One of the negative consequences of my recent CVS shopping trips is the increased printing. We match up the weekly deals against our Coupon Database, and if we find printable coupons, there goes the toner!

So, I began searching for ways to reduce my printing costs and came across this article explaining a simple solution.

This is something that is very easy to implement, so I decided to share it with you…

Change Your Fonts!

Yes, that’s the solution. Now before you go clicking to another article, read this:

Printer.com recently put this notion to the test using two popular printers. The Canon Pixma MP 210 was picked to simulate the printing of private users while the Brother HL-2140 laser printer was used to test business use. Both printers were left at their default settings (600 by 600 dpi). Changing only the font resulted in saving between $20 and $80 per year.

That is a lot of money to save just by changing your fonts! If you print about 25 pages per week, you can save at least $20; bump that up to 250 pages, and you’re looking at saving $80/year!

Which Fonts Should You Use?

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Century Gothic turns out to be the cheapest font to use when printing. Actually, if you currently use Franklin Gothic Medium your savings will be over $100!

Ecofont and Times New Roman round out the top three.

I like the look of Times New Roman the best out of this group, so I’ll probably switch to that.

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Now, I know I can’t change the font when I print out coupons, but I can change it with everything else.

…Of course, if people just dealt primarily with electronic documents, we could use whatever font we wanted and not worry about costs!

By the way, why is the fax machine still hanging around? Ok, rant over.

A few of questions for you:

Do you have any other surprising frugal tips?

Did you already know about this one?

Can you think of any other money-saving efforts that may have a negative consequence?

photo credit: PatrickS