Category Archives: Saving Money

Saving Money- Checking Insurance

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I dislike insurance of all kind and fashion. My thoughts are that they companies are making money on someone’s worries but that being said it is a “requirement” in most situations.  We have had both Auto and Home Insurance with the same company Liberty Mutal for close to 10 years. One of the reason’s that I have stayed with this company is it is easy to do. In addition, I usually check out rates every couple of years just to make sure we are still competitive. In the past, the difference have been so small that it was not worth changing.  Over the past several months, I have become more and more frustrated with the company. First is their billing system, starting 3 months ahead of time, you get a bill with monthly and then bi-weekly reminders. I receive both paper and email remainders. Next as I started to look over the bill, I found a “clean air allotment” charge, I call to ask and never really got an explanation. I was told that in the past this was split between the billing cycles??? I still don’t know what this charge is.  The final problem that made me starting comparing rates and looking for a different company was the statement that once a bill is issued, no changes can be made to the amount due on it. For example, I dropped one car off the policy which reduced my overall policy amount by over $200, however since my bill had been issued I would be given credit for this on the next billing cycle six months away.

I went online the other night and requested auto insurance quotes, I have received five. Each of the five was lower than the amount I am currently paying. So today, I decided to call the companies to verify the amounts before making a decision. I am excited to report that I saved $210.56 by switching my auto insurance to GEICO!  I will be able to make changes and even claims online if needed!!

This definitely helps our budget not only this month but for the rest of the year!

 

Square Foot Garden

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The weather has final decide to allow Spring for at least a few days! So we have spent several hours a couple of evening planting our square foot garden. This year we have added two additional pieces. The middle one that does not have a grid is for sweet potatoes, I forgot to save one to start with this year and have searching at several stories, I discovered that these plants will not be available until May. We are hoping to double our crop from last year!  Otherwise we are using a combination of starting from seeds and purchasing plants this year. Hopefully this will be the last year that I have to purchase soil to use in the garden. I don’t plant to add any additional boxes but instead we are looking at eatable landscape.

We have a separate bed for our cantaloupe and watermelon on the back side of the house where there is no shade at all. I was able to start the canto loupe from seed this year so I am really excited to see what we get.

Upfront we have tomatoes (started from seeds pear and beefsteak, cheery tomato plants were brought), squash, cucumbers, cabbage, broccoli (started from seed only one surviving), green peepers, a spicy peeper, dill, cilantro, chives, basil (all herbs from seeds).

We have spent a total of $300 on soil and $60 on plants. This is around $100 more than if we joined a coop but the cost next year will be significantly lower. In addition to cost saving the kids really enjoy this activity.

Finally a couple of pictures….

 

Saving Money/Menu Planning/New Recipes

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I have mentioned before that we have 2 freezers in addition to the 2 small freezers that are part of our refrigerators. I love having all the extra space to freeze things and I often have had all of the freezers full. Last year I was able to clean out both of the larger freezers and made one a dedicated veggie freezer and the second one for meat.  The idea is to keep just enough for meals and a couple of convenience meals up in the house. However, what has tended to happen is that we just stick things in the two freezers in the house instead of going to the building. One of the next things on my cleaning list is to organize and rearrange the freezers to make things easier to find.  We have been slowly trying to eat things and rearrange slowly.

We have lots of chicken from our big purchase in October. My original thought was that we would have one chicken meal a week so that should last a year. I am finding that each of the crockpot meals is making at least 2 meals with leftovers. I have also discovered that only 2 of the crockpot meals so far has been worth the effort.  I would say at this point that we have eaten less than half of the chicken that was purchased.

The other meat item that we have in abundance is ground deer meat.  We have been using it in some of our favorite recipes but the “wild” taste was proving to be a little strong for our taste buds. However I have discovered what I hope to be a solution to this problem, bacon grease.  Tonight we used a pound of deer meat fried in bacon grease for cheeseburger pizza, and no one was able to taste any of the “wild” flavor. My hope is that we can use this secret trick to get a lot of use out  of this meat.

