Sometimes I get creative

We got our duvet cover from IKEA oh five or six years ago. It’s very calming, with neutral colors and no quilting. I bought a couple of them and made matching curtains from one set and we’ve used the other set on our bed.

See the holes?

As with many duvet covers, you can slip a down comforter inside and this one has a zipper across one end. We’ve never put a down comforter in ours for two reasons: one, it’s much easier to wash the duvet cover when you don’t have to wrest with a down comforter; and two, when (not if) a cat pukes on the bed, I’d rather have two layers of duvet cover before the down comforter.

But as you might imagine that zipper has stressed the fabric every time we’ve washed and dried the cover. It’s not premium fabric, it’s IKEA after all so it’s gotten holes across the bottom.

Unfortunately, IKEA no longer makes the same item. Instead they have a weird quilted packaged set with sheets and pillowcases. You can’t just get the duvet cover and it’s certainly not plain and flat, it’s quilted.

I’d been bummed about those holes and wasn’t sure what to do—I didn’t want to have to make new curtains again, plus I really like what we have. And then the other night, I realized I could piece together a band of fabric the width of our current cover, remove that zipper and stitch the band to the end. That would extend the life of the duvet cover and also give us more fabric at the top of the bed.

So that’s what I did. What’s interesting is how much whiter the duvet cover is than the fabric I used at the bottom. It doesn’t matter, all that gets tucked under the bed anyway, but I did find it funny.

This instead of that

As we’ve run the numbers and scrutinized our budget on just my income, we’ve figured out that we’ll need to tighten up by about $300 a month when unemployment runs out.

Here’s an interesting side note: in Kansas, the length of time you can be on unemployment is tied to the state unemployment rate. Right now, the unemployment rate is 4.3% and that means you can get 16 weeks. If it rises to 4.5% over a rolling three-month average, then that time would increase to a total of 20 weeks. We probably won’t get there in time for Kent to have the longer amount of time and honestly I don’t actually want unemployment to rise (not to mention that unemployment pays very little).

Going back to our budget, we don’t actually do a lot of discretionary spending, Crazy Trips notwithstanding and also we haven’t gone on one in well over a year. Where we did spend like that, we stopped: we dropped my contribution to my 401K down to 10% and may drop it more after the first of the year, and we stopped paying extra on the principle for our mortgage and now just pay the mortgage.

I have one professional membership I’d already decided not to renew so that’s confirmed as money I won’t spend (I will keep my membership to SIOP, however, as that’s important to my career). But the rest of that shortfall will need to be made up in tiny savings, not big obvious ones.

We compare prices between Amazon, Walmart and whatever store we’d normally have gone to for the item. Walmart almost always has the lowest price (not in cat food because they don’t carry what we use), followed by Amazon. I know some folks who won’t shop at Walmart and to them, I would say that’s a choice you can make. Right now, we can’t (and honestly where do you think the employees of Walmart would work if all the stores shut down?), and I made no apology for that. 

Here are some of the choices we’re making:

I’m sure there are other, similar choices we’ll be making—but those are the ones we’ve identified already. Got any suggestions? 

An average of seven times

A blog I occasionally read cited a study that says on average, we wear our clothes seven times before we discard them one way or another.*

At first I thought no way, that’s not what I do! I wear my clothes way more than seven times before they’re gone. As Kent pointed out, if you buy a season-specific item of clothing (say, a light sleeveless top), you’d have to wear it at least once a week for the entire season to hit seven wearings. If you chose ultra-cheap clothing (think H&M or the like), chances are good that the top might not last more than one season.

I was still skeptical. After all, I have a Gap jean jacket I bought at an outlet mall in Nashville, TN in September 2006 that I still wear almost every week. I have shoes from before our flood in October 2009 that I still wear—or what about that leather jacket I got at that one high end consignment store in Boston (think it was 2008)?

I also have a really lovely long dress I got earlier this year; I planned to take it to Jamaica only we didn’t go and I still haven’t worn it. It’s still got the tags on it. A couple of years ago, I got a maxi skirt—black with white polka dots. Super cute and totally not me. I wore it maybe four times before I donated it.

Ever since I read that article, I’ve been mentally tracking how often I wear the things in my closet. Some of them are total work horses. I wear them frequently and year-round. In fact, a lot of my clothes are that way.

