Budget Cuts and...Onions!

Our week was kick-started with some gorgeous weather today! It was 63 and sunny.....until about 2:30pm when the sun disappeared for another week or so. C'est la vie, around here! I was able to get out twice today and soak up some rays. I'm hoping I got some extra vitamin D to make up for the upcoming rainy days:)

I have been doing lots of research this weekend for my new budget cuts. I am very determined to slim down the grocery fund, if you will (haha), and have been coming up with lots of new ideas. It's going to take some hard work sometimes and I'm feeling anxious and excited all at the same time! Anxiously excited, anyone?

Ready for my goal? I am attempting to cut down our grocery budget by $100-150 a month. We have been budgeting around $600 a month for our groceries, toiletries and household needs for awhile now. And as the prices (and appetites have risen),  we have started to go over that by at least $50. It has been SO incredibly frustrating not to be able to stick within the budget. So WHY am I doing something crazy like this??

It makes no sense! It's crazy! But it's a challenge and we are going to need to make some serious cuts and changes to pay off loans and whatnot (for the next 20+ years...) groan. If we can ever get our life situation figured out, we may be setting some serious goals for paying off the loans as quickly as possible.  (But that's another story for another time in our life.) Hence the budgeting changes....follow me?

Anyhoo. My new goal is $500 a month for groceries and household needs. That includes pull-ups, toilet paper, toothpaste, you name it! I am going to attempt to spend $100 per week on food for our meals and $100 total per month for the other goods. (Attempt is the key word!!) I am really nervous! With tomorrow being the first day of April, I am making my first week's shopping trip. I have been working hard to plan a menu for the week that is simple, healthy and inexpensive. I'll even share some of my meals sometimes! I am absolutely determined not to hate menu planning just because I want to cut expenses. We don't have to be bored with rice and beans every single night. I refuse! (I jazzed up some rice tonight with this recipe and it was SO good. Ben says it's the best rice I've ever made! I didn't exactly have all of the spices so it may be even better with those...)

Some tips for cutting expenses that I have been employing and will continue to are:

*Vinegar, vinegar, vinegar! Within this past year, I quit buying cleaning supplies and we clean almost completely with vinegar, baking soda and lemons. (I still have a bottle of Clorox Anywhere spray that I occasionally use:) Vinegar is WAY cheaper than cleaning products and safer, too. I have 3 biggish to little ones, baby sit an even littler one and have a husband with asthma. I don't want harsh chemicals all over my house for everyone to breath in! Not to mention, those 3 ingredients are killer and do an amazing job cleaning. I can share some of those tips, too:)

*Cutting down meats. Meat is expensive! I often half the meat portions required in a recipe and fill in more veggies instead. I also try to plan a lot more meals without meat! We probably only eat meals with meat 2-3 times a week, if that.

* We will be eating lots of beans! Bean, beans, the magical fruit.....nevermind:) (I live with lots of boys, please excuse me.) I am going to be buying dried beans instead of canned and learning to cook them well and freeze the extra portions.

* Buying things in bulk. Not everything, just things that will be cheaper in the long run and that we will actually use! For instance, rice. We have a huge bag of rice down in our basement. Like 20 lbs, huge. I cut an opening, keep it clipped shut with a chip clip and run down with a bowl and a measuring cup whenever I need some rice. It is SOOOO much cheaper. To buy Jasmine rice, which we really like, for instance, runs at least $6 for a small container. Maybe 2-3 lbs? Our ginormous Sam's Club bag costs about double that. For more 6-7 times the amount of rice. Definitely worth it!

* I am trying to use up everything we have on the shelves instead of letting things go to waste. I'm really bad about purposefully ignoring certain ingredients on my shelves or in my freezer because either I am not crazy about them, aren't sure what to do with them or aren't sure how long they've been there! Example: Found some brown rice that I so cleverly stored in a see-through container and realized it has been expired since 2012.....I definitely can't let that kind of stuff happen anymore!

* I am going to be doing a lot of extra preparation and stocking the freezer! Example:

 

I asked Ben to buy me an onion last week and he bought a whole bag! Normal people probably buy a bag of onions but not me. Who said I was normal?? Onions and I don't share a very long history. I honestly only cooked with dried minced onion for the first 5-6 years of our marriage. I hated onions! I still do not love big chunks of onions but I have learned how to really appreciate how much better recipes are with them! I hate cutting them up, though, hence the one onion at a time rule. So, tonight I spent 20 minutes or so and diced up 5 onions and divided them into baggies for meals. Now I have 9 bags stocked in the freezer and NO onions will go to waste!

