Luckily, there are ways to avoid Thanksgiving Day megaspend. If you strategize your meal, involve others, and entertain for free, you can host a delicious Thanksgiving Day for as little as $50. The twelve tips below will give you a Thanksgiving Day to remember–without the budgetary complications:

Plan it

Image: The Writing Loft

1) What type of feast (and people) do you want?
Will this year be a family affair? A semiformal dinner party? A gaggle of relatives? Figure out who’s coming over, what kind of food you want to serve, and how to entertain everyone.

If possible, make your event a potluck. That way, you only have to worry about the turkey, drinks, and perhaps a side dish. If you’re strapped, have your visitors bring drinks, too.

Tip: If a lot of people are coming, an easy way to organize a potluck is to create a list of items guests need to bring. Email out the list. Tell your guests to email you back as soon as they decide what item to bring. This generally leaves the slackers bringing the alcohol, which tends to cost more…but the system works.

2) What can you afford?
Look at your bank statements and figure out how much you can afford. Your Thanksgiving feast should not incur credit card debt. If you only have $5 to spare, push the potluck idea—hard. If you have $50, you can prepare a tasty, cheap meal for a family. If you have $500, you probably don’t need to read the rest of this post.

3) How much time do you have to prepare?
If you have less than an entire day, think about getting a prepared Thanksgiving meal at a grocery store. Many sell family-sized meals, including turkey, pumpkin pie, and the works, for less than $50. You pick them up on Thanksgiving Day.

Shop

Get cheaper kinds of foods.
There are several ways to do this.

1) Forego the whole turkey.
Will your guests be just as happy munching on a turkey thigh dish? Or pork? A vegetarian feast, perhaps? Substituting other food for a big turkey can save a lot of money. See what your guests are willing to eat in place of the big bird.

2) Cheap produce still makes tasty side dishes.
It costs less to make mashed potatoes than to prepare Peruvian purples stuffed with caviar and crème fraiche. Stick to sides that won’t break your wallet. Buy the produce on sale at your grocery store (called shop loss leaders). Supplement it with canned or frozen produce.

3) Buy in bulk.
There’s no better time than Thanksgiving to buy big bags of potatoes, frozen meat multipacks, and crates of juice at your local bulk retailer. See what you need a lot of, and head over to Costco or Sam’s Club to get it.

4) Clip coupons.
Start browsing your local Sunday newspaper two weeks before Thanksgiving. Stores often try to lure in customers with ultra-cheap specials. Make a meal out of the specials you find. If newspaper ads are too 1980 for you, find coupons online, at sites like Coupons.com.

If your store doubles or matches other stores’ coupons, all the better.

5) Put your freezer to work.
If you find grocery store loss leader specials a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, see if you can freeze them. Thaw before your feast, and voila, cheap fare.

6) Does anything taste just as good generic?
Some generic products, like beer, are dismal buys. Others, like canned pumpkin or cheddar cheese, might actually taste okay. See if there’s anything you can buy generic, without sacrificing taste.

7) Borrow.
If you’re lacking a turkey baster, gravy ladles, or any other Thanksgiving-specific utensil, see if you can borrow one from one of your guests. It beats buying something you’re only going to use once a year.

Entertain

1) Decorate on the cheap.
Creating your own can be cheap and fun, especially if you have kids. Here are some ideas to start you off. If you’re humble about your lack of Thanksgiving Martha Stewart-ness, ask if you can borrow decorations from someone. Or hit up your local dollar store for single-use holiday decorations.

2) Find free games.
If kids will be attending your party, print out free online games, puzzles, and coloring book pages. A Google search will lead you to a treasure trove of printables like the ones on this site. Bring out (or have guests bring) board games and DVDs if you want to keep the fun at home. If your plans include movies, see if you can schedule in a matinee.

For specific cost-effective recipes, try this website.

After criticizing finance company CIT’s reorganization as an attempt to purchase votes, Carl Icahn is offering $6bn of his own money as a replacement loan. Bloomberg has more:

Investor Carl Icahn offered to provide a $6 billion loan to CIT Group Inc., saying the terms of the 101-year-old commercial lender’s plan to raise the same amount from bondholders penalizes investors.

CIT is seeking to reduce debt by at least $5.7 billion after being locked out of the unsecured debt markets it relies on for funding and posting nine quarters of losses totaling more than $5 billion. At the same time CIT pursues the out-of-court debt swap, it’s also asking bondholders to vote on a prepackaged bankruptcy plan.

More here.

Icahn is CIT’s biggest creditor.

Incidentally, Icahn’s firm is also currently entangled with Goldman Sachs. GS is suing Icahn’s company for shorting Delphi’s bank debt, then not paying up after the market price of Delphi’s bank debt subsequently increased. Forbes has that story.

Adobe Systems Inc. announced it will buy business software company Omniture Inc. for $1.8 billion. Reuters has more:

Adobe…looks to counter falling sales from its Photoshop and Acrobat programs. Adobe, which reported lower fiscal third-quarter sales and profit on Tuesday, has been struggling to grow in the economic downturn as corporations and home computer users rein in technology spending.

Omniture shares soared 25 percent to $21.74 in after-hours trading, while Adobe shares slid 4.5 percent to $34.06. The deal, if completed, would be Adobe’s second-largest acquisition after its $3.4 billion purchase of Macromedia in December 2005.