I’ve also got some things that I don’t wear as often. This summer, I’ve been reaching for those items deliberately, wearing them again. After all, I paid for them so I might as well get the cost per wearing down while increasing my average number of times wearing the darn things.

*Despite searching, I couldn’t find the blog post I mentioned. This takes you to the one article I could find. 

It’s the small things

In keeping with my strong desire to focus on the positive (rather than freak out which does no good anyway), here’s a list of random things for which I’m grateful:

• We deliberately chose to buy a less expensive house, one that we could pay for with the smaller of our two salaries
• We left Verizon last month and switched to Google Fi which cut our cell phone bill in half (we did have to get new phones but we were on the hook for new phones anyway)
• We don’t have any recurring subscriptions to anything—no cable, no Netflix, no Hulu, nothing
• We both know how to cook and are quite good at it (sounds snotty but it’s true)
• We don’t have a habit of eating out (with the exception of our date night on Friday nights—we’ll be dialing those back but not cutting them out altogether)—I bring my lunch every day to work
• We have a good emergency fund saved up
• We paid cash for our cars so we don’t have car payments
• (This will sound weird) I recently bought new underwear—because of the stress at work, I’ve dropped four to five clothing sizes and those didn’t fit anymore. The good part here is I already bought them.

So there’s my list of random goodness. Also here's another cat picture to sooth us all.

Taken on my lap just now

We’ve done this before (or I hope this is like riding a bike)

Several years ago, I wrote a series of three posts about how we’d managed on a single income in a very high cost of living area. You can read them here, here, and here.

I've been rereading them because we are back to one income again since Kent was laid off on Friday effective immediately.

In looking back over my blog posts from then, I don’t think I ever posted how that went down.

He got the news mid-morning at work. I was at home (we were living in a temporary apartment while reconstruction was—well it wasn’t happening yet but the insurance company mulling things over) because I still hadn’t found a job. He waited until he got home and we were sitting together so that he could be with me when he shared the news. He knew I would be completely undone and didn’t want me to be alone. That right there is what love looks like in our house. I was blown away that he held that news to himself and waited to share.

That night, we were both pretty anxious. I’d say freaked out but that’s not exactly right. Suffice it to say that we drank a bottle of wine pretty quickly as we watched a movie (I don’t even remember what we saw) and then a second bottle as we watched a second movie (again I have no idea what it was) and then I turned into a complete chatter box and thought we should open a third bottle of wine and maybe watch a third movie. By that point, Kent was nearly asleep on the couch. He managed to tell me that it was already midnight and that a third bottle of wine and a third movie didn’t sound like great ideas and could we please go to bed. If you know me, you know I rarely see midnight by choice so that tells you a lot about my state of mind.

The next day, I told my mother I’d earned every bit of that hangover, and I had.

So fast forward to the last couple of years. The company Kent worked for got spun off from another company two and a half years ago and has just never gained much traction. I told Kent two years ago that I was pretty surprised they hadn’t let remote employees go already. Having people work remotely in other states is expensive because the company has to pay state unemployment insurance and account for all the state, regional, city and local taxes. That all comes at a high price tag so for a company to pay for one employee in Arizona, one in Kansas, a couple in Ohio etc., well you’re not talking small change.

I guess they finally figured it out, since from the sounds of things all remote employees were laid off on Friday.

I will admit that my first reaction on Friday was gut churning fear. We came so close to losing everything we owned six years ago; even though we are in better shape today, that fear lingers. I’m still pretty anxious to be honest. Yes, I have a job with benefits (and I’m very thankful), and we should be OK (tight, but OK). But I’ve been here before and now I’m sort of waiting to see what else (bad) might happen.

Edited to add a soothing photo of Eddie from this morning. That way, when I reread these posts later on, I'll have something calming to look at.

Frugal fatigue

I thought I’d finish up the original frugal series from my tome by including this part about frugal fatigue. I didn’t invent the term and I don’t recall where I read it first, but essentially after being good for so long, we’ll start to feel deprived and get tired of the restrictions. That’s when we’re more likely to end up having dinner out a second time in a week, and then a third time because we deserve it or are so tired or we’ve been so good etc. In the early days, we lost financial ground because we didn’t actually see the damage we were doing to our savings. Now that we review our financials every month, we see the trend right away before it becomes a budget buster. This recession isn’t over, Kent doesn’t have a job and us choosing to eat out more often just hurts US.

