I used to love Back-to-School shopping. When I was a kid, my mom would haul out the Sears catalog and let me pick out a few new dresses and a pair of new shoes. It was like Christmas in Autumn. These days, however, as a mom of two grade-school kids, I don't view the season with such delight. Why? Back-to-School shopping is often a budget-buster for those of us living on a shoe-string.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. Retailers around the country are bracing for what they think will be the worst Back-to-School shopping season of the decade. A recent survey by Deloitte shows that 70% of households surveyed indicated that they would be spending much less this season, and nearly half said they'd try to cut back on the back-to-school budget by at least $100.

The good news is, retailers are bending over backwards for the parent dollar, running promotions, two-for-one deals and sales at certain times of the day.

When my wife and I moved to New York from the relative comfort of Southwest Virginia, we were optimistic about our job prospects. She had a verbal promise of employment from a major cosmetics company, and I had a placement coordinator who was very excited about my options. However, her cosmetics job evaporated, my coordinator disappeared, the movers cheated us, etc., etc. Bottom line, we soon found ourselves counting pennies and scrambling for employment. We landed on our feet, but there were a few scary months in which we got behind on the bills and found ourselves questioning our decisions, our move to New York, and even our sanity. In the process, I learned a little bit about the hierarchy of needs.

I was already familiar with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which organizes human growth according to needs, with food and air at the bottom and morality at the top. However, as my wife and I were watching our resources dwindle, most of Maslow's higher needs went straight out the window. I'm not saying that I don't place a high price on morality. I'm just saying that when my family is hungry my morality goes on sale.

After I dispensed with Maslow, I developed the following hierarchy of needs. If you find yourself out of work and watching pennies, this little list might be of some use:

Physiological needs: Food, water, air, shelter. Luckily, air is usually free. For the other three, though, there is a lot of leeway. To put it bluntly, food is a need; fillet mignon isn't. If you're looking down the barrel of poverty, cut back on eating out and consider foods that are less expensive. Salmon steaks are out and hamburger is in.