What I Want vs. What I Actually Buy

Our espresso machine is on the fritz. It can still be coaxed into producing that sweet, sweet elixir of life, but, the writing is definitely on the wall.

In neon.

THE END IS NIGH…

This…is not OK, people.

SO NATURALLY, I am on Amazon this morning checking out new espresso makers. Because I am not about to allow civilization itself to utterly collapse around here.

…let the (mind) games…begin!

Hmmmm, this Saeco is awful sexy…

…fully automatic, programmable, self-cleaning?!?!, oh, keep whispering those sweet nothings to me, baby…oh, but, also two THOUSAND dollars, ummmmmmm, yeah-OK, er, NEXT…!

Ah! KitchenAid makes an espresso maker?! A red one that looks like something out of a 50s pop-shop?!?! Tell me more, Oh Brand I (Mostly) Trust and Am VERY Fond Of!

….aaaaaaaaaaaand, $839 dollars. Ahem. Moving on…

{repeat that basic scenario of going “ooooooooo! aaaaaaaaaah! wait, how much? er, um, what else do you have…” about three hundred times, until eventually…}

“…yeah, so, um…thanks for spending, like, two hours showing me every single thing you have, Amazon, and if you’d just, you know, toss one of these into a box and send it on over, that’d be greaaaaaaaat…”

…yeah, I’m going to end up buying exactly what I bought ten years ago, and for exactly the same reasons.

• Gets the one (1) job we want it for done
• Has a modest footprint on the counter
• Doesn’t have a whole lot of fancy doohickeys to break / lose / not-get-snapped-back-in-place-just-so-resulting-in-a-huge-mess
• Does not require a degree in physics and/or mathematics to figure out how to use it.

{face-palm}

Still, I find these exercises in mental gymnastics a bit fascinating because honestly? Just like anybody else, I’m attracted to what is shiny and new. I am very interested in things that are “modern,” things that would make me feel like I was being pampered, things that would say, “Life is showering all the blessings upon me, for lo! I am its favorite child.”

And it always, always amuses me when I engage in these kinds of “wants all the super-fancy things => spends ridiculous amounts of time arguing with herself about allllllll the possibilities => ultimately settles on something much less expensive than originally desired that gets the core job done” exercises.

Left to itself, my basic nature would be much more on the hedonistic, instant-gratification side.

I am impulsive. I am also impatient. I want things now, and I want to put as little effort into getting what I want as humanly possible.

I am also more than a bit reckless, to be honest. Because in related news, I am also a hopeless optimist, so, in my mind? Things will always work out.

…they just…will…somehow or other…

In other words, my basic nature is a manufacturer’s dream. I am exactly the kind of person who is already screaming “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!” before they’ve even gotten to slide two of the sales pitch.

But, over the last twenty years, the core habits of the LBYM lifestyle have become engrained in me. I don’t even “have to” make myself stop and walk through the steps involved – it just happens.

It is literally just as automatic for me to start bumping up what I actually need and what I value the most against what I’m proposing to purchase in order to scratch that itch as it is for me to be captivated by the sales pitch in the first place.

And to start challenging myself whenever I try to insist that I neeeeeeeeeeeed some feature I do not currently have, and have not even thought about as a thing I needed before I saw the advertisement about it being A Thing.

AND asking myself whether or not I’d still be content with my choice if, say, the washer/dryer went out next month instead of “probably at some point between January and May of next year” like I expect them to – would I then resent the blasted coffee maker if having spent the money on it meant I couldn’t buy the new set I really wanted? (…ohhhhh, heck yes I would…I would despise that new coffee maker if it had taken cash I desperately needed two months later for a “really good” new washer/dryer…)

It still amazes me that I can be that way. That I, of ALL people, have the ability to stop myself when I see something shiny and pretty and awesome and approach the problem with, you know, cold, boring old LOGIC instead.

Which is why I still firmly believe that pretty much anybody can learn how to live below their means.

C’mon: If someone as reckless, impulsive and overly-optimistic as me can get to a point where that kind of “whoa up, there, cowgirl, let’s reexamine this here deal a bit, run it through the old sanity check right quick, because this has ‘I might regret this later’ written all over it” thing is as automatic as the “ooooooooooo, that is so cool and so shiny and I want it real bad!” impulse that triggers it?

Anybody can.

True story, y’all.

True story.

The more things change…

So, wow. An anonymous tipster reminded me that it was ten years ago today that I wrote the last of a series of long-winded posts on The Motley Fool’s Living Below Your Means board. It was my way of giving back a little bit to a community that had seen me through some of the biggest, hardest changes I have faced so far in my life.

When I first started scouring those boards and articles for help I was still coming to terms with a lot of things; I was just sure I was doing pretty much everything wrong, financially.

I had no choice but to get better at it…but I was sure worried that I simply wasn’t capable of it.

I’m having trouble with the concept of it being ten years since I wrote those. It doesn’t feel like ten years. Or like it’s been fifteen since I decided to change course so dramatically.

But at the same time, it does in a way. Sometimes looking back feels like remembering a movie about somebody else’s life or something. Did I really do that? Did I really feel that? Really? Because…I just wouldn’t now. So it’s hard to fathom that I did, back then.

It’s almost surreal to go back and read those things again. Remembering those days – both the ones I was writing about, and the ones I was writing during.

A lot has changed. A lot is the same. There has been water, and it has gone under the bridge, and over it on occasion, and once or twice it has swept the thing clean away.

I’ve had to learn some new tricks; I’m still learning new tricks, actually. And the definition of what I want most continues to be a remarkably changeable thing.

But other things haven’t changed at all.

I still stubbornly believe that every single one of us has within ourselves the capacity to have, do and be anything that we want; that our biggest blockers don’t come from Outside Forces, but rather from our own lack of belief in our own power.

Further, I know for a fact that doing that I did back then – stop, think it through, plan, and then do what I’d dreamed up – was the best thing I ever did, for myself, for the family, for the ever-expanding network of people who rely on me to more or less have my stuff together on a day to day basis.

And that it still is. That whenever I remember to stop, and to step back from the situation and survey it from as much distance as I can manage at the time, and to do my best to trace through all the various paths and possibilities, pick out what I expect to be my best shot at getting out of the mess quickly and with the least damage done…I come out way ahead versus the times when I’m too busy running around with my hair on fire screaming that the sky is falling to notice that the door was standing wide open that whole time.

And that if I don’t also take that same pause on a regular basis, even when I think everything is going just swimmingly and there’s no reason to do so, I have a way of wandering way off my desired course; or of not realizing that it’s not actually going where I want it to go.

It can be a darned hard thing to do, taking that step back from a situation to consider it without actively reacting to it right immediately then; just walking away from it for a bit so that you can look at it without the wild swirling of emotion, the smoke of panic and choking gas of disappointment clouding your judgment. Your instinct says to just keep throwing energy at it. Just keep digging. Keep running. Keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing…if you stop, you’ll lose ground…!

But, lose ground to what? or on what? Where are you digging to, and is it even where you really want to go?!

How many of us are caught flatfooted by that question! We’re on the treadmill, running with all our might – but what do we hope to accomplish, what will be the signal that we have won this endless footrace? What is it you want to have? To do? To be? When you get to the end, when you break the ribbon…what does the trophy say on it?

“Congratulations, you ran really hard for a really long time and, uh, we all…admire that, we guess…”?

How much better it would be to know what all the huff and bother is for, huh? To be able to say “I really don’t want to do this right now, but, it is how I am going to get this glorious, shining thing, so, suddenly I’m not as bothered by this have-to thing I’m doing…”

I think the only difference in my feelings on the whole subject is an addendum, which would be…for gosh sakes…make sure “enjoy the journey” is on the list as well! Life is far too short and uncertain to have all your goals, all your “and then, I will be gloriously happy!” events in the distant future, and nothing but hard work and drudgery in the now.

Now is where life actually is; this, this right here, right now, this…is your life. Not in {20, 30, 50} years, when you’ve {retired, saved a million bucks, acquired a mansion and the servants to maintain it, etc}.

It’s here. It’s the meetings you have at work. It’s the commute. The bagel. The people you encounter as you go about your day. It’s the feeling of your favorite shirt when you put it on. Sunsets. Sunrises. Making your home a welcoming, comfortable place for yourself.

It’s in your laughter, your tears, your exhaustion, your exhilaration, you, ALL of you, you RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

Love yourself now, too. Be kind to yourself now. Don’t steal all the good things from yourself now, in the name of having something “better” much-much later. Honor yourself however you can, while you do yourself the even greater honor of believing that you can also have the bigger, shinier things.

I still totally believe you can.

And I’m still totally ready to clap at your parade when you do.

Onward!

