Laura Rowley Money & Happiness

My husband and I just celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary, and we have a recurring goofy argument that's endured for as long as our union: I want him to brown-bag his lunch to work, and he steadfastly refuses.

Brown-bag Brouhaha

He implies that there's something undignified about carrying a brown paper bag to Manhattan on the train. I offer to buy him a cool lunchbox, emblazoned with the action figure of his choice. He argues that lunch is an important opportunity to meet clients. I suggest that if a client meeting comes up, he can store my hearty array of delectable deli delights in his office refrigerator.

He argues that our income is adequate enough for him to afford a sandwich at his favorite midtown Italian deli, where he can talk with Joe, the owner, about football's New York Giants. I suggest he could stop in and get a $1 cup of coffee after his brown-bag lunch and still banter with Joe about which Manning brother is a superior quarterback.

Why this marital standoff over an $8 daily ritual? Because I'm convinced that for the average person who wants to build wealth, pennies count.

Penny-Pinchers Made Good

People disdain pennies. They pass them on the sidewalk. There was even talk a few years ago of the Treasury abolishing the lowly penny. Instead of saving pennies, pundits urge you to get rich quick by investing in exotic commodities, or (a few years ago) buying a heap of real estate with no money down and flipping it for a quick profit.

The latest gambit is to start a business and milk it for big bucks. A "Financial Freedom" invitation that arrived in the mail this week instructed me to attend a seminar at a Newark airport hotel so I could start my own all-cash, home-based vending business. It read: "Laura, you CAN have it all ... more money than you've ever dreamed of, and the time and freedom to enjoy it!"

Pennies aren't sexy. (Frankly, home-based vending doesn't sound that sexy to me, either.) But pennies have a funny way of snowballing into dollars, and then hundreds, and then thousands, especially if you use them to buy the stocks of well-managed companies. Consider the story of a parking attendant who earns $20,000 a year but has amassed a $500,000 equity portfolio. Or the one about a group of New Yorkers who managed to save for a down payment on a (very expensive, very tiny) piece of the Big Apple. Or the clan of seven dubbed "America's cheapest family," who paid off their mortgage in nine years on a salary of $35,000 a year.

Splitting the Difference

My husband and I amassed a very old-fashioned 20 percent down payment on our house over a dozen years by watching pennies. We lived with roommates before we married; took the subway instead of cabs; and refused to buy a car (even after the Manhattan Budget Rent-a-Car failed to honor our Christmas-day reservation, and we had to schlep on the bus to south Jersey laden with boxes, bags, and a 19-month-old).

Yet despite our success in saving, my husband doesn't think you can penny-pinch your way to prosperity. He says we should focus less on $8 lunches and more on increasing our income -- something we have the potential to do, since we're both self-employed.

I do agree that you sometimes have to spend money to make money. For instance, I hired a sitter this fall to pick up the kids from school and drive them to their after-school activities -- since, as I discovered, driving kids to their after-school activities with a laptop in tow is a surefire way to lose both your productivity and your mind. (And expose your children to an unseemly amount of traffic-induced cursing.) It also tends to push your workload into the nights and weekends, which is a surefire way to lose touch with your family and known forms of human leisure.

But wealth accumulation results from a mix of figuring out when to invest in hired help, business lunches, or technology to boost your earnings, and when to save pennies.

A Gift from the Fed

I've been thinking about pennies because of the Federal Reserve's surprise half-point cut in short-term interest rates on Sept. 18. Interest rates on consumer debt -- such as credit cards, auto loans, and home equity loans -- are expected to fall over the next few months. A half-point decline in interest rates would put an extra $30 a year into the pocket of someone with $7,000 in credit card debt, according to CardTrak.com.

That $30 is $2.50 a month -- more than eight pennies a day. But if you're in debt, those are pennies from heaven. At a minimum, keep the amount of your payment constant, so the $30 discount you receive from the lower interest rate goes to reducing your principal.

Better yet, take the opportunity to find some extra pennies to shovel a little more money at your loans. Although I don't have debt except for a low-interest, 30-year mortgage, I periodically review my spending to see if I'm getting good value for my money. I recently canceled my Netflix subscription, at $13.99 a month, because the DVDs were coming in and sitting on the mail pile. I didn't have the time to watch them, especially with school, homework, and extracurriculars back in full swing.

I also stopped buying cases of small plastic water bottles at Costco for the kids' lunches, and replaced them with washable containers (mainly for environmental reasons, but the savings is about $20 a month). And I nixed cases of diet soda, which, while cheap and sweet, are unhealthy and unnecessary (and, ironically, believed to contribute to obesity). For more easy savings ideas, click here.

Let the Pinching Begin

Clearly, the overlooked penny deserves a little more respect in a culture where saving is out of fashion. According to the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis, Americans have been spending more than they earn since mid-2005. That's a relatively new development; as recently as the early 1980s, U.S. consumers saved more than 10 percent of their after-tax earnings on average.

Pennies count, so spend them wisely. At the New American Dream organization web site, you can download a free "Wallet Buddy" -- a small paper folder for your credit or debit card, imprinted with 13 questions to consider before you swipe. For more tips for smart savers, see my blog.

My 15th-anniversary gift to my husband is to stop nagging him about brown-bagging. Because we both have better things to do with our time -- for instance, discuss how much he spends on tailgating at Giants games.