This week's shopping trip

So for this week, I was trying to stick to a budget of $30 for food. I'm sad to say, I went over a little bit. Not by much, but still, I went over. It cost me $31.92 for all this. What you don't see pictured is 10 bottles of gatoraide I grabbed at Safeway for $8. That puts me at just under $40 for the week. I hear that's actually pretty good, but I'd like to challenge myself to do better. After all, we're only doing meals for 2 people.

Here's what I got. French bread for tonight's dinner, coffee, bananas, tuna, pepperoni, kashi waffles, yogurt, sausage, stuffing, ground beef, eggs, pineapple, refried beans, baked beans, chicken, bread, hot dog buns and hamburger buns. I saved $9.85 by way of coupons. All this will feed us for more than a week. I'm eager to see how long we can go without shopping for groceries again besides milk.

The nice thing is, over the past year, I've been able to buid up a nice stockpile of certain things due to couponing. Combining manufacturer coupons with store coupons or sales or rebates or some combination of those has allowed us to have a healthy stockpile of foods that will last us for a while in a pinch. Obviously, I don't want to eat cereal, lunch meat, and snack foods for any long period of time, but we have good foods to fall back on if we need to scrape together a meal when we're broke.

The thing about this week's shopping trip though is that the chicken, the waffles, the coffee, the tuna, and a few other things will last us for more than just this week. I've got at least another 3-4 day's worth of food there. I think I can safely say that I can plan to go at least 10-14 days without getting any more groceries. Again, besides milk.

On another note, I'm in the middle of a project tonight. I've recenly discovered what everyone else knew about ages ago. Apparently, this woman knows what she's talking about! I spent the whole evening last night pouring over her recipes and then most the day today at work copying them into my recipe book and planning meals. Oh, right, I was talking about my project. I'm making cinnamon rolls from scratch! I've never done that before. I do fairly well in the kitchen, and as time goes on, I get more organized and daring and realize all that I've been missing. My next feat will be making my own pasta! I'm really excited about that one.

I've used her recipe for cinnamon rolls but cut it in half. I certainly don't need 7 pans of cinnamon rolls, but I can take 3 large pans of them to my sister's wedding in the morning so we all have something to snack on as we get ready for the big day. However, I don't have any maple flavoring for the frosting, so I'll have to improvise.

Meal planning

One of the easiest ways to save money is to watch your food budget. With a little planning, you can avoid the tired search for a meal at the end of the work day that will usually end up with a trip through the drive thru. Or at least, that's how it worked for us. We'd eat out at least 3 times per week, adding up to more than $30 or $40 per week for just three meals. And let's not even talk about how many calories and grams of fat that was!

So, however low tech, I've got a meal planner now taped to my fridge with a week's worth of meals already thought out. The idea is that I'll plan in advance what we'll be eating for a week by going through what we already have on hand, then put together a shopping list to buy the things we need to fill in the gaps. Now we're doing ok on groceries this week, but there's going to be at least a few things I'll need to pick up at the store. Nothing major, and not a very long list, but I'll go none the less.

I've already started some of the meals, which will help when it comes time to actually cooking them. Wanna see? I've only got one picture because I'm about to call it a night, but here you go.

As easy as it was to throw some chicken and BBQ sauce into a pan and cover it to marinate overnight, that little bit of effort will pay off tomorrow when it comes time to make dinner. All I have to do is call hubs on my way home from work, instruct him to turn on the oven and throw the chicken in while I run to the grocery store and pick up our few items for groceries. By the time I get home, the chicken should be almost done, I'll slice some french bread, slather some butter on it, sprinkle a little garlic salt over it, and it'll be ready to broil for 5 minutes while I throw together a garden salad. Easy! And, I already made lemonade tonight to go with it all. No take out, and it's healthy and balanced.

Now, the rest of the week, I've got lunches and dinners planned out as well. The tricky thing to this week is that we're going camping on Thursday night and won't be home until Saturday evening or first thing Sunday morning so I can be at work Sunday by noon. This creates a situation where I need to be able to plan for at least 2 full days worth of meals that can be cooked either over a fire or with the use of a Coleman propane stove, and very basic cooking utensils. I'll bring some things already done, like soup, but we like to really get into camping, so most of our meals will be cooked on sight. Here's what I've got planned for the week.

Yikes, that's hard to see. Well, the first line is this week, of which we just had Thursday. Chicken fettuccine. Tomorrow will be BBQ chicken, Saturday is my sister's wedding so I'm off the hook for that day, and Sunday starts the new week. Here's what I've got planned:

Sunday - dinner roll sandwiches for lunch, roasted turkey for dinner

Monday - turkey sandwiches for lunch, turkey spaghetti for dinner

Tuesday - turkey sandwiches for lunch, chicken tacos for dinner

Wednesday - leftovers for lunch, homemade pizza for dinner

Thursday - leftovers for lunch, hot dogs for dinner (we're camping by dinner time)

Friday - scrambled eggs & bacon for breakfast, beans & rolls for lunch, soup for dinner

Saturday - scrambled eggs & sausage for breakfast, ham & cheese sandwiches for lunch, hamburgers for dinner.