After all that let  me get back to the original intention of this post. So other than deer meat and chicken, we only have one more pack of cube steak in the freezer. We do have several packs of bacon and sausage in addition to at least one kielbasa sausage but as you can tell our choices for meat are limited. I really want to use up most of this meat prior to purchasing any more but you can only eat tacos, and spaghetti so many times. So I decided to search the internet for new recipes using chicken and ground deer meat. So far I have collect right at 10 that I am planning on using in the next two weeks. We actually tried a new recipe on Thursday with chicken and one with deer on Friday. Neither of these first two dishes make the cut, they were not awful just not good enough to repeat. My goal is to make it at least 2 additional weeks in April with using just the meat we have on hand and trying the new recipes. However, in my head, I am hoping to be able to not purchase any meat until the last weekend of April.

Do you have any awesome chicken or ground deer recipes to share to help me achieve this lofty goal?

 

ICE Storm 2014

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Yucky, nasty! Those are the two best words to describe the ice storm we experienced this past Friday, March 7th.

I actually headed in to work around 8am because I had decided I like to get paid for watching the nasty weather. However, God had different plans for me. I dodged several trees on Beck’s Church Road and even felt the back of my car slid a bit. At that time, the roads were covered with around an inch or so of ice. However, the thing that actually sent me home was when the police officer told me to turn around because of down electric lines in the road. On the white knuckle drive home of less than 4 miles, I watched several trees fall over, slide in the ice going up a hill and did a lot of praying.

Once at home, I decided a good cleaning day would be great especially with the business of the next two weeks. However again God’s plan are always better than mine.  Our power went out around 9am, we are very fortunate that my parents that live less than a mile away still had electricity and in fact were part of the 4% of the county that never lost power. Matt and I packed an overnight bag, grabbed our electronic and dinner that was  in the crock pot and headed over for a visit with the dog and kids in tow. The rest of Friday was spent watching television, surfing the internet and even a couple of games of Uno. The kids had a ball and I am betting my parents enjoyed the time as well.  By Friday evening, the ice turned to rain! We received a total of over 3 inches of precipitation on Friday.

On Saturday we had a planned day of shopping in Winston. We left my parents house around 8:30 and returned home with Rugar (our dog) around 5pm that evening. We were really surprised at the amount of snow instead of ice that was received just 30 miles north of us.  I plan to give more details of my deals in another post!

Our electricity was restored around 11 am on Saturday. We are so thankful and blessed.  The temperature on Saturday rose to around 70* and the only evidence of the massive ice storm are the abundance of trees that are laying everywhere. We have no trees in our yard so we are among the few that don’t have clean up to complete this week.

Here are a couple of pictures…

Where Did My Money Go?

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I often asked this question and one of items that I have been focusing on this year is knowing where I am spending money. My idea is that  is where you spend money is what you see as important.  I often wonder how I am doing in comparison to others but even with research it is hard sometime to find some real numbers. I did find this neat graph.

I also did some further research that I am going to share as we go along as well. I am going to do an honest comparison between the numbers I found and our spending during the month of February. I will say that our spending is up for February simply because of the extra income from tax refunds we received.  Please leave a comment if you think this numbers are correct or if you see something totally off.

15% of our spending this month was on Debt Reduction  including Credit Cards. I know this is a high number for us. We pay off our lawn mower so that we did not have to pay any interest on this transaction.

14% was Utilities. This is a high number for us, the reason is that it included an additional cell phone bill we received when switching names on our account. Normally I would estimate that utilities are about 6% of our spending.

Our mortgage $594.80 represents 8.8% of our spending, combine with utilities approximately 25% of our spending which is significant less than the 33% above for housing.

9.69% of our spending is on groceries which includes cleaning products. I did overspend our budget by $55 last month but in comparison to the 13% above I am still way below.  In research, I did discover that a “thirty family of four” spends an average of $632 a month of groceries. Dining is an area that I am really trying to monitor this year. In January, we spent over $450 on eating out, by becoming aware of this, in February we reduced this to $200 or 2.97% of our budget.   This will definitely be an area I continue to monitor as the average for dining out is $223 a month but I am unsure how many people this amount represents.

$383 or 5.68% of our spending was for Auto/ Transportation cost in February. I typically budget $400 a month.  I was surprise to find out that the average fuel cost is $243 a month.  We definitely always exceed this amount but due to the fact that all of our vehicles are paid for we still are way below the 17% average noted above.

