« playing catch-up | Main | I need an intervention. »
Sunday, May 04, 2008
pinching them hard
I have been sort of plotting a post about the way costs are rising and how that's impacting our lives, and I sort of touched on it in my last post and figured that was all I would do, but then the lovely (and I do mean lovely) and talented (and I also do mean talented) Beck posted about it and pretty much dared everyone else to do it too, so now I have to, right? Of course right.
So. We already knew we were going to have to tighten things up this year because of the new mortgage, and when gas prices didn't go down but instead kept going up, that became a problem too. We can't afford more than $350 per month for gas without going into a Deficit Spending Situation, and since we aren't the federal government we prefer not to do that, so that means that as gas gets more expensive, we have to drive less. A LOT LESS. I haven't been to the valley in so long I've forgotten what it smells like down there. (If you knew what the valley smelled like, you'd know that this means that every stupid and ugly *$&#*$-$4/gallon dark cloud has a silverish lining. They farm, we eat, I know, and I'm not really complaining, but in valley towns you find yourself checking your shoes for dog poop every time you get out of the car.)
O-K, moving on. So as it turned out, along with the mortgage thing and the gas price thing came the food price thing. The $6 for 18 eggs that cost $2 last month thing. The $4/gallon milk thing. The SEVEN FREAKING DOLLARS FOR 48 OUNCES OF VEGETABLE OIL THING. (bye-bye, once-a-month deep-fried buffalo chicken strips night.) So, with costs for very necessary things at such levels, we had three options: We could accept a few credit card offers and spend a year running them to their limits on groceries, or we could let the bank take our house back and go live with family, or we could economize. Guess which one we chose? Now, we already thought we were economizing, but people, we did not know what economizing WAS.
You might not know this (HAW! I so funny! That's a joke!), but I've always been kind of an imaginative person. The drama queen in me just thrives on a challenge like this. I am no longer Rachel, boring rural mom. I am Rachel, victim of the new depression who WILL NOT GO QUIETLY. So. I don't remember exactly where I first heard the phrase -- probably in a book -- but the economic rallying cry from WWII has become our household mantra:
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.
I know, oh so original, right? I swear I am going to stitch it onto a sampler. Maybe even one for every room of the house. Just saying it makes me feel serene and wise and determined and maybe, I dunno, Scottish or something. (There is not actually a single drop of Scottish blood in my veins.) Thriftiness becomes less of a burden and more of a challenge, and when we do it successfully we feel immense satisfaction. Some of the ways we implement our new family motto (so far I haven't made anyone recite it with three fingers in the air or anything, but give me time):
If there are leftovers in the fridge, nobody eats anything but leftovers for lunch, or sometimes, if there are enough leftovers, dinner, until the leftovers are used up. I used to throw away so. many. leftovers. Every time I cleaned out the fridge (which, OK, was not as often as it ought to have been), whoosh, dozens of dollars worth of food (in 2006 food dollars) would go in the compost. Everything from the pizza that everybody loved but then forgot about to the jar of applesauce that sat in the back almost full to the oatmeal that somebody (and I don't cook oatmeal) made too much of -- it was frustrating even before Money Crunch 2008, but it's unconscionable now. People, I ate leftover Cream of Wheat for breakfast on Wednesday. Such is my newfound commitment to thriftiness. And this new policy really has saved us money. It helps if I keep a mental inventory of what we have open and perishable right now -- bread is a biggie. I'm so bad about making sure bread gets used before it goes bad. It just sits there in the breadbox turning blue, all quiet and resigned and wasteful-like, while we gallivant around eating macaroni and cheese or Spanish rice.
Also, I restrict my allowed grocery shopping trip frequency. I mean *really* strictly. Not just because of the cost of gas to get to town, but because, of course, every time I go into the store I risk coming out having spent more than I intended to (although in the New Economy I'm better about that, no doubt about it). The simple fact of denying myself the opportunity to go to the store to get stuff for supper has made me come up with some really tasty meals from things we have on hand. I used to shop like a European when we lived in town -- daily trips to the market, musing over what I'd make for supper that night. Since we moved out of town, our grocery bill has been cut by at least 30%. Next challenge: coupons. I've never been much of a coupon clipper but I am by-golly going to start. I pity the fool who gets into the grocery line behind me once I have it all figured out.