We’ve also learned that we have to find ways to treat ourselves within our budget or else we will fail catastrophically. For us, those treats include buying an ice cream cone (or a pint of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream), or deciding that yes, this week we will eat out once and then have take-out because take-out is still cheaper than sitting down at a restaurant. The key is spending with a plan—my dear friend Cindy has the same philosophy about her diet. Six years ago she was over 100 pounds overweight and now she’s a personal trainer, certified in yoga, Pilates, spinning etc. Her tag line on her blog is “eat intentionally,” and I’ve changed it to say “spend intentionally.”

Kent pointed out that where we made the most severe budget cuts were in the areas that brought us the least pleasure (cable TV, new clothes for the non-working spouse, and minimal clothes for the working one). That’s brought us the most bang for our budget buck. Rather than spread the cut-back pain around everywhere, we completely cut some things out. Living without these low-pleasure items was easier than we thought. Even if we wound up bringing those things back into the budget, we had a very clear idea of how much we wanted to spend.

We’ve also cut out making big house purchases that fall into the want category rather than the need category. This got tested when we had to buy all our furniture again after the flood, because pretty much all of it was ruined. That was a chance for us to decide which items we really did need (not want) and hold off on the rest. So we didn’t replace my sewing cabinet, we didn’t replace the bed even though it’s got a tiny bit of rust on it, and we share one dresser (which required paring down our clothes).

If you are living on a restricted budget, where are your pitfalls? What’s likely to trip you up despite your best intentions?

Frugal, part three

I've written about some of the tactics we've used that worked or didn't work for us regarding budget. But unemployment or underemployment also affects the relationship. In my opinion, this is the area where you make it or end up a divorce statistic.

As Kent and I were talking through what we would say to anyone in our situation, he pointed out that we adopted the mindset that this situation is not temporary. That’s discouraging but also more realistic than being all Pollyanna and sunshine. He’s in one of the three geographic centers for his industry and is now on his ninth month of looking for a job and his sixth month of full unemployment. My own job search took 25 months. So basically we hope for the best but we live like this is how it will be.

Self-doubt, worth and appreciation: When I was unemployed, I felt unappreciated, questioned my value and also felt worthless. Kent says he hasn’t felt sorry for himself and for him worthless is a strong word—he says he experiences self-doubt and wonders if he is as good as he thinks he is. I’d say YES but then again, I’m not the hiring manager. But those feelings affect the relationship and have to be talked through—often.

Being the sole income provider: We’ve had two issues here: first there’s the pressure of bringing home the money because if neither of us has a job, we’re really screwed. The second area overlaps—the working spouse may bring work home if only in his/her head, and will definitely need decompression time after work, and the unemployed spouse will need a chance to have an adult conversation. Those needs can conflict and both need to be met. For us, the one at home tends to babble a bit when the working one gets home, since the cats aren’t very good conversationalists. But that becomes the decompression time for the working partner, because it’s so different from work.

We've worked through the division of household labor twice now. When I was unemployed, I picked up most of those chores. I say most because it’s not fair or appropriate for one person to do ALL the household stuff—that leads to feeling very unappreciated and like you are just a maid or cook. So when Kent worked, he also cleaned the bathroom every week and scooped the cat litter 2x a week. Plus he’d wash up dinner dishes when I cooked.

When our roles switched, we tried to just flip things around. We realized pretty quickly that didn’t work because I have at least a two and a half hour a day drive to work and back, compared to his 40 minutes on a train. Three weeks ago, we had a pretty intense discussion because I was feeling as though what little time I had at home was spent on tasks around the house. But just because I work doesn’t mean I should not lift a finger around the house—that’s still not fair to both of us. So we have a new arrangement: I clean the bathroom, I often but not always do dishes (depends on my commute), and I cook at least on Sunday. You’ll have to figure out what works for you.

Sorting out the division of labor is trickier than it first appears. Dividing equally isn’t truly fair, nor is an all-or-nothing approach. Fair is the goal because fair treats both partners with respect. Fair also takes a lot more work, but the result is a lot healthier for us.

