First of all, it's less wasteful than you think. It's not like starting up MS-Word and shutting it down once a minute (twice, actually). Cron is running anyway. It looks at your crontab each minute to see if you have any scripts that need to be executed.
And executing a script once a minute is about as server intensive as pulling up your PHP based home page. So think of it this way: Instead of getting 10 hits a minute (which is so low it's practically zero), you're getting 11 per minute. Still basically zero.
Now if you were getting 10 hits per second on your home page, that's a pretty good clip and many hosts will start talking about kicking you off... but two extra page loads per minute isn't going to mean the difference between getting kicked off or not.
The second thing is this: You can reduce the two cron jobs into one. You said that one script moves the files from one directory to another and then another script sends out the emails. There's no reason why one script couldn't do both things. (Check this, do this, check that, do that). It won't save very many cpu cycles but it might make you feel better by cutting your number of cron jobs in half.