PSA: Extra $10 at Coinstar until 12/9

If you’re one of those people who likes to hoard up coins in a jar or something, and you’ve got a Coinstar machine in your supermarket, AND you have plans to be shopping at iTunes, Dell, or Old Navy / Gap / Banana Republic – Coinstar has a deal for you: Cash in at least $40 in coins, and they’ll add an extra $10 to your eGift Card.

And, no fees apply for the cash-in. (<= always my main frowny-face thing when it comes to ‘cash in your coins’ machines!)

Here’s the details.

Love me the “free money.”

Oooooooooh, mah back!!

My back feels as though an elephant stomped on it. My shoulders are aching, My hands are chapped, tingling, hot and throbbing.

It was Pick Up The Meat Day. We just finished packing the chest and upright freezer, as well as the two freezers on the two fridges we own.

It’s always an adventure, and I’m beginning to doubt that it will ever become so old hat that we simply burn through it like it’s nothing and then sit around asking each other, do you remember when this was, you know, HARD?

But, two hogs and a steer are now safely put up for the coming year. Everything from ground beef to bacon, prime rib to the Christmas ham – pretty much all the meat we’re going to eat for the next twelve months, crammed into every available niche.

The husband and I do the same thing every year. He takes one look at the overflowing boxes piled up in the back of the van and says, “That will never fit.”

“It will fit,” I reply, confidently – even though inside I’m thinking, crap, he’s probably right…

“Honey,” he says, using the tone that clearly informs me that by ‘honey’ he means ‘stupid,’ “You have x-many cubic feet in those freezers, and they are already y-full. And this is clearly z-many more and y + z = x to the power of a zillion. It will never fit.”

“Pfffft,” I shrug at him. “It’ll fit. You’ll see.”

And now it is a matter of pride, people. it WILL fit.

And somehow, thus far, I have managed to pull it off. I have found ways to turn z-many cubic feet of meat into x-minus-y-many.

And then he tells me he is amazed and that I am amazing.

And all I can think is, I can’t believe I pulled that off AGAIN.

I’ll try to take some pictures tomorrow, when it isn’t DARK out there. Assuming I can stand up tomorrow. Because the way my back feels right now, I’m thinking I may need to stay in bed for a few days. Or weeks. Possibly the rest of my life.

…this may be a hint that I should rethink that idea I had about retraining to be a cowboy…

Investments of the indirect kind

I paid too much for the steer at the auction this year, going about $650 over what I’d wanted to pay.

But I’m not the least bit remorseful about it. There was simply no way in HELL that I was going to let the lovely gentleman to my left who was so enthusiastically supporting the Lodi-area kids have this particular steer.

Just…not happening, dude.

This steer was going to be Ashley’s last FFH project. This would be the third and final year that I could have the honor of making her project pay off for her; the last time my grocery money would be going directly into her future college tuition.

Selfishly, I wanted rather badly to share this transition with her. I wanted to take that tenuous, few-moments-once-a-year connection we had all the way to its natural, inevitable end.

It’s such a tiny, tiny part I play here, once a year for just a few moments, when I show up at 7:30 in the morning on a Saturday with my buyer’s card and my checkbook. I sit there with my coffee and circle the kids from my hometown in the auction book, and do my humble best to make sure that none of them end up getting less than market rate for their animals.

Which is why I also paid a little more than I technically had to for a pair of hogs.

Whiiiiich is not exactly the best frugal method, and there’s a part of me that rolls her eyes and sighs heavily every time I do it. (And you should hear the ranting whenever I make that little hand signal to the auctioneer: Bump that bid up a quarter, make it three even…maaaaaan, my inner Frugal Zealot goes bananas whenever I do that…but gee whiz, I can’t stand the thought of one of these kids not making at least the break-even on their market animals…!)

But this is an investment in more than meat. It’s not just about feeding my family, or even just about that local, organic-method gourmet-stuff.

To me, it’s a direct investment in the future. It’s a way for me to tell these kids that what they’ve done matters, that somebody other than their parents (who are, let’s face it, contractually obligated to believe that everything their kids do is “awesome” and “meaningful” and “good job, buddy!”) believes in them, and values what they’ve done, and thinks they did a damn fine job, kiddo, a DAMN fine job.

I don’t think it will come down to being the difference between a “successful” life versus one lived on skid row…but hopefully, it can be another chip tossed into the bucket that says “yes, you do matter, and you can succeed, you don’t suck, you are a winner.”

When the hard times hit, and they will, because, welcome to being human which kinda sucks sometimes, maybe that little extra reinforcement will help them keep their chins up, will help them keep slogging forward.

These kids are the ones who will be making the world whatever it will be for my kids – and my grandchildren, and all the other generations after them.

They’re worth supporting. And while I can’t necessarily claim a direct return on the investment, I still feel so very strongly that it is a good one, and that I do get more out of it than I give.

After the auction, Ashley brought over the paperwork and gave me a hug. I shook hands with her parents, and told them how proud I was to have had this small role in her life, what a fine young lady I thought she was.

She’s already started her college courses. Already left the nest for the dorms.

Already has both feet firmly on the path of Young Adulthood.

Considering that I still have not quite gotten my arms around the concept of Eldest being in kindergarten elementary middle high school, I can imagine that this must be a tremendously unnerving time for her parents.

I paid for my animals at the fair office; it’s always a bit of a shock, handing over a hefty sum all in one go like that. I’m still not used to it, and it still gives me a moment of vertigo.

I tend to become rather compulsive about checking the savings account balance in the days leading up to the auction. Am I QUITE sure I ACTUALLY saved enough? Yeah-yeah, I’ve been putting, like, $600 a month into that savings goal, but still…is it REALLY all there?!

I had A Moment as I was writing the check; a moment when yet again the thought occurred to me that this is so not the “cheapest” way to buy meat.

And then I thought about Ashley…off at college now, with checks of her own that need writing, undoubtedly more of them than she had anticipated because anybody ELSE remember how college was?

The money is going to be whipping out of my checking account regardless – that’s just what money seems to do, really.

And if it’s going to be generating that breeze anyway, well, by Gah…I rather like the idea of it becoming part of the wind beneath somebody else’s wings, instead of vanishing into a nameless, faceless void.

It just feels right, like it’s making the world I dream of for my own kids someday.

Which is worth a whole lot more than the price I’m paying for all this.

Fly strong, kiddos. I believe, from the center of my being out, that you guys will make this world glad you were around to guide it, someday.

Fly strong.

Money Monday: September 24, 2012

We’ve had some significant overtime for a lot of folks on our team these last couple weeks, which got me thinking about things like overtime, and second jobs, and all like that.

A lot of folks will respond to any financial crisis with the suggestion that the sufferer “get a second job” or “try for more hours at work.”

I’ve long thought that this is pretty rotten advice, on the whole. It feels a lot like telling someone who constantly has dirt in their eye to “go rinse it out,” without ever addressing the fact that they installed a Dust-Devil-O-Matic in their living room and that maybe, JUST MAYBE, turning that sucker off might help keep the dust out of their eyes going forward.

Overtime and/or a second job can be great short-term responses to an immediate need. It can provide a badly-needed jump start for a debt reduction plan, especially if you’re caught in that endless treadmill of “my minimum payments are just about 9/10ths of my average take-home pay.”

Adding even a rather small “extra” paycheck at that point can make a world of difference.

But over time, it just never seems to work out as planned. We get tired. Then we get exhausted. We start back-sliding on all sorts of things. Those of us who are married might start to bicker with our spouses; the spouse who isn’t putting in the Murderous Hours has trouble understanding why the spouse who is doing so is so danged grouchy about everything all the time.

Meanwhile, the spouse putting in the hours is thinking, …seriously, why can’t you people just SHUT UP for a damned minute so I can hear myself think, geeeeez, would it KILL you people to just…HANDLE IT, handle ANYTHING, your damned SELVES instead of dragging me into every.single.thing. that needs doing around here?!?! (<= not that this has ever been my internal dialog, mind you, but I have this friend who has felt this way from time to time…)

We start to make ‘tired’ decisions. We start to buy our way out of dealing with the things that make us feel tired.

And then, we start to become increasingly dependent on that ‘extra’ income.

And since we’re using so much of our time working in “the now,” so to speak, we aren’t working on things that would constitute working “smarter.”

We just keep working harder. And harder. And harder still.

If we’d just stop for a second, if we’d look up and around and realize that hey…I’m getting $10 per ditch I dig…but if instead of digging two extra ditches a day, I put my energy into, say, engineering school…in a few years, I’d be the guy telling guys like me where to dig the ditches, and I’d be making $300 more a day to do it…

That’s moving into working smarter, not harder. Like most things, it’s simply about being aware of how the bigger picture is playing out around you – and reacting to that rather than the far smaller world of “my immediate environment.”

