Secret frugality weapon: The neighbors

By The Simple Dollar

One of the biggest untapped resources for frugality is one's neighbors. If you have a good relationship with your neighbors, the financial benefits for all of you can be tremendous. Here are seven frugal suggestions for shared activity that can save a wad of cash.

Reciprocal baby-sitting

Offer to watch a neighbor's children one Saturday night a month in exchange for them watching your kids once a month.

This can be especially valuable at Christmastime. My parents and their neighbors used to do this in order to get the children out of the house so that presents could be bought and wrapped.

Neighborhood meals

Get several neighbors together and have rotating meals -- once every other week or so, one family cooks for everyone.

This works well for cooking something simple: grilled hamburgers with boiled sweet corn or a giant cajun feast (lots of stuff boiled together).

Shared equipment

Look into buying a lawn mower with a neighbor. Or an edger. Or other such expensive equipment.

For just a few hundred dollars, you can wind up with many years of use of a top-quality riding lawn mower and bear only a small fraction of the maintenance and expense.

Shared food

If you have a gardening neighbor, agree to grow different things in your gardens and share equally.

For example, I know many techniques for growing tomatoes, so I might offer to grow a large number of tomato plants and share with several neighbors in exchange for some of their produce.

Bulk buying

Talk to several families about purchasing a butchered and packaged head of cattle. Quite often, you can get this far cheaper than sticker price if you get ahold of a meat locker. Sell shares of it and split up the meat so that you don't overload your own freezer.

You could do this with any very large bulk purchase to save a lot of money in the long run.

Summer camp

The families on our block did a very interesting thing to save significant day-care expenses. All of the children 3 and over attended a rotating day camp at the different houses of their parents.

Each week, one set of parents used a week of vacation, hosted the camp at their house and watched all of the kids while finding fun activities for them. If day care costs $100 a week per child and you have two children, this can save a couple grand over a 13-week summer.

Shared resources

Need pruning shears but don't have any? Don't run to the hardware store for something you might use once -- knock on your neighbor's door and ask.

Quite often, you'll be able to find what you need.

How do you get started?

My wife and I have simply invited several neighbors over for a meal, just to get to know them. We do this one family at a time so we're not overwhelmed with names and such. Then, hopefully, they'll reciprocate, and you have the basis for a relationship where you get to know them well.

Don't be afraid of your neighbors. Get to know them, and you'll find a powerful resource in your life.

This article was written by Trent Hamm, the founder of The Simple Dollar, a blog offering a peek at his recovery from near bankruptcy.

Published Sept. 24, 2007