Monthly Financial Goals and February Recap

 And so, it is time to do a financial goal checkup  from last month and also do my goals for this month.

Honestly?  Is "Survive" a goal or a mind set?  Ugh.  It has been so depressing financial speaking lately.  Last month we had a lot of small paychecks at the beginning of the month and despite working my collective butt off to save money wherever I could,we're making it but barely.

And then my husband, who just got the entire bottom of his mouth capped late last year (which had us, for the first time in years, adding new credit card debt to our bills, which was 10,000.00.  We only have 18 months to pay it off interest free, which isn't easy and then we have a second half we're going to have to deal with that will be 15,000.00.  I am really wishing I was a dentist lately)  has a dental emergency on the top of his mouth (the half he DIDN'T get done last year), so we have to find a thousand dollars somewhere to pay for that.  And then I have a yearly car insurance bill due soon, so I have to save up 300.00 for that.  And that is on top of just regular monthly bills I have to make and that is going to be hard because it is a short month and utilities for last month, that are due this week are high due to some major time in between reads on my meter.  Ugh. Just ugh.

Anyway, *deep breath*, goals this month are going to be a bit depressing as a result of all of this, so bear with me on that one.

But, first, let's see how we did in February...

February Goals:

1.  Recharge cell phone.
2.  When tax refund comes in remove at least 80% and put in savings (more on that one later).
3.  Budget for gift and dinner for holidays.   
4.  Save at least 20.00 somewhere!  

Well, I was able to meet all of the goals last month!  So that was good.

My daughter had a birthday that while not as fancy as she would have liked, it did get the job done and she enjoyed herself.  We ended up spending nothing on her birthday, other than about 15.00 in gifts that I spread the cost over two months to not hurt so badly.  I made her cakes with ingredients I already had, as well as cookies for her class.  We went out to dinner at a local restaurant, but we had gift cards a friend of my husband's had given him as a thank you for working on his house.  We had been sitting on those gift cards for quite a while, so I was glad we were able to give my daughter a special night out with them.

I got my cell phone recharged right before my tax refund came in, so that was nice that I didn't have to raid the refund for that.

Valentine's Day came and went without much fan fare.  The kids each got a container of Rolos that had been on sale B1G1 one week at the store (Rolo's are peanut free).  The kids enjoyed the treat and had plenty of Valentine's stuff to play with from their parties at school.  So, it worked out well enough.

I managed to save a lot of money on regular bills last month, with finally getting my son into local speech therapy and getting my phone bill finally dialed in right (for now).  I have also been trying to implement changes around here to save on fuel and electricity, although I won't know how well those work out until next month I think.

This month's financial goals are going to be very hard to accomplish.

March Financial Goals:

1.  Save 300.00 for car insurance payment.
2. Save as much toward 1000.00 for dental work as possible.
3.  Pay bills.

To accomplish some of this, once again, my husband and I are going to be going on a "if it ain't cheap we're not eating it" type of diet, which means not a lot of shopping, but living, once again, off the foods storage I just started rebuilding (man is that depressing even to write).  It's going to be a sad month to be sure unless I suddenly have an epiphany on ways to save money (which, I have faith that this can indeed happen).  But, such is life.

So, I am going to, for now, set my grocery budget at 50.00 per week around here (which covers the things the kids will eat) and we'll see where that gets me.  If nothing else, if I can make that work, it will save the necessary 300.00 for the car insurance payment.

Hope your financial outlook is a bit brighter than mine is this month.

Mending 101: How to Darn a Sock

And ode to my days at therapy where I darned a million socks!

Okay, so as lines of poetry go, that was kind of crappy.  But, seriously, it seems like all I do at therapy anymore is darn socks.

I'm not sure why, probably from being on his feet all day and having a history of not taking care of his feet very well, but my husband has heels that resemble cheese graters.  And his socks have always suffered for it.

This last year, we haven't had the money to buy him new socks every two months like we have had to do in the past, so I have learned the lost art of darning instead in desperation as I stared at piles and piles of holey socks.

Once you have darning down it can save you a lot of money, actually.  I've repaired dish towels, sweaters with holes that had tears in them from the washer and other things.  But, I want to start out with the most useful of darning techniques (at least to me) and one of the easiest to learn.  Darning socks.

I am new to the idea of teaching anything sewing related, so bear with me here as I try to walk you through this as easily as possible.

First, you are going to need a few things.  One:  Proper needles.  There are such things as darning needles.  If you do not have these and don't have the money to buy them, don't despair.  Just use whatever needle you have with the largest eye (as you're going to have to fit some pretty beefy thread through it).

