Tag: budget

Mostly Budget Musings

So, life has continued, time has kept flowing, while I’ve been locked out of this little blog.

We’re still in a pandemic… maybe? Is it endemic yet? I can’t keep up and I’m so fried. Does everything seem to be slipping and getting worse? All this awful hateful stuff going on in the world, from invasions/war, to attacks on LGBTQ+ and women’s rights, to all the endless shootings and mass shootings. Life is freaking stressful.

And inflation. Skyrocketing inflation in some sectors. Used car prices are freaking SHOCKING. It’s inane, and you can’t get a freaking loan for one unless your credit is perfect. Seriously, my friend is currently so screwed right now by this. And Housing. Can we talk about housing prices? House or apartment if you are hunting right now you are pretty damn screwed. There is a 600 sq. ft. apartment with 1 bed, 1 bath in my town for $950/month… that is a STEAL these days! It’s outrageous at the same time. 600 sq. ft. is very small. It is suitable only for a single person or a couple and nearly $1,000/month. wtf.

We all know gas prices are up, $5/gallon at least, it’s impacting the way my family lives. We bought our house in a rural town, about 30 minutes commute to work for all but one of us, (who can walk to work) and gas prices are just murder right now. Especially for my eldest who makes like $14/hour. (and that’s with a recent raise!!!) She probably loses around $10/day of that to gas to and from work, I mean, we ALL do but she is hardest hit. Our son rides in with my husband and husband makes decent money, I’m taking a hit for sure but not as bad as my eldest. We’ve got other struggles, of course, medical care, medicine, etc etc. Grocery prices are climbing. It all SUCKS.

So, I’ve been working on actually budgeting, something that makes me uncomfortable. Budget to me means limits, limitations that I might crash up against and feel… stifled or something. It goes against my free-spirited way of doing things. I prefer to be free-range. I haven’t laid out a lot of actual limits for specific things because for some things we’re just not in control. Like the electric bill, for example, I have to pay what they charge us. I’m working on driving down our usage instead of setting an amount. That’s what I’m doing with fuel for our cars too, just trying to minimize driving. Prescriptions are picked up on the way to or from work. Thrift shop visits, and any other shopping are also added to other trips. I am planning my routes so I hit things in logical order with no back-tracking. I couldn’t bring myself to set an amount for groceries. I’m not going to have us going hungry or anything. I have goals for the grocery bills and I’m aiming for them. I have gotten our costs down somewhat already so I guess it’s a win.

What I have set limits on, solid enforceable limits, are take-out, entertainment and gifts. I also started a fund for vacations/travel, (which we do so little that we’ve never considered tracking it) just to have it as a limit on what can be spent IF we ever get to travel anywhere. So there is an amount set for take-out (and the other things)for each month, we track that amount, it can accumulate month to month but it cannot be overdrawn. When it’s gone it’s gone and we need to deal with it. Yeah, it’s an experiment for sure, and I hope it goes well and keeps us on an even keel. I’m also keeping a list of needed items for thrift shopping/other shopping. Like work shirts for my husband and son, and the sizes and preferences, I also have a limit on what I can spend on this stuff. Credit cards are dangerous so I am not going to spend more than we can pay. So, limits, fun stuff. Hopefully it won’t make us feel deprived. Cuts have to be made.

Keeping the food budget down is tricky but doable. I’m growing a little bit of food now, we have our pre-paid farm-share to lean on June-November, and pasta and rice are pretty cheap. I am being careful with buying things like meat, nuts, and other expensive things. Cutting out junk-food is huge, of course. I’m discontinuing buying chips, soda, cookies and other junk, still keeping crackers for the moment. But we can pop some popcorn instead of chips and have homemade iced tea instead of soda. More work but less money and better for us. Win-win.

I’ve got this idea that we need to “use what we have” in a lot of areas. Like let’s play the board games, card games, video games and RPGs we already own. Let’s read the books we have and use the library for more books and movies because it’s FREE. Let’s dig into our stashes of art supplies, fiber, and recycleable bits and bobs for projects. I mean, sometimes, we might actually need to pick up an item or 2 but probably a lot, lot less than we currently do. It’s a great principle from the old Tightwad Gazette; “First, go to your stash and see what you can make from what you already have. Do not spend money if you don’t have to.” Well, that’s where we’re at right now.

The $6 (ish) Dinner

I have a lovely little cookbook that I treasure called The New Cookbook for Poor Poets & Others; by Ann Rogers that talks about what she calls “the nickel dinner.” The nickel dinner is no longer really possible what with inflation and all, and wasn’t possible at the time “The New” was printed. (supposedly it was possible when the original cookbook was published) I love the idea of super cheap or free, but good, meals so sometimes I’ll figure out how much it costs me to make a meal for my family just to see how it compares to, say, the last time we ordered in or something.

