Wasting Money On Food At Work

When I totaled my weekly budget summary on Sunday I noticed that I had spent about $22 eating out at work over the past week. I only had one ‘real’ meal that week when I went to lunch with some coworkers, but that was only about $7 anyway. I dug into the numbers and realized that a bagel here, some coffee there, and a few snacks had all added up quite quickly.

$22 is probably a lot less money than I would have spent in a typical week eating at work just a few months ago (actually probably less than I would have spent on coffee alone in one week), but now that I’m committed to my budget, and paying every extra dollar I can find toward debt, the total really jumps out at me. I need to focus this week and keep the cash in my wallet. So far I’m two for two on days not spending any money while at work. This post will hopefully keep me accountable for the next three days.  🙂

Paying the Bills When They Arrive

Last month, I intentionally held off on making some extra payments on debt. I wanted to try something new in October, something really crazy that I never thought I could do- paying my bills when they arrive! I wanted to pile up some cash so I could get ahead on the regular payments and not be on the usual paycheck to paycheck cycle.

Maybe paying the bills when they arrive is normal for you, but here is how my typical month would go. The month begins and the bills start to roll in. I start by paying the credit cards due at the start of the month, I’m careful to never pay those late of course. Next on the importance list is the mortgage, but typically after making the early month credit card payments, some car insurance, cable TV (auto deduction or I could delay it), then I don’t have the money for the mortgage until my next pay day. Over the past few months, this has left me going to the bank on the last possible day that I can pay the mortgage without a late fee, then generally having to juggle a few things and cross my fingers a bit that nothing unexpected will show up in my account and send that big mortgage check bouncing. Not fun!

This month is a whole new experience. I had the mortgage check in the mail before the 1st of the month! Today is the 4th and I have paid every bill but two, and those two are due around the end of the month. I know this may be hard for some to do, especially if you are stuck on the paycheck to paycheck cycle (right where I have always been), but if you can somehow start saving money ahead of the next month I think you will be pleased with the results.

I already feel much more relaxed and if something odd does happen with a payment not getting applied or some other bank error, I will probably have a chance to correct it before any fees are assessed. I think with careful budgeting and continued hard work at earning some extra money I can keep it up. We shall see!

How I Saved $44 on My Water Bill

To be honest, I don’t deserve any credit for this one. I only had the opportunity to save $44 because I let a leaky toilet run for about four months and only did something about it when my bill for one month was $83! For reference, my normal bill should be in the $32 – $35 range. It slowly started creeping up and I didn’t think too much about it until the problem had snowballed and I had easily let more than $100 run down the drain.

Now the good news. Fixing the toilet only took about ten minutes of research and about fifteen minutes of work. The only tool required was a Philip’s head screwdriver. I’m not a handyman by any means, but I can take care of most things if I have a good set of instructions. This article from Ace Hardware is very comprehensive and includes some illustrations and a list of parts you may need. If you want something a bit more short and sweet, try this article with a nice illustration from Denver Water.

It turned out that I didn’t need to buy any new parts and just making some adjustments solved the leak. So….I traded about a half hour of effort for well over $100 wasted due to my laziness. Ouch! I have to admit that I’m somewhat new to the homeowner thing, going on three years now, and I really didn’t get the fact that a little running sound coming from the toilet could cost so much money. All I can say is, pay very close attention to your statements and as soon as you start to see water usage trending up, start looking for the problem. I wish I had jumped on this sooner. I hope this will save someone some money!

How I Saved $432 On Groceries Last Month

I posted earlier this month about my seemingly out of control spending on groceries. Now that we have reached the end of the month, I have some nice progress to report.

Quick review- in August, for two people, we spent $628.26 on groceries. To be clear, that was just groceries. No eating out, no fast food, and no household items. Seems like way too much money to me.

Now the good news- for the month of September, we managed to spend only $195.83. How did we do that? I’m not sure if I know exactly what made the difference, maybe we just got lucky, but I will try to share all the details I can think of now.