It’s been my experience so far that Life tends to reward attempts to work smarter at a better ratio in the long run than it does “just” working harder.

(And that it’s a lot easier to preach about doing it, than to actually do it. Kind of unfair, really, how ‘obvious’ things will be to everybody EXCEPT us when it comes to Such Matters, ain’t it?!)

Money Monday: August 13, 2012

So, we have a big ugly drought going on, ripping through our corn and soybean crops like a hot knife through butter. And we have begun to hear the rumblings from various sources that we may start to see higher food prices – not just on corn and soybean products, but on everything.

The Experts™ are coming up with all kinds of predictions, dire and otherwise, about the eventual percent-rise of said costs.

Those predictions do not matter at all.

Let me say that again: What ‘everybody’ is saying about how much food costs are about to rise do not matter one little bit when it comes to the question of what you, personally should or should not do in response to this impending train wreck.

So, let’s take a deep, calming breath, and a big step back from the whole mess, and attempt to apply some logical thinking to the problem, shall we?

Now, what we can know for sure is this: Yes. Prices on a wide variety of things are going to go up. They are already starting those first tiny hiccups, as goods and services that are closely linked, in the here-and-now, to those various products (mostly but not only corn) that are suffering the most – the biggest part of the show is probably between four and ten months out, which is when the manufacturers who are currently using up the corn syrup and so forth from last year’s crops will start having to actually pay through the nose for this year’s scrawny, sorry example of a so-called harvest, phooey on it.

Does this automatically mean that you need to do something drastic?

Eh, maybe…maybe not.

The first thing to do is to stop and ask yourself what All This really means for you.

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter lately about buying a super-sized freezer and packing it with all kinds of meat ‘to save money during the crisis.’ To which I say, whoa up, there, pardner.

Freezers cost money. They cost money to buy, even if you’re getting a really good deal off Craig’s list or something. And they cost money to operate, too – anywhere from $100 to $200 a year, depending on waaaay too many factors to try to list out here but including things like how old the unit is, how well you pack and maintain it, how hot the garage where it is probably kept gets, and so forth.

So let’s say you get a $200 freezer from Craig’s list and it costs you $150 a year to operate – if you use it for just one year, you need to save around $29 a month to make it work out for you.

Let’s further say you’re currently buying $10 in beef each week, and your goal in buying the freezer is to avoid paying more for it. If the cost of beef goes up by 4% (which is one of the many predictions), that $10 will become $10.40 – an additional $1.60 a month. If it goes up by 10% (which is the highest prediction I’ve seen, and which came with all kinds of…rather intense…political commentary soooooo, BIG grain of salt), you’re looking at $1 more a week, or $4 a month.

If you’re only going to do this while the crisis is on, you need another $25 a month in savings to make it worth your while.

Which is really my point: Don’t rush into very large lifestyle changes because of one event.

I tell you what: It feels weird to warn people off rushing to bulk buy. Personally I’ve found it to be a tremendous budget-booster, and it has actually sheltered me from the worst of the recent inflations that have hit others pretty hard. The price of my raw materials has barely budged, really…and even things that have gone up a lot by percentage haven’t moved much by dollars paid.

But if you want to really make this pay for you, it’s not just a reaction to this one crop failure; it’s not something you’re going to do now, then toss aside in eighteen to twenty-four months when the prices have settled back down.

To make it really pay off, it’s a lifestyle. And I really wouldn’t recommend rushing into it whole-hog (whole hog! freezer! ha!), either. Because those savings don’t come free, my friends, they come by way of work, and plenty of it.  You don’t get to just come home, unload the groceries and call it a day – oh no. At the very least, you can add “repackaging for freezer” to your to-do list before you can call yourself done. You have to make sure you maintain good rotation in the freezer, too – otherwise, you end up with The Forgotten Roast surfacing ‘at some point long after it should have been used.’ Yet another thing you have to do when on the whole you’d really rather be doing anything else.

Each step you take down the path adds more and more chores to your list. Having grains in bins means inspecting the bins from time to time, to make sure no moths or mold or other harmful things have gotten in there. (And they do, no matter how careful you are – eventually, you will pop a lid off one of those buckets and get hit in the face by escaping moths.)

And of course, buying raw ingredients in bulk means more cooking from scratch – which means more time in the kitchen, which means again less time on your backside. And it always sounds ‘easy’ and ‘no big deal’ when you’re talking yourself into it (with hints of ‘nostalgia’ and ‘domestic bliss’) – but then, well, it’s Wednesday night and work was a killer and @*^&@, I forgot to defrost anything, um, well, we could have nope out of that how about ugh, bugs got in it! OK, how about see: forgot to defrost anything, above well…I guess I’ll do the old “defrost ground beef in the skillet by scraping bits of it off the block as it thaws” trick…

Nights like that will kind of take the shine off the whole thing – and if you don’t actually want to be doing All This but are only in it because there was this corn-thing a couple years ago? So, you bought all this meat, which is still in the freezer?

There is no shine to it. It’s just painful, pure and simple. And a few such painful experiences later, that freezer is just sitting out there in the garage running and running and running, and all you ever do is glare at it resentfully as you pass by.

At which point, you’re losing money in the long run.

Now, if I were to place bets today on where the pain is most likely to be felt hardest by most people? It wouldn’t really be in meat. It would be in things like crackers and canned chili – those ubiquitous boxes and cans everybody has in their pantry, which we’re accustomed to popping open and serving up alongside whatever is “for dinner.”

The prices of those are going to go up, too; it won’t be commented upon like increases in milk and dairy will be (because those things are tracked and reported upon by Da Gummint), but given that corn syrup is in everything these days…I’d expect a $2.99 box of crackers to be $3.49 pretty quickly. And quietly. We might not even notice – even if we do, we might fuss for a little bit, the first couple weeks, but then we quickly adjust to the higher price and no longer even notice. $3.49 is the new ‘regular’ price, and we toss them into our basket without a second thought.

If you want to win the ‘I didn’t get my backside handed to me during The Great Corn Crop Failure Crisis of 2012™’ game – I’d say think that second time. Look at what you’re buying, pay attention to how much you pay per ounce or serving, consider how many servings you really get from a box that says it has ‘12 servings’ in it.

Don’t let them ‘sneak’ a 20% price increase in on you, either by raising the price or putting fewer ounces of product in the same-sized box. And don’t feel like you “have” to pay it, either. There are always alternatives. Some are as easy as switching to a generic brand; some are as challenging as ditching ‘everything that comes in a box’ for home-made alternatives or just deciding not to eat whatever-it-is anymore.

But above all else, don’t rush to stock up just because you’re afraid of rising grocery prices. It’s been my personal experience that doing that kind of thing only because of a one-time event really doesn’t pay – it’s only if you’re making a long-term commitment to a bulk-bought lifestyle that you really come out ahead on that deal.

Simply being aware of what you buy, and why you buy it, and what your other choices might be goes a lot further toward sheltering you from higher prices, good times or bad, than buying up a freezer you don’t really need and filling it up with meat you won’t actually eat.

Five Frugal Things

Pipney Jane started a meme that for some strange reason caught my interest. (No idea. None. I can’t explain why this meme caught my eye when 99.99% of all others end up on my “maybe later, by which I probably mean never” list.)

It may come as a complete shock, but I too have had that “uh…what…are you doing?” conversation with visitors a few times here and there, when they’ve caught me in the middle of some act that I don’t even think twice about anymore, but which to them is a kind of glimpse into a strange new world.

So, OK…here we go…I will attempt to think of five and ONLY five of my favorite every-day frugal things…

Compost

This takes no more effort than sweeping the peelings / trimmings / egg shells / etc. into a bowl instead of the sink or trash can, and then dumping them into the worm tower in the garage instead of the trash tote. Each week I get up to a gallon of compost tea from the spiggot on the bottom of it (great for houseplants, and no, it doesn’t smell like rotting anything – if anything, it just smells like dirt), and about once a month in the warmer months I get a full tray – about five-ten pounds – of black gold for the garden.

Double-down

This is pretty much identical to Pipney Jane’s ‘set asides’ – instead of making just one of something, I’ll make double, triple or even quadruple quantities: one to eat right then, the rest to freeze for later. It doesn’t often take triple the time to triple a given recipe, nor does it make triple the mess to clean up.

Waste not

I admit it: I’m one of those people who will add water to the “empty” shampoo bottle to get at least one more washing out of it. I push those itty-bitty slivers of soap into the new bar. Cut the ripped-up legs off jeans and call them shorts. I have a dozen ways to keep a bottle upside-down without falling over, so that I can let every last drop of whatever was in there drip out.