In a related vein, we have all had to learn to like (or at least tolerate) foods we might not otherwise have chosen to eat, because they're nutritious and they were cheap. (I'm honestly glad that I've taken this nutrition class lately, because if I hadn't I might have been inclined to neglect nutrition as I've been scrimping for groceries; not being able to allow myself to do that has made me find out that it really isn't THAT much more expensive to eat with at least some kind of attention paid to nutritional values of foods. In other words, we're not on an All-Ramen-All-The-Time diet.) Fortunately for us, we're all relatively free of food intolerances. T is the only one with any restrictions; he can't eat eggs, bananas, carrots, or sugar. I can only imagine how much more difficult this would be if one of us were gluten intolerant or something.
If we need to build something around the house, if it's at all possible, we use things that we already own. This sounds simple, but it's alarming how many times my knee-jerk reaction has been to take a trip to the hardware store, and yet when I've stopped myself and looked around, I've been able to make do with supplies on hand. The raised beds for the garden, made from the repurposed rickety back deck, are one example of this.
In fact, the garden is a pretty good example all around, although we did have to buy some PVC pipe to run water to it, some concrete for the fence posts, and a roll of chickenwire to use under the raised beds to keep the #$%&* gophers out.
- The fencing we got from a couple of different places. There was an old fenced enclosure -- 6-ft high 4" hogwire -- beyond my carport when we bought this house. Initially we were going to use the area for a garden, until we looked in it and found that it really wouldn't do (many big rocks and also large tree roots). Then it was going to be a goat pen, but goats are not a this-year project; the dog is more than enough in the new-animal department at this point, and before we get into goats we hope to get our chickens going. Anyway, the boards that held the fence up were rotten and falling over, especially when it snowed, which, you may recall, it did a LOT when we first moved here. So we had LT take the fence down and roll up the wire fencing, which turned out to be just right for our garden. My parents had just built a kennel for their dog, and we asked them if we could buy their leftover fence (also just the right height), and they just gave it to us, along with some metal pipe for posts (Dad collects metal pipe for use in welding projects). That, combined with an old gate from the ranch and a WHOLE lot of work on the part of T and LT, made our deer-resistant fence.
- Instead of buying dirt (oh how I wished we could buy dirt), we -- well, I -- have been investing the "sweat equity" required to fill the raised beds with actual dirt from the actual ground, which I think I have mentioned previously.
- We are using heirloom variety seeds so that hopefully we can save them for use next year.
- We are planting enough of the things we use a lot (tomatoes, corn, beans, winter squash) that if all goes well we -- oops, I again -- can preserve some to last us during the winter.
- We are about to get our heinies in gear and start really and truly composting our compost in an actual compost bin so that we can use it in the garden, instead of just piling it in a heap behind the carport, where it makes a lovely snack bar for the local wildlife while we buy fertilizer.
Some of the other economizing we do is pretty basic, and is essentially an extension of the kind of thing we've always done because we've never been precisely flush with funds, living in California on one income and being rather undisciplined and stuff. For example:
We use propane instead of electricity wherever we can, and we use as little of it as possible. We use wood for heat and a swamp cooler (which only works because "it's a dry heat" -- lucky us) for cooling instead of an air conditioner. Our house came with a solar water heater on the roof, which annoyed us at first (the roof leaks where it's bolted on), but since it's been warmer and we decided to go ahead and hook the thing up, we've noticed a serious difference in the number of times we hear the propane water heater switching on. I use a clothesline to dry our clothes. They can sometimes come in linty, so we have a lint brush, and the towels are scratchy but they actually work much better that way, and you can't beat the fresh feeling of line-dried bedsheets.
