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Hypocrisy
Sometimes people make choices for a variety of reasons entirely outside of my knowledge and understanding. Yet somehow, I still manage to be dismissive and occasionally derogatory.
What I have come to realize is that there are numerous reasons for making apparent bad decisions. It is easy, though often not correct, to dismiss these supposed mistakes as character flaws, without taking the time to fully understand the decision-making process.
For example, I am usually quick to point out the folly of gadgets. Odd, that, for a gadget geek. So many gadgets are merely ego purchases, bought because the are “cool”. Obviously a waste of money. A smartphone serves no practical purpose for an average person, right? What if that person’s life is so difficult to manage that a calendar sync including both spouses and multiple calendars will allow a family to make sure every kid gets to every activity on time? Or he has a side business that is easier to manage with ubiquitous email? Or even a strong urge to limit the number of items carried every day? A phone/mp3 player is fewer gadgets than separate appliances.
Another example is a close friend who started running several months ago, to be met with questions of why somebody would run without being chased. It’s easier to play on the internet or ride a bike, right? And the special running shoes? Silly. Except running is cheaper than biking and running shoes beat knee surgery any day. Running on the street is more effective than a treadmill, since you can’t step off after running two miles away from your house.
So here I sit, a runner with a crackberry and plate full of crow.
“Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.” Indeed.
Cooking Poor
Frugal cooking can be an intimidating concept. It’s easy to turn a meal into a huge expense, but it’s not that hard to trim your grocery budget without sacrificing variety and flavor. It just takes some planning and a few money-saving techniques. We usually feed our family of five, often with guests, for about $100 per week.
Schedule your meals. Find or make a weekly meal planner. I recommend this or this. Cross out the meals you don’t need to worry about due to your schedule that week. If you won’t be home, you don’t have to cook that meal. Fill in the meals in the remaining slots. Keep your schedule in mind. If you get home from work at 5:30 and have to be somewhere by 6:30, dinner needs to be something quick. Also, make sure you include every side dish you will be serving. Now, look at the recipe for each dish in every meal. Write down everything you need to make all of the food you plan to eat that week. While planning your meals, think about how to use your leftovers. If you cook chicken breasts one day, the leftovers can be chicken nuggets the next.
Take inventory. Take your meal plan and a pen while you look through all of your cabinets and your refrigerator. Why buy what you already have? If you already have steaks in the freezer, don’t waste your money buying more. If you have it, cross it off of your meal plan shopping list. Whatever is left is your shopping list. Review it. Is there anything that can be combined or eliminated? Is there a key ingredient for a sauce that’s missing?
Don’t forget the staples. If flour or sugar is on sale, stock up. Anything you use on a regular basis is a staple, buy it when it’s cheap.
Build a shopping list from your meal plan. When you are in the store, stick to your list. It’s hard, but avoid impulse purchases at all costs. Don’t shop hungry, don’t buy things just because they are on sale, and don’t dawdle. Get what you need and get out.
Avoid pre-processed food. We slice and shred our own cheese. Buying the pre-shredded cheese costs an extra $5 and saves just 5 minutes. Don’t buy pre-sliced apples or anything that will only save a few minutes for several dollars of cost.
Every couple of weeks, I cook a large pot of either beans or rice and keep it in the refrigerator. Almost every meal that we cook gets a cup or two of beans or rice added to it. It doesn’t alter the flavor much, but it adds a few extra servings for pennies. It’s a healthy way to stretch any meal on the cheap.
We have a large bowl in the refrigerator filled with mixed greens. We buy whatever salad-like greens are on sale and prepare the large salad all at once. Most meals start with a salad, which makes it easier to fill up without relying on the protein dish, which is generally the most expensive part of a meal. As a dedicated meat-eater, it took some getting used to, but it’s a good meal–cheap and healthy.
Cook enough for at least 3 meals. That will eliminate 2/3 of the work involved in cooking. Plan ahead to make your meals simple and easy.