Last night’s dinner was thrown together in a fog of humidity induced mental dullness. It was an evening I had nothing much left to give so I thought “pasta.” We had a bunch of zucchini from our farmshare so I decided to make the sauce I think I saw on Emmymade that was put out by Meghan Markle. It is a good, basic sauce but she clearly forgot the garlic so I fixed that for her. I also added a bit of cream and little shredded cheese to take it up a notch. Her recipe calls for cooking it down for 4-5 hours but I didn’t have that kind of time so i got out my immersion blender and it worked great. Next time I think I will add a little Green Dragon hot sauce to the mix. As I was cooking the nickel dinner idea wandered through my head and I stated adding things up:

  • 16 ounce box of linguini: .99 cents
  • 3 large Farmshare zucchini: $3.25
  • 1 farmshare onion: .50 cents
  • Splash of cream: .50 cents
  • 1 ounce shredded cheddar: .50 cents
  • 2 cups broth made from chicken bones, veggie ends etc: free
  • random herbs and spices: maybe .25 cents?

Which comes to $5.99. Not bad! I had a little bit of nice bread left from a previous dinner to have on the side and I picked a bunch of mint from the yard to make mint iced tea. It was a successful dinner that everyone enjoyed and it was inexpensive so a big win in my book. Yesterday I also had enough purposely grown and wild berries to make a couple of smoothies too so, despite the heat & humidity, it was a good day. ^_^ Most of our dinners are a lot more expensive than this but still much cheaper than take out. Even my fancy meals, where I go all out, are a lot cheaper than meals out.

For anyone interested in the idea of making broth for free: it is really simple! I save any bones left from dinner, veggie stems or other unused bits, tiny amounts of leftover anything too small to save, wilted herbs and so on, sealed in bags or say an old yogurt tub, in the freezer. I try to cluster these items together so I can monitor how much of it I’ve saved. When I have what looks like enough for a batch of broth I dump it all into my crockpot and cover with water. I set the crockpot to low and let it cook for a few days, stirring once in a while, until I think all the goodness and flavor has made it from the food into the broth. Then I scoop out all the spent bits and discard them, strain the broth, and store it in jars in the fridge using it as needed for recipes over the next week or two or freezing it for later use. The other day I had some leftover veggie/bean thing that I added some broth to, turning it into soup, and served for lunch.

More & Less

I want to change my life. This isn’t about being fed up with staying home, disinfecting my groceries, never seeing people in person unless I live with them, etc. Hopefully things will get better in those ways if we can all just not make things worse for a while and amazing scientists can create a super good vaccine. I mean I want to change my day to day life, the way I live, the way I spend my time. I also would love to save money, because we have dreams, we want to travel and see the world someday… when people can do that sort of thing again.

See, I don’t think it’s possible to calculate how much time I’ve wasted watching T.V., playing solo video games, screwing around on the computer, and so forth. It’s an unknown quantity, but it’s BIG. Binge watching is my default. If one show is good 8 in a row is better. I’m not saying these activities are utterly without value, not at all, just… when they become too big for their britches, well, what do you end up with? What are you left with in the end? Nothing. And it’s worse than that because, if these activities take over, you’ve LOST something that can never be replaced: Time. Our lives are made of time but we can never make any more of it. I heard this somewhere recently but it’s escaping me now: “We can’t make time, we can only take time.” It is the most finite of resources and we sell it away so we can eat and be warm and safe and, crazily, we “kill” it, whiling away hours on top of hours in mindless or useless pursuits. And then we wonder, sadly, regretfully, why we don’t have time for important things.

Question 1 for myself: What do I want more of in my life?

  • Experiences
  • music
  • baking & cooking
  • time with my hubby to relax, unwind, and connect
  • time with the kids w/ real interaction and meaning
  • sharing of life skills with the kids
  • reading
  • art
  • writing
  • a neat, restful, peaceful home
  • better health
  • time in nature
  • laughter
  • time with friends
  • Connection/Community
  • fun!
  • Enthusiasm!
  • LIFE!!!!

Question 2 for myself: What do I need to cut out to get more of what I want in life?

  1. T.V. (or excessive TV, since a little bit is ok?)
  2. Mindlessly surfing the web, playing online games etc.
  3. video games, maybe can keep a litte? but seriously, fun as they are: what do I have when I’m done?
  4. Less time in my room alone. (Basically accomplished by dropping 1-3)
  5. We can and should drop at least 2 of the 4 streaming services we currently have. (how did this even happen? I mean, all together they cost less than cable would but STILL.)
  6. Clutter/excess stuff
  7. junk food
  8. Take out food/eating out mindlessly.
  9. most alcohol (ie “it’s Tuesday” is not a real reason to open a bottle of wine)
  10. Shopping.

