Maybe, just maybe

About nine months ago, Mark and I refinanced our mortgage.  We did it to lock in a lower interest rate in an effort to save some money.  It was a grueling, horrendous process culminating in the sale of our souls to the devil.  A month later, the devil sold our mortgage to another company, a company I had never heard of before.  A couple of months after that, the second company sold our mortgage to another no-name company.  All along, we just kept paying the mortgage each month to whomever the current mortgage-holder claimed to be and kind of crossed our fingers.  There have been some hiccups along the way, but no huge blunders.

Fast forward: this week has been challenging.  The least of our problems is that we ran out of kitty money; we can’t even see the kitty money from where we ran. The money we spent this past week is laughing at our kitty money budget.  Our much larger and more emotionally charged problem is finding a new preschool for Charlie because it turns out that not everyone thinks our energetic bundle of joy is such an asset to have in the classroom.  It’s been tough.  Two nights ago, I realized that I didn’t have a couple of the ingredients I needed for dinner, so Mark volunteered to go to the grocery store and while he was there, I sent him a text message that read, “Get some alcohol.  We need it.”  And, we did.  I figured, if we’d already blown the kitty money, we might as well buy some alcohol to temporarily forget about the kitty money and everything else.  Yup, I’m just that twisted.

Last night, however, I came home from work to a letter from our mortgage company.  Enclosed was a check.  A big check.  A check for $807.09.  The mortgage company is paying us, not the other way around.  There was an accompanying brief note that said, “The enclosed check represents the overage from your escrow account.  This amount was disclosed on your recent escrow analysis statement.” There are two things that concern me about this.  First, we never got a “recent escrow analysis statement.”  Nope.  Definitely not.  Second, and even more concerning, our property taxes went up this past fall by A LOT.  In fact, I had been expecting to get a letter from the mortgage company at some point saying, “By the way, you know that obscene amount of money you give us each month?  Not enough.”  So, I have every reason to believe that there has been some kind of mistake, but the mortgage company’s office isn’t open until 8:30 Monday morning to sort everything out.  So, until then, I’m choosing to believe there is no mistake.  No, sir.  That money is ours, and I’m going to spend the next 48 hours fantasizing about what we’re going to do with it.  Maybe I’ll start by repaying our kitty.

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Five tips to save money at the grocery store

The biggest challenge we face each week to staying within our $150 kitty budget is our grocery bill.  At the beginning of the week we go to the grocery store and hope, hope, hope that we spend far less than $150 so that there’s a nice amount of kitty money left for the rest of the week.

Here are some ways we’re trying to keep that nasty grocery bill in check:

1. Prepare a menu for the week and make a shopping list from the menu. I give some thought to inexpensive meals I can make, preferably ones that will give us plenty of leftovers, and write out the week’s menu.  From the menu, I make the grocery list.  I also check what we already have in the refrigerator or the cupboards and try to incorporate ingredients I have into the menu.  Then I post the menu on the refrigerator so I don’t have to give a single thought to what I’m making for dinner when I come home from work.
2. Always bring a shopping list to the grocery store. Even if you’re not interested in planning out your entire week’s menu like I do — and boy, do I understand that because the other day I really, really, really wanted to eat a reuben sandwich and the menu called for tuna fish — it’s still a good idea to give a little thought to all the things you need from the grocery store before you walk into it.  You’re less likely to be swayed by whatever looks yummy to you in the moment.  And, uh, bringing a list to the grocery store only really works as a money saving tip if you don’t add to the list once you get there.  Yup, we struggle with that every time we set foot in the store.
3. Check out sales before going to the store. One of our local grocery chains posts all of their weekly promotions online.  They even have a tool where you can make your shopping list right from the promotions postings.  Even if your grocery store doesn’t offer this feature online, virtually all grocery stores — even our local co-op — run print ads featuring their weekly or monthly sale items.  I’ve found that if I don’t know about the sales before going into the grocery store, then I’m easily swayed by sale items while I’m shopping.  I mean, who wouldn’t want to take advantage of the 3-for-$10 sale on Ben & Jerry’s?
4. Be buy-one-get-one-free savvy. For a long, long time I believed that when our grocery store listed a sale item as buy-one-get-one-free, they meant that I had to buy two items.  Nope.  Turns out that the item is just half price whether you buy one or thirty.  Do you know how many times I’ve bought TWO of something because I believed that was the only way to take advantage of the sale?
5. Don’t take your kids to the grocery store. This is a tough one for us because Charlie LOVES the grocery store so if one of us goes without him he’s sort of miffed.  But, the problem is that if Charlie comes to the store, he sees things he wants and when Charlie sees things he wants, well, let’s face it, he usually gets them.  He is an only child, after all.  Another problem we have when Charlie comes to the grocery store is that we’re often so busy deflecting his reaching for things on the shelf that 1. we don’t always know what he’s managed to put into the shopping cart, and 2. we don’t have time to really read price tags, so comparison shopping among brands is virtually impossible.  The final problem with taking Charlie to the grocery store is that he can be distracting to the point where we don’t get everything on the carefully planned list.  Case in point, yesterday the three of us went to the grocery store.  When we got home we unpacked our bags and discovered that we’d come home with FOUR bags of goldfish crackers.  Four.  That’s three more than we’d intended to get.  And, then we realized that we’d forgotten three other items on the list.