Next up you are going to need some round object that you can fit into your sock to help you work on the hole without you pulling the fabric too tight, thus puckering the sock and making it uncomfortable as all get out to wear (I actually started by darning a few of my husband's socks that were beyond hope of repair to get this process down before starting on socks he'd actually wear).  A lot of older books suggest a lightbulb or actually a Darning Egg or Ball.  Me?  I use a play ball from my son's ball pit.  You can use anything round and relatively smooth.  An incandescent light bulb would work fine...personally I just can't stand the idea of something really breakable transporting back and forth to therapies and such in my knitting bag, so I stick with the play ball *laugh*.

One last thing you are going to need is the proper thread to do this.  Embroidery thread would work alright if you are pretty easy on your socks overall.  My husband quickly destroyed it with his cheese grater feet when I tried it on his socks, though, so I switched to this...

Twisted embroidery thread (much tougher stuff).  This stuff goes for about 2.00 per thing of thread at JoAnn Fabrics, but if you sign up for coupons you can use your 40 and 50% off a regular priced item coupons on these, or wait for them to go on sale (which is what I tend to do).  Either way one 2.00 thing of thread does quite a few socks, so it really is still pretty cost effective.

Okay and now the procedure.

1.  Take the ball you are going to darn with and work it down into your sock so that the hole is nice and centered on the curved surface.  Like above.

2.  Load your needle with thread (I go for a decently long amount) and start well beyond the hole in the sock.  Weave your thread in and out of the sock and working in straight lines (once again be sure to start well beyond the hole in the sock and then keep weaving your lines around and get closer to the hole).  Once you hit the hole do NOT sew the hole shut, but instead make lines of thread where the original sock was.  This is the first step to weaving a new piece into the sock.  See figure one for more detail...

3.  Once you are well beyond the hole in the opposite direction, weave your thread around the other way and create a cross hatch pattern to the sock.  When you reach your hole and the lines of thread, weave the thread in and out of the lines of thread you put down previously, creating a new woven piece to the sock.  See figure 2.

4.  Once the hole is woven shut and you are well beyond where the original tear was you can clip your thread, admire your handwork and realize you've now darned your first sock!

I realize this looks difficult, but it really isn't once you get the hang of it.  Yes, once you have a pile of things to darn this does get to be time consuming as you find yourself fixing all the holes you once thought unable to be fixed.  But, it actually is a kind of relaxing way to spend your evening as you sit watching a movie.  And it gives you great practice with your straight stitch in hand sewing *laugh*.

Hope this tutorial is found useful by some.  Good luck with your darning endeavors!

Note:  The graphs above were originally printed in the British pamphlets "Make Do and Mend" series for use during WWII.  I do not claim to be the artist who originally made them :).

Menu Plan Monday: Menu for Week of 3/2/15

Man, this is one of those days where menu planning was HARD.  Mainly because every single time I went to do it, all I could think of was, "Man, I'm so tired.  Need more caffeine to function."  And that would be as far as I would get on the menu planning front.

But, armed with a too-short nap (and a very unproductive day *sigh*) here I am with menu plan in hand.

Warning:  This menu goes kinda crazy in places.  It's amazing what oddball things you can get cheap on sale (thus the cornish hens on the menu).

Menu Plan for Week 3/2/15

• Monday:  Chuck steak, rice, salad
• Tuesday:  Orange Brined Chicken (recipe coming soon), Leftover Rice Pilaf (another recipe that I'll hopefully post soon), salad (trying to use up salad from last week before it goes funky)
• Wednesday:  Corned Beef and Cabbage (and other veggies of course)
• Thursday:  Parmesan Mustard Pork Chops (this is a recipe I'll definitely be sharing soon.  Super easy and tasty), Green beans, Mashed Potatoes
• Friday:  Cornish Hens, stuffing, leftover mashed potatoes and gravy
• Saturday:  Corned Beef Hash (using left over corned beef) with poached eggs.
• Sunday:  Beef Roast with roasted carrots, fancy baked potatoes (recipe coming soon on that too), bread.

Breakfast (out of the ordinary):  Apple Cinnamon Baked Oatmeal (from freezer).  I'm really enjoying this for breakfast with a splash of milk on it warm.  Banana Bread (made it last night from some of the tons of bananas I have in the freezer).  Honey Oat Bran Muffins (on Saturday).

Desserts:  Maple Custard Pie, Apple Pie

And there you are.  Definitely an interesting week of eating ;).

Monthly Shopping Goals: March 2015

Well, the pantry is slowly being restocked between my 25.00 a week I've been putting aside, a 200.00 trip to Costco on Valentine's Day (where my husband and I got rice, sugar and some other essentials with a part of our tax refund) and just generally working on stocking up on things in my regular grocery budget from week to week as I ran into sales.  So, instead of doing a 25.00 breakdown per week like I have been, instead I think I'm going to switch to monthly goals on what I need to build up food stores around here as I'm hoping to start reducing my grocery bill to 100.00 a week instead of 150.00 a week around here soon just to see if I can do it and to save very needed money.  And hopefully it might give you some inspiration to help out in your building up of food stores too.

