I’ll Never: Know As Much About Cars As I Want To

My car has been sick lately.  In the shop a couple of different times.  Check Engine Lights.  Not starting.  We think it’s a bad battery, but you don’t really suspect a bad battery when you’re 13 months into an 85-month battery.  Mechanic says bad battery.  Battery store says it isn’t.

And, of course, “Since we’ve got your car in here ma’am and it’s coming up on 90,000 miles, there are several things that Toyota recommends that you do…” So I had to get my muffler fluid replaced too.

Sigh.

(Just kidding on the muffler fluid.  It was fine.)

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I’ll Never: Work Full-Time Again

Without having a crystal ball that can predict the future, I’ll say “I’ll Never Work Full-Time Again”.

Normally, I work each day, but generally just the mornings.  Most days of the week, I’m home around 1:00 in the afternoon.  But, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had some weird working schedules.  Because of some schedule changes, I ended up working one full-day instead of two half days and I ended up working an afternoon instead of a morning.  I.Hated.It!

Those two days that I either worked all day or worked in the afternoon, I didn’t make dinner.  I ended up picking up fast food.  It wasn’t because I didn’t have time to plan meals.  Oh no, I had meals planned.  It wasn’t because we didn’t have leftovers that we could have eaten.  We did.  I just didn’t feel like getting home at 5:30 p.m. and making dinner – even if it just involved reheating yesterday’s dinners.

And since Phinehas goes to bed around 7:00 p.m. or so, I only had about 90 minutes with him at night before he went to sleep.

How Do Full-Time Working Moms Do It?!?

This isn’t a judgment that working full-time is a sin.  I don’t think it is.  But from a practical perspective, how do full-time working moms do it all?  With only 90 minutes in the evening, I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to spend a significant portion of it making dinner.  And I wouldn’t want to save laundry or cleaning or grocery shopping for the evenings and weekends.  Truth be told, when I got home, I didn’t feel like doing anything.  I just wanted to drop on the couch.

I adore working only part-time.  To me, it’s a wonderful thing for our family.  For this time.  Jeff leaves for work super early in the morning to avoid traffic.  I get about 90 minutes with my son in the morning before work.  He goes to my sister’s and hangs out with his cousins.  I work a few hours.  I pick him up.  We come home or we run errands.  We hang out in the afternoons.  He naps.  While he does, I prep dinner or do laundry or clean or read.  Jeff gets home around 3:00 most days.  We catch up on our days.  We eat dinner (usually by 5:00 p.m. – we’re early eaters around here!).  We play with Phinehas.  We watch Wheel of Fortune at 6:30.  Phinehas goes to bed shortly after.

There are tons of time that we both get to spend with him.  Not many dads are home around 3:00 most days.  Not many working moms are home around 1:00 most days.  We are truly in a great phase of life.  We truly are blessed to have this lifestyle that suits us so well.

Things will change.  I know this.  Jeff might not always work this schedule.  I might quit my job some day.  But I don’t ever see myself working full-time again.  Not even when we’re empty nesters.

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Life on the easy street?

Another Rosemond quote from his book New Parent Power!

By and large, today’s children have been overdosed not only materially but emotionally as well. They’ve been given too much attention, too much praise, and too many rewards. In short, we’ve made their lives easy, and in so doing we’ve created a fantasy of how the world works. Another family therapist once summed up the situation for me quite well. He said, “This generation of parents has done a wonderful job of sharing their standard of living with their children, but a miserable job of endowing those children with the skills they’ll need to achieve that standard on their own.”

This is something that I’ve been a little thoughtful of lately. I often listen to Dave Ramsey’s radio show. Many of his callers have little comments from their kids who ask their parents “Do we have coupons for ice cream?” or “Is a candy bar in the budget?” – different things like that. I think kids having an awareness of the fact that money isn’t infinite is awesome! I like the idea that kids know that everything has a cost and some things are worth the cost and some aren’t.

I also know that I have a higher standard of living as a young couple than my parents had when they were first married. My parents were 18 and 21 and just getting started in life. My husband and were 30 and 33 and pretty well established when we married.  (While being older has it’s advantages, it’s also not what I would’ve wanted – I would’ve loved to have been younger when we married – maybe not 18, but not 30 either! This isn’t an argument to wait til you’re 30s to get married.)

My husband and I budget, but our budget isn’t super tight. We can go on vacation if we want to. If our car were to burst into flames tomorrow, we can buy another one. Maybe not a Porsche, but we could buy a Toyota Corolla.  I do coupon at the grocery store, but it doesn’t make or break our ability to buy something.  I fear that Phinehas will turn 22, be out on his own for the first time and expect to own a house right away, take vacations, and have a pretty car even though he’s just starting out. I hope we can set his expectations correctly.

