Save Money Make Money: Episode 11

Concept 11: Use of Pressure Cooker in Your Kitchen

The invention of pressure cooker as a cooking gadget in your kitchen is pretty old now. However, a large numbers of households all over the world do not put it to its best use and thus deprive themselves of a good chunk of savings. Besides, there are other benefits too.

Use of pressure cooker saves times and therefore, saves the expenditure on cooking fuel or electric power. It takes on an average around 53% less time to cook in a pressure cooker when compared to open pot cooking. This takes into account the time required to bring the cooker to full pressure as well as the time during which the food is cooked under full pressure. The longer an item takes to cook, the greater is the time saved through pressure cooking.

Here are some examples of time saved on cooking certain basic food items. The time taken to cook around 1.8 kilograms of potatoes in an open pot is around 47 minutes whereas the cooking time for it in a pressure cooker is around 16 minutes giving you 31 minutes saving in time or in terms of percentage of time saved, it is 66%. For cooking 900 grams of rice, these figures are approximately 33 minutes, 14 minutes, 19 minutes and 58%. For cooking 2.5 kilograms of mutton they will be approximately: 100 minutes, 26 minutes, 74 minutes and 74%.

Because you cook faster in a pressure cooker, you save fuel or electric power and therefore money. A family can save at least half of cooking gas or electricity, it would otherwise need, by using a pressure cooker to cook daily meals. The fuel or electricity prices are constantly rising and the supply may also be erratic at many places, this saving is an advantage one can ill afford to ignore.

The beauty of a pressure cooker is that you can cook a number of dishes simultaneously at a time in a pressure cooker thus further reducing the time taken and increase in the savings per dish cooked. For non-vegetarians it provides additional savings because even the tough cuts of meat also get cooked in minutes in pressure cooking. So, they can by even tough cuts of meat instead of only choice cuts which are normally more expensive. From the point of view of nutrition or taste, the tough cuts of meat are no way inferior to the choice cuts.

In addition to savings in time and in your expenses on cooking fuel and electricity, pressure cooking is healthier since it retains nutritive elements of food, it improves taste and it is fully hygienic. One more advantage is that you can use pressure cooker as a sterilizer. Pressure cooker operates at a steam temperature of 121 degrees Celsius which is also recommended for sterilization of bandages, babies' feeding bottles, injection syringes and host of other items that require 100% germ free condition.

Also refer: (Home Page for All Home Tips) http://home-tips-tricks.blogspot.com/

Save Money Make Money: Episode 10

Concept 10: Another Evil: The Credit Cards

The main evil is "living on debts, living on loans". The interested parties have glamorized it a lot by brainwashing most of the people by advocating that the real way of living life is to start enjoying all the material pleasures from the very first day of your life and for that these interested parties are willing to provide you the loans at vulgarly and obscenely high interest rates.

Credit card system comes very handy, on a day to day or even minute to minute basis, to fulfil your such desires without your possessing any ready cash of your own with you. And if you default to pay back the entire money due on you on the specified date, the credit card companies allow you to carry forward your loans. It is so convenient for you if you are spending more that what you earn and credit card companies are happier still, since they can extract lot more money from you after a few months or few years on that carried forward loan. Ironically, they do not have to do any work to earn that extra money. Just keep adding the interest. And so, you get a shock of your life when the credit card company sends a statement after few months demanding a sum of money that is far higher than your own estimate of what was due on you. The interest rates are unimaginably and more so, unreasonably and illogically high. (I wish that the government in every country could exercise some control on it and put a cap on the highest interest rate that the credit card companies can charge).

Under the existing circumstances, better thing is to use cash to buy things and if you at all use the credit card, keep a track of how much have you bought on credit card in order to keep a control on expenses using the credit card. This way, you will be able to pay back the entire money due on you on month to month basis and you will never waste your money in paying the unnecessary and heavy interest.

Also refer: (Home Page for All Home Tips) http://home-tips-tricks.blogspot.com/

Save Money Make Money: Episode 9

Concept 9: Manage Your Health and Medical Expenses

Lots of vicious systems have come to stay in human society because of the economic muscles of the interested parties and their ulterior and greedy intentions and actions. One of them is the exploitative execution of the otherwise noble concept of insuring. So the whole lot of insurance companies, who have become unimaginably stinking rich are controlling the entire medical and health care market. The result is: prices of using the medical services whether they are hospitals, doctors or medicines etc have been draconically, artificially jacked up.

Till such time these system remain intact and flourish further, you have no alternative but to cover yourself and your family by a good and economical medical insurance scheme. If you do not do so, you will have to shell out fortunes to buy these services and your coffers will drain out in no time. Today's medical and health system is that bad and that expensive. You just cannot afford it without taking an insurance cover.

So do it. Choose the better of the lot that are available in the market.

(I wish we could eliminate the insurance companies altogether who act as the mafia type middle men and instead let the real professionals like doctors, pharmaceutical companies and medical equipment manufacturers etc run the show as a free competitive economy. The prices of buying the health and medical services will surely come down).

Also refer: (Home Page for All Home Tips) http://home-tips-tricks.blogspot.com/