Advanced Laziness

Advanced laziness is an art, one that is frequently mistaken for hard work. When I spend a weekend cooking and filling up the freezer, people have a tendency to think I’m “working hard.”

Nah. It’s advanced laziness. By putting in this time now, I am actually buying myself tons of time when I’m going to want it the most – on those weeknights when the idea of having to stand up for even five more minutes is enough to make me want to cry. “Ha! Joke’s on you, Exhaustion, because dinner is already ready! I WIN!”

Be childish

I may be cheating a bit here – this is probably more of a philosophy than a simple action. But still, it’s one of my favorite every-day money-saving things, and it’s so very simple.

Instead of looking at things like a grownup – a segment of our species who tend to be rather set in their ways, prone to thinking they know what that is, it’s a {something boring and scientific}, and it is used for {something even more boring and pedestrian} – I try to look at things more childishly.

A grownup will see an empty #10 can as “recycling.” A child will see…a helmet. Or a fairy house. Or, a container garden. (You’d be amazed at the miniature container gardens you can build with empty #10 cans.)

Just looking at the things around you as if you didn’t know exactly what they were, and what they were for, looking at them playfully and as though you had just announced, “OK, new game!!” and were making up the rules right there on the spot – it both helps to keep the frustration of tedium at bay, and frequently leads to little flashes of inspiration that save money, or add a splash of uniqueness, or both, to something as ordinary as a kitchen towel or cardboard box.

Money Monday: July 30, 2012

Well, dang. Not doing so good keeping up these posts, am I? Honestly, I don’t know what is going on with me lately. Eh. That’s not entirely true. I know what, what I’m not sure of is why it seems to be hitting me so hard in the creativity. Writing, knitting, dyeing, anything that isn’t purely and only practical keeps sliding further and further down my priority list lately.

{purses lips thoughtfully} Huh…weird, ain’t it…?

ANYWAY. I did actually work on my List (from three weeks ago) (oy, I suck!), and I tell you what: I had a horrible time trying to do it.

Not because I couldn’t think of anything, but because pretty much the instant I started, I was trying to skip ahead, not only to here, but pretty much trying to do the and then we hit the >> button and everybody lived happily ever after, the end thing.

Which is so typical of me, really. “Hey, that looks cool!” {immediately and enthusiastically jumps for it} “Ow! Well, what idiot put a briar patch THERE of all places?!”

Sigh. Dear Me: The point of the exercise is not just to write down a bunch of random things and then rush out and start doing them. It is rather about creating a map with built-in compass, to help you actually decide where you’re going – instead of just ending up somewhere and, well, like it or not, it’s where you are now.

So, backing up a little bit and resisting the urge to start doing anything – what’s actually on the list? And what are those things collectively trying to say?

The next step in the exercise is to start organizing things – by overall ‘group’ (that is, “things to HAVE” versus “things to DO” versus “family things” or “career things” or “personal development”), by relative importance and effort/duration.

The relative importance is the tricky part; nothing is “unimportant,” but not everything can have the title of Most Important. It’s highly subjective, too, which is tricky because you can’t go to Wikipedia and get a definitive answer on which is more important, the chicken or the egg?

It’s up to you. ONLY you can answer that. (Yeah, it does kind of suck - sorry about that.)

I have to admit, my list is pretty easy that way. Fifteen years ago, this part was hard, hard, HARD…but now, well, you know…there’s really only two categories.

One is around here and now. We’ve had a rather spartan few years, really, while I was hyper-fixated on scrubbing away all the crap that had accumulated over the years before them. I have a few things that sum up to “giving the Denizens back a childhood.” More extracurricular things, more art and sports (yeah, um, they’re not actually all that thrilled about that one – but, tough beans, it’s good for you, dang it!) and music.

That is the easy one. After all, for me, mommy-hood is my number one thing – getting the kids from infancy to adulthood is kind of my master-work.

The other is around increasing our independence – which is a trickier proposition. Right now, we’re heavily dependent on paychecks, and retailers. (Unlike everybody else in America, right?) We trade our lives for paychecks, which we then trade for goods and services we don’t have the time or resources to make for ourselves.

If the recession highlighted any one thing for me, it is how precariously balanced that web really is; how many of us were in a world of hurt almost immediately after a job was lost, even if there was another job still in full swing in the household?

How many of us felt the rapidly rising prices on everything from cornflakes to gasoline as if they were sharpened icepicks driven into our guts?

Anyway, it really brought home to me how dependent we are on the massive, yet rather antiquated, commercial engine that is the American economy. We need it from both sides, too – first, we go to work for it, creating goods and services for others to spend their paychecks on. Then, we take our paychecks, flip them over, write “Pay to the order of MegaCorp” on the backs of them, and shove them right back under the door of our own office, so to speak – in exchange for the goods and services that make up our lifestyles.

It’s not that I want to build a compound and live entirely apart from the world (please. I love soft, clean sheets and Starbucks as much as the next minivan-driving suburbanite), but more that I don’t want all our eggs in the same basket. I don’t want us dependent on one or two regular cash-infusions from MegaCorp, followed by a need to turn right around and sign that check over to MegaCorp in exchange for t-shirts, electricity, groceries and everything else that make our lives what they are.

Seems like a great idea to me.

Now.

Um.

What does that really mean? What does “mission accomplished” actually look like, on something like that? What are the steps to get there?

This is where the dreaming begins to merge into the real world. Nothing is impossible, but not everything is easy; but neither is it automatically as hard as it might sound. Sometimes you look at something “big” and think it’s too big, or too far from where you are right now, and give up on it immediately.

But if instead you look at it not in terms of “the whole big thing” but rather as individual steps, one thing at a time, each individual step isn’t that big a deal. Each step is do-able.

And it is astonishing how often it goes faster than you thought, how one step leading to another and another “suddenly” becomes mission accomplished.

But it can’t happen if you don’t start taking the steps. And you can’t start taking the steps if you don’t know where you’re trying to go.

I think I’ve got a good rough idea – now, I’ve got to pencil out some ways and means and turn it into an actual map.

Hopefully with built-in compass.

And also a martini dispenser.

Because that would be COOL.

Money Monday: July 2, 2012

Among the many things I keep thinking I should totally be better about are these sorts of posts – one of the many ways in which finances can be like dieting is that having something that keeps you motivated (and also honest) can really help you stay the course when you’re trying to accomplish something.

Which is actually a large part of my problem: I have a lot of vague ideas, a fistful of could and a pocketful of should and a side helping of would, but I don’t have a particularly clear-eyed vision around what exactly I want to do, or how precisely I think I should chart the course to get it.

This lack of vision tends to make it hard to actually get anywhere. Kind of like driving a car with the sunshield still up, you know? Where we goin? Dunno, but I think we’re getting there fast!

We’re actually at an excellent place in life to be having the sorts of conversations we need to have, too. Not only because we’re sort of between Grand And Sprawling plans at present (which is rather a problem that needs to be addressed), but because we are – whether we care to admit it or not – standing in the doorway to Middle Age.

(There. I said it. We are middle. frickin'. aged.)

(Well. Chronologically, anyway. Mentally…well, let’s put it this way: Fart. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! SHE SAID FART!!! HAHAHAHAHAHA! See? Maximum mental age: Fourteen, MAYBE.)

The way I tend to operate now is on an autopilot that was first set in place fifteen years ago – when we were newly-minted young adults learning just how hard this whole “being a grownup” gig actually was. We had six-figure dreams but only four-figure experience. We had lots of hope and energy, but not a lot of power in our jumps. We had tons of opinions, but not a whole lot of wisdom. And of course, we were desperately squeezing nickels hoping to transform them into dimes through sheer force of will.

But that isn’t where we are now. Now we are in our prime earning years. We are sailing into what we will undoubtedly look back upon as our best-ever earning years, the years when we were making the most money we ever made.

I could be wrong, but I suspect if I don’t get off my arse pretty quickly here and apply my experience in Such Matters to the question of how we want to leverage these literally golden years, I will be rather pissy with my younger self when we are sitting around in our Golden Years wondering why we even call them that, seeing as how it probably should be called the Once Upon A Time We Used To Have Some Gold, ‘N Now It’s Almost All Gone Years. (<= I very much doubt I will become less wordy in my old age. Just a hunch.)

The place I like to start for Such Things isn’t directly with dollars and cents and how many of them go to what categories – rather, I like to start by daydreaming a lot. This is actually a really fun exercise, because at this point in the game you don’t have to be realistic.

You don’t have to be sensible.

You don’t have to be all accountant-ish.

