Stretching our Meat Budget

I did a brief and completely unscientific poll on facebook about how my friends save money on their meat budget. While I did receive a few of the answer I expected (buying what's on sale and freezing it) I got a lot of answers that surprised me. One I saw quite a lot more than I expected was cutting down/cutting meat out.
A few others answers that I appreciated was using co-ops and local farmers, as well as trade. And one smartie who suggested trading a vegetable budget for a meat budget. Joker.

I realize that people cut out meat for many reasons aside from budgetary, but the quantity still took me off guard. For the most part I'm on side with those friends. I find it easy to cut down/cut out meat, I lived on no red meat for years, and loved it; but living with a self-proclaimed meatatarian means that I needed to find a new creative solution to eat meat at almost every meal without breaking our bank.

In our household, the solution was trickery. I couldn't cut meat out of too many meals, because no matter how delicious the food was, I would still receive a pout and a, "Where's the meat?" And that bugged me.
So instead of cutting it OUT, it gets cut in half, and "filled in." And the filler is usually a vegetable, sometimes rice or beans, but I generally try to camouflage it in a way that doesn't betray a cutting to the meat. At first I thought I was getting away with it, completely unnoticed, but a yelled, "I see you adding carrots to everything" from across the room revealed I am nowhere as covert as I once thought.
Hubby's pretty patient though with my "Rabbit food" way of eating. I think he appreciates a goal of a financially and physically fitter family, and whatever the means are to make a cash grocery budget last as long as it needs to. As long as it doesn't mean saying goodbye to meat completely.

Resisting the "value" temptation

Sometimes “value” is a hard thing to resist. A jar of sour cream is $1.99, BUT for just $.20 more you can have twice as much. There is no guarantee I will use the sour cream, but it’s only 20 cents…so for the sake of the “deal” I have to do it, right?
A hard lesson to learn for me was putting the blinders on to marketers’ deals, steals and “irresistible offers” and focusing on the quantities that my family will actually use. With some items like toilet paper, there’s really no downsize to maximizing the bang for your buck, but it gets tricky for perishable items, or items that you only need so many of. The good deal I scored on sour cream becomes $.20 wasted when I throw out half a leftover, expired container.
One of the most significant lessons I learned in my course on environmentalism is the focus and effort poured by marketers into driving the consumerist forces of our society. My wasted $.20 also translates into wastes added packaging material that will wind up in the landfill by consuming more than our family needed. The costs to over-consuming reach farther than what appears on the surface.

It’s hard posting a consumerism driven post so close to Christmas (because I really love Christmas), but it was on my mind. I treasure this season for times together with family, baking, and my Saviour who is the Reason for the Season.
Merry Christmas to all!

Making the System Work for You

This is us the weekend we decided to change the way we look at our family's finances. Yeah, I wasn't that thrilled during the actual conversation. Trust me.

So, you've made the decision to clean up your finances, to get organized and in control. It's a little intimidating making that commitment, not knowing exactly what's ahead, and how things will work out. When you're in that starting point, the safest way to stay on track is to make things as simple for yourself as possible. If you're using the magic jars, the best way to begin is with the tried and true method. From Gail's website and interactive budget you know that your variable, or "life" spending, should be about 25% of your net income. (The budget is posted a couple months back) The jars that Gail has assigned are Food, Transportation, Entertainment, Clothing and Gifts, and Other. If you're just beginning, it's best to start with these divisions.

Once you've gotten the hang of spending with cash, and only withdrawing from the bank machine once a week, you get to play with the system to make it work best for YOUR family. It's your money, and every family is going to have their own quirks and needs. The basic starting point is pretty universal, and as you go it can be tweaked to work better for you. If you are making changes to the basic standard though there are some guidelines I'd suggest.

1) Only make 1 change at a time. If you decide you want to change the withdraw schedule, AND the number of jars, AND the amount you're taking out it will be too much to deal with all at once. Prioritize which changes are the most important to make and start there.

2) Keep the number of divisions between 5-7 jars. The more divisions you have, the harder it is to track exactly where your money is going. If you keep it simple you make less work for yourself.

3) Don't make a change without your spouses input. When we decided to change our withdraw schedule from weekly to semi-monthly (Based on Ted's pay) it took 2 or 3 discussions for me to warm up to it. Considering I'm the one that is in charge of day-to-day spending I needed to be on board. It's worked out for the best for both of us, but it took some practice for me to think of a budget for 15 days as opposed to 7.

4) Review what's working, and CELEBRATE it. Be proud of the work you've put into managing your money. For a lot of people it doesn't come naturally and it's not easy. Don't beat yourself up over slip ups, but don't dismiss them either. Try to figure out what needs fixing and fix it.

5) Keep it about the team. I was not eager to start, I hated talking about our finances, and I didn't want to fix what needed fixing. It was only after I realized how much BETTER I felt talking about things that I wanted to make changes and make things better. Without a spouse that was encouraging and kind I don't know if I would've done what I needed to do. Making taking control of your finances a together thing will bring you more understanding of your spouse and increase your chances of success.

Make a List, Check it Twice.

I am not a natural list maker.

