Random Thought Tuesday

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Sheila

I have lots of these to share!

Happy Cinco De Mayo, we celebrated by having cheese Quesada and Mexican Rice for dinner. Matt and I ended the day with margarita wine! Yes we are partying hard.
The white van is having even more issues, currently I have a flashing light and it is running rough. I am frustrated. In fact I am so frustrated that we are discussing options for purchasing a new to us car and making payments. The goal right now is to wait several months in order to reduce our debt load and make sure we can afford a new huge monthly expense.
I purchased 48 bottles of water at CVS for a grand total of $0.10 yesterday. This was in fact all tax. I have not been shopping regularly at CVS for over a month now but was excited to actually grab a great deal and use ECB at the same time.
Our bean plants have spouted! I have had horrible luck with planting seeds this year that I was becoming concerned that the green beans would not grow either. In fact I was trying to find a store to purchase live plants from. But yesterday, they started popping out of the ground and today I am counting a close to 90% growth rate from the seeds.
Spring/Early Summer has finally arrived in North Carolina. The high temperature this week are crawling slowly into the 80s. We have not needed to turn on our air condition yet but I am sure it will not be long. The great news is that we have now been a month without use heat or air. Our electric bill should remain below $200 for the month of May as well!
Amanda has applied for and been accepted into the community college starting in the fall. I am so excited and proud of her.
On Sunday both Lily and Kendall participate in their final cheerleading competition for the year. Lily’s team received a special honor of best tumbling for the entire day! My plan is to post lots of fun pictures for Wordless Wednesday. Pictures not only of the competition but also from the rides we enjoyed at the amusement park where it was held.

Saving on Saturday- Car Wash

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Sheila

I came up with a new idea to help me be a little bit more creative and save money each week. I am calling it Saving on Saturday. The goal will be for me to post one way we save money during the previous week. I would love some idea so feel free to join me!

This week we ended up saving money and have some fun at the same time. It feels like we have been living in a car for the past several weeks and both vans are starting to look like we do as well. So washing our own cars is the first way we are saving money. A low end cleaning run around $25 and even the automatic wash is $12 so I am going to estimate by doing all the work at home we save at least $24 and the memories will be priceless!

April In Review

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Sheila

Blogging: Goal: 15 per month Goal Met! Even with posting this month in review 2 days late! Go Me!

Weight: Goal: Met and maintain weight of 175. This goal will be considered met each month that weight loss is achieved and once this weight is achieved, each month maintained is considered achieved. Fail again! May is the month that I am getting back on track with this! I have been fairly consist with exercising but the diet part is lacking,.

Spiritual- Goal. I want to spend time reading and or studying the Bible at least 5 days a week for the year. Another Fail! I have been reading at least 3 days a week need to up my game for sure.

Personal Goals: Achieved 1 of 3

Financial Goals: Achieved 2 of 4 (50%)

1. Pay off all debit by December 2015, except for mortgage.
a. Home Depot-     $170 a month Payment. Will be paid off in September. Smaller than usual payment to offset expenses and also I ended up purchasing some new dirt for the garden. We are still on track with no interest paid on this card so May and June will be catch up months.
c. American Express   – pay $900 this month. Again smaller than anticipated pay so I have to buckle down.
d. Personal Loan (used to purchase van) .The current scheduled payment is $217 a month with this scheduled to be paid off in December 2015. Goal Met!

2. Emergency Fund to $2000. Used this to cover the unexpected car repair. So we are starting at zero again. Fail

. 3. Groceries: Spend $600 a month . Huge success this month. We spent $195 on groceries including $50 worth of plants for the garden. The real test will be in May if we can stay around $800 for the month, then this will be back on track for the year.

4. Gas: Spend $400 a month with any remaining to be move to Auto fund for repairs. I was unable to pay for this last repair out of our gas money so ended up using the Emergency fund to cover the large repair cost of $400. Otherwise on track with spending $364 for gas, which does include our gas for all trips this month as well.. In May, we will have to cover tags, inspection and taxes on the Dodge van. We also have several out of town appointments. My goal will be to stay at $400 including these extra expenses.