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Budget buster

Charlie got sick on Monday.  It started with a cough, then a fever, and finally, vomiting.  For four days all he wanted to do was be held, carried from his bed to the couch, and sleep.  Oh, and cry.  A lot.  When he finally decided to agree to eat, all he wanted was popsicles.  But, he rejected the ones I made him.  Instead, he wanted gourmet popsicles from a store here in town.  Yup, we have a store that only sells very fancy popsicles that are made locally.  Unfortunately, on Monday before I realized that Charlie was sick, I went to the grocery store and spent $128 of our $150 kitty money.  Well, after many, many gourmet popsicles for Charlie as well as much needed french fries and pizza for Mark and me when I could no longer stand the thought of cooking, we went over our budget.   I would have sprung for wine with the pizza too, but that would have really busted the budget.

The good news is that Charlie is finally feeling better.  How did I know he was feeling better, you ask?  He rearranged the furniture this morning so that he could stand on a dining room chair and do a somersault over the back of a big, cushy armchair we have, landing on the chair’s soft seat.  Uh, yeah, he’s feeling better.  But I could still use some wine.

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Jumping for joy

Every Friday (and sometimes Saturday) Mark takes Charlie to a local gymnastics studio for “open gym.”  Open gym is free play for any kid whose parents fork over the $10 an hour they charge.  $10 an hour is kind of a lot in our opinions, but this gymnastics studio is such a fantastic place for Charlie to play because he can almost literally climb the walls, jump off, and be in no danger of breaking any bones.  He does the same thing in our house but since our walls and floors aren’t padded we’re a little nervous when he makes his flying leaps off the furniture.

The last time we went to the gym I asked whether they offered discounts for frequent gym-goers.  Guess what?  They do.  You can buy hours in bulk at a discount–5 hours for $45 ($9/hr) or 10 hours for $80 ($8/hr).  Mark bought the $80 card which is well worth the initial outlay for us considering he always takes Charlie at least once a week.   We’re so happy that maybe we’ll join Charlie in jumping off the furniture.

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Keep the change

My mom gave Mark a piggy bank for Christmas.  She didn’t know about our plans to create this budget.  Instead, I think, the gift was motivated by visits to our house where she always finds change lying around in random places.  In fact, once when she and my sister were visiting they were so appalled by the mess in our car (uh, we have a 3-year-old–isn’t it normal to have kids’ CDs tossed about and Cheerios littering the floor?) that they had it professionally cleaned.  In exchange for this nice gesture, my mom and sister made us give them all the change that they had picked up in the various crevices in the car.  I think they ended up winning out on the deal–the money came to some staggering amount.

Anyhow, I digress.  Now Mark has a designated place for his change and when the piggy bank gets full he and Charlie take it to our credit union which has a change counting machine in the lobby.  For credit union customers, the machine is free (unlike the grocery store which charges $.07 for every dollar it counts).  Charlie has a blast pouring the change into the machine (he also likes dropping the coins into the piggy bank), and Mark likes taking the little slip of paper detailing the sum total of our change to the teller and exchanging it for paper bills (which he then adds to his weekly kitty).

Yup, we have big love for the piggy bank.

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Yikes Money budget

My new year’s resolution is to create a budget and stick to it.  This blog is my reflections on this experience.  Step 1: create the budget.  A friend of mine told me about this budget tool by Michael Ham so we decided to try it out.  It’s an Excel workbook that helps you to budget for all of your obvious expenditures like the mortgage or rent and utilities, but it also asks you to budget for easily-overlooked items like all the things in your house that, once they break, you have to replace or live without.  Not budgeting for the latter has been one of our problems for awhile.  These unexpected expenditures represent some of our “yikes” bills and we need “yikes” money set aside for them.

So, we started working on the spreadsheet.  First up, input my monthly salary after taxes.  Then the spreadsheet automatically takes away 5% of that to put in emergency savings (basically, that’s for inevitable screw-ups like “uh, we were supposed to budget for new shoes for Charlie?  Woops.”).  Now, the basic principle of this workbook is that if you budget for every possible expenditure, then you’ll know how much money you have left for your “allowance.”  With the allowance you buy everything that you didn’t put in your budget, including groceries and entertainment.  If you’re out of allowance money and you didn’t budget for an item elsewhere then, well, you shouldn’t buy it.  As you work through the workbook inputting all your various expenses, there’s a running tally at the top of the workbook that tells you how much money you have left for your allowance.  (Oh, by the way, Mark HATES the word allowance–“what are we, ten-years-old?”–so we call it our “kitty.”

After inputting all our other expenditures and messing around with the numbers some more, we finally settled on a weekly kitty of $150.  Mark gets $140 and I get $10.  Mark, as a stay-at-home dad, does all the grocery shopping and pays for virtually all of the Charlie-related expenses.  My $10 a week can go toward the occasional coffee or snack at work (although I’m trying really hard to always bring food with me to work so that I don’t spend money going out to lunch).

So, that’s it.  $150 a week.  I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.  And, I imagine that a lot of my blog posts will be about our grocery bill and how we’re figuring out ways to eat less expensively since food has always been a major expense for us.  Wish us luck with this new budget–I have a feeling we’re going to need it!

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