TWENTY TEN

Hard to believe we are approaching a new year and a new decade. I love writing out TWENTY TEN instead of 2010. It looks graphic and more fun than the numerical. And so much more official, just as if I was announcing the new year on some kind of authentic new year's letterhead belonging to Dick Clark. I dig making resolutions and over the past few years Jaren and I have had fun coming up with a yearly mantra, of sorts. Last year was Just Be Better and I think we pretty much rocked it. We have some loose strings, of course, that can always use tightening, but it has been a killer year for buckling down and setting new priorities for simplicity, family, home, and productivity. We haven't decided on this year's mantra yet but I'm gunning for KEEP YOUR HEAD ON STRAIGHT since I think if we keep going down this path we're on without getting all disorientated looking over to the weeds, I think we will be in good shape. But I will have to wait for Jaren's vote before this mantra becomes cross stitch material.

I haven't set down a full list of resolutions for the new year yet but I took a step toward one this weekend that I'm excited about. In TWENTY TEN I am hoping to feed my family only locally raised, sustainably produced meat. Through the wonderful local chapter of Slow Food International, I learned about a small family farm that raises hogs and allows people to purchase as little as 1/4 of the pig which is a lot of meat, but isn't so much that you need a full meat locker in your basement. I have a second fridge in the garage and the meat is packed tight in there, but it is manageable. So the farm is Christiansens Hog Heaven and I had the pleasure of meeting Christian and his wife, Hollie, this Saturday when I picked up my 1/4 pork from the back of their white Ford Superduty 150 in the parking lot of Home Depot. I loved the gritty fact of picking this meat up in a random parking lot, straight from them and their truck with their 3 kids watching a movie in the cab. It was fun and it felt good to support them so directly. There was a line of other people waiting for their meat (they had 44 orders!) and it was heartening to see this and to know that other people out there are looking outside the grocery store case to find a more natural order in the food chain. I made a couple rashers (look at me and my new butcher talk!) of bacon this weekend and it was delicious--thick and chewy and not too salty. I love the look of all those wrapped freezer paper bundles stamped with the cut of meat. I am now the proud owner of a ham hock! Wow! Beginning this February, the Christiansens' are going to be adding grass fed beef to their offerings--all pasture fed, free range, and humanely treated. And they will be offering it in small 1/8 sizes too which is lovely for small families and small freezers. I think you still may even get some choices about what cuts you want. They may have pasture raised chicken and turkeys ready by spring too, which means they may just become my one stop local meat shop. If you live in Utah, eat meat, and have concerns about where your food comes from, check out their blog via the above link and consider supporting them. All you need is a freezer and the will to help change a broken system!

Another resolution I have for the new year is to move to a cash only spending situation. I have to face facts. I am not responsible enough to have a credit card in my wallet. It is just that simple. I am a flibbertigibbet and so full of impulse and attraction to beautiful, shiny things that I might as well be a magpie. I just don't do well without parameters. If I am to ever stick to a budget it has to be one that I can relate to in a tactile way. I've tried spreadsheets and mint.com and setting goals. I've had a piggy bank and a high interest cd. But somehow it is never real to me if I only see the balance on the screen. It is real to me, however, when I see the thread bare lining of my wallet. It's that simple. I'm 5 when it comes to money. If I see it, I have it. If I don't see but have a debit or credit card handy, I just pretend to see it. But if I don't have an alternate form of payment and I don't see it...well, you get the idea.....it's gone! I have no more money to spend. I'm done. Again, so simple my kid can do it. So maybe I can finally do it too and stick to a hard and fast budget in TWENTY TEN? If I keep the old head on straight, I don't see why not.

i will learn to respect you, budget

this week, post experiment, has been a tough one.  i've found myself relentlessly tempted to over-spend but feeling twice as guilty about it. the residual habit of not spending money is there (in its infancy) and it has made me agonize over what i do spend.   i've been working hard at staying on the proposed new budget but am quickly realizing just how limiting it really is.  it doesn't allow for any extras and coming off last month's scarcity, i seem to be more in the mood for extras than i thought!  i'm trying to reign it all in but in "real life" and not the vacuum of last month's experiment, it is more challenging than i would have guessed. 

i think i might just be an all or nothing kind of gal. maybe i do better with total restraint instead of just some constraints...does that make sense?  i read recently on the happiness project blog, which is a new fave of mine, that people fall into two categories: moderators or abstainers.  these terms are basically shorthand for whether you find it easier to go cold turkey without something or to moderately indulge in it.  i can see that i don't have the budgetary control to moderately indulge, at least not yet.