Disney- The yard sale was a HUGE! success! In fact it was the biggest yard sale profit I have ever made! I did pay an additional $300 toward our trip so this is awesome! I do not expect to make big gains in this area until July due to extra annual expenses that are coming due in May.

April was a crazy expensive month. I had planned for our cheerleading trip to the beach but with yet another van repair, we are now going to have to tighten way down for several months. I was extremely pleased to realize that we actually met several of the established goals. May is another expensive month. I have been able to save some money in advance but in May we have to pay insurance and pool dues. In addition our mortgage has increased due to the escrow account, that I am unable to close. I am hopefully that all car repairs are done for several months. No extra saving or spending planned for May but I am doubtful to have anything extra.

Celebrating Success with Ham!

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Sheila

Today is April 30! I am celebrating the fact that we have maintained our grocery budget at $195 for the month. I will be honest this has been a challenge especially this last two weeks while the list of things we are out of continues to grow! But we did it! I should also include as part of this celebration that $50 of that budget went to purchase plants. These will eventually provide food for us but this month they were just an expense. Today is another busy day with dentist and doctor’s appointments so I was trying to figure out a dinner that would work with the items we still have on hand. We do have food but the problem is using the ingredients that we have together. I am proud to say that not only did I come up with a dinner plan but add a choice for lunch as well.

My parent served ham this past Sunday, we were given the left over ham on the ham bone to use. I honestly learned how to live cheaply from my mother so of course she would not simply just throw out the left overs. First I made ham salad, which is one of Matt’s favorite and decided to use the ham bone for soup. I decided to include both these recipes with a couple of changes I made.

Ham Salad: diced ham(ended up around 3 cups), mayonnaise, red onion( about 1/2 cup), mustard( a generous spat) and pepper. Simple easy but very good.

The soup I used the basic recipe from here. But used frozen kidney beans, a can of corn, frozen baby carrots and sautéed the remaining red onion, and finally sprinkled heavily with Mrs Dash. The soup actually smells really good and I will add a verdict later today!

Wordless Wednesday- Zach at Beach

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Sheila

This was one of the highlights of our recent trip to the beach. Since each of the girls got to pick out either a hair bow or doll outfit, Zach got to ride this “Jumping Spider” I was honestly really surprised how well he did and how much he liked it!

Waiting in line…for over half an hour!

Food For Thought

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Sheila

Up until this Saturday, I had done no grocery shopping in the month of April. Matt actually ran to the store to pick up milk after we came home from the beach. Because of the limited shopping our budget has stayed very low for the month. My goal for the month was to keep our grocery budget low and to use up as much as possible from our stockpile so I had already decided that I did now want to spend a great deal and I am pleased to report that I was successful. Saturday turned out to be a very rainy and nasty day, Amanda had planned to spend the day with the kids so she offered to watch all three of the little one while Matt and I went to the grocery store. After ten years of marriage, this even is considered a date! Matt has a free drink from Starbucks so that was our first stop. Next we went to Harris Teeter, I saved around 50% and only used 3 coupons, $3 off a 12 pack of diet coke, $3 off 2 boxes of Starbucks K-cups and $5 off purchase of $50. This last coupon was after all other coupons as well. I did shop in the clearance buggy where I found 3 boxes of ant bait. We also purchased sausage, bacon and pepperoni with our total our of pocket being $47.67. Next we stopped at Food Lion where we purchased 10 boxes of fruit snacks, 5 boxes of pop tarts and a gallon of milk for $22. I was very pleased with our trip> I am actually still under $200 for the month so I may go to Food Lion for a couple more rounds of Fruit snacks.

After keeping our food budget extremely low for the month of April, I am already looking ahead to May, I know that we are going to need to make a Costco trip at the beginning of the month and it also appears as if we will be purchasing 40# of ground beef from Zaycon to last us through the summer. My goal is to stay under $600 for the month so between these two large purchase we most likely will continue to adapt and ate things that we have on hand. Otherwise if the budget goes extremely high it will negate our positive gains in April.

Next item on our food list is that our square foot garden is growing! I am so excited that not only did all the plants that I have initially planted survive but they are growing. Matt has also added a 2×6 box that we will be planting corn in. Depending how well the corn grows and if we really like it, we may add a third box just for corn.

