food waste friday #1

my friend kelly and i decided to take the frugal girl up on her invitation to join her on food waste fridays, wherein you clean out your fridge/pantry each week and take a picture of the food that has gone bad that you have to toss.  the idea is that by taking a picture and sharing it, you'll be motivated to waste less food - and also that you'll be going through your fridge regularly enough that you'll find food to use before you waste it.  perfect in keeping with my #7 resolution to finally get my grocery budget under control!
anyone else care to join us on this endeavor??

without further ado:

in sum: a few random black olives from a looooong time ago, half a container of homemade pesto from one of my sisters-in-law (it was so good, too!  darn me), a bit of vanilla yogurt still lingering from my friend alison's visit when mats was 6 weeks old, some gravy from thanksgiving, half of a lime, a bunch of cilantro (let's be honest, who can ever finish one of these bunches??), one crunchy taco shell that i was going to save but that got cracked when i was wedging it back into the pantry, and the saddest part: most of a container of goat cheese.  (i got two containers from whole foods as a topping option for grilled pizza bar for tapestry lunch a few weekends ago, we used one, and while i tried mightily to use this one on subsequent dinners, it was blue and just smelled off this evening when i went to use it for salad.)

really, not nearly as bad as it could have been!  i did discover a few lurkers in the back corners of my fridge, though, so hopefully i can stay on top of it and have a good showing next week!

(this is also a good motivator to get my kitchen cleaned up!)

lessons and resolutions

since i'm a goal oriented person, here are some things i've been learning in 2011, and what i want to learn this year:

1. on parenthood
1. lesson: parenthood does not suddenly make you an all-wise, perfect being.  i totally thought it did as a kid. (my parents seemed way more mature to me growing up than i feel right now, even though i'm the same age having mats as they were having me.)  it is, however an inately sanctifying experience.  it reminds me of our first year of marriage in that i'm suddenly seeing my own selfishness magnified against my abrupt closeness with this other person.
2. resolution: be more intentional about placing matson's wants above my own.  even if i have a really good want (like to finish the dishes before scott gets home), it's good to set that aside every once in a while if he is tugging at my leg wanting to play.  even better to let it go if it's a purely selfish want on my part - like hanging out for an hour on the couch browsing pinterest when mats wants attention.  i want him to know that he's more important to me than my laptop or a spotless sink.  (please don't read this to say that i think i should be spending all day doting on my baby ... i really do think independent play is good for both of us, but i think i could also be better about making sure we have simple fun together.)
2. on projects
1. lesson: i'm a big dreamer, and a little follow througher.  this has long been a stumbling block of mine, particularly with big projects, or house cleaning.  (my floor hasn't been mopped since before matson was born.)  i want to do what i say, though.  i've been working on vocalizing fewer project ideas so that i at least don't feel like i'm not following through on anything ... but i also really do want to work on finishing things!
2. resolution: follow through on projects!  i'm going to make a list of things that i have half-baked, and do them.  i'm going to have to get scott's input before finalizing this list, but it's going to include some things like setting up a college savings account for matsy, iras for us, staining our window sills, refinishing our coffee table, and finishing a picnic quilt.
3. on homemaking
1. lesson: for the last nine months, i've been telling myself that my house is messy and we still eat dinner at 8pm because i have a new baby ... but let's face it, he's nine months old now, generally naps well and is good about entertaining himself when he is up.  my house is messy and dinner is late because i choose other things like pinterest and errands and hanging out with friends and reading books.  i want a neat house and a non-rushed evening, though.
2. resolution: read the frugal girl's post about scheduling my time and do something with it!  possibly revisit flylady.net for inspiration.  plan one crock-pot meal per week.
4. on marriage
1. lesson: life is busy, and it's shockingly easy to not get quality time with my sweet husband now that he's added school to the mix and we have a baby.  lucky for him i'm exceedingly self-aware and will happily communicate when i feel like things aren't quite up to par with us.  which is why we're instituting ...
2. resolution: date night!  our date night has been things like take out and watching tv/movies for the last few years, and while that's not bad, it's also not good focused communication time.  since we don't have limitless hang out and communication time anymore, we need to work to get that communication time in there.  so, 1-2 times per month, we're going to do an outside-the-house, matsy-free date together.  could be dinner and a movie, could be a coffee date, could be a bike ride ... but something just the two of us to remember why we chose each other.
5. on cooking
1. lesson: we eat a lot of junk.  we also eat a fair bit of tasty, healthy food ... but my fallback is always things like macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets, and potato anything.  as mats is getting closer to eating table food, i think i'm becoming more conscious of this - i feed him things daily which i enjoy but eat rarely.  (zucchini and sweet potato, for instance.)  i want him to enjoy healthful food, though, not just push it aside and want mommy and daddy's soda and cheese fries instead.  (we went to steak 'n shake last night - first one in the state!  and it was awesome.)
2. resolution: experiment with one healthy food at a time.  i go on new recipe kicks sometimes and get overwhelmed.  this year, i'll pick one new healthy food from time to time and go for it.  first up: quinoa!  i've been wanting to learn how to cook with it for a while and found some yummy recipes for it on pinterest, so we'll give it a shot.  easy dinners will remain, but i'll try to limit them in favor of quick healthy dinner options.  also, talk to scott about a soda ban in the house.  (i had started getting generic diet root beer at the grocery store as a treat for myself, which led to us always having soda in the house and drinking it on a pretty much daily basis.  diet so not terrible for us, but also not a good habit.  matsy loves the shiny cans.  hmm.)
6. on faith
1. lesson: i'm pretty bad about prioritizing bible reading time in day-to-day life.  prayer is definitely getting better, but bible time has definitely not been benefited by having a baby.  i joined a women's bible study at church this fall and loved it - totally loved it.  in the five months between having matsy and joining study, though, no time reading the bible (just being honest), and in the month since study ended, also nothing.
2. resolution: stay in bible study.  definitely worth it.  (there are studies offered every fall, spring, and i think even a short one in summer.)  during the off weeks between studies, make sure that i have a game plan for bible time before the break occurs ... and then follow through on it.
7. on finances
1. lesson: i had grand plans of a mostly-unchanged grocery budget once i was staying at home.  umm, yeah, that totally didn't happen!  i'm not sure just how much it didn't happen yet since i haven't done my final budget update of the year with comparisons of budgeted-to-actual spending and year-to-year changes and all that ... but my grocery spending was ridiculous.  my other plans of limiting food waste, eating leftovers, and doing cash for grocery also didn't pan out.  and, scott generally has no idea where we stand with our budget.
2. resolution: revisit my goals from a year ago.  we've switched most of our spending to credit card (which we pay off in full every month) to reap that lovely 1% cash back reward, but i think we really need to go back to cash for grocery for a while, to keep a better handle on where we are with our spending for the month.  i'm also toying with the idea of doing a weekly food waste photo (a la frugal girl) to motivate me on that front.  do my menu planning on tuesday evenings when the grocery ads come in the mail so i can shop produce sales better.  and do a monthly budget update for scott (also per fg).
8. on service
1. lesson: over the last few years, i've realized that my love language is acts of service, and one of my spiritual gifts is also service.  (makes sense.)  i love to help people.  i also want matsy to grow up wanting to help people.  i think it's good to live outside yourself.  for the past few years, i've tutored with whiz kids, but decided not to this year since mats needs to be my priority and scott's work/school schedule could interfere with that commitment with no notice, which isn't fair to the kid i'd tutor.  instead i committed to cooking a meal for the middle school whiz kids, but that happens maybe once a month.  i serve in the nursery at church two sundays a month, but i have lots of great time during the week with matsy, and i really want to be able to use it to help someone (in a way that matsy can do with me).
2. resolution: there's a great ministry in denver called open door ministries, which has a few residential houses to serve homeless men, women coming out of prostitution, and single moms.  i started an application a few weeks ago to babysit for the single moms so that they can do things like work and go to school, but i need to actually finish it.  as a new mom, i understand how totally overwhelming motherhood can be, and i have an awesome support network.  i want to help provide support for other moms, and it seems like it'd be something that i could easily do with matsy during the day or on nights when scott's at class.  also, i want to be open to other service opportunities that come up.

so there we have it!  play with matsy more, make and do a to-do list, schedule my time better, date nights with scott, find healthy new foods to play with, plan in bible reading time, lay the smack down on grocery spending, and babysit for some single moms.

overall our life is in a pretty awesome place, but in general i feel like you're either moving forward or backward, and goals keep me moving forward.  sink or swim!  and for the record, these are all mental goals i've been ruminating on and working toward anyway, i just decided to list them out for better processing and in honor of the new year.

