Saving Money

THERE WAS a big sigh of relief in the land when Congress passed its mammoth budget cuts. Americans love budget reductions and thrive on slashing the deficit.The first week went smoothly, and everyone commented how well a cost-effective government was working.But during the second week the entire city of Cincinnati was poisoned by a mysterious slug in the drinking water."How could this possibly happen?" the newspaper editorials huffed and puffed."Where were the Centers for Disease Control?"

The University of Maryland's independent student newspaper will cut publishing to four days a week in the fall, Michael Fribush, president of parent company Maryland Media Inc., confirmed Friday. "We'll beef up our digital presence on Fridays. It'll be a little more economical to publish Monday through Thursday," he said. "[Editor-in-Chief Michael King] would be putting out a Friday issue on The Diamondback but digitally. " The Diamondback has been a weekday publication since its establishment in 1910 and receives no university funding, according to its website.

As Kathryn Moosbrugger plans her September wedding, she has found two effective ways to save money: Keep a firm budget in mind and meet with people face to face. These tenets helped her cut costs when she hired a band last year. She and her fiance, Nick Laganza, met with the production company in its office and told the agent that her budget was $6,000. The band asked for $6,500 for a seven-piece orchestra to play at their reception. After an hour of chatting about music and the wedding, they settled on $6,200.

There's a P3 in your future. Maryland is poised to join 34 states and key federal agencies in transforming the way government works. The new mantra, "P3," is shorthand for public-private partnerships. Maryland's P3 legislation, championed by Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, enables state agencies to engage business in planning, financing, building and operating public projects, from roads and rail to schools and other infrastructure. These could offset up to 10 percent of the state's capital budget, or $300 million annually, and create thousands of jobs.

They might not be old enough to open their own savings accounts without help from Mom or Dad, but Worthington Elementary School pupils already have learned the important lesson of saving money. That's because, for the past 10 years, the school has had a partnership with Columbia Bank that enables the children to learn about saving with real accounts and meetings with bank representatives. "This just shows them how important it is to save," said Jane Sims, assistant principal at the school, who oversees the program at Worthington with school counselor Milene Pettit.

In the 1990s, saving money is in style.This is why when I read a recent interview in the Wall Street Journal with a tightwad, I decided to take some of the advice in her newsletter.Rinse out your coffee filters, let them dry, and then re-use them, she said. So I did, and didn't tell my fiancee before she made herself a cup. She took one sip, spat it out, and yowled, "This coffee has freezer burn."So I learned there is such a thing as going too far to save money. Still, that doesn't mean that saving money is a bad idea.

Seven-year-old Harish Lall put a dollar in his account the other day and vowed to keep depositing money until he saved enough to buy a $2,000 laptop computer. Getting to the bank, at least, will be easy: It's at school. Every Friday before class, Harish and other pupils at Swansfield Elementary in Columbia deposit their coins, bills and checks in the school's bank -- an honest-to-goodness, FDIC-insured place to hand over their money. That's because Farmers and Mechanics National Bank is backing the project, and the deposits are transferred to its vaults.

Michelle Potter has always been passionate about the environment. And growing up in a single-parent household, she was always aware of a need to be thrifty. But it wasn't until 1987 that she made a connection between saving the Earth and saving money."When I started to garden organically, doing things like composting and using cayenne pepper and garlic spray to deter pests, I realized that not only were those methods effective and safe for the environment, but also that it was much cheaper than buying chemicals," says Potter, 37, who lives near Guilford.

Sure, Brandon Eckard plans to be the next Michael Jordan when he grows up. But he wants to go to college before joining the NBA -- in case he has to fall back on being a lawyer or businessman -- and if he doesn't get a basketball scholarship, that means hefty tuition payments.That's why he's saving now. Brandon, a 9-year-old at Elmer A. Wolfe Elementary in Union Bridge, won a fourth-grade essay contest yesterday on the importance of saving money."Another reason why I should save for the future is because I need to buy a house and pay taxes," he wrote in his essay.

Welfare reform was high on Gov. William Donald Schaefer's list of priorities this year. But the welfare reform bill that passed the General Assembly is sitting on his desk, facing a possible veto because it does not contain a "family cap," a provision that would deny an increase in benefits to a woman who has an additional child after being placed on the welfare rolls.The cap appeals to fairness, but the governor's attachment to it is somewhat puzzling. He asserts that it would save money, but that is a dubious proposition since it would affect only a minority of women on welfare.

