How to save money by making your own products

Although it may seem like a trifling sum at times, you should not overlook the savings when you make something for yourself, because the amount you save really grows the more items you make. And here are very good reasons for this.

• Every time you buy a bottle of ketchup for the table, shampoo for your hair, salve for an itch, or even liver snaps for your dog, only a very small percentage of the money goes to cover the costs of making the product.
• Indeed, if you leave out the actual cost of manufacturing, the ingredients in most products account for only pennies of the purchaser's dollar.
• What happens to the rest of the money that you plop down at the cashier? It goes to cover the costs of advertizing, packaging, shipping, the retailer's rent and light bills, and of course the cashier's salary and her boss's bottom line.

• Paying a healthy chunk of your shopping dollar for advertizing is especially irksome, considering advertizing's well-known penchant for grossly inflating the image of a product to entice buyers.
• If it weren't for the happy faces, cheery jingles, and promises of better living in ads, why else would so many of us, who are otherwise rational, thrifty people, pay good money for cola drinks?
• After all, they are little more than fizzy water doctored up with sugar, caffeine, artificial flavouring, and brown dye.
• Actual lab analysis shows that colas are 99.5 per cent sugar water; only 0.5 per cent is flavouring and colour.
• You can make any number of healthier, more satisfying, better-tasting thirst quenchers in your own kitchen for just a few cents each.

• Similarly, a lot of the money you pay for a product goes to packaging — in many cases, the cost of the packaging surpasses the cost of the product itself.
• So saving your hard-earned cash for better uses is certainly a major reason for making products yourself whenever you can.