Food-wise, when there is an amazing sale on something we use a lot (Vons has $.99/pound bone-in beef steaks this week. When is the last time I saw beef for a dollar a pound?) we buy as much as we can reasonably afford at the time and freeze it. This is pretty much a no-brainer. We are on the lookout for an inexpensive but relatively new (=relatively energy-efficient) chest freezer to make this even more profitable. This means that there has been a shift in the way I plan meals; it is more reasonable under a system like this to build your meal plans around the food deals you find, rather than making a chart for a month's worth of meals and shopping accordingly. Now I plan maybe a week or ten days in advance, based on what I have a lot of in the freezer and pantry.
A Costco membership really is worth it. I kept track one year and the savings in chicken alone pretty much paid for the membership. Also, there's a store in Fresno that we LOVE with a whole area full of bulk bins and the stuff is CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP (no membership required). Bonus: It's far cleaner and less depressing than Food 4 Less, where, just as an example, Jenn and I once saw a mouse running across an aisle. Fresno is $50 away (I don't think in terms of miles anymore but in terms of dollars worth of gas; town is $4 away in the car but $8 in the truck, etc; we may not go to Morro Bay this year, much as we love it, because it is over $150 away) but sometimes we HAVE to be in Fresno, and while we're there we always stop off at that store and stock up on stuff. Do you buy those yummy steel-cut oats in a can? Don't. Buy it in bulk; it tastes exactly the same and you can get something on the order of five pounds for the cost of a little 12-ounce can. And five pounds of steel-cut oats lasts even my hot-cereal-loving husband quite a long time. The bulk bin area at Winco is bursting with many such amazing discoveries.
Treats are now genuine bona fide treats instead of daily occurrences. Ice cream, candy, Diet Cherry Coke... all the little things that we used to think of as staples (I wonder why we all struggle with our weight?) Oh well. We appreciate them more when we do have them, right? We have had to give up buying Diet Coke, but we participate in MyCokeRewards.com, and people give us their codes, so we get the occasional pleasure of a free 12-pack.
Store brands, duh. We are lucky in that our local grocery "chain" (it's an independent chain, not sure exactly what the difference is except that nobody has ever heard of IGA, whereas everyone knows about Safeway) has a generic brand that is really quite good on most things. (But never, ever buy anything called Nutty Nuggets.) Even if it wasn't good, though, we'd still be buying it these days. You get used to minor differences.
There are a few little luxuries that we haven't made ourselves give up yet. Our domain names, which cost $15 a month plus $15 a year, seem like an obvious choice when it comes to something we can stop paying for, and I'd be willing, but T... isn't. I've discussed this before. I'd be just as happy at blogger with my $25 a year Flickr pro account. DSL has gone from luxury to near-necessity in the past few years -- so much of how we stay connected with the world and our friends and even (most importantly) my college classes depends on having a solid Internet connection. Also, my cell phone: every time I think about getting rid of it, I almost can, but not quite. It's really so very useful, although it's less so now that we are traveling so little (see above re: $4/gallon). Still, it's worth the cost to me just to know that I have it in case I ever truly need it, like say if I ever break down in that looooong no-man's land on the way home from grocery shopping in the valley when it's 110 degrees out. If things get much tighter, though, these are some things that will come under intense scrutiny.
Oh, my goodness, this got very long. I'm tempted to split it into two entries but I'm not cool enough to need to do that. Maybe I'll post a garden update tomorrow; we've been veryvery busy with it and it's actually starting to get exciting. There are actual seeds in the actual soil! Yippee!
Comments
Loved this post, Rachel. Very inspiring! Thanks for taking the time to share.
Posted by: Denise at May 4, 2008 10:31 AM
Excellent post.
My Baby is gluten-intolerant AND my Girl is REAAAAALLY picky and my husband likes a lot of variety in food. Ha! That's fun to cook for - good thing I like a culinary challenge, eh?
We don't live near any club-style stores, unfortunately - or fortunately, since I think I would impulse buy a lot of dopey stuff.
My dad brought us some fish this afternoon with their HEADS STILL ON... ick!
Posted by: Beck at May 4, 2008 11:45 AM
Great post. :) One of my close friends is gluten-sensitive and her groceries are just ridiculously expensive. A few random responses to things:
1) The #1 thing I am doing to economize is moving! Seriously, my combined rent and utilities will be 50% of what they are now.