i had an interesting experience yesterday that got to the heart of the matter.  i met my friend and her kids at the library for storytime and then she innocently said "let's go up the street and grab lunch before the girls have school." it made sense, we were all hungry, but my inner dialogue was saying "no, eating out for lunch! this will break my budget!"   i wouldn't have thought twice about spending like this a month ago, but suddenly the thought of unplanned spending made me feel really uncomfortable. but instead of saying no, i went.  the situation pointed out that i don't have any practice at defending my budget and vocalizing or admitting my budget constraints to another.  other than last month, i've never told anyone before that i couldn't do something because i didn't have the money.  if i didn't, i would either make up an excuse about why i couldn't do said thing, or more often i would just do it anyway and put it on the credit card to be dealt with later.   

i have never been accountable to a budget and i can see now that is the most important aspect of staying on one. i have to own it.  i have to agree that i'm not going to just "ballpark it"  for  the amount i can spend on eating out, but instead i must stop eating out when said money is spent. end of story.   i need to accept that the budget is my ally, not my foe.  i'm skipping little stuff now so i can reap big rewards later, maybe a reward that includes an airplane ride and a warm beach?  i'm skipping stuff now so i don't have to worry about that credit card stuff and ever living beyond my means.  i think people can respect that, right?   so what should i say next time i'm invited to something that will violate my budget?  the proper language evades me. this is new territory.  i am reminded of my friend once telling me that her parents dealt with her and her 6 siblings' constant requests for new clothes and toys by saying one simple phrase "sorry, we can't afford it."  there's no debating that, there's no come back one can offer.    now i just need the balls to say it out loud to someone and mean it.

nuts and bolts

i'm not a coupon clipper and anytime i ever actually have clipped them 99% of the time i forget about them and leave them in my wallet or in the car (alongside my re-useable bags.)  every week since i moved back to utah i get those annoying grocery store circulars in my mailbox. they basically advertise the things on special at the main grocery stores in the area. i used to take those papers straight from mailbox to the recycling bin and not even look. but a couple weeks back i happened to notice a store was offering bananas for $.49 a pound at just the time i needed some for flynn and only had $2 left in the weekly budget.  so i went to this store and JUST bought the bananas on special.  

since then i've been paying attention to the weekly ads and i've started to see the value in price shopping when you are on a restricted budget.  this weekend it was worth my time to hit reams up for the $.60 sour cream and $1.29 gallon of milk. (have you ever shopped at reams?  it really is an experience, up there with the library in terms of people watching.)  and i'm already eyeing harmon's $.99 5 lb bag of potatoes.  that's a crazy deal!  the funny thing is that before this experiment i wouldn't have been able to tell you what the REGULAR price of sour cream was. i just never paid attention to the minutia of individual item prices because i never shopped with an actual budget in mind that i could not exceed.  it was basically irrelevant to me if i spent $129 or $149.  

as i formulate my plan for where my budget goes from here, i'm finding that knowing exact prices of stuff does matter.  studying your receipt and having a ballpark idea of what something usually costs (and therefore knowing when something is really a good deal and on sale) is useful.  individual prices are the building block of the budget.  duh.   i'm trying to figure out a realistic food budget going forward and right now i'm thinking of structuring it a bit differently than just a lump sum for everything.  i'm going to try out a new approach and break the budget down like this: 

$30 per week for what i'm going to call my  grocery add ins--the stuff i need to make specific items in the recipes i've planned for the week and fresh perishables i need to replenish like milk, yogurt, etc.

$50 a month for replenishing pantry staples like flours, sugar, syrup, butter, meats that i freeze for later use, etc. 

$50 a month for costco items  

this food budget adds up to $220 per month to feed my family.  and considering that I'd like to keep our e's (entertainment, eating out, and other "extras" ) to $50 per month, our expenses (other than all the bills we pay each month) would be under $300, $270 to be exact.  after this extreme month this budget sounds plush, but i know it will still be difficult to accomplish and i'll have to work hard and continue to reign in my spending.   

i think the main thing that will make this budget realistic is being super organized about knowing when to buy things and where is the best place to do so.  i think costco offers a lot of values but for me it has mostly been a budget buster.  i'm working on coming up with a list of the items we really like to have from there (cashews, frozen mixed berries, omega eggs, boursin cheese...) as well as the things that really are cost-effective to buy there (diapers, dishwasher soap, blueberries....) and then i will just have to start keeping an updated master inventory and stagger when i replace things.  obviously this will mean sacrificing some. for example,  the month i buy ground beef for the freezer, there won't be much cash left for anything else.  but instead of just buying the 12 pack of fuji apples anyway, maybe i will just buy 2 fuji apples at the normal store instead.    the same deal for the pantry staples, once i've identified the things i've really found to be necessities to have on hand (more on that later)  i will have to start keeping a master inventory and replenish little by little, not necessarily as needed.  