In Point Of Fact, the best way to approach this little task is playfully. Take yourself back to your childhood and play Let’s Pretend with yourself. Let’s pretend that we have all the time, money and talent in the whole wide world at our disposal…nothing is impossible, nothing is too big or too small, nothing requires too much pre-work that we haven’t even started yet, we can have, do or be anything we want…

Well. What do we want?

Grab a notebook and a pen, and start writing! It doesn’t matter whether the thing is an object, a destination or an accomplishment. It doesn’t matter whether it is “silly” or “serious.” They don’t have to be all the same category, or level of difficulty – you can have “swim the English channel” next to “grow at least one edible radish.”

It doesn’t matter whether anybody else approves. It doesn’t even matter whether you approve – yet.

The point here isn’t to carve into stone all the things you will absolutely, without fail strive to and possibly beyond your utmost to have, do and be…it’s simply to give yourself permission to dream, to imagine what such a reality would look like for yourself.

Sure, ultimately we’ll go over this list and prioritize things and look at what steps are between here and there and all that boring sensible stuff.

But for right now…don’t worry about it. Just rough out what “reality” would be, if you got to decide on it.

It’s so easy to get so caught up in what is that we forget that we aren’t necessarily defined by it. Reality seems so…well, real. Finite. Defining. Immovable, and irresistible.

Living as we do within the boundaries of What Is, we can start to believe that we, too, are part of it. That we too are what we are, nothing more, nothing less, unchanging and unchangeable.

It isn’t really so. To our species has been given a terrible and profound gift – we do not have to be defined by the world we are born into, or have fallen into, or even have worked long and hard to arrive in, only to find that, eh, now that I’m here? It ain’t quite what I expected, ya know…?

We have this gift of imagining. Of dreaming. And daring to mold ourselves, so that we fit the reality to which we would like to become accustomed.

Whether the journey is across the street or across the world, though, we can’t get started until we have some idea which way we want to go…so!

Start scribbling, and don’t overthink things at this point. Let those hopes and dreams of yours talk without being interrupted with words like “but” or “if only” or “can’t” for a bit. Build some castles in the air.

Next week, we can start looking into how we can get some foundations under them.

Money Monday: April 9, 2012

So. Here we are. A full week after my last day of the contract. The cold has (mostly) run its course, I think I’m almost caught up on sleep, and starting to get into all those things I said I wanted to get into while I was between contracts…one of which was, of course, a more in-depth scrutiny of what-all we accomplished over the last thirty months.

I’ve been a little afraid to look, actually. Math can be rather cruel, you know? You can “believe” that things are “about” here, or that it “should” be about right…but then math comes along and is all, “ACTUALLY, if you subtract 32 from 9? Negative number.”

And no matter how hard you believe, expect, or want it to be otherwise…math is mean that way. Subtracting a number greater than the originating number will result in a negative number. Period. (WAIT! Unless you use ABS(x – y)! I smell loophole…!!!)

I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and started looking – long, and hard, and with merciless refusal to use any “special” functions [dammit! Another brilliant plan, thwarted!] – at where we were and where we are.

I have to say: I’m rather impressed with what-all we accomplished over the last thirty months. We have paid off…get this…$83,340.69 in assorted non-mortgage debts. I know, right?!

The loan on the van, all the credit cards, and the whopping-huge tax bill I’ve been pissy about for going on four years now are gone, and the larger and nastier of the two medical gotchas is well on its way to being nothing more than a peculiarly angry and frustrating memory.

Yeah…we did good. Which is good, because if we hadn’t I think I might have suffered a complete mental breakdown.

Which leads me to where we are.

On the one hand, we definitely are in a much better position than we were; we’ve got a lot less being forked over in interest and payments, which means we have a much better ability to ride things out while I look for my next Adventure in Employment.

On the other hand, there’s still a fair amount of work to be done. I decided to forgo putting a whole lot of cash into the emergency fund in favor of paying off those debts, so we have a fairly thin bank account balance right now – and we have a lot of goals coming up that are going to be hitting the “write a check” line all too soon.

I looked at Eldest the other day and had one of those moments, you know? She’s off to high school next year, which means that college is only five short years away…and her college fund is woefully inadequate right now. Eep.

I look at our retirement funds and almost want to weep. We are not only behind where we wanted to be, but behind where we should be for “average” retirement savings.

We’re still underwater on the Den, and laughably far away from being able to even dream about moving somewhere with a little land around it.

But, you know…in terms of how things could have gone…we came out pretty darned well, all things considered. When I look at the kinds of things that we have simply absorbed, and how little direct harm we actually took from them…I have to say I feel like I just climbed over a fence, turned around and saw a big old sign on it that says, “Danger: Mine field! Do not enter!”

…wait…sooooo, that field I just walked across…was a…?

The husband is making about 15% less now than he was in 2008; my price book tells me that the cost of stuff like flour, eggs and milk has meanwhile gone up between 18 and 24% in that same time. We’re paying about $700 more a month for healthcare premiums and such, too, which makes it no wonder that I’m finding it awfully hard to yank the ends far enough to, you know, meet.

But when it comes to this household, crazy as we are I can say this one thing for us: We ain’t no bunch of whining crybaby work-fearing wimps. Nobody around here wasted much time sitting around sobbing and carrying on about things – nobody pitched fits about vacations not taken or stuff not bought.

Everybody just pulled up their socks and got to work, did what they needed to do and didn’t fuss about it.

And we did some amazing things.

I’m so proud of this family I could about bust.

I’m also kind of excited about the next phase; this last one was a bit dark and gloomy, actually. I mean, it felt good to be taking a hatchet to all those bills…but at the same time, it was also like endlessly picking at scabs on my knees or something.

Most of those bills were the direct result of something at best ill-advised (and at worst, flat-out stupid) that I’d done…and every time I looked at the bills, it was like taking a little jab, you know?

Yeah…that also was not one of your brightest moves ever, right there…sigh…

When I get started on the next contract, that money will be going into far happier things – into college and retirement funds, into those future dreams, and hey, while we’re at it? Some right here and now stuff too.

Two words for you, people: New. Ovens.

I wants them.

Working ovens, that don’t get to 225 and say, “Eh, that’s close enough to 375 for ya, right?” or zip up to 475 and then go, “I dunno what you’re all pissy about…350, 475, they’re practically identical! Oh, fine then, I’ll just s-l-o-w-l-y lose heat so that in an hour, I’ll be at, like 117, bwahahaha…”

That’s the stuff I couldn’t bring myself to spring for while working on this last contract; I was so determined to pay all that other gloomy stuff off first, get rid of it, make it not be there anymore.

Destroy the evidence, as it were.

Now that I’ve done that, and I’m sitting here with nothing left at over 5% interest, I’m ready to start adding back in those things that are not necessarily “needs”…but which sure would be nice to have, nevertheless.

That was a rather long, steep and dark hill to climb – I’m ready to do a little coasting in the sunshine now.

With maybe a hint of spoiling on the side.

Money Monday: March 26, 2012

This is probably going to be the shortest of these posts ever. This is the last week of this contract, and I’m probably going to be AWOL yet again all this week. There’s just way too much to do, and I’m way too agitated / tired / cranky / etc. to write much.

I’ve spent a lot of time pondering What’s Next over these last several weeks…but to be honest? I’ve been trying not to do that.

My brain is overloaded with all the work-related chatter going on inside it; all the shoulda-woulda-coulda crap that insists on playing through no matter how often I shout, “NO TIME! TOO LATE! QUIT IT, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT NOW!”

It keeps me up at night, which leads to exhaustion (go figure), which leads to crankiness and more brain-chatter.

This is not a good time to attempt to make balanced, reasonable decisions about what I want to do once this contract is over; history has shown me, again and again, that decisions I make when I’m emotionally or physically off-balance – and I’m a bit of both right now, frankly – tend to be bad ones.

Not to digress, but I feel like I need to say this: I’m not being abused by anybody but myself on this deal. Nobody is being “mean” to me, or anything like that. What has got me so worked up isn’t my situation, but that of the people I’m leaving behind – who are damned good people that I like an awful lot. I don’t like what I’m seeing ahead for them, which is taking a whole lot of blame for a whole lot of stuff that they are not being equipped to defend themselves against.

And that’s got me irritable and upset, because it hits my ‘that ain’t fair’ button.

ANYWAY…I’ve been spending a lot more time playing video games than looking at spreadsheets or doing feasibility studies. Which I feel is a much better use of my time than coming up with “great” ideas that start off like, First, we buy a really big used motor home…

The one thing I’m pretty sure of is, I won’t want to stay home for long, if at all. We still have way too much that we want to get done, the husband’s pay is still a good 15% below what it was five years ago and there’s a lot more coming out off the top – the health insurance premiums alone are almost triple what they were five years ago. Combined with the cost of Everything Else going nowhere but up, retirement funds that are deflated like flat tires, woefully inadequate college funds for the Denizens and still being upside-down on the Den – which essentially hamstrings us when opportunities that would require relocation come up – we’d just really like to keep the double-income power-lifting going for a while yet.