So, here are my monthly goals (some vague, some specific) on what I need in the way of food.

Bulk Stores:

Food:

I want to get some #10 cans of tomato products, at least, from the bulk stores to use in different applications and just because it's a good thing to have around for food storage.  I didn't realize that tomato products were so cheap this way until recently and am thrilled to find them as when I can things like salsa...a #10 can goes a long way to making salsa easier.  Not to mention other recipes (which I'll share at later date).

Get more cans of canned crab and shrimp to use in salads and fondue and such (Three Bears is the cheapest place I've found to buy these canned around here).

Get more chicken stock (I use it all the time and I like the Kirkland Brand of stock as it is the most allergy friendly).  I'm hoping to make more chicken stock and freeze it, but freezer space is kind of limited with meat and apples at the moment, so I'm thinking buying boxes might be the best option.

Get a big container of Hershey's baking cocoa.

Bath and Cleaning Supplies:

Get a couple more bottles of the cheap Windex, Lysol and dish soap.

Regular Stores:

Hoping for another sale at Carrs for cooking oil as I would like to get at least another bottle of it.  I hate to keep too much around as it does go rancid, but at the same time if I make fried chicken it blows through the cooking oil relatively fast.  If that fails, I want to get a thing of cooking fat from Three Bears.

I am hoping for a sale on laundry soap as well.  I went to Fred Meyer for their laundry soap sale today and wasn't happy that the stuff I normally buy for 6.00 on sale at Carrs was 9.99 for the same bottle and the huge bottles that were on sale didn't include the type I normally buy.  Here's hoping there's another sale on that.

Also hoping for a good sale on cat litter again just to add a few more boxes to my stockpile.  If you can find these on 5.00 Friday be sure to look for peelies (peel off coupons) on the cat litter.  I was able to score a box for 3.50 last 5.00 special!

Amazon.com:

I am budgeting out for a Subscribe and Save order in the middle of the month.  So far I have toilet paper, drinking chocolate (a more concentrated form of hot chocolate that my husband and I like because it takes a lot less chocolate to make a mug of hot chocolate and is also safe for my son from peanut cross contamination) and oats on order.  Other than that I will try to shop for around and see if I can find some good deals on there as if you order 5 items you save 15% versus 5% (I haven't got Prime yet). 

Other Online Sources:

I put together an order today for 3 lbs of nut free butterscotch chips from Vermont Nut Free Chocolates.  Sadly, three pounds of butterscotch chips cost me 25.00 after shipping, but these are one of the few foods my son will eat for positive reinforcers at school, so it was a necessary purchase.

So, there you have it folks.  My "here's hoping I can get this stuff" list for the month.  Do you have anything you want to get for your pantry this month?

What I'm Reading in 2015, February: The 1940's House

Ahh, reading.  It puts wrinkles in your brain you know.  And unlike the fine lines that are slowly creeping into my face, these wrinkles will keep your brain sharp and help you expand your brain power.  That's a good kind of wrinkle if ever there was one!

I know people are just waiting with baited breath to see what book I'm reviewing this month ;).

Well,this month's selection is...

The 1940's House  by Juliet Gardiner.


The 1940's house is actually a companion book to the PBS special that aired back in, I think it was 2000 (actually mine is an ex-library copy which I thought was kind of neat).  A real life family was taken out of their modern lifestyle, planted in a house that had been recreated in the late 1930's down to every detail and then the family was thrown into the world of the outbreak of WWII through V-E Day.  They lived out everything in that period of time condensed down into a 9 week stay in the 1940's House.  That meant dealing with things like washing laundry by hand, dealing with rationing and dealing with being hungry, working and volunteering outside the home (as women were expected to do during those times), dealing with black out and all the while having to run out to a bomb shelter in the back yard when "air raid" sirens started blaring through the house.

Oddly enough I read the companion book to this series before I even saw it.  I ran across the book when researching rationing during WWI and WWII and ordered it, intrigued.  After I received the book I realized that it was actually a series and really wanted to see it after reading the book.

I found that the series isn't easy to find as it is so old now that it no longer exists on You Tube or obvious sources (my best guess, although things like the 1900 House you can still find easily...go figure), so it took a while to find a place where I could watch it.  I've now both seen the series in it's entirety and read the book and I have to say that I really enjoyed the book more.

Not that I didn't enjoy the series, but the book goes into so much more detail.  It goes into the history of what actually happened during WWII in the civilian world, especially in Britain (where the 1940's House was filmed) and also goes into way more detail about things the modern family in the series experienced and lived during their nine week stay in the past.

