Goals for January 2014

For some reason Blogger will not let me add any images to this post, so I will share a quote from Pablo Picasso without his picture;

"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money".

I think I will get into why I feel that way at some later time.

I have made some financial goals for the month of January. These goals are a way for me to challenge myself and to be creative and imaginative rather than spendy. Hopefully at the end of the month I will also be well on my way in making progress toward some good habits. The goals are:

• Spend only $100 for the whole month on groceries by eating food we already have on hand, menu planning and shopping sales; 
• have 20 no-spend days in January by grocery shopping once per week, 2 bill-paying days, and combining errands and other shopping on the other 5 days; 
• spend no money at all on craft supplies by finishing projects I have already started or have the materials for; 
• check out books and movies from the public library for free entertainment instead of going to the bookstore or movie theater; 
• find one free thing to do each week to spend time with my BFF instead of doing our usual shopping-as-entertainment; 
• be diligent about tracking spending by writing down receipt totals and keeping receipts. 

Stay tuned to see what I'm going to do with all the money I save in January!

The week, sort of.

I couldn't decide if it should be "last week" or "this week". Whatever. A time frame spanning the last five or so and next five or so days.

Last week I went to a gardening seminary showcasing the "Mittleider" method of gardening. It seems like a pretty good and manageable way of doing things and has some different options, and after much waffling I have decided, partially, which options I think would work best for my values, abilities, climate, geography, available space and so forth.

I have been daydreaming quite a bit about the backyard paradise my backyard could become. Honestly it sounds like a lot of back-breaking and sweaty work. But what about this? What if I did a little bit at a time, experimenting and seeing what works for me in my own yard, and what I can truthfully manage, and let the backyard evolve over time (years?) into something useful, beautiful, productive, and awesome?

What if I don't dig up all the grass this week, get totally exhausted and sore and mad and overwhelmed, and then give up on it?

That sounds very much not like me at all. I'm all about jumping right in with both feet and trying to achieve what is impossible for me and then completely giving up because I can't do everything.

But I think I will try. I gave up on gardening a long time ago, but have recently felt an indescribable urge to get back into it. Maybe I'll just dig up a little bit of grass and see what happens this year. Up there in the picture is my oxalis which is a volunteer plant (it just showed up in our yard one spring) and has survived drought, winter freezes, summer scorching, and neglect for years now. I love it. There are two clumps nearby to each other. That other green stuff in the pic is some wild blackberry vines which are covered in thorns that make an angry red rash when you try to pull them out. The roots are deep and long and extremely strong. I worry that it will never be totally gone from our yard. Every spring more of it comes up.

This week's dinner menu includes beef stew leftover from last week, boiled eggs, cheese sandwiches, oatmeal (with homemade/home-bottled preserved apples), and maybe a pancake/bacon dinner one night. Because my good Mr. Dub is out of town learning all about a new way of fracking there is no need for me to actually make any "real" dinner.

Frugal living pays off. I added it up - even with one son in university and one son on a two-year mission for our church - (which are both on a "pay as you go" plan; no new debt is being acquired for either) we've paid off more than $35,500.00 of debt in the last 12 months. This includes:

• one of my Pretty Girl's student loans, 
• two cars,
• and a home equity loan.

These debts have been paid off in all cases years earlier than originally expected. All that is remaining on our debt is:

• our mortgage (we have quite a bit of equity),
• one car loan,
• and one more of Pretty Girl's student loans (even though these two loans are technically her loans, we are co-signed on them which makes them in reality our loans. Lesson learned - never cosign a loan).

That makes me pretty psyched. Whenever I get sick of scrimping and saving - which has happened a few times over the past year - I look back at the progress we have made in the last year, I re-read Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey and The Richest Man in Babylon by George Samuel Clason, and I get myself back on board with the program. If I can manage to continue on this path we will be out of debt except for our mortgage before the end of this year, and will have enough saved to pay cash for our trip to Argentina next spring. Which thing we really want to do.

I am still feeling a little bit overwhelmed by my life. But I am also still feeling more optimistic and upbeat than I was even a few weeks ago. I am trying to take it easy on myself and not expect that I will be perfect, even when I expect myself to be.

Which makes sense to me, anyhow.

Progress feels great!