As a parent, how do you balance the fact that you can afford a middle class standard of living, but also set the expectations that your children will have to work to get to that same standard – and it will take some time to get there? I think, for us, it won’t be saying that we can’t afford something, but rather telling them that we’re choosing not to spend our money in a certain way. And probably talking about what our lives were like right after we got out of college – apartments, roommates, cheap cars, no vacations.

Setting the expectation that money comes from working and helping him to build a good work ethic and skills that will lead to a good job.  It’s parenting!

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Book: Thou Shall Prosper

I listen to Dave Ramsey.  Pretty much every Monday – Friday, at least for a little bit. I’ve taken his Financial Peace University.  We’re debt free.  I just like his philosophy and the advice that he gives.

A few weeks back (or maybe longer than that), he had a Jewish rabbi on the show – Daniel Lapin.  They referenced his book “Thou Shall Prosper: Ten Commandments for Making Money”, which I have since checked out of the library and read. Utterly fascinating read.  Really.  I thought it would be a “Here’s what you do if you want to make money.  Get yourself a business plan.  Get some business cards…” kind of book.

But it wasn’t.  Not really.  It was mostly him writing about why making money isn’t bad like some would believe. It’s about why and how Jewish people have often been more wealthy than other groups of people.  He uses a lot of Scripture (which is the Old Testament for him) and tells how the Jewish tradition would teach those examples to their children, which happens to be principles that just naturally lead to more wealth.

Is he right about everything?  I don’t know.  But I learned mucho.  And had mucho reinforced. Things like:

• You’re always in business for yourself (even if you work at someone else’s company)
• Don’t forget that you owe your company an honest day’s work for the pay you’re given
• Business is not evil
• Making money, even lots of it, is not evil
• Its how you earn that money and what you do with it that matters
• The key to making money is knowing people and letting them know what you can do for them

Some excerpts that I really liked:

“Whenever a notable philanthropist makes a public gift, there is one phrase you can count on hearing.  It is “giving back to society” as in “Isn’t it wonderful that he is finally giving something back to society.”  Is referring to a charitable contribution as “giving back to society” implying that the for-profit activities that created that wealth in the first place are somehow “taking from society?”

…

“Bill Gates does quite a bit for the world even before making his very large charitable foundation bequests.  After all, creating thousands of jobs and supplying magical software that allows millions to do their work and to communicate seamlessly with one another are in themselves rather large contributions.  Theodore [someone who criticized that the wealthy don't give enough away] fails to question entertainment and sports figures who undeniably “have a great deal of wealth” yet are notoriously stingy in their charitable giving.  Apparently such criticism is reserved for people who earn their living through business.”

…

“Much must be right about the economic system in the United States because it allows Americans to take so much luxury for granted. … Have you heard folks say things like “Why not take a day off and spend it with family?” or “Nobody ever dies regretting not having spent enough time at work”?  Those are very pretty notions, but they can be said only by someone with no fear at all of having to put his children to bed that night, hungry and frightened.  In some countries at this time and particularly in earlier times, many parents have been tormented not by not spending enough time with their children, but by  not being able to prevent them from starving to death.”

And a quote from George Mason University economics professor:

“Take out a dollar bill and look at it.  Now pat yourself on your back because you are looking at a certificate of performance.  If you did not rob or steal from anyone to obtain that dollar, if you neither defrauded anyone nor persuaded your government to seize it from a fellow citizen and give it to you, then you could only have obtained that dollar in one other way – you must have pleased someone else.”

How cool that thought is!  We have money because we have pleased someone – a client, our boss, someone else.  They are pleased and show it through payment.

Great read!

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Saving on groceries: Knowing when its enough

By couponing and ad matching and freezing things, I’ve built up quite the supply of certain things – like diapers, formula, tomato sauce, mixes, flour, sugar, cheese and cereal.  If there are things that we use commonly, I stock up on them when there are fantastic prices.

But I’m learning (like literally in the past couple of weeks) to know when enough is enough.  As I:

• re-organized my pantries for the 18th time
• realized that I had a year’s worth of cereal in my basement
• had to throw out food that had expired before we used it
• started having to store paper towels under beds
• went over our grocery budget by buying even more diapers (in the size that he’s on the verge of outgrowing!)
• was told by my husband ‘no more shampoo!’

I realized that, for some things, I had enough!  It was time to stop buying!  Well, not time to stop buying everything.  There were still things that we need and can use, but I had to stop and calculate how long the things that we have will last.

I don’t need a year’s supply of shampoo on hand.  It will go on sale again before then. I don’t need diapers for the next 2 children!

I was getting great deals on things, but what’s the point if you don’t need them, can’t use them or are going over budget?  If I was looking to donate these things, that’d be one thing, but that wasn’t my mindset when I was buying them.

So, you save money on groceries when you buy what you need and only what you need and don’t build more of a stockpile than you can reasonably use!