I've got breakfast planned while we're camping because that's usually the only time we eat that meal together. We'll sometimes eat it together on the weekends before I head to work, but during the week, we get up hours apart and usually just have cereal, fruit, or some sort of bread item (waffles, toast, cinnamon rolls). In the future, I'll try to plan out breakfasts on the weekends. Hubs complains that I never make a hot breakfast anymore, so I'll see if I can fix that for him.

Ok, so there's my meal plan. The things that I'll need to buy are buns for the hot dogs and hamburgers, beef for the burgers, eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, veggies and fruit. Everything else, I already have on hand. Oh, nope, scratch that. I'll need to buy toppings for home made pizza as well. I'd say we're doing fairly well on the food budget this week. I hope to be able to keep this up for a while. Wish me luck!

Getting ahold of it all

Let me start by introducing myself. My name is Lydia. I'm 27 years old, and my hubs and I have been married for 4 years as of yesterday. We have no children due to a disease I have called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), but we do have 2 very sweet and large dogs and 2 cats. We live in Salem Oregon in a lovely house that we just adore, and we do our best at living within our means.

What does this mean? Well, first of all, we don't have any credit cards. We pay for everything straight from our checking account. We budget ourselves week per week and forecast our future finances so we have a big picture outlook. Hubs does the maintenance on our vehicles himself, and drives a motorcycle when the weather's good. We do have 2 vehicles that are financed, but those were unavoidable. We both work full time on different schedules in different towns and we just can't be a one vehicle household. However, the vehicles are our ONLY debt.

But mainly, the thing I'm most known for is the fact that I clip coupons. Like a mad woman, actually. I print them off the internet, I take them off of tear pads at stores, and I buy at least 3 copies of the Sunday paper every week (except weeks with national holidays because there are no coupons those weeks). I use coupons combined with store sales, store coupons, clearance deals, and rebates to get name brand products for cheaper than the store brands. Most of the time, I can find something for free, and then there's the real deals out there that you actually MAKE money by buying something. Stick with me and I'll show you how to do it. It's fun, it's legal, it's easy, and it just makes sense.

So, the other thing I do is keep a very organized Excel spread sheet that keeps track of our household finances. It's organized one week at a time and I have (hold on) a full year planned out financially. It's this spread sheet actually, that has caused me to finally break down and start this blog. I was going over it today in great detail and realized, I can save a LOT more money that I currently am. That should be "we" can save a lot more money, but I say "I" because I'm the one in my house that's responsible for the finances and the keeping track there of, but really, it's our money and it's something that both hubs and I need to work on. This paragraph should be example enough of how disorganized I can be sometimes!

That being said, I've decided that it's completely feasible to do much better that we're doing now. To start with, I'm going to see about trimming our utility bills as best I can. You might try this as well. Call your utility companies. See if there's any way that they can give you a discount on your services. Specifically, check with the phone company and the cable provider that you use. Bring up their competitor's prices and package deals and see if they'll match them. Ask for a loyal customer discount. If nothing else, ask them to go over your package with you and see if there's anything you can cut. We recently did this with our cable television and internet provider, and found out that if we added a land line, it would save us $10 every month. Yes, we ADDED a service, and it's now costing us LESS. This is only good for 12 months though, so we have it marked on our calendar as to when we need to cancel the land line and renegotiate a price. Be careful about those deals so that you don't stick yourself with a higher bill later on. I know I can still get rid of one of our two DVR boxes and discontinue some of the channels we get, so that's my goal for this week.

Another area that needs help is our meal budget. Last week, hubs and I were complaining that we had no food in the house and needed to go grocery shopping. To get together a list, we both went into the kitchen to see what we needed in order to prepare meals for a week. You know what we needed? Milk. We had enough food for plenty of meals! We just had to open our eyes and think about what could be made with what we already had on hand. So, you'd think our food budget for that week would have been next to nothing. No, it was nearly $150. Now granted, we had our anniversary in that 7 day time frame, so we went out to an expensive dinner, but still, that's way too much. And, to top it all off, I only made 3 of those meals that we said we had the food for. We ate out the rest of the time because I was too tired to cook or we didn't have enough time to wait for a home cooked meal.

If I had made up meals ahead of time and stuck them in the freezer, we could be eating in less than 20 minutes and saving money. That's hard for me to do since I work 7 days a week, but I know that I can carve time out of my days to do more than I do, and save money in the process. As well as being easier on our budget, eating at home is easier on the body. I can avoid all the salt and huge portions that restaurants give us, and be more organic than most restaurants as well.

This can be done. I know it can, because I read blog after blog of other families who are doing it quite successfully, and nobody has been committed yet! Frugal living doesn't have to stop in the kitchen either. I have well over a year's supply of toiletries including shampoo, conditioner, soap, body wash, deodorant, tooth paste, tooth brushes, make-up, hair color, eye drops, pain killers, sanitary pads, tampons, toilet paper, face wash, the list goes on and on. Take Christmas for example. I was able to pull off Christmas for less than $100, shopping for 15 people, and they were good presents. I can do nice gifts for birthdays, baby showers, any event requiring a present, for very little money. Living frugally can be done. You have to be dedicated to it, but it's totally possible.

So, I promise that the next post will be shorter, more to the point, and hopefully more specific. Until then, I'm off! Have a lovely Friday.