I don't claim to be very financially savvy, but I know that in order to raise your chin above the filth you have to live on less money than you make, and that when you owe people money they own a part of you.

A couple of months ago my good Mr. Dub said to me, "I'll never be able to retire, will I?" and that hit me like a ton of bricks. I think I do pretty well managing our budget and I feel like I'm learning more all the time, but time passes like a speeding train and with our kids currently in the "high rent districts" of teenager-hood and young-adult-dom and not a lot of decades left until retirement age there is clearly a lot of improvement that is needed. One of the blogs I read talks a lot about living on what has seemed to me a drastically low percentage of your income in order to retire early and enjoy what he terms "financial independence" but is actually a way of life in which you can do whatever you want including quit your 9-5 job so long as you keep a tight grip on your spending. So I have thought a lot about how low I can go in regards to spending Mr. Dub's hard-earned salary so that he does not have to work at his job one more day than he absolutely wants to.

This week we paid off one of our three loans (which include our mortgage, a car loan, and a home equity loan). The home equity loan is paid off three years early, and it looks like, barring an unseen and very costly emergency, we are set to pay off the car in a couple of months which will be nearly four years early. That will leave us starting the new year 2013 owing money only on our mortgage and freeing up a lot of my good Mr. Dub's salary to put toward our own financial independence.

I think with our new president elected to another term it is even more important to have your financial house in order and plenty of food and money safely tucked away for that proverbial rainy day.

What I think about Suze

I recorded, and subsequently watched, Suze Orman's new show "Money Class".

I was less than impressed.

She makes a big deal about what she calls "standing in your truth". About how what you have - the brand of your clothing, your cars, furniture, vacations, etc. - doesn't have anything to do with who you really are. Who you really are is manifested in your kindness, your courage, your integrity, your good heart, your artistic soul, your whatever. And so forth.

Which sounds all great and everything. But then she goes on to tell people that the last thing you should pay when money is tight are your credit card bills. The most important debt that you should pay off is your student loan debt. Why? Because you can't get rid of student loan debt by declaring bankruptcy. You still have to pay it off. Next in the order of importance is mortgage and car loans because the lien holders can take those things away from you if you don't make your payments. And you still have to put gas in the gas tank and food in your belly. You have to keep the electricity and other utilities going. Credit card bills are "unsecured" debt so nothing can happen to you if you don't pay them.

One lady Suze interviewed had made a deal with the bank that held her mortgage. She needed to reduce her payments because she had lost her job and her bank cooperated with her and she was able to stay in her home. Because she remained unemployed for a long time she was now having trouble making even the drastically reduced payment. Her bank was now talking about foreclosure, and this, understandably, was a great sorrow to the lady. Suze asked her what her original loan amount was - $209,000. She asked what other condos in her building were currently going for - $100-150,000. (Hello, real estate bust!) Suze advised her that her best bet was to let the bank foreclose on her, "repair" her credit, and come back in a few years and buy another condo at half price.

What in the world do these things have to do with "standing in your truth"? How are you truthful or integrous when you buy merchandise on credit or sign a loan with a bank, and then decide it's in your best interest to un-shoulder these burdens? People realize that these debts don't just disappear, right? They get passed on to everybody else. Maybe you are feeling a great burden lifted off your shoulders, but everyone else's burden just got a little more weighty. But hey, as long as you feel better, right?

What's the moral difference between government bailouts of big corporations and people defaulting on their mortgages, car notes, and unsecured debts?

The grocery budget

I'm making a goal for 2012 to spend $10 or less per day on food for the family. I haven't tried it yet to see if it works, and I don't know yet if I'll be able to include cleaning products/toiletries/other essentials in that $10. I won't know if I can do it or not until I try it.

The thing is that we already have so much food in the house (both "long-term storage" items and a full refrigerator/freezer and pantry) that I think I can get away with spending less than $10 a day for quite a while. Maybe a month or more. I'm not going to count the cost of items that I already own in the $10. I'm only counting money that I spend in the store starting from yesterday, December 26, 2011.

I will try to remember to blog about it on Saturdays - what I spent on groceries during the week, how I feel about that, what we ate during the week, etc. It will be a change for me, because for the past several years I have been doing the grocery shopping by stocking up on things (for example, buying six months worth of spaghetti sauce) when they went on sale and I won't be able to do as much of that. Now I'll be setting a weekly budget and planning on buying things only for that week. Hopefully it will be fun for me, and I'll get a chance to do some creative menu-planning utilizing some of the food we already own. A happy consequence of this is that it will be a good way to see if I'm storing the right food items for my family.