Food, glorious food

Kent and I have a second strategy we use to control grocery costs. I wrote about shopping the pantry earlier this month; the second approach involves buying mostly first order foods. I learned about first order foods and stacked costs a couple of years ago from a blog I read, Casual Kitchen.

Daniel, the blog owner, wrote an article about stacked costs and second order foods and discussed how food manufacturing layers in additional costs at every processing step. Think of first order foods as those that come directly from the garden with almost no processing. Second order foods are processed, packaged, reduced in size and scale—and the costs associated with that processing gets passed right along to you and me.

I’m not going to outline the entire article; go read it, it’s well written and worth reading. I do think that sticking with mostly first order foods is another reason why Kent and I have been able to cut our grocery bill.

Kent and I have fun rating food orders, and sometimes we’ll add a decimal point. For example, the so-called baby carrots you can buy in the produce department, which aren’t baby carrots but have been peeled and somehow whittled down to size—we rate those a 1.5. But the individual serving size cups of peeled, sliced and diced fruit are clearly a 2. Then the bagged salad mixes are 1.5 while the bagged salad mixes with small packets of dressing, croutons, bacon bits and so on are off the chart. By the way, we don’t buy any of these things. We just point and laugh.

Edited to add: bonus article link today for Casual Kitchen. You should read his blog.

Loyal

Yesterday I filled up the gas tank, something I do every other day. I spend $90 - $130 a week in gas, so that's a real cost in our budget. I always check the gas prices along Route 1 because they can vary by a good 20 cents a gallon. Yesterday I cut that cost even more.

For a long time, we refused to sign up for grocery store loyalty cards—we didn’t see the point and didn’t want to share our names and addresses with yet another vendor. That’s changed and today we always use our Stop & Shop loyalty card. Using our own card instead of letting the cashier use the register’s loyalty card means we can get a register coupon for something useful, since those coupons are most certainly targeted to our buying habits. In addition to those, we’ll occasionally get store coupons for $X off when you spend $Y.

The best feature of that loyalty card is the discount we can get on gas. We get points for our purchases, and for each 100 points we earn, we get a 10 cent discount per gallon of gas. Yesterday I had enough points to drop that price per gallon by 30 cents.

I will say the participating gas station on my commute isn’t the cheapest one, but I still saved 18 cents a gallon over the normal, cheaper place I usually go.

I read a lot of blogs that extol the wonders of the CVS loyalty card, which we have. But we don't shop there enough for us to be able to play the CVS game, although our daughter-in-law does.

Shop the pantry

Today’s post is partly from that tome I mentioned I wrote about the things that Kent and I have learned in the last 32 months.

This afternoon we’re heading to a barbeque with some friends. In the past, I’d have made a shopping list and gone to the store to get stuff to make whatever was on my list. We don’t do menu planning that way anymore, and that’s a direct result of the 32 months of living on a single income. Here’s what we do now:

We completely changed our approach to menu planning and grocery shopping. I’ve always been a good menu planner so I didn’t need to learn to plan our meals. But I would shop for the week and plan menus around that week’s sale items or I'd buy things that weren't on sale because that's what was on my menu list. That’s not a horrible approach but I read about a different way to go and it’s saved us a lot.

We stock our pantry with sale items we know we always use—for example we have about a dozen cans of black or pinto beans in our cabinets right now because they were 2 cans for $1 which is a great price. Previously I’d have bought the one or two cans I needed and missed out on future savings. Now my pantry is stocked with beans within our space limitations and I won’t need to stock up again until the next sale. I’ve read in various other frugal blogs that the sales seem to be on a 10 to 12 week rotation, so I try to get about a three month supply of the sale item if we have the room to store that much of it.

Now we shop the pantry for our menu planning. What that means for today’s get-together is that I looked at the ingredients I already have on hand (which were all pretty much on sale when we bought them) to plan what to bring to the barbeque. As it turns out, we’ll bring a pasta-mushroom dish from Nigela Lawson that I love, plus I had everything I needed to make my amazing brownies (not bragging, they would rock your socks off).

For fresh produce and fruit, we do still shop the sales because clearly those won’t keep for months and months. Buying produce in season helps to keep costs, too, although I'm not the best at that. I flat out don't like a lot of the New England seasonal vegetables that can be gotten for practically nothing (Brussel sprouts for example). But I get the ones we do like and we eat a lot of salads. Salad fixings tend to be inexpensive if you aren't going for the more extravagant items like avocado.

