- Bad. My 3yr old knows how the Nationwide commercial ends…including the agent's name. Too much TV. #
- RT @MoneyCrashers: Money Crashers 2010 New Year Giveaway Bash – $9,100 in Cash and Amazing Prizes http://bt.io/DZMa #
- Watching the horrible offspring of Rube Goldberg and the Grim Reaper: The Final Destination. #
- Here's hoping the franchise is dead: #TheFinalDestination #
- Wow. Win7 has the ability to auto-hibernate in the middle of installing updates. So much for doing that when I leave for the day. #
- This is horribly true: Spending Other People's Money by @thefinancebuff http://is.gd/75Xv2 #
- RT @hughdeburgh: "You can end half your troubles immediately by no longer permitting people to tell you what you want." ~ Vernon Howard #
- RT @BSimple: The most important thing about goals is having one. Geoffry F. Abert #
- RT @fcn: "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." — Winston Churchill #
- RT @FrugalYankee: FRUGAL TIP: Who knew? Cold water & salt will get rid of onion smell on hands. More @ http://bit.ly/WkZsm #
- Please take a moment and vote for me. (4 Ways to Flog the Inner Impulse Shopper) http://su.pr/2flOLY #
- RT @mymoneyshrugged: #SOTU 2011 budget freeze "like announcing a diet after winning a pie-eating contest" (Michael Steel). (via @LesLafave) #
- RT @FrugalBonVivant: $2 – $25 gift certificates from Restaurant.com (promo code BONUS) http://bit.ly/9mMjLR #
- A fully-skilled clone would be helpful this week. #
- @krystalatwork What do you value more, the groom's friendship or the bride's lack of it?Her feelings won't change if you stay home.His might in reply to krystalatwork #
- I ♥ RetailMeNot.com – simply retweet for the chance to win an Apple iPad from @retailmenot – http://bit.ly/retailmenot #
- Did a baseline test for February's 30 Day Project: 20 pushups in a set. Not great, but not terrible. Only need to add 80 to that nxt month #
Quality Time – The Best Way to Enjoy Time With Your Kids
- Image via Wikipedia
It’s hard to know your kids.
We live in a world of constant distraction. Working full time, chasing the kids to whatever activities they’re enrolled in, play-dates, and other commitments all conspire to chase you away from the one thing that truly matters: your family. It’s not enough to be merely present, you have to be engaged.
How can you carve some time out of your hectic schedule to spend time that your kids will never forget?
We play a lot of games in my family and we start far younger than the recommended ages on any of the games we own. I taught my oldest kid to play chess when he was 4 and he caught on well enough to teach his grandmother within a few months. If a game doesn’t require reading, the recommended age is complete fiction. A two-year-old can count, so Sorry! is a good game. 5-year-olds can add, so Monopoly is a good choice that reinforces math skills.
To keep it fun, we have a few generic rules for playing games.
1. We play for blood. Nobody gets to win a game without earning it. It took my son 5 years to beat me in a game of chess. Two years later, he’s still bragging about it.
2. Losers don’t cry. Sportsmanship is important. It’s no fun to play with someone who throws a tantrum for losing. My son’s friends learned that lesson in a hurry.
3. If you’re not a good winner, you won’t play the next game. We talk a little smack when we play, but it’s only in fun. When someone gets mean, their gaming privileges get suspended.
4. The TV is off. We don’t need more distractions. No TV, no texting, no phone, no nothing. Game time is about family time, not about letting the outside world in. Guard this time with your life. I even hesitate to bring in other friends.
5. Video games don’t count. You get far less interaction when you’re staring at a screen. The goal is to have a good conversation while you’re playing and really get to know your family. You can’t do that when the only words coming out of your mouth are “Ack! Zombie Nazis! Shoot him!”
Board games and card games are relatively inexpensive. Settlers of Catan costs less than a trip to the movies. The games don’t wear out quickly, though we are on our third copy of Phase 10. For the price and the time, you don’t have any excuses.
How do you spend time with your kids?
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.
Budgeting Sucks
Budgeting kind of sucks.
Filling out a budgeting spreadsheet, putting in all of your expenses, listing all of your income, tracking all of your spending. Yuck.
Balancing the fact that you may have $200 to spare, but if your gas bill is a bit lower one month then you have a some more money, but if your electric bill’s a little bit high, then you have a little bit less. It’s too much work.
