Compensating for you bad habits

[Caoineag]

Okay folks, I am curious. I know a bunch of us have things that we won't give up completely for the sake of frugality and I know we tend to make up for it in other ways.

Mine is cooking from scratch to compensate for eating out. I won't give up the eating out completely because I enjoy it too much. However, cooking from scratch ensures I eat cheap quality food the rest of the time.

And when I say cooking from scratch, I mean completely. I don't make cheese from scratch but bread (included hamburger buns and sub bread), pasta, tortilla, dips, salad dressings (I have two here that I haven't perfected but give me time), burritos, brownies, etc. You get the point. It comes in as a meal (flour, cornmeal, etc), produce, milk, eggs, butter, cheese, or legume. 1% of what we purchase is still processed but we are working on even them.

A nice consequence is that certain foods aren't attractive anymore. We do better on burgers and fries so those have been eliminated from the out to eat.

How about you? What do you do to compensate and for what bad habit? I know a few of you have answered this question before in a roundabout way but I think a lot more haven't answered this question.

[JanH]

Hmmmm. I've got a few bad habits! I tend to buy books. But, I buy them at discounts, used bookstores, library sales, etc. To compensate for that entertainment, Hubby and I don't go out to movies or even rent that many. Mostly we wait and it eventually comes out on tv. And we don't buy much in the way of music or other entertainment. And no premium cable stuff either. Rarely any fancy coffee out. I would love to cut down on cable channels if our basic would carry the few we actually watch. Can't wait to the day we can pick and choose what we want to watch and pay for. Til then, we watch a few channels and like to read a lot.