We also keep a price book in our heads. Some people actually create soft copies of this but I’m pretty anal about numbers so I haven’t taken that step. We know the normal prices for our regular items so when something is on sale or says it’s on sale, we know if it’s a good deal. For example, last week Kent passed on “sale” tuna at Costco because we can get it cheaper at a regular grocery store.

If you'd like to see the average cost of food as reported by the government, go here. Then you can select the month you want to see (the actual reports are PDF documents). It makes for interesting reading and also a good place to start figuring out where you are, and where you'd like to be with your grocery bill.

Money saving me

So someone else in my inner circle of family/friends is losing a job. This loss cuts their income to the lower of the two incomes and is something they haven't gone through before.

Well Kent and I have--for 31 months. And while neither of us are advice-giving people, we did a brain dump this weekend about what's worked and not worked for us regarding managing a restricted budget and also how we've handled the emotional/relational issues that are part of the unemployed territory.

Much to my shock, I ended up with a six page document, and it's not even double-spaced. I guess we have learned more than I realized.

Here's an excerpt:

Coupons. We tried this probably four or five times but realized that (a) we buy very few processed foods and (b) even being on email lists for getting coupons, it takes a lot of work to track down the one or two that might apply to us. If you buy more processed foods, you can save a ton with coupons so consider doing the work if that’s the situation. For us, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

How do you handle reduced finances?

Thrift stores

Boston has a couple of really nice thrift stores. I guess technically they are consignment stores but you get the idea. Both are on Newbury Street and tend to carry nicer brands of clothing that are in good shape. Saturday we headed out and each got some items. I found a J Crew silk/cotton blouse in magenta for $15 plus a Ferragamo wool sweater for $36. I care more about fit and color than I do about name brands, and both items work well for me.

I don't mind buying second hand clothing but I can't bring myself to get used shoes. There's something repulsive about that to me, and I'm not sure I can clearly articulate why that's so. But it's as nasty to me as buying used underwear.

I thought you might enjoy seeing Eddie's new perch. He's lying on my sewing storage cabinet under the light (and heat) of my new sewing lamp. It uses a 100 watt incandescent bulb, which I really need for the light. I'm pretty sure he thinks the lamp is his sun lamp.

What frugal habits will you keep?

I've read a lot of articles recently discussing how long people will stick to any cost cutting strategies in place since the recession started affecting paychecks. And I asked Kent that last night as we each worked on our pizza dough. We were making personal pizzas since Kent wanted pepperoni, and I didn't. I think some of the changes we've made are permanent even if I get a job at my previous pay levels, but to be honest not all would make the cut.

Kent agreed. He said he doesn't miss having cable TV, although technically we do have basic cable but really there's nothing on there worth watching. Instead, he's been watching TV online using Hulu. I haven't missed TV enough to even bother with that, although perhaps I will one day. But he would prefer we buy boneless skinless chicken thighs, instead of the bone-in with skin ones I've been getting. I think I'd keep making the granola bars, but that's because I like mine better. Ditto on the bread, I could make bread on the weekend rather than during the week day--and we both like it better. That it's cheaper is just a bonus.

We'd also keep making our pizza. Last night I forgot to cut the dough recipe in half so we had pretty thick crusts. But they were really good crusts, and they sure didn't cost $5, which is the cheapest I can get two pre-made crusts for at the store.

What habits will you continue? Which ones will you ditch?

What’s natural, anyway?

When I was in junior high, I started on the first of many attempts to get fit and control my weight. My mother devised an eating and exercise plan, and I stuck to it faithfully, doing at least one hundred sit ups every day. Sure enough my belly muscles got very strong but my stomach wasn’t entirely flat. My mother pointed out that I could hold my tummy in with those rock hard abs, and then it would be flat. Honestly the idea had never occurred to me, and I sort of thought it was cheating and not natural, that my belly should just be flat as it was with no sucking in of the gut.

Fast forward to today. Last week, after growing out my hair to its salt-and-pepper state, I colored it dark again. And I found myself dreading in advance the negative comments I think I’ll hear from family members.

