My in-laws are visiting us this week – they arrived today, and they’ll be here through next Tuesday. I get on really well with them, and I’m excited that they’re here. This morning I got up early and went to the grocery store for lasagna ingredients. I already had noodles in the cupboard, so I bought a package of ground turkey ($4), ricotta and cottage cheese ($5 total), and two jars of spaghetti sauce ($6 total). I had an onion in the cupboard, and I picked a bunch of swiss chard and Italian herbs from our garden. I had a homemade lasagna in the fridge by 10am, ready to go into the oven tonight for dinner.  And I spent $15 on it. People pretty much always like my lasagna, so I rely on it quite a bit – and it’s great to make before the guests arrive and put in the fridge. That way I have time to clean up all the prep stuff, so that the kitchen looks nice again. Then when it’s dinner time, I just put the pan in the oven for 45 minutes and make a salad. Looks like magic to the guests! And I love how easy and inexpensive it is (we’ll get two meals out of it, which makes the $15 look even better). I’m planning a picnic lunch on Saturday and a pancake breakfast sometime this weekend. My in-laws love to take us out to eat whenever we’re with them, which we really appreciate and enjoy. But I want to make sure that we take care of some of the meals aswell, and since I’ve got more cooking ability than money, I try to make some good home-cooked meals whenever they’re here.  Now to think of some good picnic food… although I may just fall back on tuna sandwiches, since my MIL loves them.Â
Archive for » June, 2007 «
Today I went to the thrift store to look for some chairs for our deck. We’ve been using folding camp chairs since we moved here, but they’re a bit worse for the wear, and not all that sturdy to begin with. My husband’s parents are coming to visit next week, and we’d like to be able to hang out on the deck with them and stare at our new front yard without having them risk tipping over when a camp chair leg gets stuck between the floor boards.
My husband suggested I look for a couple chairs while I was out doing errands, so of course the first place I went was the thrift store. It took me about 4 minutes to find just what I needed. Two heavy duty molded plastic deck chairs. The comfy kind that are slightly reclined with wide arms and sturdy legs. Very nice. They’re in need of a good cleaning, but for $5 each, I don’t mind getting out the hose and the scrub brush (especially since my husband will probably do that part). Then, as luck would have it, I came across a pair of full-size chair cushions, the kind that cover the seat and back of the chair. They’re outdoor fabric, and just a bit dusty – but I love the color, and they fit just perfectly in the chairs. So I bought everything ($17 including tax) and carted it home. I had to stop at KMart on my way, and just out of curiosity, I went to look at their deck furniture. They had the identical chairs on sale for $15 each, and the cushions (different colors, same style) for $32 each! So if I had just gone to KMart and bought the chairs there, it would have cost me $94 plus tax. Ouch. It’ll probably take us about 30 minutes to clean both chairs and the cushions. Not bad for an $80 savings.
While I was at the thrift store, I also bought myself a few shirts. I just couldn’t help myself (although as soon as I got home, I weeded out several shirts from my closet – I’m determined to keep clutter at bay). I got a great patagonia yoga tank top and a Nike dri-fit tank top, both looked brand new. I also got a super cute Roxy tank top and a high-tech long-sleeved shirt for cooler weather sports. Clothes at that store are $2 all the time, so I spent $8 on four shirts. Whenever I go shopping with my mall-loving friends, I look at price tags (but never buy anything) out of curiosity. I’ve seen tops just like the Nike and Patagonia ones for anywhere from $25 – $55. The four shirts I bought today would easily have cost $120 had I bought them new.
My husband and I have all sorts of frugal habits, all of which stretch our dollars. But I’m convinced that the number one way we make our money go as far as it does is buying pretty much everything second-hand. We’ll earn about $70,000 this year, between the two of us. With that, we’ll put about $10,000 into retirement accounts, $3000 into an HSA, $1200 into an ING account, and we’ll put about $5000 extra towards our mortgage, in addition to the amount due. There is no way we could do that and live the life we have if we bought everything brand new. Either we wouldn’t have much at all or we’d be very broke.
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I noticed a Yahoo Answers question today about how much money one should spend on a wedding gift.  The fact that this was even a question up for discussion suprised me – isn’t that a personal decision? But when I started reading the answers, I was laughing at first, and after a while I was just disgusted. What has happened to us? When did people begin to feel entitled to gifts? How in the world did we get to the point where someone would actually write this:
In NYC, anything under $150 for a regular size wedding per person is considered inconsiderate. For a more fancy wedding, it’s $200 per person. If it’s a good friend, it can be more. If you can, find out what the couple pays for each plate and add approximately $50- $100 on to each plate.
Have we really become such a jaded, greedy culture that we put a price tag on what’s considerate in terms of gifts? I guess I live so far at the other end of the spectrum that I assume people like this are few and far between. But in the first 25 answers posted, only two made any sense to me at all. One person pointed out that you need to look at what you can afford:
I think you should be honest with yourself on what you can afford…and spend that. Anything else your friend is not a friend if she gets offended thinking you didnt spend enough
And another person summed up exactly what I was thinking, but it was after 23 other answers that all tried to put a price tag on friendship. How is this not what most people think?
The notion that the guests are supposed to pay for the wedding is pretty silly. This “wedding as a money maker” business is getting out of control. What happened to “celebrating love”? When I got married, I was just happy to have my friends there w/ me.