But for right immediately now…I’m not going to worry about it. I’m going to get this last week done, and get as much put to bed as I possibly can before I go.

And then I’m going to take a week off from Everything.

And then, I should be ready to actually get moving on something…something that doesn’t involve motor homes and a live-off-the-land lifestyle.

(…which has seemed a lot more tempting than you’d think lately…except I still haven’t come up with a good solution for the Yarn Stash Storage Issue yet…hmmmmm…)

Money Monday: January 16, 2012

I went to Costco this weekend. Which I really didn’t want to do, because Weekend + Costco = 12-layer Crazy Cake, but, we were out of eggs, flour and sugar.

Let’s be honest here: A lot of us “peek” as shopping carts wheel past us. I too can be fascinated by the choices others make. And sometimes I wonder why somebody buys what they buy. The answer is usually really simple: Because they don’t know there’s an alternative, nor do they WISH to know, so, ZIP IT, CRAZY LADY.

But as I was charging around snagging things off the shelves and racing for the finish line, I bumped up against somebody who was stunned to discover that a) #10 cans of tomato sauce existed and b) they were significantly cheaper than the 6-packs of the same exact brand.

This week, the #10 can of S&W tomato sauce was $2.49. They also had a 12-pack of the same stuff for $6.99. A #10 can holds 106 ounces, making the cost per ounce about two cents. The 12-pack of 14.5 ounce cans comes to 174 ounces, or four cents per ounce.

Which calculations were done on my phone while a fellow mom looked on in wonder. We then discussed the various uses for “that much” tomato sauce, and how to manage what you didn’t use that very day when you opened the can.

The idea that you could simply take a few quart-sized Ziploc bags, put 2-4 cups of sauce in each one, lay it flat in the freezer, and have a minimal-footprint supply of frozen spaghetti sauce ready to go…was revolutionary.

I had a new best friend. She followed me around the warehouse watching every single thing I put in the cart, and wanting to know how I used it, how I stored it, why this not that, etc. etc. etc.

It was a stern reminder for me, actually. I tend to think of a lot of things as “obvious” that really aren’t…until somebody else points them out.

Like…yogurt. A lot of us like yogurt, as a snack or in recipes. Did you know it’s super easy to make at home? Seriously. This is all there is to it.

At the store, buy one small tub of plain, unsweetened yogurt; you want the kind with live, active cultures. I haven’t found that the starter yogurt having gelatin added hurts anything, but definitely no sweeteners or vanilla-flavoring! I generally grab the store’s generic plain yogurt, which runs about fifty cents when not on sale. (You can also buy yogurt starters if you either want different flavors or can’t find a yogurt that pleases you in the store – Cultures For Health has a variety of easy-to-use starters, both the kind you can perpetuate [e.g., make another batch from the batch you just made] or direct-set [you have to use fresh starter for each batch].)

Take the yogurt out of the fridge and set it on the counter to move toward room temperature. If you have an electric oven, turn on the oven light; if you have a gas one, the pilot light is probably enough to keep it at around 100 degrees (you can check that with an inexpensive thermometer) (I have two…because I have two malfunctioning ovens, awesome!!).

Take four cups of milk, and heat it to scalding (just starting to bubble around the edges, but not outright boiling); let it cool to between 90 and 110 degrees (you can put your [clean!!!] finger in it without yowling).

Stir the now-room-temperature yogurt into your cooled milk. Cleanliness is key here – make sure whatever container you’re using is super-clean, because what you’re going to do next is let it ferment for a good six to ten hours in your ~ 100 degree oven…prime temperature for all kinds of things to thrive, yogurt and otherwise. You do not want harmful bacteria to be joining the yogurt’s party!

Shorter fermentation results in a less-tangy end product; I usually go with ten full hours, which usually makes for a particularly tangy yogurt. Because I am a wild thing that way.

Then, carefully move it from the oven to the fridge – don’t stir, shake or otherwise agitate it! I’ve discovered through trial and error (mostly error) that if I don’t agitate it, I end up with a nice, thick, creamy yogurt. If I can’t resist the temptation to stir (or taste-test) it, I get a runnier version. It’s not bad, exactly, but I prefer the yogurt to resist the spoon a little bit when I’m using it.

You can also use a crockpot – preheat it while you’re scalding your milk, then mix the milk and yogurt in the crock, turn the crockpot off, put the lid on and wrap the whole thing in a nice warm towel for the duration.

I’ll stir in some fresh or frozen berries, homemade preserves, honey, vanilla or whatever for the ones that are snacks, and leave the rest as it is – set aside about half a cup of it for the next batch and you can be making homemade yogurt for a good long while. When you start getting “runny” or “flavorless” batches, it’s time for new starter…I generally get a good two months of weekly batches out of each $0.50 tub.

To me now…that’s so obvious.

But I was stunned when it was first pointed out to me a couple years ago that it was that easy to do.

Come right down to it, nothing I do is particularly hard, or requires skills only attainable after twenty years of meditation on the Holy Mountain.

It’s easy, practical stuff…it just takes time, and curiosity. The ability to laugh off your mistakes helps a lot, as does the ability to look at something from a variety of angles.

If you can do that, a lot becomes “obvious” that makes other people go, “Whoa, wait, what? You can do that? REALLY?!”

Which is a deeply satisfying feeling, by the way. Just sayin’.

This week’s meals are largely about getting large, bulky things out of my way in the freezer; we’re still down by one freezer and I need to clear some shelves so I can cook breakfasts and lunches ahead again!

Also, there is a lot of spinach going on right now. I just harvested thirty POUNDS of the stuff this weekend. Yoinks!!!!!

Monday: Leftover Extravaganza! (a.k.a., everybody forage, mommy is busy having a What Do You Mean I Hafta Work Tomorrow?! episode)

Tuesday: Balsamic-glazed pork roast, roasted red potatoes, spinach

Wednesday: Lamb roast, “Turkish” rice [rice with peas, slivered almonds, and other horrifying things in it] [the Denizens are not fans of ‘mixed up’ foods, but, they’ll just have to deal]

Thursday: Roast Chicken, [hopefully] Blue Nile potatoes [rogue potato plant ready to dig up – here’s hoping it actually has potatoes attached to it!], more spinach, yay!!

Friday: Beef Soup (crockpot, because I am always lazy on Fridays)

Saturday: Chicken pot pies

Sunday: Beef empanadas, Spanish rice

Money Monday: January 8, 2011

Bet you didn’t know that Tuesday is the new Monday. I know. I too am shocked at the things that don’t make the main newscasts in this country.

Ahem. Yes. Well. The weekend got away from me a little bit – there’s a Thing at work that was supposed to go into a testing environment, but then the main partner who is forcing us to do all this in the first place was all, “Oh, wait, hang on, we’re not actually ready!” but I had all this code that wasn’t ready to go, but also couldn’t exactly be dropped, and…it was just a weird weekend.

Then last night got away from me.

And tonight is about to do the same; I had one of those away-from-home-for-sixteen-hours days today. Awesome.

Anyway…I didn’t have any Stunning Revelations last week; I think the most interesting thing for me last week was the realization of just how much certain things I never really took into consideration as Particularly Big Deals have impacted our ability to really get our feet under us.

Mind you, when placed into a pool of average people – I’m relatively sheltered from a lot of the stuff that has absolutely slammed the general population. For example, I realized this weekend that what I pay for flour has gone up by 23% in about two years time. Which for someone who does as much baking as I do is a pretty frightening figure.

That’s right. I’m paying $1.83 more per month for flour. Somebody call the Red Cross! Get this woman some aid, STAT!

As line items, they don’t really hit my radar. I’m aware of them, but they don’t hit me in the gut and make me feel sick, you know? Irritated on occasion, granted, but not devastated.

But at the same time…milk has gone up 40%. A dozen eggs 43%. A tank of gasoline that used to cost $23 is now $34. The monthly penalty for gas and electricity has gone from $205 to $355 – and not because we’ve suddenly gotten all crazy with our usage, which has actually stayed flat or even dropped over the last four years – and yet never does this result in a lower bill, somehow.

Meanwhile, the husband is not only earning less, but handing over far more of his pre-tax-so-at-least-there’s-that income for health insurance.

None of which is news. None of which surprises me. I’m (cough-cough) more than slightly aware of even slight fluctuations in the prices of things I buy regularly, and am one of those people who will walk away from darn near anything when it trips my oh-so-sensitive Too Expensive O’Meter.