It seems as though many people believe they have a right, almost a duty to voice unsolicited negative opinions on almost everything. And sure enough I’ve gotten comments like that about my hair from a few family members—probably not the ones who read this blog, but family members nonetheless. And really, who cares what color my hair is? It’s just dead protein and I’ve happened to color that dead protein a darker color than those people like. That’s fine, we all have opinions. It’s just that not all opinions need to be shared, especially negative ones about stuff that doesn't matter in the scheme of life. After all, it’s my hair, and next year it might be purple. Well OK probably not but still if I want to color my hair purple, I will.

And if you’ve read this far and are curious, I did it for three reasons. First, I get bored with my hair pretty easily and I was ready for a change. Second, the job market is not exactly picking up but I am seeing more postings and unfortunately age discrimination—while nearly impossible to prove—most definitely exists. The silver needed to be mitigated. Finally, I got lowlights for a while because I have one area on my part line that is really silvery, so it was very obvious. The lowlights helped cut that a bit. But they are really pricey. My hairdresser is working with me on this a lot and because it’s a single process rather than the low lights, I can get a good price break on it.

I’m comfortable with my hair like this. So let's raise a glass to live and let live.

Do you use coupons?

I do use coupons, but not very many. I’ve noticed most coupons are either for prepared foods or they are for cleaners or household products I don’t use, or they are a brand I really do not like. In the past I’ve felt somehow guilty and wasteful when I don’t use a coupon but a couple of good blog posts have helped me clarify when and how I’ll use them.

First, take a look at this article about first-order foods, which is just another way of describing food that’s lower on the food chain. Most coupons are for second-order foods and I pay a premium in dollars, quality and unwanted additions to my food when I choose most second-order foods. So that eliminates lots of coupons right there.

Second, here’s a list of coupons that should be in this Sunday’s paper. As I scanned this list, I saw either quantity requirements that disqualify me from fulfilling the terms of the coupons, or I didn’t see the few brands I do really prefer. For example I have a coupon for Lysol’s tub and tile cleaner. But I have to buy two bottles to save a dollar. Now I have the world’s most sensitive nose and most cleaning products smell really bad to me. I’m willing to take a gamble and buy ONE bottle of the Lysol cleaner but I probably won’t buy two bottles.

Having said all that, we are in the process of stockpiling the foods we do use when they are on sale. Shaw’s has Barilla pasta on sale, 10 boxes for $10. That’s a pretty good buy since it’s usually $1.49 a box. So now I need to make room in this closet for 10 boxes of pasta. Wish me luck.

An amazing cake

I like to read blogs, and love finding all sorts of information or ideas to try. I've bookmarked blogs about personal finance, productivity, devotionals, information about WoW and of course food.

I stumbled across this recipe while searching for a granola bar recipe (which I found here). I'm tired of paying at least $3 for a box of granola bars. I want to check out the cost of ingredients and see if it would make financial sense to make my own. I liked the tone of this blog so I checked out her current entries and found this strawberry cake recipe.

I made this yesterday afternoon--behold the yummy strawberry cake. It's similar to a shortcake but not so spongey. And it's also very simple to make. I took it to small group last night and was barely able to save a slice for Kent. This recipe is a keeper. I did use 8 T of butter rather than the 6 T called for in the recipe. I learned that trick from my friend, Shima, who is the most amazing baker I've ever met.

Updates

Creating and sticking with a budget takes a lot of time, especially the food budget. Who knew grocery circulars could be so fascinating? We kicked off our official budget on June 1, even though we haven't yet finalized all amounts for all categories. We'll save all our receipts for at least a couple of months so we can find out what we spend in some of those not-yet-finalized categories, and also get a real-time idea of where our money goes. We can do that when we get our credit card statement but then the information is a little dated.

I made the most amazing pork chops last night. I'd read a blog post about how to decide if a cookbook is worth buying (yes I know, I should have read that prior to my last cookbook purchase). That spurred my decision to more fully use the cookbooks I have on hand before caving in to buy more. So I pulled out my Food & Wine Fast cookbook and made chili-dusted pork chops. Wow, just wow. They took less than 30 minutes to make, had enormous flavor, were tender and just all around fantastic. If you're interested in the recipe, holler and I'll send it to you.

Finally, lest I neglect the namesake of this blog, here's a funny picture of the boys. They are riveted by some small flying bug on the wall.