Charitable cash donations represented 5.48% of our spending. The averages I found ranged between 3 and 4%.  This is a significant decreased from the 10% I expected to find.

12.38% of $836 represented our spending on clothing in February. I do know that this included a new wardrobe for Zach and at least half a new winter wardrobe for Lily. In addition, I purchased clothing for our trip to Michigan in January in this same category. Both the kids have sudden grown significantly in the past couple of months. The reason this amount is so high for February is that I intentionally used our tax refund to pay off credit card debit for these clothing items. The only averages I could find were based one adult which was $121 a month on clothing.

Household or as call above other spending represented 7.34% of our spending. I use this category for things such as our YMCA membership or expenses that I don’t know where else to place them. I am pleased to find out that this is probably close to the national average of 7% .

February Goal Update

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This month brought a welcome 4.5 day break for me due to snow!  Unfortunately, I seem to have some difficulty getting back into the swing to things. But time marches on so no use complaining.  Here is the goal update for the month

Financial Goals–

1.  Pay off lawn mower by March 2014 to avoid interest being charged.  Goal MET! I am going to change this goal since it is nice to stay accountable.  The new goal is to pay off all credit card debt by July.  This will leave our only outstanding debt as a personal loan.

2. Emergency Fund to $2000.  I could easily move this money and say goal met however in reality due to a expensive month heading my way, I honestly did not do this because I will be using extra money for March spending.

. 3. Groceries: Spend $600 a month-  I spent $601 for groceries this month. I am going to count this as Goal MET!   The goal for March will be $400 or less.

4. Gas: Spend $400 a month with any remaining to be move to Auto fund for repairs. $13.00 left in the budget for the month. I am rather pleased as we had a lot of travel this month and this also includes an oil change for the van.

Blogging:  Goal: 15 per month  This is post number 14! I am really happy with this as I have struggled the entire month to keep on track.

Weight: Goal to exercise 3x a week and to be down to 150 by December 2014.  I am continuing to make progress with this. I did lose another 4# this month so GOALLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL met!

 

CVS Shopping 2/16/2014

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Although we still have some snow still laying on the ground, things have pretty much returned to normal in our state, so back to shopping I go.  I really debated this trip to CVS but decided some of the deals were too good to pass up.   I was really surprised today when one of my receipts showed a saving of 100%. I ended up pay $1.16 for this transaction but that was entirely taxes. I usually including taxes in my spending vs savings so I was excited to come home and check out my real savings. I am going to be very detailed with this trip because just about anybody could do the same.

I started with 5 ECB that I received on Friday for purchasing Diet Cokes.

First transaction:  1 Child’s  Culturelle      regular price 27.49 on sale for $10.00 Spent $5.68 got back 10 ECB

Second transaction: 4 bottles of Suave Kids 3n1 Body Wash/Shampoo,  regular price 3.79, on sale for 2.75, coupon B2G1 Free (deducted $3.00), 2 Suave Men’s Body Wash, regular price 2.77 sale price $2,coupon B2G1 Free (deducted $3.00), 3 packs of Mega M&M, regular price 1.48 sale price 0.75, coupon  B2G1 Free (deducted $1.29) used the ECB from above. Paid 1.16 received back 4 ECB and 0.75 ECB.

Trip total:   Spent $6.84 saved $46.76  or 87%

Are You Thirsty? Stockpiling

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Today was officially another snow day for us. I was unable to get out of the driveway or up the street as of 10am when I had to make the decision. However, with the temperature being 45 with the sun shine, we were able to venture out to a couple of stores this afternoon.

The items that we purchased are for the stockpile. The first stop was CVS, the last 2 weeks they have been running a special on 2 Liter Diet Cokes. They are on a stock up price of $.99 each, in addition for each $10 spent you receive 5 in ECB. I have been slowing purchasing a couple but decided to finish up today. I purchased 15 Diet Cokes a couple of Sprites and a couple of Cokes for a total of 19 drinks. I did not use any coupons but did use one of the $5 ECB I received.  Total spent $14.97, saved $24.09 or 62%. I also received another 5 ECB to be used later. The total cost per 2 L including tax was $0.79!