My first trip to the grocery store this month was very different than it used to be. I actually have fun shopping for groceries and because I like to cook I tend to spend a lot of time looking for specific, hard-to-find items that I may have seen on a cooking show or heard recommended somewhere- almost like a kid in a candy store, but with produce and spices.  🙂   This time, I didn’t allow myself to do that. I stuck with the list I had prepared and I didn’t always look for the ‘best’ items. I spent quite a lot of time comparing prices across different brands and doing some quick math to figure out what was the best deal per unit. I also brought an envelope full of coupons and made sure to use them all (can’t tell you how many times I’ve brought coupons with me and simply forgot to use them).

I saw results right away after taking this new approach. The bill was much lower than I had expected for the amount of food that I purchased. I also made sure to pick up items that I knew could go a long way for little expense (bags of rice and beans for example).

The other change I made was to focus on eating what was already at home. Yeah, that probably sounds obvious, but I would always go out and buy more food when I already had a lot to eat at home and this often led to me throwing away a lot of food.

That’s about it really. All it took was some effort. Instead of just walking through the grocery store with only a vague idea of what I needed, and grabbing what looked good along the way, I planned ahead, I stuck to my plan, and I really labored over every extra penny I had to spend. For example, we wanted a little Mac and Cheese (not healthy and the stuff in the box is really awful compared to home-made in my opinion but my wife likes it). First I looked at the Kraft brand, it was $0.99 per box. Then I found some generic brand for about $0.70 per box. I thought I had found a winner until I looked a little further down the shelf…and there it was! The cheapest of the cheap, $0.33 per box for Mac and Cheese. That’s a huge price difference and there is very little taste difference, if any.

Ultimately, if I want to lose weight, I can’t afford to be eating cheap food that is loaded with empty carbohydrates and lots of sodium. I really want to explore how to prepare my own foods at home, make them as healthy as I can, and do that while still spending less money. In my mind, I have always equated eating healthy with spending a lot of money on groceries, but I suspect that isn’t really true. Look for more on that some day. For now, I will take the $432 saved on groceries and throw it at the debt snowball.

How Much Stuff Do We Need?

DVDs, CDs, video games, books…how much is enough? I have a feeling that if I could undo every purchase I’ve made in these categories I might be debt free today. Maybe that’s a bit of a stretch, but there is no doubt I’ve burned a lot of money on this stuff. I’ve spent some time over the last couple of weeks going through what I own and figuring out what I can get rid of. If I am brutally honest with myself, I could get rid of all of this stuff- I don’t NEED any of it. If I lost my income and had to figure out how to survive none of this stuff would help- unless I built a shelter out of DVDs and burned books for heat and light. 🙂

Ultimately, there needs to be a balance here. We do need (lowercase need) a few items for entertainment and it is hard to argue with the value of a good book. The problem is our rabid consumerism culture drives us to always buy more and more stuff. If you buy a DVD and watch it 10 times, I’d say it’s a pretty good value. However, if you watch it once or never, what good does it do to have it on your shelf? Is a DVD collection some mark of pride or satisfaction? I imagine that it could be for some people, but it really shouldn’t be. I think the other problem inherent with large collections of ‘stuff’ is that we naturally must put less value in each individual item that we own. If you own 4 DVDs, there is probably a good chance you really like those 4 and you will watch them over and over. If you own 50, how many of those DVDs do you really like? Could you possibly name all 50 that you own? If not, what is the point? What if you could go back in time and turn 40 of those DVDs into $400 that was sitting in the bank right now or being paid toward your debt? I know which I would rather choose, though I probably would have made the wrong choice not too long ago.

So…what is the point of this little rant? I’m trying to practice what I preach and spend some time cleaning out my collections of stuff. Currently, I am spending a lot of time listing things on Ebay and preparing some boxes of things that wouldn’t sell for very much to take to a local used book store to cash in. I have literally found so much stuff that this is going to take at least a couple of weeks, but look for a report later this month on how much cash I’ve turned this junk into and what I will do with the money.