I can’t even say I was surprised to add up all the columns and realize that the husband’s net paycheck can’t cover even the non-discretionary budget items on its own. Slightly bummed out and a little bit riled up, but at the same time…

…at the same time…

Y’all have no idea how lucky I feel.

We’re going to have to keep on working hard and keeping a tight rein on things; there won’t be any big vacations, or new cars, or indulging in iGadgets and maid services.

And we’re OK with that. It’s a road we’ve walked before; sometimes because we had to, sometimes because we wanted something that was otherwise beyond our means. We already have a profound sense of why…and it has nothing to do with being punished.

It has everything to do with continuing to pursue what we really want, and having a better chance of actually getting it, by letting go of things that don’t really matter to us – things that are just shiny, or cool, or fun, but that we’re going to drop forgotten on the floor in an hour’s time, bored and looking for the next fun thing.

I did come away with a couple action items; we are indeed spending too much on pre-fab food, and I also definitely need to quit being lazy about how I categorize things. I suspect an awful lot of stuff is getting dumped into “groceries” that doesn’t belong in there, but I’ve just been too lazy to actually break things out or even think about what I was actually buying – let alone taking the receipt out of my wallet and reviewing it.

The other thing I want to do is figure out if there is any way I could pay off at least one of the debts remaining from the Great (Under)Employment Fiasco™ next month. I think it might be possible…but it may require a fairly intense display of tightwad prowess, a healthy dose of Being A Damned Grownup For Once (nooooooooo, not THAT!) and extremely on-top-of-things organizational skills (…uh oh…) because there would be a bit of Financial Alchemy involving shuffling the virtual envelopes containing the savings goals for things like property taxes, annual car insurance premiums and stuff like that in a kind of shell game – all of it to be fully settled as if nothing had ever happened before April 17 when the income tax returns have to be filed and the bill (if any) paid in full.

Meals could have gone better last week; early in the week, I charged out to get the necessary ingredients out of the freezer and found the key to it had gone AWOL. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

This was what might be called a major setback; you can imagine how frustrated / angry / freaked out I was, with thousands of dollars in food right there in the garage…and me not able to access it!!

After having torn the house apart about five times (including a thorough search of the trash cans and every pocket of every pair of pants I could lay my hands on), I thought to look behind the freezer itself; sure enough, somebody (me) had left the key sitting on top of the freezer instead of putting it back in the cupboard, and somebody else, though warned with increasingly foul language not to EVER do so (husband), had come along and shoved mass quantities of boxes, totes and other paraphernalia onto that same freezer top (the chest freezer is proving a real challenge on that front – everything from baskets of clothes to power tools keep being piled up on top of it! ARGH, QUIT IT!!!)…thus knocking the key clean off the freezer and into the spider-webbed darkness behind it.

Fortunately, the insanely large-headed and bright-red-haired Power Puff Girl keychain was relatively easy to spot in the garage…this weekend, when I was finally home in daylight hours.

Hopefully, I’ll be back on track now with making more meals at home; I’ve got nothing particular going on this weekend (don’t tell anybody, for GAH’S sake!), so hopefully I’ll be able to get ahead on some meals enough that the number one obstacle for me, which is coming home so dog-tired I can’t even think about food, let alone fiddle with it, can be overcome by virtue of said meals being oven-ready. Go to the freezer, take out the casserole dish…

This week is turning out to be mostly a “put random ingredients into skillet, heat through, and serve with rice or noodles” kind of deal.

Gah, I hope I can get my feet under me a little better next week…

You know you are "other directed" when...

...you see a magazine called "Soaps In Depth - ABC" with a description of "in-depth coverage of only the ABC soaps!", and you don't immediately think 'TV show,' you think, 'huh, is that a brand of melt-n-pour glycerin I've never heard of?!'

...I really do live in some kind of alternate universe, don't I...

The cost of the cuts

(This is another one vegetarians or people who get queasy when talking about how meat is made might want to skip.)

There have been a ton of questions about the latest example of how crazy I am bulk-meat purchases; for once, I’m going to try to get around to answering them before so much time has passed that I’m all, wait, WHAT blog post?! and having to contact an archeologist to dig it up for me because it has been buried under three centuries worth of sand.

Not that this has ever happened, mind you. It’s just a hypothetical possibility. (Ahem.)

No matter where you get your whole, half or quarter animal, there are some gotchas along the road; while they aren’t necessarily intentional, they can make something seem like a much better deal than it actually is…like when somebody like me is all, “Ya, so, I bought this 1,000 pound steer for two dollars a pound.”

This naturally leads one to believe that I have brought home 1,000 pounds of beef for $2,000.

Which just ain’t so.

So. If you’re thinking about getting into the by-the-whole-animal game…here’s some of what you might expect expense-and-finished-meat-wise if you buy your animal in this sort of venue, where you’re bidding on a live animal for custom processing.

The first term to throw out is live weight. This is the weight of the living animal, and your bid on auction day is going to be multiplied by this figure; how much that is will vary depending on a variety of factors, from your location to who is doing the selling to what the overall quality of the animals themselves.

On auction day, you’ll get a list of the auctions to be held that will have the auction number, breed, weight of the animal, and seller information on it – unless otherwise noted (some animals like turkeys and rabbits are sold ‘flat rate’ rather than by the pound), whatever bid you put in will be multiplied by this weight and that’s the biggest part of the check you’ll write. There will also probably be a fee or two; at my fair venue, for example, there is a $115 charge for the transportation and slaughtering of a steer.

So let’s say that I’ve picked a 1,050 pound steer (let’s just say), and I’ve bid $2 a pound for him, and by golly won. The check I write at the fair that day will be for $2,215, and the steer goes first to the slaughterhouse, and then to the processor that I selected.

Now, the processor will charge a certain price per pound to turn the carcass into finished meat for your freezer – this charge will be based on the hanging weight, which is the weight of the carcass when it arrives for processing. This is going to be roughly 60% or so of the live weight, because at this point things like the head, hide, offal and other “unusable” bits have already been removed.

So the 1,050 steer arrived as a 619 carcass; at $0.73 a pound, that was a $451 check.

This is also, by the way, one of the “gotchas” when you’re purchasing “a quarter” or “a half” steer from your neighborhood farmer, without going through the live-weight-live-auction drama.

When you ask the seller “how much is a quarter,” the answer will probably be “about 150 pounds.” What they’re quoting you there is this hanging weight, not the final packaged (or cut) weight. That is going to be considerably less than this 150 pound figure, because there’s still an awful lot of stuff that you don’t want or can’t reasonably use in that carcass.

It may feel a bit unfair that you’re paying the processor for pounds you won’t take home and eat…but, well. You’re also not driving home like Wilma Flintstone with a huge beef femur on your roof that you now have to deal with in some way, sooooo…this is a good thing.

So how much meat do you actually get? This will depend on a few things, but the general rule of thumb is to take the live weight and divide it in half – that’s the ballpark figure (or, 525 pounds for my 1,050 steer). That would make the total price per pound $5.08 ($2,215 live weight at auction + $451.14 to processor / 525 pounds finished meat).

Now, I actually took home a bit more than that, about 580 pounds – dropping my price per pound to $4.60. [ed: this is almost a dollar higher per pound than I thought the other day...I'd mistakenly added almost half of the finished lamb to my beef weights. Then I was looking at it again and went, "Wait, wha? That's not possible, I could NOT have ended up with over 600 pounds of finished beef from a 619 pound carcass..."] [for bonus "what the HECK?!" points, I then cheerfully used that finished lamb AGAIN when doing the lamb calculations, because when I get math wrong? I DO IT ALL THE WAY!]

That is an insanely high “finished” weight for that 619 pound hanging weight, and I got that mileage for two main reasons.

One is the steer himself – he was at the very bottom of his weight class, had very little fat to speak of, and was also…well…this sounds weird considering I’m talking about a cow here, but…he was dainty. He had small, fine bones (for a steer) (ahem); that translated to less overall weight loss as he went from carcass to packaged meat.

The other is my own processing preferences. I ask them to leave as much as possible intact – give me fewer small cuts and ground up bits, and more large roasts. Even if they’re ugly. Even if they’re “weird.” Even if they don’t have an easily recognizable name or couldn’t be bought at the supermarket. And go ahead and leave the bone in there, rather than opening up the roast – what I’m looking for is improved freezer life, and these things can add months to the length of time that sucker can be in my freezer before it starts to lose its luster.

Months from now, when I’ve run out of pre-ground ground beef and stew meat but want to do a big cooking day, I can defrost one of those BIG roasts, do my own Processing Lite on it with my big knife and meat grinder (and the occasional cuss word), and there you go – “fresh” ground beef and stew meat, right from my freezer.