Spending intentionally

A friend who is a personal trainer and a hero of mine has a fitness blog and her tag line is Eat Intentionally. I love that notion and think the intentional part can be applied across most areas of my life. Like our budget.

With that in mind, Kent decided to ditch cable TV. I am not a TV watcher in the least, and Kent hardly watches anymore either. When he does watch, he’s more likely to get movies from Blockbuster to take on his business trips. Well it turns out that to have just internet costs more than to have the exact same internet plus basic cable. I’m sure ComCast has metrics that show people who sign up for basic cable can be persuaded to upgrade. But I don’t think we will, and we’re saving a bit over $50 a month now.

Along the same lines, I read this article about brand disloyalty on Casual Kitchen. I giggled at his account of how he was blindly loyal to Tide. I did the same thing regarding certain brands for years but now that money is tight, I find I have very little brand loyalty. I’ll try the generic brand for pretty much anything, and if I like the quality, I’ll stick with it. For example, I tried the generic brand of regular oatmeal and it was disgusting, the texture was all wrong. So I’ll buy Quaker unless I find another brand to try. On the other hand, I love the store brand of organic diced tomatoes and won’t spend more on a brand name now.

We’re zeroing in on our final budget and will kick the whole thing off on Monday, June 1. I found some interesting statistics regarding percentages for various categories and as I suspected, our housing costs are higher than recommended since we spend almost 50% of our income on housing costs (the national average in 2007 was 34%). On the plus side, we spend very little on transportation—about 3%.

The whole point of doing all of this is to both prepare for our future and also to make sure when our money leaves our pockets, its bringing us exactly what we want.

Score!

And the budget stuff continues on with some successes.

We finally got our own store loyalty card for Stop & Shop—I got tired of hoping to get the card discount but not knowing if the cashier would do it or not. So we got our own card probably two months ago. This week I looked at the bottom of my receipt, and to my shock we’d already saved over $50 just by shopping wisely and using that card.

Yesterday I saved even more with it. You accrue points every time you buy stuff there, and those points (which expire in 30 days) reduce the price of gas per gallon. If you have 100 points, you pay 10 cents less per gallon, and so on. I (finally) needed to put gas in the car—first time since Thanksgiving, can you believe it?—so I used my card. You already get a discount for using the card, usually about five cents. I had enough points that instead of paying $2.18/gallon, I paid $1.93/gallon. How cool is that?

But the real score came at Target. Try as I have (and I have tried, believe me), Kent is not interested in giving up soda. He has at least switched from the pricier cans to the 2-liter bottles but he still drinks a fair amount of it. So when I find a good deal on diet Coke products, I stock up. Target had 2-liter Coke products on sale 5/$5.55 which is a good price. But wait, it gets even better. Caffeine-free diet Coke was on sale at our Target for $1/2-liter bottle. So I got five bottles which are sitting in the smelly (and cool) closet just waiting for their turn in the fridge.

Of budgets, eggs, and general penny pinching

Kent and I have pulled together a spreadsheet we keep on Google Docs. We’ll use this spreadsheet to track our spending, list future purchases so we can save for them, and continue saving for retirement. If you’re interested in budget resources, I bet you can find something that suits you here.

Speaking of eggs, I paid $3.49 for a dozen eggs two weeks ago. I ended up short for a recipe I was making, so I headed out to Whole Foods and paid dearly for not realizing I didn’t have enough. To make things worse, I dropped one egg in the sink. At 29 cents an egg, that hurt. The best price for eggs that I’ve found here in Boston is about $1.99, but that’s on sale and only rarely. Butter is worse, I’m lucky to find it under $3 a pound. I bet you feel better about the cost of your groceries now, huh.


In the general penny-pinching category we have these lovely napkins. We’d already greatly reduced how many paper towels we use—not really out of any great initiative to save the environment, I’m sorry to say, but because we keep the paper towels in the cabinet under the sink. And that cabinet is almost always secured with our Velcro ties to keep them safe from Wally. We use the tea towels Kent’s grandmother made for him (mentioned in this blog entry), and they work really well.

This week I thought hey let’s do the same thing with cloth napkins. So I bought the four new napkins you see in the picture to go with the solid red napkins we already have. I sprang for ones from Crate & Barrel because I think they are really cool-looking and we’ll use them for a long time. The green glasses are our patio drink ware, and they are also from Crate & Barrel.