Shopping. Shopping is huge. It’s an activity that is just begging to be abused especially in our consumer culture. I have used shopping as a social activity when I didn’t actually need to buy anything, as a pick-me-up when I ‘m blue, (OOO, look, Bargains!) as a sport, (again, bargains, I am Awesome at it!) as a way to kill time while waiting for someone, something, some event, etc., because I deserve __________, a treat, etc. and from a feeling like I might be missing out if I don’t go. I need to appreciate all that we have and stop adding to what is already too much.

Our worst budget-offense seems to have been take out meals. I don’t know how it got that way aside from me getting burnt out because I am the only one who really knows how to cook and I get wildly sick of doing it sometimes. That and migraines, poor sleep, stress, and how damn easy it was in the days before the sickness came to just order food and go and get it. We justified it way more often than we should have. Between that and my shopping “for bargains” because I know that was more money than I would probably be willing to accept, we must have been spending a ton. Somehow, our savings is actually trending in an upwards direction despite not having the rental income from our little apartment. We are both working from home but our income has dropped by a significant amount with the apartment empty, yet somehow, because we have barely had any take out and I haven’t been shopping as a sport, our savings has grown. And that with an increase in grocery spending.

Note: These revelations are brought to you by; The Year of Less; by Cait Flanders, and time spent in my 30 yards from the house getaway spot: The Airy-Fairy Peace, Love and Granola Hippie Fort & Art Studio. I’ve seen some harsh reviews of Cait’s book and I seriously just don’t get it. My guess is that people bought it wanting/expecting a how-to spend less kind of book, but it is clearly a memoir. The author is super clear that the book is basically all the stuff she went through while on her spend less journey that she didn’t include in her blog. So, it isn’t some step-by-step how-to book, though she does include her shopping ban rules, revised rules and some tips to get people started on their own journeys. What I find in her book is inspiration. Her life is/was very different from mine. She was single, in her 20s, and had a drinking problem and a spending problem that were both dragging her down. She was starting and developing a career and just in a very different place from me. I am a grown woman, well into adulthood, I am married with 3 adult and near adult kids, a house, etc. We don’t have the kind of debt she did. Getting drunk and forgetting things isn’t a thing. (my memory issues are more age or stress than anything else) But this young woman’s memoirs have much of value for me. She figured out some really important things well before I did and I’m so happy she decided to share her story.

So, thanks Cait! I am definitely going to keep working at this.

Events, Food, Etc.

Bad news: I’m ill. Good news: I finished the house scarves for Saturday’s Harry Potter party at the Library. ^_^ I’m really looking forward to it. The Festivities:

  • Watching Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
  • Drinking home-made Butterbeer
  • Doing word-jumbles, word-searches, and Crossword puzzles
  • 4 teens winning a house scarf by random drawing!
  • Happy Holidays, Teens! ^_^

My ornament workshop was cancelled due to snow so it’s the only thing on this month, pretty much.

In other news I stumbled across a book and then 3 videos by my high school art teacher. I was just browsing the gardening section and found her book on foraging and wild foods. I checked to see if there was anything else by her and found we had 3 videos in our library! It’s lovely watching her after so many years and her recipes look delicious so I will be trying them out in the Spring. I took a class on wild foods a few years ago but these videos seem more comprehensive and being able to watch the foods being harvested and processed it helpful too.

We got our latest credit card bill and it is, as is somewhat usual this time of year, High. Ugh. It’s so hard to stick to a budget when buying gift for people I love. I want to do so much and sometimes I do too much. So I am now clamping down on spending to make up for this extravagance. I only have a couple more things to get and holiday shopping will be done. That leaves the feast shopping and some of that has been done already so we should be good. When I clamp down on spending I rely on my pantry more than usual. I lean on my supplies of pasta, rice, and dried beans etc. I cut back on using meat and focus on using up winter squashes and whatever else is on hand. I recently found that I can make a killer mac & cheese with about 1/2 the cheese by adding in mashed winter squash. My husband LOVED it. I added a few new spices to it too. My son wasn’t as big a fan of it but he needs to eat more veg anyway… and he did eat it. I’ll dig down in the freezer too and use any meat we have on hand. Casseroles will make more of an appearance too as I go through all the frozen veg, pasta and so on.

I’ve been working on not wasting food anyway. It’s such a problem and it’s ridiculous with the prices we pay for the stuff that any should be wasted. I’m thinking of putting together a big entry on eliminating food waste sometime soon.