does this make sense?  will i be able to do it?  do these numbers sound crazy?  if anyone out there has feedback or a way they structure their budget that works for them, i'd love to hear about it.  

and because this post has been so nuts and bolts serious, i thought i'd share a site i found via Evan Kleiman's Good Food radio program which i regularly podcast.   the site is grocerylists.org and it features hundreds of random found grocery lists collected from grocery carts, parking lots, etc.  it is surprising how funny and interesting reading what other people shop for can be.  you get this little window into their lives by how they shop and what they eat.  you can tell if someone is having a party or if they have a zillion cats.  it is pretty fascinating. the lists are compiled into a book called "milk eggs vodka" but you can check out a sampling of the lists at   http://www.grocerylists.org/lists/100/

Free Blog Counter

 

means to an end?

one of my goals this month is to establish a realistic budget of outgoing expenses vs. incoming moolah.  i hate to admit that i have never in my life lived on a true budget; not when i was single and bringing in my own dough, and not since i've been married and living off someone's else's hard earned bacon.   i've never decided i could only spend x on clothes or x on groceries or x on eating out and then stuck to it and skimped when i went over. never.  i used to blame my upper middle class upbringing.  then my right brained-ness--putting something down on paper felt too scary and too structured-- but i think the real factor was that i was too lazy to take a serious look at my spending patterns  and too scared to get serious about being restrictive on my wants.   

money is stressful.  and, shocker,  i really think i agree with the bible, it is the root of all evil.  materialism, greed, keeping up with the jones'...it all boils down to what's in your bank account.  there is never enough since wants are insatiable and there is always so much good stuff to buy!  in my own marriage, i'd say that we conform to the statistics, money is the number 1 thing we fight about.   these few weeks spending so little have made me feel powerful and in control. it has made me see what i'm capable of resisting and how much better i can be at controlling my wants.  i mean nothing, NOTHING, i buy can equal the piece of mind i FEEL from doing right by my family's means.  

i think i mentioned before that we aren't into outrageous debt or anything but there are definite euphemistic "expenses"  that accrue interest in our world!  i am not a huge dave ramsey listener or subscriber, but i like his encouragement of never using credit cards.  cash, cash, cash! i know that when checks first came about people were suspicious of them.  it wasn't cold hard cash so it seemed fake.  but now, checks even seem credible!  i remember my mom meticulously recording every check into a little register log in her checkbook.  who does that with their debit cards?   

it seems strange that money could ever turn into anything else, but somehow we've turned it into credit. and credit, seems to be causing the lot of us a big problem.  credit isn't real because it doesn't always accurately reflect what we have and yet we don't seem to care and neither do the retailers. BUY NOW AND PAY LATER!  0% for 24 MONTHS...and on and on.  these offers, credit, set us up for an unhealthy relationship with our money.   i am working hard to revert back to a cash only system and i think the best tool i have to make that a reality is a true budget.  i've been exploring a free online program called pear budget that looks like a no-nonsense beginner's budgeting program.  i need something to make me accountable and something to make me manage my expenses.   i hope this is the ticket. i'll keep you posted on my experience.

and in the spirit of people being very accountable for their spending habits, i wanted to share one of my favorite artists and her very cool project.  kate bingaman-burt records her spending patterns in a cool blog called http://www.obsessiveconsumption.com/ 

she records what she's buys in simple but beautiful illustrations...originally she drew everything she bought but now she's too busy so she kind of cherry picks what she draws, but it is still amazing.  and, my favorite thing is that she draws word for word her credit card statements each and every month.  i find so much bravery in this because don't we all hate to get those statements each month, and i would never want to read each and every word on them, but kate does it and recreates them in her own one-off style.  i also respect the openness it takes to share your debt and what you spend money on or how much money you have.  i know in my own family these subjects feel pretty much taboo so i admire kate's willingness to turn the specifics into public art to be scrutinized and admired.  if you have a second, i'd really recommend looking at kate's flicker page and all her drawings and statements posted there. http://www.flickr.com/photos/kateconsumption/sets/1520842/    

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kateconsumption/sets/72157603933005907/

she's amazing and the project is super inspiring.  enjoy!  

Free Blog Counter