three month break

three month break ... whoops!  what's happened in the interim, since september?  a lot!
on the matson front:
- he started eating solids
- he started crawling
- he started standing up
- he started taking steps (only while holding onto something, so far)
- he started seperation anxiety (yaay)
- he started jabbering a lot more and saying "dada" constantly (pretty sure he doesn't know what it means yet)
- he discovered his love for christmas lights
- he started taking showers with daddy instead of baths, which is basically as great as a water park when you're 8 months old

on the me and scott front:
- scott finished his first semester of his mba - hooray!  he just finished last night and doesn't have his final grades back yet, but i'll be pretty shocked if he didn't get straight a's.  so proud!
- scott went to men's retreat for church, which meant he was gone for a whole weekend.  which means that i survived a whole weekend with mats on my own!
- we got our first artificial christmas tree.  the weather was too bad to go cut a tree the weekend we had set aside to do so, and i decided i was tired of paying for an overpriced lot tree on the years we couldn't go to the forest, so we found a nice fake tree on craigslist.
- i finished my first "semester" at mops and women's bible study and am loving both so far.
- i made myself take a break from saver's - it's just too easy to find so many things to buy there!  for the time being, i can only go when i have something concrete i need to look for (personal favorite: picture frames).

and what's happening with us now?
- scott just finished his semester last night at about 10:30pm (online test), so we celebrate!  we're going to look at christmas lights with goo and her boyfriend, grant, tonight.  scott is very excited to have a poker night tomorrow.  christmas party at a friend from nourish's on saturday.  and $5 movie and a fancy dinner out (via a giftcard that scott's first boss left in his desk when he left the company, which a coworker found when cleaning out the desk, and then gave to scott because we live way closer to the restaurant than do she and her husband - very generous!) on sunday evening while mats hangs out with the macauleys.
- finishing up christmas shopping and wrapping so that i can get gifts shipped out asap.
- flying out to illinois to see my parents for christmas.
- re-doing our kitchen!  scott said that we can look at updating our kitchen as our christmas present to ourselves (which we've been wanting to do since we moved in), so just yesterday i started looking at all of that.  the cabinets themselves are still nice, but i want new cabinet doors.  i'm debating painting the cabinets vs leaving them wood, and looking at all kinds of counter options - mostly corian vs laminate at this point.  (granite's out because it's so non-renewable and it makes me sad when we're out hiking over granite boulders to think of people stripping those away from the ground.)

and more immediately:
- i need to paint a bunch of picture frames.  i'm bummed that i slacked on this last month when it was still nice out, because it's chilly enough outside now that i have to clear out my laundry room, lay out tarps, and spray paint inside rather than in my back yard.
- i finally bought myself a sander and need to start using it!  first on the list: refinishing our chipped up cheapo coffee and end tables.  next up: refinish a cool old dresser that i got on craigslist and put wheels on it - sideboard for the dining room that can easily be wheeled 10 feet over into the kitchen as a moveable island when needed!
- finish washing matson's diapers.
- go grocery shopping.  i resolved to not buy meat the month of december so that we can start using up some of the 1/4 cow of grass fed beef that we have in the basement freezer, and the pounds upon pounds of chicken breast that i've been stocking up on all fall since it's been so cheap - $1.67/lb some weeks!  i bought chicken wings last weekend per scott's request because we had a friend over to watch football, but other than that, so far so good!
- figure out why the little man is squeaking rather than sleeping.

saturday's dinner cost breakdown

i think it's worth mentioning that both of the dinner recipes i made this weekend (refried bean tostadas and salsa chicken)  came from my hunt for inexpensive dinner ideas!  my rough cost break-down to feed 8 adults and a 3-year old on saturday night:

• salsa chicken: total cost: ~$13.20, cost per adult: $1.65
• chicken: ~$6 (actual cost unknown - had chicken breasts in my freezer, and i have no idea how much they each weigh, but i typically get chicken for around $2/lb and i used 4 chicken breasts)
• salsa: $1 (used 1 jar of generic salsa on sale for $1/jar)
• cheese: $1.50 (shredded half of a large block of cheeddar that i think cost around $3 total)
• green peppers: $3 (might omit these in the future and just get a better salsa, though)
• black olives: $1.50
• sour cream: ~$.20 (bought a tub for about $2.25, but we used a small amount)
• spices: minimal cost, used what i already have at home
• refried bean tostadas: total cost: $5, cost per adult: $.63
• tortillas: $1 (doubled the recipe to make 12 tostadas, used a whole 12 pack of tortillas that were on sale for $.99)
• refried beans: $1 (used leftover refried beans in the fridge and another 1/2 can that was on sale for $1, but i'll use the price of the can since i now have new leftover refried beans)
• salsa: $.50 (1/2 jar of generic salsa)
• cheese: $1 (high estimate - shredded the other half of my large block of cheese, but we have quite a bit of shredded cheddar left over)
• sour cream: ~$.50 (again, used a small amount overall)
• tomatoes: ~$1 (chopped up some roma tomatoes that i had on hand to put on top - have some leftover)
• other sides: total cost: $10.25, cost per adult: $1.28
• guacamole: $6 ($1/ea for 3 avocados, a few roma tomatoes on sale for $1/lb, and some cilantro that i had going bad in the fridge)
• chips: $.75 (we keep these on hand, bag of la favorita costs $2, we used less than half)
• rice: ~$.50 (total guess, we keep rice on hand, and i have no idea what the bag cost or what percentage we used)
• salad: ~$3 (bag of greens with some veggies on sale for $1.50, added some green bell pepper and carrots that we had on hand)
• total cost of the whole meal including sides: $28.45
• total cost of the whole meal per adult: $3.56

and really, the cost per adult is actually high as we have lots of leftovers: 4 of us had dinner from it last night, and scott and i still have a few lunches/dinners left!

for january, i have $2 left in my grocery envelope at the end of the month - which means so far so good on my quest to keep my grocery budget in check! i just went shopping last week, though, and am pretty well stocked up, so i'm going to try to drop my grocery budget to $300 in february to prep for march when i'll have to be feeding both of us 3 meals a day from home.

i'm trying to figure out how to balance stocking up on items (especially meats) that are on a good sale with what we actually need for that week or two weeks.  i guess to a certain extent, the trick lies in making sure that if i stock up on steaks or pork chops, that i plan meals that actually use up those items, rather than buying them and then not using them for months at a time.  (meats we freeze, at least, so i guess it's easier to stock up on them - produce, not so much.)  how much stockpiled loss-leader frozen meat do you really need in your freezer, though, before it's just not worth it?  i think that in general, i still need to work on being more strategic with my menu planning.

thoughts on groceries

we sat down a few weeks ago and set a budget for life with a baby - goodbye, dink-hood.  (i'm taking maternity leave in order to not burn the bridge of my awesome job before we need to, juuuust in case something happens to scott's job, but we're planning that i'll stay on at home as a full time homemaker.)  since we have two more full months before i start maternity leave and matson joins us, we decided to start enacting our baby budget now.  it's honestly not too terribly different than our current budget, mostly things like smaller allowances, vacation budget, and monthly entertainment budget.  in discussing how much we want to alot for grocery in the future, though, it came up that one of scott's biggest pet peeves of late is how much food we waste, most of it either leftovers or uneaten vegetables going bad in the fridge.

the frugal girl is one of the few blogs that i subscribe to and actually read faithfully, and not going to lie, i more or less want to be her when i grow up.  as it relates to the situation at hand, though, two of the big things in her blog are eliminating food waste and keeping a food budget of $100/week ... for her family of 6!  and they actually eat real, healthy foods, without the crazy couponing.  compare this with a grocery budget of about $80/week for just me and scott - and all of my food from 8am-5pm is provided by my company: breakfast, lunch, and snacks.  when i start maternity leave, we'll suddenly be responsible for that other 2/3 of my daily food consumption, not to mention that i won't be bringing home lunch leftovers for scott like i do now.  fg, by the way, homeschools her kids and packs lunches for her husband, so that $100/week provides all food for the six of them for every meal of the day, seven days a week.  as far as food waste elimination goes, in trying to cut down on food waste both as an environmental and a financial concern, she posts a photo every friday of the food that went bad as a motivation to herself to do better the next week.