Toyota Motor Corp yesterday announced a recall of almost 96,000 Corolla, Corolla Matrix, and Scion cars due to potential accumulation of ice on their braking systems. Reuters has more:

The recall involves 2009 and 2010 model year Toyota Corolla, Corolla Matrix and 2008 and 2009 Scion xD vehicles, all equipped with 1.8 liter engines, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

Since the condition can happen at low temperatures, Toyota’s recall applies to vehicle owners in 19 states: Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

IBM today purchased SPSS for about $1.2 billion in cash. Tech Crunch has more:

IBM is buying analytics software and solutions provider SPSS in an all cash transaction at a price of $50/share – a 42 percent premium to Monday’s closing price of $35.09 on Nasdaq – resulting in a total cash consideration in the merger of approximately $1.2 billion. The acquisition is subject to SPSS shareholder approval, regulatory clearances and other closing conditions, and is expected to close later in the second half of 2009.

Big Blue said the acquisition of the publicly-held Chicago company was expected to strengthen its information-agenda initiative, which helps companies take information and turn it into a strategic asset. IBM shares fell 67 cent to $116.96 in pre-market trading, while SPSS shares jumped 41 percent to $49.59.

The article quotes SPSS Chairman/CEO Jack Noonan as saying that with IBM, SPSS will “advance Predictive Analytics as a competitive advantage for companies and organizations worldwide.” The buyout is “a transformative event that will accelerate the adoption of Predictive Analytics.”

I’m not sure about that, but the move is within IBM’s traditional strategy of growing its software business. Wonder who’s next in mergermania?

P – Positively proactive. Professionals demonstrate behaviors that are positive, proactive instead of negative, and reactive.

R – Respect. Through this ethic and value of respect, professionals are known and trusted within and without their respective organizations.

O – Opportunities to help others. Those who avow before understand they have a responsibility to help others whether it is to grow self-leadership skills or provide some expert advice.

F – Follow-up. No one likes to wait for un-returned phone calls or emails. Professionals make it a habit to follow-up on everything and accept responsibility when they fail to engage in that behavior.

E – Empathy. Professionals know how to be empathetic. This characteristic is a one of the signs of high emotional intelligence and a predictor for leadership success.

S – Self-confident. When individuals are self confident, they do not have to put others down at their own expense. These individuals have a high sense of balanced self-esteem and role awareness.

S – Sustainable. Professionals are truly sustainable in that they can continue forward when times become difficult. Their ethics and beliefs keep them focused.

I – Integrity. Integrity is putting your values into action; doing the right thing when no one else is looking without personal gain or benefit; and accepting a potential personal cost.

O – Optimize all interactions. This is critical because professionals do not negate the value of people. They look to see how one interaction can benefit someone else even before himself or herself.

N – Nimble. Being flexible and open to change allows these individuals to be quick on their feet and nimble to the opportunities that they encounter on a daily basis.

A – Awareness. Having a high level of awareness of themselves, the marketplace, the community and even the world helps these individuals continually stay on top of things.

L – Leadership. Last, but not least, professionals demonstrate exceptional leadership skills and even more importantly self-leadership skill. For if you cannot lead yourself, you cannot lead others.

How do we bring out the best in employees? Provide them the right tools to do their jobs? Optimum working conditions? In professional sports steroids get the job done. How far would corporations go if we had legal performance enhancing drugs? In a story for the Conference Board Review, Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, asks how far a company should go to improve its workforce.

From the article:

“You may soon be forced to rethink everything you thought you knew about improving talent and bringing out the best in people. All over the world, the best-performing people in the best-performing organizations always look to get better at getting better. In tomorrow’s global markets, being the best will increasingly depend on ready access to the best technologies, the best (and presumably legal) drugs, and the best coaching and mentoring money can buy.”

If you don’t believe corporate America will embrace they types of technology Schrage refers to, consider the case of coffee. Caffeine is a stimulant that has been provided at no charge to millions of workers for decades. (I once knew an office manager who spiked it with sugar at the brewing stage to squeeze extra energy out of his employees.)

It’s not all about the drugs. How much pressure will executives receive to participate in self-improvement techniques such as counseling and coaching?

More from the article:

“Employees looking for an edge personally purchased the drug or the surgery or the technology or the coach. The firm allowed — encouraged? — employees to effectively subsidize the organization through their own portfolio of performance-enhancement investments.”

Schrage also ponders independent drug use by individuals:

“Is popping a pill to stay up all night to meet a deadline a leadership choice to be celebrated, accepted, ignored, or discouraged? Does it depend on the talent, or on the result?”

Extremely intriguing stuff. All the more reason to shore up those business ethics.

Check out the full article here.

Image Credit: rodrigo senna

I was watching one of those cooking reality shows the other day while I was putting a frozen lasagna in the oven and opening a bag of salad. I don’t remember if it was Top Chef or Naked Chef or Chefs with Big Knives or That Hot Foreign Chef with the Really Cute Accent, but it was one of those.

If  you’re not familiar with these type of shows, they assemble a crew of amateur or professional cooks who compete in these *very exciting* cooking challenges wherein they only have a limited number of ingredients – say a pork chop, four anchovies, 2 cans of mandarin oranges, and a bag of rice. The chefs have to make something that tastes good and looks good on the plate, and that is also original. On the show I was watching they had 20 minutes to do it, outside, over a campfire, with some snooty looking Top-of-the-Toppest Chef looking over their shoulders.

And what’s a reality show without an elimination? There were two tied for last. One chef had an amazing idea. She had combined ingredients in new and stunning ways that impressed the judges. Her execution, however, left them hungry. She hadn’t quite manifested her vision on the plate. Her competitor had done the opposite. He delivered a somewhat predictable, ho-hum dish. But he’d done it flawlessly.

Who won? I don’t know because I changed the channel. But I kept thinking about the issue, and I think you should too.

What’s more important in business – concept or execution?

Image Credit: nicholas.boullosa, Flickr