By Andrea Sachs

Wednesday, Jan. 06, 2010

Sick of high household bills? Shopping maven Stephanie Nelson, founder of the popular website couponmom.com has developed a method that she promises will slash your food and drugstore costs. She describes her techniques in her new book, The Coupon Mom's Guide to Cutting Your Grocery Bills in Half (Avery). TIME senior reporter Andrea Sachs visited with the thrifty author, who lives in Atlanta, Ga., during Nelson's recent visit to pricey New York City:

Is it really possible to cut your grocery bills in half?
Easily. My mantra is that strategic shopping isn't changing the way you eat; it's just changing the way you buy the food that you like. In the book, I use the example of pork chops costing $5 a pound. But if you ask the butcher to cut up the pork loin, it's $2 a pound, and for the same amount of money spent, you have more than twice as much food. I tried to bring out what I think are some pretty frugal practices that are so old they're new. Like washing your own lettuce. People are so used to convenience items they're not even thinking of them as convenience anymore; they're thinking of them as minimum requirement.
(See TIME's "It's Your Money" blog.)
 

The best that can be said for 2009 is that it could have been worse, that we pulled back from the precipice on which we seemed to be perched in late 2008, and that 2010 will almost surely be better for most countries around the world. The world has also learned some valuable lessons, though at great cost to both current and future prosperity — costs that were unnecessarily high given that we should already have learned them.

The first lesson is that markets are not self-correcting. Indeed, without adequate regulation, they are prone to excess. In 2009, we again see why Adam Smith's invisible hand often appears invisible: it is not there. The bankers' pursuit of self-interest (greed) did not lead to the well-being of society; it did not even serve their shareholders and bondholders well. It certainly did not serve homeowners who are losing their homes, workers who have lost their jobs, retirees who have seen their retirement funds vanish, or taxpayers who paid hundreds of billions to bail out the banks.