Big Jugs Of Wine Make Saving Easier

We’ve finally figured out how to pay for college. We’re going to start drinking big ol’ jugs of wine.

You see, at our house, we’ve been agonizing for 18 years over how to come up with enough money to send our children to college. We never actually agonized enough to institute an actual savings plan, yet trust me, we agonized.

Now, however, our son is a senior in high school and reality is setting in. He has earned some money himself, but we will still need to come up with $10,000 or so extra dollars a year, which, up until this year, I thought maybe we could find by just looking a little harder.

“This is working out perfectly, dear!” I imagined myself yelling to my wife, with my head under the car seat and my legs sticking out onto the driveway. “I’ve found $8,000 so far and I haven’t even checked under the back seat yet!”

What a ridiculous fantasy. Who would be so delusional as to try to find college money that way? I found less than $4, which is actually not bad.

Anyway, we started looking for ways we could cut down our monthly household expenses. We canceled some magazine subscriptions. This saved us about $58 yearly, meaning we had to come up with only $9,942. I soon realized that the only way to save that much money was to give up the truly big-ticket items. I decided it was time to make the ultimate sacrifice in America - we would cut back on our “lifestyle.”

“Carol,” I said to my wife. “We’re going to have to sell the boat.”

All in all, I thought she took this very calmly.

“We don’t have a boat,” she said.

“That’s right, and we can just forget about getting one, either,” I said, taking a tough fiscal line.

While this was a huge sacrifice, it didn’t save us any actual money, so I began to take a close look at our grocery bill. What could we lop off? I began to wish I was a smoker, because I had read somewhere that a two-pack-a day smoker could save nearly $2,000 a year by quitting. If only I was a smoker with a yacht, I would be sitting pretty right about now.

But then, with stunning clarity, I saw the way out. The biggest item on the grocery bill was $7.99, for a bottle of red wine. Now, you have to understand, this is what would be called an “affordable little bargain wine” by people who really know wine. It very well might have had the names “Ernest and Julio” somewhere on the label. Yet it was a big grocery expense, bigger than most meat purchases, bigger than most fruit and vegetable purchases, bigger than, and this is really saying something, almost all cereal purchases.

“Carol,” I said. “Wine is the key. Wine is the key to college savings.”

“We’re giving up wine?” she asked.

“What? Are you nuts?” I said. “Of course not. We’re going to start buying the cheapest wine we can find, in the largest quantities.”

Wine is the most democratic of commodities. You can get it at any price. I soon discovered that I could get an entire gallon of jug wine for the price of one mid-priced bottle of cabernet. Now I have discovered something even better. I can get a whole box of wine for the price of one “affordable little bargain wine.” Now, this box holds five liters of wine, which means that I am getting the equivalent of six and two-thirds bottles for what I used to pay for one.

Of course there are some drawbacks. That $7.99 bottle was made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, while the $7.99 box o’ wine was made from the kind of grapes they put in canned fruit cocktail. However, why should I kid myself? Wine is wine. Some of the happiest memories of my wild youth involved a warm fireplace, soft music and a jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano. And just think how much happier these memories would have been if someone had been there with me!

Anyway, my new plan will cut my wine bill to one-sixth of its previous size. I have yet to calculate how much we will save, because that depends on how heavily we have been drinking recently.

Yet even if we don’t save the entire $10,000, this plan is guaranteed to work one way or the other. Nothing like a big ol’ jug of wine to take the sting out of being broke.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review