Freeze the leftovers in usable sizes. Stock up on semi-disposable meal-sized containers. Freeze some in single-serving sizes for work, and others in family-size servings for last minute meals at home. Preparing for last minute meals keeps you from serving garbage or takeout when life gets in the way of your plans.
Avoid wasting leftovers. Wasted food is wasted money.
When you are done cooking meat, take any drippings or scraps and throw them into the slow-cooker along with any vegetable scraps laying around. Cook it overnight, then strain it into an ice cube tray. You now have stock/broth ready to be added to any recipe.
Plan for serial meals. Chicken breast leftover from today’s meal can become chicken nuggets tomorrow, to be shredded into chicken salad the next day.
When there isn’t enough left for a full serving, we put the remains in a resealable bag in the freezer. When we accumulate enough to fill our slow-cooker, we dump in all of the bags with a couple cups of water. I look through the refrigerator for any leftovers that have been overlooked that week or any vegetables getting close to being too old. It all gets cut up and added to the cooker to cook on low all day. I rarely add seasoning because everything going in the pot tastes good. We never get the same meal twice and our “free soup” is never bland.
That’s how we cook cheap, without sacrificing too much time. How do you save money cooking?
This post is a blast from the past. Originally posted here in January 2010.
Snip!
News flash!
Incubating my third half-clone was my major motivation to get out of debt. I wasn’t sure how we were going to be able afford her without pawning one of her kidneys.
We managed, though. She’s intact.
The idea of squeezing a fourth little monster into our budget scared me right out of the gene pool. I got a vasectomy.
Interesting fact: When the doctor says “I’m going to cut your vas deferens, now. It’s going to feel like you got kicked in the crotch, but don’t move”, he’s right. It does. And you shouldn’t. My doctor complimented me on my ability to not flinch. I reminded him that he had my fun bits in one hand and a scalpel in the other. That’s a sure way to have both my attention and my obedience.
It costs money to have a baby, particularly if you do so in a hospital. Our cheapest birth cost us $250 out-of-pocket, but that was because my wife was covered by two health insurance plans. Adding her to my plan for a couple of months cost us a few hundred in premiums. We’ll call it $500 to get the baby into the world.
My vasectomy cost $125 out-of-pocket. That’s easy math.
What if you don’t have insurance, or are covered by a lousy plan? Baby #2 fit that category. We got a bill for $8500. After begging the charity department of the hospital for help, our actual out-of-pocket was about $2500.
The bill cost of my vasectomy was $1500. Again, easy math.
Clearly, getting snipped is cheaper than having a baby, even without considering food, diapers, crib, nanny-dog, toys, padded cardboard boxes for those rare date-nights, and everything else that you have to spend with a baby.
But wait, what about condoms?
While I find it odd that you can buy condoms online, I will use Amazon’s numbers.
You can buy a pack of 72 condoms for about $18, $15 if you use Subscribe-And-Save. That brings the price down to 21 cents per condom. According to Amazon, the most popular subscription option is one delivery every five months, which comes out to one condom every other day.
If that’s you, then yay!
At $15 per delivery, it would take 9 deliveries to make up the cost of an insurance-covered vasectomy. According to Amazon, that would take 45 months, or almost 4 years.
Without insurance, it would take 41 years to make up the difference.
Condoms are cheaper.
On the other hand, a vasectomy is pretty well guaranteed. I went to the best I could find. No back-alley doctor with a hedge-clipper for me. He guaranteed his work, provided I came in for two follow-up visits to check his work.
Now, I have no risk of expanding the budget for another ankle-biter and I don’t have to worry about random 3AM trips to the pharmacy.
Mistakes Made
- Image by K. Sawyer via Flickr
My wife and I started dating when we were 19. We married shortly thereafter, and–at 31–we have 3 kids.
Now, most of a decade into my career, with a dozen years of experience as both a husband and an adult, I think we make decent decisions.
When we were younger, though, we were dumb. We didn’t think much past the “year” in “0% for a year”. Our long-term financial planning was non-existent. Heck, most of the time, our short-term financial planning usually consisted of a call to the bank to see if we had enough money to buy whatever we wanted at the moment or rushing to the bank to deposit the change we found in the couch, hoping to beat the last check we wrote.
