Mary Hunt: What you can do to outsmart inflation

If you haven't noticed the arrival of inflation (where the cost of goods and services go up while the value of our money goes down), you must be hiding under a rock somewhere. Even a trip to the supermarket these days is enough to scare the daylights out of an otherwise well adjusted person.

Rising prices are not limited to food. The cost of cotton continues to skyrocket, making everything made of it go up, too — like sheets, towels and clothes. So what's a wise person to do? Fight back! There are things we can do.

1. Build hedge funds. What that means is that you wait until something is on sale at a rock-bottom price, and then you buy a lot of it to act as a hedge against future rising prices. Example: I knew in early October that peanut butter would be going up 40 percent a few weeks hence. I went to Costco and bought eight giant jars of Skippy Extra Crunchy Peanut Butter before the price went up. My peanut butter hedge fund will last us at least two years.

Right now, we have an excellent opportunity to build our nonperishable hedge funds. Pantry staples are on sale in every major supermarket. If you want to fight back against inflation, load up on as much of these items as you will need in 2012. You'll be grateful you did come July, when sugar is $7.99 for five pounds, knowing you paid just $3.99 for the same thing months earlier.

2. Learn to do it yourself. Think of all the ways you hire others to do what you could do for yourself. Just the other day, I dropped off a pair of pants at the dry cleaners to be shortened. When the lady said it would be $7.50, I whipped into mental calculation mode. Sure, I know how to hem pants, but it would take me at least an hour and my time is so much more valuable than that, right? Theoretically, yes. But realistically, I could do this in my sleep or while watching TV. I can pay myself $7.50 an hour to watch TV. And I did, because I ended up hemming them myself.

3. Reduce your needs. I have a theory that many of the things we characterize as needs really aren't. Our basic human needs are few: shelter, food and clothing. OK, add taxes and medical attention to the list. Beyond that, everything else falls within very strong wants.

Start paying attention. Before every purchase, ask yourself, "Is this a need or a want?" I'm not suggesting that we should never buy things that are wants. But you won't believe how many times you'll decide not to buy simply because you were honest with yourself.