Many people in my life depend on their daily to-do lists and agendas full of details and check boxes. When I was younger I always thought the running mental tally written in my brain would suffice. As I got older, and my life got busier, I found it became easier to fall behind. When times were really busy I would miss things altogether. I still remember that pit-of-stomach feeling in university when a prof would mention an assignment due next class, and I would think "I was SURE that was due NEXT week!" Not taking the time to write things down, and plan things out had negative consequences not just on my productivity, but in the confidence I had on my own capabilities. It's hard to keep cool, calm, and collected when you've missed things that are important.

I've discovered that forcing myself to commit things to paper, even though it doesn't come naturally, brings much a needed order to my priorities. There's an added satisfaction in CROSSING a chore off a list, rather than just completing it and moving on. At the end of the day I can examine what I accomplished. In the middle of the day I can better focus on what is most urgent. And at the beginning of the day, I get a rough idea on how my time is going to be devoted. There are still days that I skip making a list. Sometimes I make one then lose it in the shuffle of tidying and baby-minding. The days that I don't make a list, I can feel the toll that it's taken on my productivity and prioritizing.

Sometimes taking the time to sit down with your partner and make lists can help focus and prioritize the situations you are dealing with. Whether it be things you want to accomplish over the span of a weekend, or your long term planning in terms of your finances, committing your plans to paper will help ensure that you're aligned in your goals. Making lists together will hopefully help spark conversations of dreams and priorities and give better perspective on what is at the forefront of your spouses' agenda.

Positivity Despite...

I recently told my husband I was discouraged in the face of negative comments on my blog. Really, it was just one comment, but it's still something I think a person never gets used to. It's difficult when a person who obviously knows you somewhat is discouraging behind the veil of anonymity.

My husband sometimes just understands what I need to hear. Not what I want to hear, but what's best for me to hear. He said "the whole point of this blog was to open dialogue that isn't easy to open. It's to have discussions about topics that are personal and that in the past haven't been talked about. That's exactly what you've done here, you've opened discussion, and people are debating both sides."

It was a humbling reminder that I can't expect everyone to agree with me. Whether it's about money, or my family's personal decisions, if I'm putting it out there, I need to be brave enough to deal with differing points of view.
My life would be really boring if everyone around me had the same opinions I did.

Eating Well While Saving

It's not just about saving money, but saving on time too. Depending on where you are in your life, there's a good chance that your time is at a premium, and you're willing to invest a little extra to give yourself more time flexibility. An awesome goal for any household is to find ways to have both-cut spending and cut down on time spent cooking.

A friend introduced me on her blog to the idea of cooking once, eating for a week. I see the wisdom of this on so many levels. Stock up on what's on sale (Ground beef for example) and cook as many pounds of ground beef you need for however many meals you are preparing. Divide some into the base of a Shepperd's pie, add tomatoes and freeze cooked pasta sauce, add beans and vegetables and freeze a chili for a cool winters day. On nights that you're running behind, too tired to cook, or surprise! guests show up, you have a meal that only has to go from the freezer into the oven. You paid bottom dollar for the most expensive ingredient, and you know EXACTLY what went into your food. There's nothing like pulling out a ready made meal out of the oven and getting that faint whiff of preservatives. Nothing more unappetizing anyway.

Because we don't have a deep freeze, we can't quite pull of the "cook once, eat for a week" kind of schedule. In our household, we usually go by the model of "cook once, eat twice." And I don't mean cook, and have the exact same thing the next night for supper (though the eating of leftovers does happen in our house). We do our best in this house to remodel our meals after they've been served, so it's a completely different feeling the next day. One of my favourites is BBQing two extra chicken breasts when we make any kind of chicken dinner. The next day it becomes a big chicken salad, whether greek, southwest or cesear. Any chili in our home gets remade into sloppy joes the next day, because I love them. When ground beef is cooked it can become a hundred different things with different seasonings.

When I make two meals out of one, my kitchen cooking time is cut way down. When I make two meals out of sale items, I get more bang for my buck. The real test would be to invest in a deep freeze (huney??) and see how far cooking and freezing can take our family.

Finances aren't everything

I know that every post I make is financially focused, but our family is currently in a journey that is discovering where our finances are placed in term of priority. And it's certainly not first.

Being secure in our family budget is incredibly important to us. We need to know we're not living beyond our means. We need room to breathe, and hopefully, we need a little left over in order to be able to afford things like family trips, and updates to our home.

Our priority though, in making a financial structure for our family, is OUR FAMILY. We're doing it to be good examples for our son. We're doing it to take the stress of being stretched too thin out of our home. We make a plan to have goals in sight and achieve them, and hopefully when Sam is older we can include him in our plans and goal-making.

We recently faced a decision, a crossroads. We were in a position where there was an opportunity for me to work full time, out of the home. This job would certainly give us the opportunity to afford more travel, and update our home. We would be able to afford more stuff. But we sat, we discussed, and we decided that stuff, is just stuff. It can never replace the time I spend with my son every day. By being home, I feel our family eats healthier, because I have more time to plan and execute healthy meals. We have many lunch times together when Ted is not away. Because I maintain the household in terms of day-to-day chores, our evenings and weekends are our own. With a full time job, I would lose so much more than we would gain with extra finances.

So the decision was made, TODAY, that I would begin selling Epicure Selections. I work from home. I set my hours. I LOVE the stuff. I am not sacrificing time with Sam, and we are still gaining financially.

I am so blessed I know to be in the position that we are flexible enough in our finances to be able to work in the home.