You really come away, after reading the book and watching the series, with a sense of gratitude for what we have today and that we haven't had a war like WWII since it occurred.  The amount of shortages worldwide, the loss of life involved, the sheer scope of what happened...it really hits home when you read something like this and really does make you realize how lucky we are today.  That we have a roof over our head that isn't in danger from bombs dropping 24/7.  That we haven't had to live hungry for five years straight during a war and that our food hasn't had to be rationed for longer than that (rationing in Britain wasn't over until the mid 50's).

I've really become kind of a social history nut for WWII and really have found a major sense of pride in my side of the species on what women did during those dark times to make the home fires continue burning.

I definitely recommend this book to anyone who is the least bit interested in this period in history.  Very good read and lots of great information.

How to Budget With a Variable Income Part 1: Tax Return or No Tax Return?

Image source:  Google images

First a disclaimer:  I am not a financial adviser.   Nor am I a CPA or other person who works in the financial end of anything.  So, please, don't take this article to mean that I am giving you financial advice.  Far from it.  I'm just sharing my experiences and what works for my family.  That is all.

Ages ago, so it seems, I used to coupon blog.  One of the biggest complaints I'd get from people about budgeting was,

"But, my husband (wife) is on a variable income.  That makes it impossible to budget!"

Au contraire mon fraire!

I used to think the same thing.  The entire time I've been married my husband has worked in construction and has worked in a family owned business.  That makes variable income an understatement.

Obviously (if you're reading this blog and are following along with what has happened to us) variable income inevitably also means periods of unemployment.  Which, yes, sucks.  But, I thought one of the things I could share on the blog is ways that I TRY to budget as well as I'm able on a variable income with an income that has no sick days, no personal days, no benefits of any kind and can go from my husband making nothing in a week (if he's sick or just doesn't have work that week) or to working high pay rates (such as working for federal or state union wages).

So, first part of the series is a big one I've seen on money saving sites for years where they extoll the values of no getting much of an income tax refund back in favor of being able to keep more of your money NOW.

I had a teacher in college who was a brilliant accountant say that no matter what you should never shoot for a large tax return as it will hurt your weekly income and it wasn't worth it.

I hate to be one to disagree with a man I heavily respected, but I not only PLAN for a tax refund at the end of the tax year, I also pray for it.

See, during the first year I was married, my husband got very sick with acid reflux.  The next year we were still dealing with medical bills, had to buy a truck because ours died and were trying to make ends meet.  And then my husband went through forced unemployment for a while.  I was working a minimum wage job and was making bills, but barely and I did the whole "take out what you're expected" on your taxes every week.

Well, due to illness, lack of work, SMALL paychecks on both our ends (which it turns out is what hurt us the most) and family problems, my husband made very VERY little that year and so did I.  We had both done the "married" allowances on our tax forms that year.  And we paid for it dearly.

In a year where we could barely keep our feet financially we ended up owing the IRS 214.00!  I cried, a lot, when I was scraping together that money to pay when we really didn't have the money for regular bills let alone money for the IRS.

Ever since that year we've made darned sure that something like that will never happen again.  This is how we do it.

No matter who was working. whether it just be my husband or my husband and myself (which since we've had kids it's just been my husband working) we kept our allowances at single and 0.  Period. 

And yes, we have kept it that way even after we've had children.  This has saved our bacon in years where jobs would result in small paychecks, many times multiple paychecks from different jobs (with federal work) where your gross income wouldn't really jive with what was being taken out for taxes.  In years where my husband's co-workers would be paying out sometimes thousands to the IRS at the end of the year due to this dilemma, we've always gotten money back.

For us the week to week loss of income is worth it.  No we don't do this for the "big tax refund" at the end of the year that a lot of sites act like is the only reason you work it so that you will get money back at the end of the year.  No, we do it so we don't end up paying OUT on a year where we just plain can't afford to do it.  We'd rather get money back, which we can put into savings, instead of worrying about having to write a check to the government.

But, that is us.  Every set of circumstances is different and I hope you can find a system that works for you!

Next up is how I tackle when we get a large sum of money in, such as a tax return.

Rebuilding a Pantry on 25.00 a Week (Week 8)

So, this week's pantry rebuild went toward a few basics that I needed.  So here's where my 25.00 went.  This week was spent at Fred Meyer.

• 4 Monster's Inc. battery powered tooth brushes, on clearance for 2.99 each.  
• 2 Angry Bird's battery powered toothbrushes on clearance for 2.49 each
• 1 thing of waxed paper 1.89 (I'm planning on using wax paper more around here)
• 1 thing of bread crumbs 1.19
• 1 thing of paper lunch bags (I use these for popping popcorn for the kids in the microwave) 1.69 on sale
• 1 thing of facial tissue 1.25 on sale

Total spent:  22.96

Total left of 25.00 weekly allowance:  2.04