2) I'm so stressed about moving that I'm not worrying much about anything else at the moment, but once I get settled, I need to get much better about food and stuff like that.
3) I will soon have a yard, so thank you for the reminder about the clothesline. Not that that will save me money (utilities are included at a flat rate in my rent) but it's better for the environment and I might as well save my roommate money where I can.
4) I had forgotten about Coke Rewards when I gave up soda for Lent, and apparently my points went away. Bah. But I should start using that again. I didn't know you could get free Coke with it!
5) I think the "Use it up, wear it out..." is a WWII thing.
6) I like your leftovers rule. I have to learn to just suck it up and eat one thing a bunch of times. I hate cooking for one.
7) I should probably stop before my comment is longer than your post. But I will probably have questions for you about composting and gardening when I get settled in the new house. :)
Posted by: Kat with a K at May 4, 2008 06:53 PM
Are you close enough to ranching country to be able to buy (and freeze) a side of beef at a time? That's what my MIL in Oregon used to do, twice a year or so, when she was raising two hungry boys.
One thing I've learned recently: if you get to the point of looking at all those traditional old staple dishes that became staples because they were cheap, like all the ethnic dishes based on rice and/or beans and/or corn, you can stay quite well nourished is you vary the staple. And if you make stuff based on ground corn if you get masa prepared with lime from a Mexican grocery it does not inhibit absorption of B vitamins. (Lots of useful information in this post and its comments, and in some of Ozarque's other posts, though you won't agree with everything she writes. It might all be stuff you already know, but I thought I'd post the link just in case.)
Posted by: dichroic at May 4, 2008 08:50 PM
Oh, and: Kat, you don't have to eat the same thing a bunch of times in a row. Ziplocs and your freezer are your friend here. F'rinstance, whenever we have turkey, my husband dissects it and puts a bunch of single-size servings away, then eats them now and then over the next couple of months. (I confess, he's much better than I am about this - I don't like the stronger taste it gets, but he doesn't mind. I think most people who like dark meat at all wouldn't.)
Posted by: dichroic at May 4, 2008 08:58 PM
Thanks. I do freeze stuff sometimes... must get better about that. My new place will have more freezer space, so that should help.
Posted by: Kat with a K at May 5, 2008 03:55 AM
Hiya
Laura is coeliac, as you know, but we are lucky we get a lot of her staple foods on prescription, and being under 16 years old, her scripts are free :) Pity the folk who have to pay for their GF foods.
Chickens. You can give them the stuff that isn't quite up to human standard, and you get the eggs! Yum!
Posted by: Carol at May 5, 2008 10:21 AM
First, you have inspired me with the eat-the-leftovers thing. You're not kidding about the stuff that we throw away out of the fridge! I'm on a rampage now.
Second -- cell phone. We switched to a prepaid plan. Not sure which providers you might have in your area, but it's saving us over $500/year since we hardly ever used the stupid thing.
Posted by: mary at May 5, 2008 05:04 PM
Oh yeah, and do I want to know what Nutty Nuggets are?
I've heard of IGA but I don't know why -- we didn't have them in California where I lived. Maybe we had them in PA when I was a kid?
Here's a blog I've been enjoying: http://crockpot365.blogspot.com/
A crockpot recipe a day all year. So far we've only done one of the recipes (Korean short ribs) but maybe you can find some good stuff on there that would work for your family. We've been doing the same as you -- scour the sale papers, stock up on large quantities of meat, use.
Also, here's a recent post about how much does driving affect the prices of items you buy (in this case, she's talking diapers, but it applies to just about anything):
http://babycheapskate.blogspot.com/2008/05/how-much-does-driving-add-to-diaper.html
Posted by: mary at May 6, 2008 11:43 AM
One thing that saves our hides is belonging to a natural foods buying co-op. Not like the brick-and-mortar patchouli type thing (which is great, but expensive) but just a bunch of us buying through different distributors as one entity so we get wholesale prices. If you have one in your area I highly recommend it. We get Costco delivered through the co-op as well. Hooray for cheap TP!
Leftover cream of wheat though...you are a better, stronger, and more tenacious woman than I.
Posted by: MamaGeph at May 12, 2008 09:31 PM