Here’s the new plan:
I just opened up a new credit card. This credit card’s got a fairly high limit, not that I care since I’m never going to come close to the limit. It’s got an okay interest rate, not that I care–it’s going to be paid off every month. It also has a good travel rewards plan, so our family vacations can, to a large extent, be paid for.
Now, with this card, I’m taking all of my regular bills, and setting them up to be automatically paid by the credit card. It’ll get automatically charged every month. I won’t have to think about it. Once a month, I’ll just log on and pay off the card. All I have to do is make sure the balance stays under my monthly budgeted amount. I already know what I have to be paying each month, so, no problem.
This will make it easier to budget and track my actual spending. It’ll even make it easier to balance my checkbook, since right now, I’m logging into my bank account a couple of times a month to compare it to Quicken. Any budget helper is nice.
After this plan takes effect, my bank account will only have any ATM withdrawals that I need to make–which shouldn’t happen more than once or twice a month–and my checks to day care. There should be just six manual transactions every month plus all of my miscellaneous transfers to and from INGDirect, which should also be minimal– there should only be two of those each month.
This will simplify everything while at the same time giving me the maximum amount of travel rewards I’ve been able to find. Hopefully, it will work as well as I think it will.
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.
My Net Worth
I last did a net worth update in August. I don’t worry much about tracking my net worth, but I’d like to know where I sit at the beginning of the year. If I’m going to track it, I’m going to share it.
This is where I was sitting in August:
Assets
- House: $252,900
- Cars: $19,740
- Checking accounts: $1,342
- Savings accounts: $5,481 I
- CDs: $1,101
- IRAs: $10,838
- Total: $291,402
Liabilities
- Mortgage: $31,118
- Car loan: $0. Woo!
- Credit card: $20,967
- Total: $52,085
Overall: $239,317
Here is my current status:
Assets
- House: $252,900 (-0) Estimated market value according to the county tax assessor. This will be going down in a few months when the estimates are finalized for the year. It hasn’t gone down, yet, so I’m not counting the change, yet.
- Cars: $20,789 (+1049) Kelly Blue Book suggested retail value for both of our vehicles and my motorcycle. Wee! Value went up on things I intend to drive into the ground!
- Checking accounts: $3,220 (+1,878) I have accounts spread across three banks. I don’t keep much operating cash here, so this fluctuates based on how far away my next paycheck is.
- Savings accounts: $6,254 (+773) I have savings accounts spread across a few banks. This does not include my kids’ accounts, even though they are in my name. This includes every savings goal I have at the moment.
- CDs: $1,105 (+4) I consider this a part of my emergency fund.
- IRAs: $12,001 (+1,163)
- Investment Accounts: $1,155 (+1155) Occasionally, I run across some stocks that can’t possibly go down. I’ve only been wrong once on this front, but I never risk an amount that would be painful to lose.
- Total: $297,424 (+6022)
Liabilities
- Mortgage: $29,982 (-1136)
- Car loan: $0.
- Credit card: $18,725 (-2242) This is the current target of my debt snowball. This has actually grown a bit over the last week. I did a balance transfer that cost $400, but it gives me 0% for a year, versus the 9% I was paying. That will pay for itself in 3 months, while simplifying my payments a bit and saving me almost a thousand dollars in payments this year.
- Total: $48,707 (-3378)
Overall: $249,717 (+9400)
2011 Totals
- Assets: $297,424 (-1441)
- Liabilities: $48,707 (-10021)
- Overall: $249,717 (+9580)
I had two goals in August: Get an IRA rolling and save an extra $2500.
The IRAs I have are just sitting. I haven’t done anything to boost them, in any way, so hurray for the free $1163!
My savings have only grown my $773, but the $1000 I put in the investment account 3 weeks ago came from my car fund, so it would have been a growth of $1773, which isn’t bad at all.
I would still like to kill that credit card debt by August, which I think is doable. My crazy goal is to get rid of it by the end of May.
On 4/15/2009, I had $90,395 in debt. Today, it’s $48,707, so I’ve paid down $41,688 in just under three years, for an average of $1263 per month. That average is down $92 over the last few months. I blame our insane Christmas.
Overall, we had a good year. Paying off my car loan while paying down $4800 in credit card debt feels good. Now, I need to make 2012 better.
