Make your place the best on the market by offering small, inexpensive extras, like instant oatmeal packets for breakfast, granola bars and bottled water for side trips.

Oatmeal for breakfast and no restaurants and you have the trifecta working for your savings rate.

But ice cold lemonade and oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip cookies will be fine.

A lot of travelers drive in and arrive late, unpack and work the next day so I try to think of it like "if I arrived in the evening and I want to cook up some pasta real quick for dinner or make some oatmeal for breakfast what are the basics I'd need?"

We want them to have coffee/tea, dairy and non-dairy creamer, some fruit and instant oatmeal so they can grab a quick meal in case they don't have time to hit the grocery store.

But here is the real bug in the oatmeal. 

Do I really want to read a review regarding how they would prefer oatmeal cookies over the chocolate chip cookies that I left out?

I don't know if this is frugal or practical, but I use the small cardboard boxes with my packets of instant oatmeal as trash receptacles and plastic cereal bags as their liners.

You could also add a small microwave and mini fridge which allows leftovers and oatmeal packets and cold drinks and to heat up muffins if you have butter packets.

Go purchase a brick house on the west part of Chicago, rent that out, it will definitely stand longer, with little to know effort.Don’t put your money in styrofoam, chicken wired houses, slapped together with glue and painted, hardened oatmeal.