 

* I'm also planning on making a LOT more things homemade. I've always loved to make things from scratch; a love I got from watching my mom growing up. But I am going to need to take it to a whole new level to make this budget cut thing work. I am going to try to make all of our bread, tortillas included, and freeze a bunch. I'm going back to homemade laundry detergent (that took a little hiatus since I broke my food processor 6 months ago doing it! I guess I'll be grating soap by hand!), homemade snacks and I still have to do some research but I may attempt other things like lotions, etc. Think I'm crazy yet?? (um, I do...)

 

* Let's talk cereal. My 3 bambinos and their daddy are cereal mongers. I can barely keep cereal stocked in the house! I'm not as big of a fan and prefer to eat other things so this won't be so much of a loss for me. I wonder how they will all fair though when I break the news that cereal won't be so easily accessible in our house......We're going to go the route of oatmeal (whether fresh in the morning, in the crockpot or baked), cream of wheat, muffins (which I LOVE to make!), eggs, smoothies, etc.

 

The reason I'm writing this all out is a) to keep me accountable! This is really important to me and will hopefully help our family eventually get out from under the looming mountain of school loans someday. Not to mention, I'll feel so much better if I know I'm being careful with what we have and feeding my family in a healthy way!

 

b) I am hoping my journey through this might help others! I've been reading many, many different blogs, websites, stories about people's tips and ideas for this and I'm pooling a lot of it together. I can't do it all. Like I said, no chickens, no garden and I'm not knitting my kids matching outfits. But maybe I can take the dirtiness out of the word "budget" for someone and inspire them to try, too!

 

c) This is a little bit fun, venturing into a more challenging territory that will require me to quit making excuses and making impulse buys. I need to learn to have better self-discipline and also build up some confidence in myself. I think I can, I think I can....

 

d) I'll probably need your encouragement (whatever you can muster up!) sometimes when this is really hard or we are existing on rice and beans only at the end of each month or something. Or I am missing that impulse buy I really wanted to make....

 

I will write a post at the end of the first month, and hopefully each month after, about how the budgeting is going: failures AND successes. Because there will be both! And I am allowing myself some grace. (gasp!) If this is too unattainable, then I'll give myself a little wiggle room and up the budget by a tiny bit, if I need to. But I am really hoping not to.

 

I don't have all of the little details and organization worked out but I am in the process and Ben is behind me 100%. We will probably have to buy a bread machine because I really don't have the time to knead bread every single day. I so miss my wonderful bread machine that happily churned our delicious loaves and dough for 10 years.....sniff. Any recommendations??

 

Bottom line. I'm not a crazy hippy person. Just trying to be a better steward, if you will, and trying to help ease burdens and be a little more responsible. I still want to have fun and eat well and love chocolate. Just a little more carefully!

 

Thoughts?

 

 

Budgeting...Again!

I've blogged about this oh-so-delightful subject before. And yet...here I am again! Budget seems to be a more and more common word among Americans since the collapse of the economy. I have seen many people close to me affected by more financial challenges than ever before. And usually, when you are financially challenged (sounds like a disorder!), you find yourself budgeting. Dirty word.

We first started budgeting back in 2006. Our first 3 years of marriage, we just bought what we wanted, when we needed it. Of course, that was back when we ate frozen pizza and ice cream 3 times a week. True story.

We slowly changed our eating habits and in 2006, after completing our first year of school here, we realized that we desperately needed to change our ways and stop making so many last minute trips to our very expensive neighborhood grocery store!

Well, here we are 8 years later....still budgeting! I'm for seeing this being a lifetime habit of ours. The only problem is that budgeting needs to be changed from year to year with ever-growing prices and budgeting can often evoke feelings of guilt!

Go do a little research on the web and you'll find some really ambitious people out there in the world of blogging who feed their families of 4 or more on $250 a month. Crazy! Read the finer print and you will come to find that they also grow gardens, have their own chickens who lay eggs and can a bunch of produce for the winter.

So what do you do when you don't have your own yard for a garden, don't want to own dirty chickens and live in a higher cost area?

I tend to feel a lot of guilt when I read about these women who achieve the impossible! But then again, if I examine our finances closely, there really isn't too much to feel guilty about.

If you read over the top ideas for budgeting, we hit them all, pretty much, which leaves me with little help!

Cut down on buying processed foods? Check. And I'm really trying to do it more and more.

