What is a napkin worth?
$5378.70: Yes you read it right… five thousand three hundred seventy eight dollars and seventy cents.
Bear with me Grasshopper and all will be made clear.
Being frugal involves lifestyle choices… a number of which are really very painless to implement and IMO do not affect your “lifestyle” at all.
One of these is the refusal to buy or use paper napkins… (this flows over into paper towels, paper plates, and throw away cups but to keep it simple I’ve restricted this example to just napkins).
I’ve lived in my home for 20 years and not once has a package of paper napkins crossed the threshold… what do I use?
Cloth restaurant napkins. Reusable cloth napkins!
You can buy them for as little as 83 cents each if you buy 5 dozen from places like Table Linens For Less. Even just one napkin can be bought for $1.25 so they’re not expensive.
Five dozen cloth napkins will last for years if not decades. Just needing to be thrown in the wash with your towels and other non-wearables. Get a couple of different colors if you want and reserve a dozen or so for really messy foods that stain badly… I save a dozen for just eating BBQ… and another dozen for entertaining. (Here’s where different colors and patterns come in handy to tell them apart.)
So how does a Napkin become worth $5378.70?
Math time. The average household spends $3 a week on paper napkins.
$3 x 52 weeks a year = $156.
$156 divided by 12 = $13 a month. (You have to remember that a month is not exactly 4 weeks)
We go to (the free!) www.math.com to the Savings Calculator and plug in a $13 initial deposit and $13 a month for 20 years at an assumed interest rate of 5% (Savings I-Bonds currently pay 5.69% so not an unreasonable interest rate) and out comes $5378.70.
This is what you would have spent over 20 years for the cost of the paper napkins plus the lost opportunity cost of compound interest on that cost..
All of it THROWN IN THE GARBAGE. You might as well use dollar bills to wipe your lips while eating. If you think paper napkins are bad for the Wallet add in the other items.
Average Household in addition spends:
$3 on two rolls of Paper Towels
$3 on Paper Plates
$3 on Disposable Cups
With the Paper Napkins it totals out to $12 a week or $52 a month. Plug it into the Savings Calculator under the same time frame and interest rate and you get a whopping $21,514.80. All Thrown Away.
So replace the paper towels with terry cloth bar mops/towels. The paper plates and disposable cups with inexpensive china and bank the savings.
Do you have any things you can change from throw away to “reusable” that won’t “change your lifestyle” or only cause a minor change but have the potential to save you big money over time?
Photo credit: stock.xchng.
That’s impressive math. I use only cloth napkins I didn’t pay for. I have a friend who finds them at thrift stores and I got a bunch that way and for free when a friend moved away. I have a zillion hankerchiefs instead of tissues (I wash my hands frequently, though)
We use cloth napkins, only breaking out party napkins for the kids’s parties. We use about 3 rolls of paper towels a year on things like draining grease from fried foods or cleaning up dog sick. Mostly we have rags made from worn out wash cloths or cut up old t-shirts. We use handkerchiefs and cloth diapers and cloth baby wipes. I can’t believe the amount that people spend on disposable paper products. It’s appalling.
How much does detergent, water, and the energy to run the washer/dryer cost? Seems a bit deceptive, and possibly more preachy than you intended.
I agree with you from an environmental perspective, Roland. But there are some tasks that I absolutely refuse to use a terry cloth towel for – cleaning the cat box is one of them. Paper towels for that.
Karen: Not intended to be preachy…as for the laundry costs I think they are very minimal. I don’t wait for a full load of just napkins and bar towels. Those I use go into the washer with the bath linens. Napkins might be one or two a day and the bar towels the same…probably not more than the equivalent of one load a month.
Serena: I understand on the cat box though I used to use an old spatula I got at the thrift shop for scooping up the mess in the bottom of my parrots cage.
This definitely has some possible comparisons to using cloth diapers, rather than disposable ones. Always a good choice, says this non-parent.
However, I feel that the math here has been taken to an extreme. Admittedly, we are a household of two (+ cat), but there is no way we go through $3 worth of paper plates and cups per week! What does Average Household do? They must have BBQs and eat on the patio twice, every night of the week. Don’t they use real dishes, ever?
The only time we use paper plates/cups/napkins is when we have a party, and simply not enough legitimate dishware to go around. For ourselves, we might go through a roll of paper towel (always bought on sale) every 2-3 weeks (barring any accidents, of course).
So, while I get that one might save some cash – and, arguably, some of the environment – by using cloth napkins, I can’t see it adding up to $5300, even after 20 years.
Nevertheless, something to think about!
That’s very impressive math and, while I don’t disagree with your point, I find it doubtful this would add up to much savings for the “average” household.
We’re a family of three. I buy a pack of 250 paper napkins for about $1.79 at Kroger roughly once per month. Even if we say I do it every 4th week that’s still only 13 packs a year at a cost of less than $25 a year including sales tax for my area. Now, our usage may be lower than the “average family” but at even double that cost it would seem that the cost of buying all of the cloth napkins instead and laundering them over time would even out in the first year. There would not seem to be any savings until the 2nd year and even that is negligible at such a low level of usage.
My son prefers what is perhaps the most frugal and environmentally-sound option of all: wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Nothing extra to buy, and the garments get washed anyway.
My partner and I must be inherently neat eaters, because we seldom need napkins. The rare times we do, we can usually find a few leftover McDonald’s napkins from one of our infrequent trips to the drive-thru.