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Saving on groceries: using less expensive ingredients

I feel like I’m starting to “come into my own” when it comes to cooking.  I’ve shared that I’ve started cooking more from “scratch” (my version of it).  Before I got married, I had several things that I knew how to make and was good at it – but they tended to be the big “company’s acomin!  Gotta be fancy-ish!” meals.  Delicious.  Tasty.  Fun.  Expensive!  Time consuming!

So I’ve started learning how to put meals together that aren’t so expensive.  Mostly because they’re just your everyday meals. Still tasty.  They’re just a little more common.  Things like pizza on leftover hamburger or hoagie buns, calzones, chilis, soups.  These meals just naturally tend to be cheaper to make.

There’s a limit to it, though, for me.  Because you can go crazy with trying to spend the absolute least amount of money imaginable for a meal.  Example:

$$$$: Buying a bag of the pre-made salads

$$$: Buying a head of lettuce and making your own salad

$$: Buying a head of cabbage and making a salad with that

$: Growing your own lettuce or cabbage

In regards to salads, I’m at step $$$ – meaning I buy my own lettuce and make my own salad.  But others with a garden can choose to grow their own, putting them at $.  Other things, I’m more a the $$ level.

One thing that I’ve started realizing is to skip over recipes that have strange-to-me ingredients.  (For the most part…unless I’m really wanting to start experimenting with that item.)  Why?  Cause chances are that I just need a little bit of it and the rest will be wasted.  So instead of using 15 cents of kale, I waste $2 because I just can’t use it all in that soup.  Unless I have a need or a way to use the rest of it, it’s kind of a waste.

I also try to use the same ingredient more than once a week.  Examples: Because there are only 2 of us eaters in the house, a pound of hamburger is easily more than 1 meal.  So, I’ll typically brown up a pound of hamburger, use half of it for spaghetti one night and use the other 1/2 for tacos the next.  (And even that will find us with extras for a lunch or two!) Or I’ll prepare chicken and use some of it for quesadillas and some of it for chicken fettucini.  This helps us not to waste food – especially when it comes to things like veggies, which can go bad before the 2 of us can eat them.

There are still times to splurge and make those big “company’s acomin!” meals.  And you don’t even need to have company over to do so!  But it’s more realistic to have less extravagent and time consuming meals as a part of every day life.  Cheaper too!

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Saving on groceries: using the freezer

This past winter, we bought a deep freezer – the upright kind. I adore it!  At the time, I was just starting to get into the habit of price matching, coupon clipping and freezing meals.  With just a normal size freezer on top of our refrigerator, I didn’t get to take advantage of too much before I filled the capacity.

The freezer has been key to being able to stock up when there are really good deals on meats and cheeses and frozen veggies.  Buying 3 pounds of chicken breasts at $1/pound is great.  Buying 20 pounds is better.  And since there’s just 2 of us, that 20 pounds of chicken will last quite a few months!

The freezer is great for making freezer meals:

• Storing that spaghetti sauce.
• Making 2 lasagnas out of one kitchen day.
• Putting away the other 1/2 batch of chili or soup we didn’t get to

The freezer is great for not wasting food:

• I can buy a container of sour cream, make a couple of pans of enchiladas with it and freeze a pan.
• I can buy ricotta for lasagna and not waste 1/2 the container.
• I can buy a loaf of french bread, cutting it into fourths for garlic bread and sticking 3 of them in the freezer.
• I can brown 5 pounds of hamburger (that I got at a great price!) at one time then freeze them in 1/2 pound portions for tacos or pizza or spaghetti or chili.
• Freezing potatoes since a bag of potatoes would spoil long before we could eat them all.

How I store things:

• To store liquid things, I freeze them flat so once done, they stack nicely.
• To store casseroles, I use Money Saving Mom’s tip here.

I’ve been getting into more of the freezer  meals that you see online – the “put together a bag of ingredients and you can pop them into a crockpot later”.  Saving time will be nice, but really, it seems a great way to not waste food.

I’m loving my freezer – how about you?

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Saving on groceries: Coupons

More “paying less for food” savings!  I’m not an extreme couponer.  At all.  I do okay at coupons.  My main sources are:

• Krazy Coupon Lady
• Money Saving Mom
• Coupons.com
• Couponnetwork.com
• Target.com
• Passionate Penny Pincher
• Newspaper

Once I go through my ads, find out what I want to buy, I look to see if there is a coupon that matches it.  Occasionally, I’ll see a great coupon and wait for those items to go on sale in the future.

Great coupon + great price = wonderful deal!

Here’s what I love:

Target – they let you use 2 coupons for 1 item – as long as one of the coupons is theirs.  So, if there’s a $3.00 Pampers coupon and a $2.00 Pampers Target coupon, I get $5.00 off the one item!  If you wait and buy diapers when they’re having their “buy 2 boxes, get a $15 giftcard” and use coupons, then you’re really saving some serious cash!  Target, I’ve found, doesn’t have great prices on food and such, but they are my #1 source (so far) on diapers and formula.

