So today was more failure, of a sort. There's a bridal shower Friday evening, and after much dithering I decided that merited breaking the no spending rules. No, it's not a necessity - but it's also not the bride's fault that her shower and wedding fall in the middle of my experiment. So off to Target, where I got a bridal shower gift - and also bought some allergy medicine. I've been miserable the last couple of days, and I'm not willing to be miserable for the sake of my experiment. I also bought a book of stamps. I did spend a while thinking about how I would have handled these things if I really had no money to spend - I could have bought a cheaper gift, but most likely I would have skipped the shower because I couldn't afford to bring something. And I most likely would have bought just the stamps I needed (which would mean driving to the post office every time I had something to mail) and suffered with the allergies. I think I'm glad I'm not that close to broke in reality.
Then I did my first grocery shopping trip. $5 doesn't go very far! I actually spent almost double that, but then again this was my first shopping trip of the month (thanks to not needing to buy milk because of Girls Camp). I needed milk (which I've gone without since Camp because I've been to lazy/allergy-ish to go shopping) and bread, and bagged salad was on sale this week. So I bought a gallon of milk ($2.99), a loaf of bread ($1.79), two bags of lettuce ($1.98), buttermilk to make Uncle Dan's ($.49), 3 bananas ($.99), a cucumber ($.88), and a bunch of green onions ($.69). Total: $9.81. Sigh. I could have skipped the bananas, but I like them with my breakfast cereal. And obviously I could have skipped the extras for the salad and just had lettuce with my emergency dressing in the fridge. Only to stay within the $5 limit, I would have had to skip the lettuce, too, and just get bread and milk. Or I could have gone with a half gallon of milk and just had it on my cereal. Basically, I've concluded that $5/week would be a meager existence indeed! On the other hand, I'm also at half way through the month today, and have spent less than (barely!) half my money. (Yes, the problem were this a long-term financial thing is that I'm also eating my way through what I already have on hand....)
So half-way through, here are my half-baked conclusions:
- the need to spend money pops up constantly - stamps, gifts, etc.
- it's much, much easier to not spend money by not leaving the house - it's really hard to not spend money when standing in the middle of Target and seeing all the sweet deals
- I will spend a lot less on groceries if I learn to make a list and stick to it - and then eat what I buy without letting things spoil - but I will still spend more than groceries cost in my head. Apparently, my grocery budgeting mind is trapped about 3 decades ago. Or to put it another way - I know milk is around $3 a gallon, and bread at least $1-2, but when I put it all together $5 seems way excessive for one gallon of milk and one loaf of bread.
- I really like a lot of inexpensive foods that I could make with much more regularity. I hardly ever think to make cornbread (I only associate it with chili for some reason), but I like it a heck of a lot. I also like quite a few easy things to make. And while it seems like cooking from scratch is too time consuming beforehand (when starving of course), it really doesn't take much time at all. Or maybe it's that I'm occupied doing something, so I don't think about it? Anyway, I used to be at least decent about planning a menu based around what I had on hand and what was on sale that week, then making up a couple of things on the weekend and eating the leftovers (sometimes remixed to seem like it's something new) all week. I have no idea when I got away from that, but I need to get back to it.
2 comments:
Like all good plans it's easier to think up and write down than it is to implement it.
gram
Mmmm...cornbread.
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