Finally, meal planning for the week. This will be a special week as both girls have Field Day this week, several appointments on Thursday and we are headed to our last competition for Cheerleading next weekend.

Breakfast-French toast (leftovers) , Cereal, Poptarts, eggs and Baked oatmeal.

Lunch-Lunches are going to be packed later today(Sunday) and I will be taking either a salad or leftovers.

Dinner– Crazy evening schedule with several quick and easy meals thrown in.

Saturday- Lunch: new chicken recipe, Dinner- Homemade pizza with sourdough crust.
Sunday- Lunch- at my parents, Dinner- Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, veggie and fruit.
Monday- leftovers
Tuesday- Hamburger helper
Wednesday-Chicken pie and Squash casserole, I am taking the day off so I will be cooking!
Thursday- hot pockets or pizza roles
Friday- Pepper steak and rice.

Random Thoughts Thursday

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Sheila

It does not feel like just a week ago we were enjoying some fun at the beach!
Matt’s birthday was Tuesday but due to our schedule we decided to celebrate tonight. He wished for things to slow down and I just laughed!
I am amazed at the difference in the weather in different parts of the country. Today it was windy but 65* but in Michigan it snowed! I am also very thankful I don’t live where it snows in April!
I was able to plant most of my square foot garden today! The current plan is to finish it in two weeks and replace anything that does not survive. I thought I had checked the weather better but it turns out that we have a chance of going below freezing today so I hope everything survives. I am so excited to get things growing!
. We are doing really well on our budget for the month. I knew in advance that our beach trip would cost us extra and I am hoping to cover the additional repair to the van as well. As of today, we have spent only $121 of our $600 grocery budget and that includes not only the plants you see above but steaks for Matt’s birthday dinner! In gas, we have spent $309. This amount does include our gas for travel to and from the beach but not the repair that was made on the white van prior to going. I don’t see that we will be spending anything more in gas but do expect to end up spending around $150 on groceries by the end of the month.
Weird things excite me, as you can tell from the numbers above, we have not been grocery shopping this month. On Monday, we went down to our building where we have both our freezers. In the chest freezer is all veggies, it is starting to look a little low except for the zucchini which I froze over 2 years ago. The other freezer now only contains chicken and is less than half full. I am excited to finally be using and seeing a difference in our grocery budget. I definitely don’t want to use up all our stock pile but like the idea of starting fresh at the end of the summer and attempting to maintain the same $600 budget after cutting it down to a fourth for a couple of month.
Our next and final cheerleading competition is only two weeks away but it at Carowinds which is an amusement park. It will be very expensive but a fun trip. I am actually really looking forward to decreasing our schedule by at least one night a week for cheerleading! Swim team starts everyday in the month of June so I am not sure what we will do for the month of June this year. I would love to take a month off from cheering but just don’t see that happening!

Wordless Wednesday- Beach

Posted on April 22, 2015 by Sheila

Water Fun!

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Sheila

One of the reason that we chose to stay at this particular hotel is because of the cool water areas that it has. These include several both indoor and outdoor hot tubes, a really cool water slide, several pools that range from 1.5 to 2 ft of water with buckets and sprinklers galore, a lazy river and of course several regular pools. Zach has even decided that he likes playing in the water. Check out the fun the kids have been having…..

5 Things Friday

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Sheila

We are enjoying our mini vacation so far, one of the favorite things about this trip is that we are eating out most meals. Zach actually at all his breakfast this morning at IHOP.2. Amanda decided at the last minute to join us for this trip and everyone is really enjoying having some quality time to spend with her. The funniest part is that they are “taking turns to sit beside her” but no one wants to sleep with her because she snores! 3. We had planned to play Putt Putt today but the weather has not cooperated at all so instead we surprised the kids with a trip to Ripley’s Aquarium. They LOVED it..I am going to plan an entire “Wordless Wednesday” post with some of the awesome pictures that Matt took.4. The water slide that is part of the outside pool at our hotel was open today and all three of the little kids were so excited to go down it. Unfortunately Zach ended up with a battle scar from it. I was so proud that he did go down a second time after hitting his head the first time. 5. We have not even been down on the beach because of the weather but I did at least get a picture from the pool.