anyway, i've been reading about her grocery budget amd food waste stuff for a while thinking that was awesome for her, but not thinking there was much application for my busy life.  with our life already entering a transitional phase, though, i decided that we have a perfect opportunity to make some changes with the way we do groceries.  since we'll be adding a lot of extra food for me to the budget, i don't necessarily want to try to trim our overall monthly grocery budget at this point, but i do want to try to keep it more or less the same as it is now.  so, rather than $80/week feeding scott breakfast and lunch and both of us dinner, i'd like it to provide three meals a day for both of us.  (yes, clearly we'll need to start figuring in food for mats by the fall, but i'll cross that bridge when we get there.)

how are we going to accomplish this alongside lowering our entertainment budget (thus limiting our eating out)?  very good question.  thus far, i have a five part plan:

1. get back in the habit of planning meals.  if i look at the calendar and have a mental expectation of what we'll be having for dinner, i find it a lot easier to muster up motivation at the end of the day to cook it, which drastically lowers the likelihood that i'll say, "screw it, we're getting taco bell."  plus, if i have meals planned out, i can be more efficient with my grocery shopping - looking for sale items or coupons, and only buying produce that we'll actually need, rather than just seeing that bell peppers are on sale, buying a bunch, and then forgetting to use them before they mold.
2. plan simpler meals.  i do love to cook, but i think i get too overambitious in my menu planning sometimes, and after a long day at work end up nixing complicated recipes for something easy to put together or doing take out, which often leads to wasted produce and a boosted grocery/entertainment budget.  (i get the impression i probably won't have too much more motivation or energy for a while with a new baby!)  fg, on the other hand, has lots of simple meals on her calendar.  like one night this upcoming week is asian meatballs, brown rice, and grapefruit halves.  nice and easy!
3. find frugal meal ideas.  my friend lianna is hands down the most intensely frugal person i know - a few years ago, in order to aggressively pay down debt, she and her husband eliminated eating out from their budget for a full year!  i asked if she had any advice on cutting our grocery budget, and she recommended the $5 dinner mom cookbook.  the $5 dinner mom also has a website with a bunch of recipes posted.  i normally am not much of a cookbook purchaser, but i got duplicates of a book at christmas, so when i return the unneeded extra copy, i'm planning to use my credit to get this book instead.  (last night's baked ziti, salad, garlic rolls, and blueberry apple coffeecake was inspired by this goal, by the way.  the plan to host small group sunday night came together on saturday afternoon, and i made it my goal to have dinner for six using only ingredients we already had on hand, with no extra grocery store runs.  i succeeded!)
4. use cash envelopes.  we took dave ramsey's financial peace university class probably about five years ago (one of the best decisions we've made, both for our finances and for our marriage), and he's a strong proponent of using cash envelopes to track your spending.  we did that system for a year or two, but then got back into just using our debit cards for everything.  we were all over the board with monthly grocery spending last year, but in the end hit a $350/month average for groceries, which was our budgeted amount.  entertainment, though ... i think we ended the year with a monthly average of spending that was about 27% higher than we'd budgeted.  ($190/mo avg instead of $150/mo.)  whoops.  since we will be cutting our entertainment budget and are effectively cutting grocery without really cutting it, i think being limited to the cash in an envelope will be helpful for us.
5. eat our leftovers.  currently, this end of eliminating food waste falls primarily on scott since he's the one who eats lunches provided by us every day.  once i'm home, though, i think it'll be a lot easier to monitor the status of leftovers in the fridge and make sure that we're eating stuff before it goes bad - and to make sure scott actually remembers to bring leftovers for his lunch.

so there you have it, my five part plan to keep my grocery budget the same!  i think i need a more exciting thought life.

odds and ends

so two days after my last post (don't know why i didn't write about this then!), we went in for our 20 week ultrasound ... and found out we're having a boy!  you probably already know that as i think everyone who still reads this also follows my life in other contexts, but hey, has to be written.  and is exciting!  i kind of sort of was leaning toward wanting a girl, but if i had had to guess, i would have said that pinto is a boy ... it's fun to know for sure!  his name is matson, which is scott's middle name and his grandma's maiden name - so yes, it's technically not a first name, but whatever, this is 2010 and you can name your kid banjo if you want, i think matson is a perfectly cute and acceptable name.  we're still working on a middle name for him.  on to odds and ends:

1. no, we haven't started any work on the nursery yet, but it's all decor related, so it won't be too bad.  we painted that room yellow when we moved in so that it'd be ready to go whether we had a boy or a girl and can be used as a nursery again without repainting if we have other other gender next time, so that's staying.  i was planning to get a white crib and changing table so that i don't have to worry about matching wood stain colors and can buy a changing table via craigslist, and my mom and i covered the glider in dark brown fabric (no i haven't finished the ottoman yet, mom!) so we're good to go on that front.

the room already has nice white wood shelves on either side of the window, so we just need to touch those up and put the actual shelves back on (just the brackets are left on the wall, from when we painted over two years ago - whoops).  so other than that, it's just getting the furniture, finding a few cute boy accents (which i already have visualized), and we're good to go!  oh, and cleaning things like spare sheets, broken sewing machines, and christmas wrapping paper out of there.  i think i might start working on that over our long thanksgiving weekend.

2. as regards our mouse travails ... well, we're still in progress with that.  we've been setting up traps and poison like crazy and were getting ready to declare victory over the mice when scott saw one scamper under the dishwasher last week.  bummer.  i googled mice and dishwashers and found this blog detailing mice coming in from a sewer pipe behind the dishwasher, eating plastic piping, water leaking, and ultimately having to replace the dishwasher ... aaah!  i had this image in my mind every time we ran the dishwasher last week, but come saturday, we decided it was full on cleaning and war-against-the-mice day.  we can't pull out our dishwasher because we had our wood flooring installed in front of it, but thankfully scott put his engineering degree to work and figured out how to remove the bottom faceplate from the thing so we could see what was going on ... and breathed a sigh of relief.  no mouse droppings or nests, no chewed pipes, no mouse-holes gnawed into the cabinets back there.

we did find mouse holes on the cabinets behind the stove, so we threw some poison packs back there and jammed up the holes with steel wool (which they allegedly won't chew through).  scott put steel wool under all of the floating walls in our laundry room downstairs, we sterilized our whole kitchen, and now we're just waiting to see if any mice continue to creep through.  i think we've killed maybe 10 or so mice over the past two months, but i'm semi-optimistic that we're nearing the end.  fingers crossed.

3. scott was finally able to feel matson move the other night!  admittedly, i had had both soda and ice cream with dinner, so the kid was quite literally bouncing off the walls, but it was really fun getting to share that.  i've been able to feel matson move for the past probably 4-5 weeks, and it's neat to feel him getting stronger and more active (or maybe just bigger so there isn't as much space to absorb his movements!) - at first i would maybe feel him move once a day at the most, but now it's pretty frequently throughout each day.  also fun is when matson curls up on one side toward the front of my stomach - i'll poke my belly and one side is rock hard, the other is soft and normal.

4. i had a craving for corn dogs yesterday, but couldn't justify having corn dogs for dinner.  (maybe this weekend. :))  in trying to talk myself out of it, i decided that rice sounded really really good ... so i went back to my midwestern roots and made my dad's classic chicken breast in cream of mushroom sauce over rice.  and it was amazing.

5. a few months ago maura asked how much we paid for our trash service because she wanted to know that she got a good deal on her company (one of their neighbors had recommended it when they moved in).  her company charges $45/quarter for trash + $5/quarter for recycling, whereas we pay $45/quarter for trash and $12/quarter for recycling.  turns out, though, that her company doesn't charge any extra service fees, fuel surcharges, or taxes on top of that rate whereas mine does.  in the end, we were paying $77/month (they just increased the rate this summer) while they were paying $50/month for the same thing from a locally owned company.  switching's been on my to-do list for the past few weeks, and i finally got around to it this week.  $108/year savings, here we come!

motivation

i am utterly unmotivated to do my budget.  a few months ago, i was excited for the end of the month to come so that i could balance out and do my projections for the upcoming month, make payments, etc.  i mustered enough motivation to sort of halfway do september's budget, but now come october, i find myself putting it off and wondering if it's really necessary.  why the change?  i think because we paid off my students loans.

when we were still working on my students loans, i was so excited to see how much we could put toward the loans after each month's budget was balanced up.  we still have financial goals, but nothing as concrete as that, and nothing with as much immediate impact as being able to pay off a loan.  my current goal is basically to save as much money as we can, but it's more or less going into bulk savings fund that will eventually be distributed to pay for baby stuff, go into a roth ira, or toward the grad program scott wants to start next fall.  all good things ... just not as immediately exciting as paying off a loan.