We were never able to judge ourselves based on how happy we were. It was always a matter of how we were doing in relation to someone else. A relative–a close relative–is 10 years older than we are. That means, naturally, that she had a 10-year headstart on us. We saw the nice house, the nice cars, and the nice furniture and couldn’t help but compare it to our situation. Their stuff was always shiny and new, while we were making repairs and ignoring rust.
That comparison always made responsible spending difficult. We watched one friend upgrade her house twice in 2-3 years, while driving nice cars. Why couldn’t we do that, too?
Bad logic.
In one year, we put an addition on our house, got married, bought a brand-new pickup, and spent 10 days on a ship in the Caribbean. We did that with a gross household income of about $40,000. Before that summer, we didn’t have a mortgage. Since that summer, we have had a car payment, a credit card payment, and a mortgage payment.
I can still smell the scorched plastic peeling off the sides of our well-used credit cards. That year was when we figured out how everyone else affords all of the nice stuff: they bury themselves in debt.
The debt was never a big deal to us. Yes, money was tight. We always had more month than money, but we also had $50,000 in available credit on the cards and a $5000 credit line serving as our overdraft protection. Since we never missed a payment, we thought we were doing well. After all, you don’t have to be able to afford the debt, as long as you can afford the payment, right?
After that, we started putting the nice truck to work hauling home new furniture. Who can go wrong with 0% for a year? Surely, I’d have a raise by the time that comes due.
The same time we paid off the truck, I got a raise. It was a good raise. There we were, a wallet full full of balance-laden credit cards, a mortgage that we could have done without, furniture we were still paying for years later, a freshly paid-for truck, and a small stack of new money. That meant, of course, that we could “afford” a new car that came with a payment that was–coincidentally–equal to the raise. No problem.
Six weeks later, I got laid off.
Two weeks into the layoff, we found out that we were no longer “trying” to have another baby, we were just waiting for 9 months.
I wish(wish!) that would have been a wake-up call, but that moment of clarity was still 18 months away. The driving obsession to get out of debt was another 18 months away. Unemployed and expecting brat #2, I still wasn’t ready to take a rational look at my finances. That, however is a story for another day. Today, is my day to share my biggest financial blunders, not my successes.
What financial mistakes have you made?
Born to Launch
I’ve recently discovered something about myself: I like doing new things.
More to the point of this post: I like making new things.
I also like learning new things.
Unfortunately, once the newness wears off, I start to lose interest.
I’m a software engineer, so I regularly build new things and solve new puzzles. When a project gets into maintenance mode and the new stuff ends, I want to chuck the whole thing in the river and move on.
That carries over into other things, too. Start a business, lock down some skills, get some customers, then enter maintenance mode. Boring.
Pick up a new hobby, achieve a basic level of mastery, watch it stop being fun.
Play a new video game, get good at it, get bored.
It’s a flaw in my character and it’s a pretty serious flaw. Soon after I reach the point where I can fly with a new skill or project, I quit wanting to do it.
When it quits being new, it quits being fun.
When I pick up a new hobby, I get good at it, I get bored with it, so the setup equipment tends to collect dust.
Some of this is work stuff, which isn’t supposed to be fun. If it were, they wouldn’t call it “work”, they’d call it “happy fun time”.
Some of this could replace work stuff, but I’m not sure how to power through when I hit this particular wall. Just making money doesn’t keep something exciting. If I’m not excited, it’s hard to stay motivated, which is probably why I let the dishes pile up. (Sorry, honey!)
There is a good side to this flaw: I’m never bored. I fill notebooks with the things I want to do next, from blacksmithing lessons to building a foreign language learning site. I have absolute confidence that I’ll never be bored for long, and I’ll never be short of new ways to make money, but that doesn’t make me feel stable.
I have a need for stability, and I have a need for new. Finding that balance is a challenge.
Maybe I just need to launch things faster to build a bigger safety net. That would let me revel in the new without putting my lifestyle at risk.