(Important Note: After you've defrosted it, do NOT just cut it up and refreeze it. Trust me on this one. Cut it up, COOK IT, and refreeze? Fine. Cut it up, re-wrap and stick it back in there? Beef-flavored mush. Blech.)

I also take more of the stuff that is ordinarily just tossed aside. I go ahead and take the suet (hard fat from around the organs) and other fat-trimmings, to render into tallow for use as cooking oil or soap-fat. I take as many soup bones as we can reasonably get – awkward-shaped, fatty, “too big,” “too small,” I’m not proud. Go ahead and give ‘em to me, and I’ll make gallons of beef stock to can up and put in the pantry. It’s a bunch of huff and bother at the time, sure, but nothing beats it for “quick” meals over the year.

And I’ll just toss this in here, because it’s the second question most commonly asked: The 525 pounds of beef that would be the more-average haul from a 1,050-pound steer would fit – barely – in a 14.8 cubic foot chest-style freezer.

But there will not be room for anything else. Not even a single Otter Pop. Nothing. If a hair falls off your head into that freezer? It will no longer shut right.

I am (almost) not kidding.

I’ll try to talk about inventory management later this week.

Hopefully, I won’t get all distracted and oh look, a squirrel!!!!

Paying Down v. Holding Onto

This is such an awesome (and not at all ignorant) question!! From the post yesterday, Elizabeth asks:

OK, but I have an ignorant budget question. Sticking with your scenario of spending only $200 of the $650 grocery budget example...

Why, instead of holding the unspent grocery for later - even though we know there will be a later - do you not dump that onto debt? Is it because when that killer month comes you don't have to add back to the debt? But, even if that's the case, doesn't it save you some interest? Is it just too complicated this way?

It’s a perfectly logical thing to do, putting any ‘extra’ cash from the household budget into debt reduction. You do usually save at least some interest, although the actual savings can be less than you’d think – especially if you’re going to turn right around and charge things back on, and your issuer is using the ‘average daily balance’ method to compute your interest charges. The longer you go between ‘extra payment’ and ‘extra charges,’ the better off you are…but, well.

Let’s say you’ve got $5,000 sitting at 15.99% on a card with average daily balance interest calculation (which is the majority of credit cards – check your statement or {gulp!} disclosure agreement if you’re not sure if that’s how your card rolls), and your normal payment is $250. This month, you add that extra $450 from the grocery budget to your payment.

Normally, your average daily balance after the $250 payment was applied on day 3 of the 30-day cycle would lead to a monthly finance charge of (roughly) $63.52. If you make that extra $450 payment and charge nothing new, you end up with about $57.92 – saving yourself $5.60 in interest.

But, if on Day 17 of the cycle you put that $450 back on the card to buy something you now can’t afford because you made that extra payment instead, your average balance at the end of the full thirty days earns you a $61.32 interest charge – you’re down to only $2.20 saved in interest.

And if it happens earlier in the month, even just a week earlier, say on day 10, your interest savings drops to only $0.80.

On the one hand, it’s still a savings…on the other, it would be (for me, anyway) a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. Day 3 when I make the payment I’m all, “Yay me! I rock! I’m paying an extra $450 to this, yippeeeeee!”…and then, a week or two later, I’m pulling that card out of my wallet and thinking, “…dammit, I suck…I shoulda known this was gonna happen…meh…” {begin downward spiral of self-loathing, buy a few extra things since a) I’m a lost cause anyway and furthermore b) a little pick-me-up is probably needed around now and plus c) not like it matters since we’re all doomed anyway, etc. etc. etc.}

But even if I wanted to do that anyway…I personally can’t. The accounts I’m paying down at this point aren’t available to me in that way, so if I send them money I can’t turn around later and say, “Wait, actually, I need that back!” and charge something new to them.

Meanwhile in other news, I’ve sharply limited my ready access to new debt. I can’t just run out and charge up things if I find myself short – I’ll just have to let whatever it is go if the money isn’t there for it. Which I find to be less awful than ending up with a whack of new debt I didn’t want, but which is still darned annoying when I had known this day was coming, but instead of being smart and keeping the money I knew I needed, I’d gone ahead and blown it all on Something Else – because it was there, and the Something Else was there, and oh…what the heck!

That’s why this has suddenly become a more difficult challenge for me than it used to be; back in the day, I could smooth out those hills and valleys quite a bit by using the grace period on Old Reliable. Now that I’ve switched over to a card with a lesser limit and gotten rid of all the “extra” cards I wasn’t using, I’ve been discovering just how hard I used to lean on that available credit.

Which of course was what got us into the first round of trouble, you know? I could float things, so I did; then I could finance things, so I did; then I could make the payments work…on increasingly tight margins…so I did. Because whatever-all I was buying seemed so necessary, so important, so not-optional.

Hindsight is so much clearer than day to day vision. When I look back, what we got in exchange for all those new debts was so not worth the price we ended up paying, especially when I throw in the stress of watching the security we fought so hard to get crumble like a dried-out sandcastle around me.

I remind myself of that whenever I get frustrated with my new limits, when I have to let something I want pass me by because I wasn’t able to get the cash together for it, when some stupendously awesome deal pops up on my radar and ooooooooh, gawd, I want to grab this, the price per unit is just crazy good…but…it’s a $150 minimum purchase, and I only have $100…it frustrates me no end. It makes me feel poor. It makes me feel like I’m not doing it right, somehow.

But at the same time, I know I am doing it right. I’m not going to let us go there again, not without having to work at it a little harder.

So, for me…I need to hold onto money I know I’m going to need, and keep it available to me when the time finally comes to part with it.

Even if there's a really good sale, or I find myself tempted to add just that little bit more to the debt repayment.

It just won't be worth it, in the end.

Money Monday: May 16, 2011

Well. I finally got around to fiddling with the budget. Gads. You’d think it would be easier by now…but it isn’t, for the simple reason that I am a crazy person I have somewhat extraordinary buying patterns.

With a lot of outliers.

Which is fancy statistics-speak for randomly scattered big line items.

Which is another way of saying, I do things like buy meat by the whole animal and maple syrup six gallons at a time, plus instead of buying a nice little supermarket-box of Cream of Wheat, I order up a 25-pound sack of farina (which is what Cream of Wheat is, in case you didn’t know that) (which very few of us do, before some smart aleck comes along to go, “Hey, did you know Cream of Wheat is actually just farina?” in oh, EVERYBODY knows that! tones so that you’re all, gee, what’s wrong with me, that I didn’t know that, I must be a real dufus or something! when actually, I suspect there’s only about nine people in whole world who know and/or retain this information).

Which tends to make my monthly grocery bill look like this:

January: $Negligible
February: $Negligible
March: $YOWSA!!!!
April: $Negligible
…and so on…

Same thing with the clothing purchases, which tend to be made in two or three B-I-G shopping experiences rather than a bunch of little nibbles throughout the year…and just about everything else, really.

What I then end up doing is really kind of laughable. Obviously, I know I need to look at a good, long period – twelve month at least.

And equal in obvious-factor, I need to abide by those numbers, and not start playing, “Oh, ya, but…there was That One Thing in there, sooooo, I can totally shave, eh, a good $300 off that monthly figure…” game.

PLUS, once I’ve managed to overcome my denial and smoothed those numbers down into a workable budget – I need to stick to it. In both directions.

We have a tendency to spend what we have. It’s just human nature – and if you have given yourself $X to spend on something, and you don’t spend it, well! It becomes mad money, right?!

But I can’t really do that. If I’ve got a grocery budget of $650, and I only spend $200 in a given months, I can’t just go ahead and spend the other $450 on something else – I need to just hold onto it, in the ‘grocery’ envelope, and wait.

The Big Spend is coming – inevitably, it is coming.

So one of my big challenges is to really pay attention to how my spending is lining up with the overall budget, and to try to stay with it – even if my “problem” is what appears to be excess cash piling up. (And if I don’t actually end up needing it, well, so much the better! But if I do…I don’t want to be sobbing into my decaf about how I shoulda knoooooown this was coming. It’s embarrassing. And then I get pissed about it. And everything just kind of goes downhill from there.)

Overall, though, I think I’ve got a workable go-forward budget in place; the core expenses are all covered by the husband’s paycheck, which leaves mine responsible for childcare and pushing forward on the bigger goals – paying off those remaining bills, bumping up our savings, and trying to position ourselves better for the future. It’s cool to see things line up like that again; we’re still pretty close to the margin, but if I can stay the course and keep working those expenses down, pay things off and keep reducing obligations, we can come out of this (ahem) experience with nothing more than a few new scars on our psyches.

Which we can pretend we got in a knife fight. Oh, THAT debt-related paranoia? Ya, got it in a knife fight in the outback, mate…THERE I WAS, surrounded by ninja crocodiles…!