plus, with the loan, i knew that i had $x left to pay down, and if i was averaging paying $y onto the loan each month, i could figure that it would take me z.z number of months to pay off the loan.  very tangible!  paying for baby stuff?  no idea how much we need set aside for that.  roth ira?  more like we need to be saving every month for the rest of our lives, not z.z number of months left to go.  grad program?  totally depends on whether his company is able to help out, if he gets financial aid, and how many classes he takes at a time.  all very ambiguous!

but i still need to do my budget.

i like budgeting

for the past few months when i'm done with reconciling and budgeting, i've been doing a tally of how long it will take us to meet various goals at our current savings rate.  right now on the board i have a full 6-months-of-expenses emergency fund, paying off my student loans, and getting a small retirement account started.

when i first started the projection back in july, we were 15 months out from meeting our goals, which would put us at completion in october '10.

between getting better about staying on budget (thus increasing monthly savings) and an anticipated bonus, i think we're now about 10 months out, which is august '10.  however, as we're currently on the last month of throwing money into our savings account, i think the most exciting part of my projection is that my student loans will get paid off in july '10!  it feels very satisfying to know that this set of goals is very much within reach - and to know that by our 5th wedding anniversary, we'll be debt free except for our mortgage.

because i'm a planner

so evidently working out doesn't make my legs immune to walking down ridiculous numbers of stairs. the last time i did the my building's full building evacuation drill (two years ago), i remember my calf muscles were in knots for a full week afterward - and so far, it's looking to shape up the same way this time, too. what a drag.

on a positive note, i discovered close to $1800 in my checking account that we had left over from transfers made for things like landscaping and purchasing walden that didn't get used! i had known for a while that the checking account looked abnormally full, but couldn't decide why and didn't feel like going back through my savings tab to figure it out until this week. even though it's clearly money we already had, it's still fun to be able to transfer it back into savings and mark it down on my spreadsheet. if all goes according to plan, our 6-month emergency fund should be fully re-funded by mid-november, which will allow us to put extra money each month at my student loans, and we could have those paid off by next august! *fingers crossed* at that point, we could throw money toward any number of things - saving for a new car for scott, retirement, paying down our mortgage ... the sky's the limit!

my monthly personal responsibility rant

msn had a story this morning about a woman who has decided to spark a revolution against credit card companies - by not paying her bill. i get that she's now unemployed and frustrated that her credit card company has apparently raised her interest rate to 30% despite her working with them to try to lower the rate, and her always paying the minimum payment on time ... but here's the thing:

1. you can't NOT pay your bill. you just can't. when you get a credit card, you sign an agreement that for the privilege of using the cc company's money to buy things that you cannot currently afford, that you will pay them back in a timely manner at the rate that they set. emphasis on "the rate that they set" - not the rate that you think is fair.
2. one of the commenters at the bottom of the article said, "the bank has made its profit on her card use many times over," as a justification for why she should not have to continue to pay. right, because she agreed to let them profit off of her card use! that is the point of credit card companies offering the services they do - visa is not a non-profit company.
3. 30% is an absurd rate, and so is the 12.99% she was paying before, for that matter, which leads me to believe that a) she must be maxing out her card regularly, b) she's not in fact paying on time every month, c) she is an incredibly unwise person for finding such a high rate card, or d) she has a history of credit problems. yes, scott and i have excellent credit, but we were approved for an 8% card in the last six months or so. if you're frustrated with your card company for raising your rates, check out the competition - there are PLENTY of other lenders out there.

one of the other commenters (stlmo), left this note, which i think summarizes my thoughts nicely: "Ann Minch knowingly ran up her credit card bill, spent years making only minimum payments, then decides to protest the interest rate by NOT PAYING AT ALL. And this makes her a hero? I don't think so. If she really wants to protest the ungodly profit, then she should STOP LIVING ON CREDIT CARDS and PAY THE DEBT. PERIOD. If she can't, then she needs to see a debt counselor or see a lawyer about bankruptcy. And if she won't do that, then she's no better than the credit card companies she's protesting."

in her defense, i do think 30% is completely outrageous and unacceptable, particularly as she is unemployed and thus in financial hardship. credit card companies should have policies in place to work with the people they are lending to - i'm sure many card users are currently in states of financial hardship, but a 30% interest rate is not going to help them. personal finance classes will. and, you know, learning to live within their means. if your means don't provide much room for living, i'm pretty sure i pay taxes for a reason and that there are programs in place to help you until you can provide for yourself.