We have a great capacity for placing people into categories and minimizing their humanity. One such category is "felons" and another is "drug addicts. " We can easily forget that men and women who have been convicted of crimes or are suffering from substance abuse issues are the same as the rest of us at the core - fallible but resolutely hopeful. Here in Baltimore, a celebration of that capacity for hope and a reminder that redemption comes in many forms took place earlier this year in a small chapel within a church on Cathedral Street.

Why did Baltimore need to pay outside consultants half a million dollars for a report that says the city's financial future is grim? Some city residents wondered as much after Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake called for a new trash collection fee, a smaller city workforce and cuts to employee benefits as a way to deal with the projected $750 million, 10-year budget shortfall the consultants projected. For a city as financially strapped as Baltimore, couldn't that work have been done in house?

Federal workers' unions and food safety groups have joined to oppose new rules proposed by the Department of Agriculture to streamline federal poultry inspections. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service says the rules would "modernize" inspections of young chickens and turkeys, saving money for businesses and taxpayers while allowing inspectors to focus on the areas of poultry production that pose the greatest risk to food safety. The new inspection system grew out of a pilot program that began in the 1990s under President Bill Clinton.

In Part I of creative ways to cut costs , I covered the big areas such as the cake, the flowers, the decorations and the food, but there are plenty more ways to save on your big day. The Rehearsal Dinner Keep your rehearsal dinner light on the pocket by keeping the choices simple. Decide on a set menu with the restaurant or make it a family style meal. This allows everyone to have options without going overboard on cost. You can also opt to bring your own dessert at most places, This allows you to add a personal flair -- and for less.

Annapolis officials are considering a plan to remove trash cans from city parks, a strategy they say would save money and could keep public spaces cleaner. Without trash cans, officials said, visitors would take refuse with them or learn to not produce it in the first place. Other parks across the country have adopted such "trash-free" policies, including all Maryland state parks and scores of national parks, which urge visitors to "leave no trace. " In Annapolis, the idea comes amid broader changes that, for the first time, shifted city trash service into private hands to cut costs.

Giving some illegal immigrants more access to higher education in Maryland could mean an extra $5 million a year for the state government, according to a new cost-benefit study by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The study found that the net benefit to local, state and federal government could be as high as $25 million. And it estimated an additional $41 million a year in private sector benefits. An analysis by the non-partisan Department of Legislative Affairs found that the Dream Act would cost the state about $3.5 million a year . The law, which will be on the Nov. 6 ballot, allows some illegal immigrants in Maryland to pay in-state tution at colleges and universities.

NEW YORK -- There are two kinds of nonsavers, according to certified financial planner and investment adviser Bill DeShurko: people who don't earn enough money to put anything away and people who think they don't. If you're making a reasonable salary and still find yourself living paycheck to paycheck, the problem almost certainly isn't your income - it's your attitude. So says DeShurko, author of a book scheduled to be published next month, The Naked Truth About Your Money. The undressed truth about saving money is that we simply have to seize every single opportunity to sock it away.

From the time she was a little girl, Dorian Rehfield understood the importance of saving money. She has always made sure to set aside enough funds to cover a year's expenses just in case of an emergency. She just never thought she'd actually need to tap into that account, as she is doing now. Rehfield, 42, lost her job as director of marketing services when her Glen Cove, N.Y., company shut down in August. So she's now forced to live off her savings and unemployment, which is paying her about 14 percent of her salary, until it runs out in about three months.

With gas prices hovering around $4 a gallon this summer, everyone who drives can appreciate the beauty of vehicles designed to go twice as far on a tank of fuel than today's models - including the people who build cars. Some ideas simply make too much sense to stir much controversy. That's why even the U.S. auto industry has embraced the new fuel efficiency standards issued by the Environmental Protection Agency this week. The rules will require all new cars and trucks to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, nearly double the fuel efficiency of the U.S. fleet in 2008.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakeand her allies on the city's Board of Estimates today voted down a $7.4 million contract with IBM for switching city offices to voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phones because she believes there needs to be greater coordination between the Municipal Telephone Exchange, which is part of Comptroller Joan Pratt's office, and the Mayor's Office of Information Technology. And who could argue that isn't needed? Switching the phone system could save the city millions of dollars a year, but doing so without the significant participation of the workers who maintain Baltimore's computer network could lead to costly mistakes.