The next stop was Food Lion (our local grocery store), I read on Wednesday of an awesome deal. PowerAde and PowerAde Zero are on sale for $0.89 with the purchase of 15 you receive $10 off at the register. The total cost per 32 oz drink including tax is $0.23!    Matt decided he was okay with stocking up. I did a total of 7 transactions which  was the only down side, we ended up purchasing 105 drinks. In addition to the awesome saving this represents, I will earn 3 points from Coke Rewards for each of these bottles which will be 315 point, of which 250 points earns a free 12 pack!

Total Spent $18.55
Total Saved $146.59 or 89%  And I didn’t even use a single coupon!

Brand Loyalty and Coupons

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One of the first things you will read when beginning to coupon or trying to learn more about coupons is that you can’t be brand loyal.  I disagree with this statement. I have discovered over the years, that I am more brand loyal than I would have ever imagined. The things that come to mind are deodorant, laundry detergent, toilet paper and of course Diet Coke. In addition, Matt has used the same razor brand since we got married almost 10 years ago.  This weekend almost all of the above have been needed and on sale so I have spent $93 of my $300 grocery budget on these items.  But most of these should last the rest of the month if not several months

. First of all, let talk about Matt’s razors, I have learned that is it usually cheaper to buy him a whole new “Proglide razor” than purchase the replacement cartilages.  When we travel, he will use disposable ones just to save time. So I usually purchase disposable razors when I find a really good deal( less than $1.00) on them.  I know his preference for razors so if a good deal is running I will buy at least one and stick back, however this morning, he let me know that he was completely out of razors.  I checked my bag and found a rain check so this afternoon he was back in business. I love CVS because their rain checks never run out. I ended up spending $2.00 for his razor of choice!

Next is laundry detergent, I have tried several brands including the Kirkland one but return to Tide because it cleans and does not bother the sensitive skins of Lily or Zach. Tide usually goes on sale once every 3 months or so. I try to stock up but also know that I can grab an ok deal at Costco on Tide if I need to. I feel like the money I spend on Tide is made up with keeping the resale value of the kids clothes in addition to prolonging the life of most of the other clothes.  CVS also had a good deal on Tide so I purchased 4 20 load bottles. This should last until the next sale cycle.  The one exception I make in this area is a general exception across the board, if an item is free and I am shopping that store anyway, then I grab it. One of the black Friday deals at CVS was their brand laundry detergent, I grab both my free bottles. I will use these on our beach trip because I watch swim suits and towels every day or for towel at home. These are nice to have in a pinch as well. if it is free then it is worth one load of laundry.

Following close behind the laundry detergent is toilet paper. We have a really bad septic systems that we have spent several thousand dollars on in the past 4 years.  So I have to be careful what we put in it. I have found that Scott Extra Bath Tissue, first is soft enough to use and then is one of the safest for our system. Luckily, between coupons and sales, I can always find it for $0.45 cent a roll or less. Today, I grabbed it $0.40 cent a roll. In comparison when purchasing from Costco, I end up paying $0.63 a roll for the house brand, I purchased 54 rolls today so I am positive that we will be using them for several months!

Finally deodorant, I have always like Mitchum, luckily I am usually able to purchase for $1.00 or less a bottle I always grab as many as I have coupons for anytime I see them for this price. Matt on the other hand is adventurous in the area. But last year, he discovered “Right Guard” cooling effect. I have been able to stock pile about a 2 year supply so currently unless it is free, we don’t purchase any men’s deodorant!

January No/Low Spend Final Update!

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  • Get $100 in our Emergency Fund.  Transferred $100 today!
  • Pay off the outstanding Verizon bill from where we switch names
  • Deposit for Beach vacation
  • Reduce Groceries to$400 for the month with the remaining $200 set aside for Cheerleading competitions.  Total spent for Groceries $298.63.  I did use the remaining $100 on a order from Pamper Chef!  $212 used for Cheerleading competition spending money!
  • Transfer $50 to auto fund by the end of the month. This has been transferred! Goal Met!

 

I have  managed to met 3 out of 5 of my original goals, I am extremely pleased with these as they were made prior to our planning a trip to Michigan.  This was an awesome way to start the new year!  I will have my goals for February posted on Saturday!