A wedding is very personal. I think that most of what’s involved in a typical wedding is a huge waste of time and energy, and my husband and I stayed true to that belief when we got married. But, if having a big blowout will make you happier, then go for it. BUT DON’T EXPECT YOUR GUESTS TO PAY FOR IT!!! The very fact that people think that there is a set amount that must be spent on a wedding gift is a sign of a very sick society that we have found ourselves in. This is one of the things that bothered me the most about the idea of a wedding, and one of the deciding factors behind our elopement. I did not want anyone to feel that they had to get us a gift just because we were getting married.Â
I don’t have any friends who would consider a gift to be inconsiderate based on the value of the gift.  I can’t imagine such a person having very many true friends at all. Friendship is based on taking care of each other, being there in good times and bad. Friendship is driving across town at midnight to sit on the couch with a friend who’s just been dumped by the guy she loved. Friendship is taking a meal to someone who’s just had a baby.  And then staying for a few hours to clean the kitchen and do some laundry while the new parents squeeze in a little nap.  Friendship is celebrating each others triumphs and mourning each others losses.  It is so many things, but how much you spend on a gift is not one of them.
My husband and I are both health insurance agents, and I also work at the library part time. My library gig pays about $20,000/year, so it most certainly would not keep us afloat on its own. For quite a while now, we’ve been discussing what we’ll do if and when the US gets a national health care system. Ironically, we’re both very far left of center, and both of us believe that the country would be better off with a single-payer national health care system. It would equalize the system that currently provides better care for people with money. But the bummer for us would be that we’d be out of a job.Â
We know that government projects like this don’t tend to happen overnight, so it’s likely that we’ll have plenty of warning if things are going to change. But health care is no longer an issue that elected officials can continue to ignore, so we assume that something will change, probably within the next five years. And alas, we probably won’t be ready to retire by then.Â
I’m feeling a bit un-marketable at the moment. I have the ubiquitous undergraduate degree in psychology, combined with minors in math and economics. I spent two years in the Peace Corps, two years at Enterprise Rent A Car (one year of which I was managing my own store), and the last four years working with my husband, running our own health insurance agency. What am I qualified to do, other than what I do now? I’m not sure. When I look at job openings online, it seems that everyone wants a masters degree these days. I checked out some MBA programs last night, and the price tags are scary. I found in-class programs that ranged from $50,000 to $120,000. Ouch. But my alma mater offers a distance learning MBA for under $20,000 total. That doesn’t seem so bad….
The other issue I’m struggling with is that we want to have a baby sometime soon, and I’m not sure what I’m going to want to do as far as being a stay-at-home mother versus working outside the home. If we can continue to have our home-based business, I could do both. But health insurance reform is the unknown factor there. I don’t want to spend $20K right now to get an MBA, and then find out that I only want to stay home with my baby, and don’t start using the degree for another five years. Maybe I could work on an MBA while being a stay-at-home mother? My husband is much more marketable than I am, as he has extensive knowledge of search engine optimization (our website is number one on yahoo and number three on google in the organic search results – we don’t pay for our rankings) and could probably get a job pretty easily. So he could provide for us for a couple years while I take care of a baby and get some additional education.Â
One thing that I’m certain of is that I don’t ever want to get into a big debt situation again. If I were able to pay the $20K for the MBA over the course of the two years that the program runs, I think we could swing it without going into debt. We might have to cut back on our retirement plan contributions during that time, but I don’t think we’d need loans. I hated having debt when we were starting our business, and I”m determined to pay as we go from now on. So I’m adding education to my list of things that we’re saving for (the other stuff: having a baby, lasik for my husband, and new cars when ours eventually wear out). I figure if I start thinking about this well in advance, we’ll be able to make it happen without too much of a strain on our finances. Good thing I’m not much of a shopper!
I’m back from my weekend with the girls. We had a blast – it felt like we were back in college, and we laughed until our sides hurt. We went for a great hike on Saturday, and the town we were in was having an arts and crafts fair while we were there. One of the girls went to a spa for a massage and facial, but the rest of us skipped that part. We only ate out one meal, dinner on the first night we were there. We went to a local budget diner – dinner was about $10each. Here’s the breakdown of my spending for the weekend:
- my share of the condo: $130
- groceries: $40
- dinner out: $9
- bottled oxygen for my husband: $26
- two beers from the brewery for my husband: $9
- two stuffed toys for my pregnant friends’ unborn kids: $18
- coffee and a muffin during a walk around town: $5
Grand total: $237. Awesome – that’s under my budget. I drove, so one of my friends put gas in my car, and we all kicked in for groceries, which was much cheaper than eating out the whole weekend. The oxygen might confuse some people, but it’s something my husband is always looking for. He loves the idea of extra oxygen as a health enhancer, so when I saw that they were selling bottled oxygen in one of the mountain supply stores, I had to get it. It seemed odd to pay $26 for what felt like an empty can, but my husband was thrilled, so it was a good purchase.Â
When we were at the craft fair, two of my friends bought expensive pottery. One of the girls is in a relationship with a guy who was cleaned out by his ex-wife, and she’s not sure if the relationship is going to work out because of the financial issues. But she spent $150 on a few pieces of pottery. It amazes me how people can manage to forget about their money woes when confronted with something that they’d like to buy. Out of the five of us, only myself and one other girl made it through the weekend without spending at least $100 on “stuff.” I found that I wasn’t even tempted. I used to be, but not anymore. I admired the stuff at the craft fair, but I really didn’t have any desire to buy anything (except for a $1200 painting, but that was more of a whimsical wish than a real desire, considering the price tag). I can remember a weekend my husband and I spent in another mountain town 6 years ago. We spent about $200 on “stuff” at the local art gallery. Ironically, some of that stuff is in a box in my garage right now, waiting to go to the thrift store, because I’ve reached a point where I don’t want stuff cluttering up all my tables. It’s a good place to be – a lot less expensive, and a neater house aswell.Â