Gail Vaz Oxlade says that unless you write it down you have no way to track what you spent your cash on. Blogging about it will hopefully help me not only keep track of my spending, but stop me from mindlessly spending money at the store for things that are nice to have but not really necessities.

The truth is that I've spent too much money at the store this year and for the past few years. I want to get us completely debt-free, and tightening up our variable expenses is the place I'm starting. Although I say I don't like shopping, there is definitely both a sort of thrill and a sense of security for me that comes from spending money. I've actually added it up, and in November I spent over $1000 in Walmart and other grocery stores. I have no idea if that was all food because I didn't keep track, but I know it's typical of a usual month. If I can cut that amount even in half, that's $500 a month. In my opinion that is a substantial amount to add to our debt payments each month. And we have a LOT of debt.

Do you ever worry...

... about the two big "E"s? I'm talking about the Economy and the Environment, of course.

I've been reading some blogs about frugal living lately, and one of the big categories in a house and budget that suck money and resources is cleaning supplies, specifically paper products. Every single day in my house we use:

1. paper napkins
2. paper towels
3. paper diapers
4. and paper... well... just regular plain ol' paper.

Since I'm a grandmother and not a young mother there is no way that I'm going to deal with cloth diapers. Actually what I'm not going to deal with is the rinsing and the wringing and the soaking in the diaper pail that is an unavoidable part of cloth-diapering.

(I will also say here that some truly frugal and die-hard budgeters/green people use washcloths rather than toilet paper but that is out of the question. I mean, really, that is so not happening here that it's not even an available topic for consideration or discussion. Toilet paper is required here.)

But I'm thinking that cloth napkins and a big pile of clean, white cloths with which to dry and wipe in the kitchen might be a frugal and "green" alternative. I already use cloth dishcloths and dish towels, but we also use a lot of paper towels. A basket of white cloths on the counter ready to mop up spills, wipe faces, dry hands, etc. might be a good idea that could work for us.

So I did what women in the 21st century do - I went online looking for cloth napkins. But I somehow just KNEW that when I was looking online to buy cloth napkins (the ONLY two reasons being so that I can stop spending money on paper all the time and to stop throwing away so much of that paper after a single use) that when the appropriate category is listed as "Table Linens" that is not the kind of site I'm looking for. And sure enough - $56 for 6 napkins.

I went to a different site and found some that were more affordable that I like okay. I didn't buy them yet - I'm waiting. Waiting to see if I want to make them instead. With some couponed fabric and my sewing machine they might be even cheaper.

I'll let you know. Because I just know you are waiting to see how this turns out.

Who's on first?

Every day, or almost every day, I read a few blogs that I've bookmarked in my Favorites. These people write something new every day, or almost every day. I'm going to share one with you each day for a few days.

Maybe you'll find a new favorite!

Today, I'll tell you about Gail Vaz Oxlade. She is a Canadian, but you really shouldn't let that scare you away. She's a financial guru of sorts, probably on par with Suze Orman but more real, more down-to-earth, and not so icky. What is it about Suze that makes my skin crawl? I can't quite figure it out. Anyway, Gail seems like a regular person, and I like her no-nonsense approach. She has had a couple of TV shows which I watch whenever they're on - Till Debt Do Us Part and Princess - and has written a few books. Which I haven't ever read.

You can find her blog here.

Live long and be thrifty

Did you know that the root of the word "thrift" comes from the word "thrive"?

In other words, well-being and prosperity. Thrifty doesn't mean cheap. It means thoughtfully using your resources in a way that will bring you the most satisfaction over the long-term.

Lock, stock, and...

...well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Remember this post?

I paid off that car today. It's all ours, and it feels good.

I'm re-reading The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey this week, trying to strengthen my resolve to live a different kind of life. It's hard to change your way of looking at the world but I'm doing it now while I have both time and a husband with a good job.

362

= the number of dollars our electric bill was this month.

A/C, I love you. You are outrageously expensive but without you my quality of life is virtually non-existant no matter what other goodness is going on in my life.