my budgeting woes

so for the past few years, we did the dave ramsey budgeting method with taking cash out for certain budget categories (we just do grocery and entertainment) to keep better control on spending and make you think about what you're actually spending the money on. i really like the idea of it, and i think it's effective, but we've fallen out of the habit in the past year or so. every month, usually within the first few days of the month but sometimes as late as the 15th, i'll download all of the transactions on our account from the past month and reconcile them, add up each category (love excel!), and type in the "actuals" to see how we did with the budget, then set a fresh budget for that month. i'm currently reconciling the transactions from august, and remembering another reason why i like doing cash instead of debit: number of transactions.

looking back at previous months' transactions - back in sept'07, when we were good at doing cash, there were about 55 transactions to categorize. this month, not doing cash - 99. last july, when we were buying a bunch of random house stuff, didn't take out cash, ate out a lot, AND took our big 10 day alaska vacation? 130. really, my attention starts to wane after about 60, and that's with scott having set up my spreadsheet to have a dropdown menu of category options so that i don't even have to type in each label. *sigh. (and yes, we do go to the grocery store way too often for our own good.)

take responsibility, people!

so ever since the big wall street bailouts began last year, i feel like every group of people has figured out a way to band together and put a collective hand out to the government for their own bailout. first it was the big american car companies (well, chrysler and gm at least), who flew to washington on private jets to say, "we're broke, so sorry, but bailing us out is totally the most patriotic thing you could do." now it's people with student loans wanting a total loan forgiveness program.

i say this as unoffensively as possible ... but whatever happened to personal responsibility?

as i was looking at cars, i spent a fair amount of time on consumer reports trying to figure out what good car makes and models are, and they have a really handy chart that tracks ten years of reliability ratings for every make and model out there. they have a system of dots that range from red to black, with white in the middle - red is excellent, black is poor, white is neutral. anyway, as i was scanning the chart, i realized that the brands like toyota and honda have almost universally red dots next to their cars, with a few whites scattered here and there over the past ten years. subaru, similar - they had some black 5+ years ago, but now it's all red. even ford was mostly white with some red and black here and there. chrysler and gm brands? black. maybe a few whites here and there, but nothing at all in the red range. sorry, but the reason why you're bankrupt is perhaps that you don't make a good product. (i know plenty of people love their chrysler or gm made vehicles, and i don't fault you for that at all.) no, america's not straight capitalist, but we are primarily a capitalist country, and the list time i checked, that meant that consumers are supposed to go get the best product they can for their money, regardless of where it comes from. i love america, but if japanese cars are far and away a better product, i'll be buying japanese cars until american car companies bring their standards up and stop relying on people to buy their cars out of a misplaced sense of patriotism. (plus, japanese car companies employ plenty of americans in factories and dealerships, so i am still supporting american workers.)

with student loans, i'm sorry, but i feel similarly: you got the student loans, you need to pay them off. if you're in financial hardship, the companies are usually willing to work with you and put the loan into deferment until you're able to pay. be responsible on the front side - if you know your life's dream is to be a kindergarten teacher, don't go to a school that you'll have to take out $100,000 worth of loans to graduate from. there are always other options, even if they aren't as glamorous. part of being an adult is learning to sacrifice and make good choices. don't lease the new car, the flat panel tv, and the $150 jeans if doing so means that your budget is then too tight to fit in both groceries and a student loan payment. the article quotes an author midway through, "If students are given carte blanche on borrowing now, how will they learn to budget, save and borrow within their means when it comes to a mortgage? 'That's the whole reason of going to school," she says, "not to avoid debt, but to get a job that enables you to pay it off.'"

i know i'm in a pretty great situation right now, being a fiscally responsible adult who loves to budget with a supportive, equally fiscally responsible husband, both of us working, no health problems, and no kids. but i love knowing that i have a solid 6-month emergency fund that i worked hard to put together, i love the feeling of sending a $1500 payment off to citibank to pay down the principle on my student loans, i love examining our spending and finding ways to cut back, i love planning ahead and figuring out how long it'll be til i'm debt free. i even love paying my taxes, but i really think there are far better ways for my tax dollars to be used than to take the necessity of personal responsibility away from college educated people. or car companies run by very well paid, college educated people.