Cut down on eating out? Check. We have an eating out budget of $35 a month. That equals one eating out experience a month for our whole family. Or two smaller outings of a treat or something. Compared to most American standards, I don't think that's much....

Cut out excess expenses like cable? Check. We've never ever had cable until now. (more on that in a sec.) I know, right? How do we survive???? We absolutely loathe reality TV and current TV shows so we do a lot of movie renting from the library! We are very blessed to have really great libraries all around us with great movie collections! We occasionally do a Redbox movie, if there is something good out. And whenever I get offered a free month of Netflix, we take it. Now, about the cable. You can't miss what you never had! Actually, I call our local internet provider periodically and fight to get lower promotions for our internet. They have new promotions ALL THE TIME! If they say they don't, they are lying! I actually got our internet bill lowered this week by $7 a month, by adding basic cable. It just happened to be one of their newest promotions. It's basically all the channels we had with our antennae plus a few extras. The promotion lasts for six months. So guess what I'll do then? Call:)

Cut down on extra spending like haircuts, manicures, pedicures, lattes? Um. Check. I get my haircut once a year....if that.  And the rest of the time, I trim it myself. Okay, that might be why I look a little on the frumpy side......:) I totally get that people have different hair and need cuts more often! (no judgements here!) I just really hate to spend the money on something like that and plus where we lived the first 5 years here in Chicago, no one cut white hair (true) so I had to wait until trips home to OH to find a good hair stylist. Guess I just got in the habit of not going!! I never get manicures and pedicures and lattes. Maybe I'm boring but when you don't have the money, you don't even think about things like this!!

Menu Plan? Check! I started doing this several years ago and have tried to improve on it ever since. It most DEFINITELY cuts down on spending by helping you avoid those pesky "last minute" trips to the store.  And it saves me from standing in the kitchen for endless minutes at dinner time saying to myself, "What should I make tonight??" Now, I have been worse about menu planning lately for a few reasons and I often find myself dreading dinnertime. I think the reason I have been dreading the whole process is a vicious cycle for me. I have been feeling a lot of guilt for not being able to stick completely within our grocery/household budget because things are so much more expensive and our growing children are eating more! So when I feel guilty, I don't want to buy things and then I don't buy enough, then we don't have enough to make full meals, then I dread making meals, etc. See the vicious cycle? Something needs to change!!

Coupons? Now here is something I rarely do! I think most coupons are for junk food or processed food and the stores where I shop don't accept coupons anyways. Oh well!

Trust me, none of this is to brag about my awesome budgeting skills. The opposite is true!! I am mostly resigned to it but sometimes I do find it frustrating not to just be able to splurge every once in awhile and be free! I struggle with guilt over not being a perfect budget-er and struggle with the whole comparison thing when I hear about these thrifty people eating for like .47 cents a week. I'm not planning on living on a farm anytime soon and raising chickens!

I am going to try really hard though to curb in the budget some more, especially in our grocery/household area. I am going to set a new goal and probably blog about that soon so reader, beware! We are going to have to be more careful than ever now that we have debt payments to add into our life and no dream job looming. Ah, the joys of life! Ever wish money grew on trees?!

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This afternoon, the kiddos and I finally got to do something fun! We've had a pretty quiet week. First we were hanging around letting Zakkai recover and we haven't had the car a couple of days either. So this afternoon, after Baby C went home for his nap, we piled in the car and headed to Ikea to browse:) It doesn't take much to entertain us!

We spent some time sitting on the different couches and dreaming of buying a new one and picking out our future new table and chairs and then we headed to the kid's section to hang out for a little while.

Funny guy:)

Eliana had fun playing in the play kitchen and rocking on this red moose!

And then she and Samuel climbed through the tunnels...

Eliana spotted some cute little toddler beds across the way and before I knew it, had climbed in one to show me she fit in it! Ha:) Ben called me while we were winding our way to the end and we sat in the outdoor furniture section for a few minutes so I could say hi to him. The boys were taking turns rocking in a hammock and Samuel had just put the extra material material over himself (not sure what he was doing!) when a lady strolled by casually with her cart and stopped to check the hammock out. She reached out to unfold the flap at the same time Samuel was opening it and he scared the heck out of her! She yelped and then laughed so hard she could hardly stand up. It was SO funny! Samuel sat up and had the funniest look on his face! He told me later he was going to tell her he was sorry because he didn't know she was there and hadn't meant to scare her but she walked away before he could. It gave us a good laugh!

And of course Miss "I never sleep" fell sound asleep within 10 minutes and snoozed peacefully all the way home! It was a nice way to spend our afternoon!