Get more coupons – Sometimes stores have sales where you have to buy 3 items, then you get the discount price.  If that’s the case, then I try to get my hands on 3 copies of the coupons.  CVS does this often.  Spend $15 on Head & Shoulders, get $5 back.  It’ll take 3 bottles to get to $15, so I look for 3 $1 off coupons.  Instead of spending $15, I’m really only out $7 (plus tax) since I have $3 in coupons and get $5 back.

Buy One, Get One — When you have a “Buy 1 item, get 1 item free”, you’re still buying 2 items.  Which means you can still use 2 coupons!

I don’t save an insane amount of money on coupons each week – I’m just not that good at recognizing deals.  And I also don’t take advantage of some of the deals where you have to buy lots of an item – we just can’t eat things that fast with only 2 people in the house.

But coupons definitely help.  Especially on building my stash of diapers and toiletries!

My diaper collection — including some for the next kid!

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Saving on groceries: cooking more

“Cooking from scratch” is a relative term.  To one woman, it means making her own pasta.  To another woman, it means opening a box of brownies and mixing it herself rather than buying pre-made brownies.  To me, it’s somewhere in the middle.  I guess you can’t really call it “cooking from scratch”, but you know what I mean…

I’ve never been a frozen dinner gal, but I’m learning more and more how to make my own stuff.  Mostly for financial reasons, but taste is definitely a consideration.

I’ve been experimenting with making my own brownie mixes, spaghetti sauce, cakes, garlic breads, soups and marinades.  Raw ingredients are almost always cheaper than the finished product that the store sells.  Examples: A loaf of garlic bread can be made for 1/4 of the cost that you could buy the Texas Toast stuff. A batch of brownies is about 1/3 of what you can buy.  You can buy things cheaper with coupons and price matching, but even with those tactics, it’s usually cheaper to make your own.

Since I have a freezer, I can buy the institution size cans of tomatoes and make a big batch of spaghetti sauce and be set for quite a while.  You can get even cheaper if you grow your own tomatoes, but without a garden, this is where I’m at.

This means that I go through alot more flour, sugar, eggs, butter, cocoa than I did before and those don’t often have coupons, so ad matching is key here.  I bought HUGE amounts of butter at Christmas time and that lasted for a few months, until it became on sale again.  Freezer kept nice for us!

Cooking more has also been great for our family with a son.  Since becoming a family of 3, we don’t eat out as much – it’s just not as easy.  But I don’t miss it too much since it’s easier on the budget and since I’m learning to cook better food!

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Saving on groceries: Price Matching

Today’s tip falls under “paying less for food” as a way of lowering your grocery bill.

I love price matching.  And combining them with coupons.  Today, I’ll show you an example why.  And this isn’t even a fabulous example because this shopping trip only used one coupon – this trip was all about the price matching.

Price matching is the act of taking the ads from other grocery stores and having that store match that other place’s price.  I used to do this at No Frills, but lately Wal Mart’s been my place because they also match on meat and produce where No Frills is more selective on those items.  Wal Mart is particularly great because they don’t make you show the ad…which saves mucho time in the checkout lane.  I always have the ad with me and I’m always honest, but it saves time!

Anyway, this shopping trip, I paid about $36 for $65 worth of groceries!  I saved almost as much as I spent.  Awesome!  (Now the $65 was calculated using Walmart’s regular prices – which might be higher or lower than other stores).

The biggest savings was on meat – I got steak that was originally $4.98 and $5.68/pound for $2.99/pound because No Frills and Fareway were having sales on them.  Everything else on my trip saved me money, but not nearly as much.  Examples from this trip:

• Brownie & Cake mixes for $.79 instead of $1.50 and $1.28
• Ken’s Salad Dressing for $.99 instead of $2.48 (plus I had a $1 off coupon for 2 of them, making them $.49/bottle)
• Eggs for $.99 instead of $1.29
• Cherry tomatoes for $.79 instead of $2.48 (they should’ve been $1.59 but the gal gave me even more off.  I think she was mad at Wal-Mart.)
• Doritos for $1.99 instead of $3.59
• Petite Sirloin Steak – paid $8.53 for  $16 worth of meat
• Chuck Pot Roast – paid $15.34 for $26 worth of meat

Because we’re a family of just 2, that meat will get us 6-8 meals easily.  I don’t even do as well as some people do, but it’s definitely worth my time to go through the ads, write down the best prices on items that I need or will use eventually and get price matches!

They key isn’t too get too crazy – if I can’t use it or freeze it before it goes bad, then it isn’t worth buying – no matter how great the deal is!

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