. A gust of fragrant wind from outside cools your sweaty brows. You take a deep breath and you smell victory. It feels unreal, unbelievable, incredible. You pinch yourself to make sure you aren’t dreaming. And, for once, your reality is better than your wildest dreams. That’s how I feel right now.

Maggie.” He’d warned her this time a moment before he slid his arms around her. After a minute pause to discard the dictates of good sense, she turned to hide her face against his chest. For a long moment, she let him hold her, until words rose up in her aching throat. “I want to cry.” Stupid words. Maybe he hadn’t heard them. “I think it’s worse,” he said, his hand stroking across her back, “when you want to and you can’t. It’s an indignity to cry, a worse indignity when you can’t even cry.” She nodded against his chest. Why did he know such a thing? Was it because his sisters had been through an ordeal? Because he knew half of the beau monde’s sins and mistakes? “Stop thinking, Maggie Windham. Everybody is occasionally blue-deviled.” His voice was very quiet, right near her ear. She liked the sound and feel of it, but he was wrong. Years and years of looking over her shoulder, dreading each day’s mail, pinching pennies and carrying secrets was not simply a case of the blue devils. And the worst, hardest, most difficult part was she could see the rest of her life falling into the same dismal pattern, with only death promising her any relief. Hazlit’s hand went from tracing patterns on her back to cradling her jaw. He shifted his hold subtly, turning Maggie’s face up to his. When his lips settled on hers, it was so softly Maggie wanted to groan with the pleasure of it. He tasted of the almond icing on the tea cake, his mouth sweet and warm against hers. She leaned into him, knowing he had the physical strength to support them both. There was no hurry in his kiss, no fumbling or force. It dawned on her that it was a kiss of invitation, an offer for her to explore him intimately. A gesture of trust. She

The U.S. government spends billions of dollars on disasters after they happen, but it pinches pennies when it comes to preparing for them.

The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So

Find her a good home, someone to take care of her. She’s a little girl, Melrose. She shouldn’t be spending her days at Heathrow, scanning for villains. She should be safe.” The other members who were awake turned wide-eyed stares at Melrose, who was laughing so hard he was doubled up in his chair. “Just what the hell is so funny?” “Take care of her. This is Patty Haigh you’re talking about. The same Patty Haigh who got through Heathrow security on a pinched boarding pass; who wangled her way into B.B.’s good graces and flew to Dubai; who outwitted police in London, Dubai and Nairobi; who carries in her backpack a full selection of costumes and wigs to meet any eventuality; who requisitioned strangers to be her aunts, uncles, parents; who roamed around that godless slum, Kibera, on her own; who got into the Hemingways Hotel without paying a penny; who crossed the dark veldt between Kibera and Mbosi Camp protected only by her wits. This is the person we should keep safe!

People like Larraine lived with so many compounded limitations that it was difficult to imagine the amount of good behavior or self-control that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. The distance between grinding poverty and even stable poverty could be so vast that those at the bottom had little hope of climbing out even if they pinched every penny. So they chose not to. Instead, they tried to survive in color, to season the suffering with pleasure. They would get a little high or have a drink or do a bit of gambling or acquire a television. They might buy lobster on food stamps.

But unlike Erica, who had never worked a day in her privileged life, he felt most strongly about those who were sentenced by fate and misfortune to work in such places, part of a faceless corps of first-name-onlys who bartered their raw freedom for a paycheck, spending their lives in boxes as spare as the cages at a zoo, selling shoes, selling soda, filing nails, serving crap on a bun with a side of fries, restocking shelves picked clean by ravaging hordes, pinching their pennies while extravagantly spending the hours of their lives to satisfy the basest needs of the American consumer.

Why do men get magazines and books on investing and getting rich while women get lectured on pinching pennies at the grocery store and cutting back on our shoe collections?