Garden Fail

So, with doing this blog I need to be completely honest because life isn't always sunshine, roses and success.

In the spring we were all about doing a garden, we had the garden plotted out with what we were planting and plans to expand it.  We were going to try to preserve our harvest to eat during the winter. Well....... as you can see below, the garden didn't happen.

Between our son, my husband's alternative work schedule and me having to work a lot of overtime, the garden didn't come through. I did do a few tomato plants in buckets on our back deck. Sadly even the tomatoes did poorly and were devoured by slugs. So, overall, this year I feel like a garden failure.

But we have decided to make sure that our plans are ready to go for next year. We'll be preparing the gardens within the next month for next year. They have gotten overgrown this year from disuse. We'll rota-til it, spread some compost/fertilizer and cover it.  We're also going to prepare to expand it for next year.

I'll keep you updated about our progress of getting it ready. 

Ugh- another Reboot

Well, so my last foray into the blogging world went airy. I stopped writing because at the end of the day I was usually too exhausted or I was doing things, like dishes, laundry or putting in extra hours at work.

It seemed I just didn't have an extra minute, and when I did I usually spent it doing things like taking a shower. I never believed people when they said that having an infant was a full time gig and would take all your time. I (mistakenly) thought, hey infants sleep a lot, I'll have plenty of time to get things done. Well, that's the biggest load of crap ever, infants, even when sleeping, monopolize every second of every day.

Now, for those that easily get their hackles raised when kids are discussed; I love my son more than anything in the world. I wouldn't trade a single minute with him for anything else. I just didn't realize (like many first time parents) how much life will really change once you finally get your amazing bundle of joy.

We also fell off the budget wagon again, so, we're trying to get back on it. To start off, we're taking a long look at our spending and itemizing our purchases. My husband and I each have a credit card that we use, we do not use our debit cards and rarely use or have cash on us. So, it's pretty easy. We're going to be tracking them the old fashioned way, with a spreadsheet. It's a little more time consuming, but won't cost us anything but our time.

I'll be posting screen shots of these to show how I'm tracking everything. I'm also going to be trying different ways to make supplement income. We'll see how I do, so far I haven't been super successful.

Making the Most of your Benefits

I am lucky enough that I am able to work for a large national company. Something that I've learned (some of it the hard way) that I want to take a few minutes to discuss.

Read through what your benefits are relating to your 401K, many employers amount match up to a certain percent. If they match up to a certain percent, if you can afford it, make sure you have that percentage put into your 401k. If you don't you're losing free money! You wouldn't leave a $20 bill at the the cash register when you're done at the grocery store, why leave it in your employers pocket. 

There are a number of employers that offer other perks, make sure to leverage them to benefit you. Do you have kids, check to see if your employer offers a benefit for child care, mine gives a weekly subsidy. Is it a lot, no, but it takes only a few minutes to set up and puts a little extra money in your pocket. 

Another benefit that may be available relates to your health. Some employers or your insurance company will pay for your gym membership or give you some type of compensation for completing a certain number of work outs during a year. 

Some companies have benefits that could surprise you, one my company offers that my husband and I were considering at one time, is $10,000 towards your costs for adopting a child. We tried for 6 years to have our son, and we were seriously talking about adoption. Now that our little guy is here, that conversation has been tabled, at least for now. 

These benefits that your employer has and offers is part of your compensation for doing your job. Just like the health insurance they provide, it is something they offer to compensate you. So, make sure you use and take advantage of them.

You should be able to find these on your employers website or in your employee hand book. Make sure to take the time to look through what is offered. You might be surprised at what is available to you. 

Taking Advantage of Your Local Sales

When trying to save money and live frugally, a great way to cut down your grocery bill is shopping the sales. If you're able to match up even a few coupons you can rack up significant savings. This week Shaw's,  one of my local stores, was having a sale, buy 10 items and get them all for .79 each. The great thing about this sale is you can mix and match, so I got 4 cans of soup, a package of butter, a can of stewed tomatoes, 2 bags of frozen ravioli and 2 bags of frozen gnocchi.

By buying all 10 items I got them for .79 each. However, to make the sale better I did the following:

Soup- $1/4

Ravioli- $1/2

Gnocchi- $1/2

So, all 10 items cost me $4.90 or .49 each

Shaw's also had coupons in the paper recently for their brand, Value Corner. There were coupons for pasta, well, I found the pasta was .69 this week, and the coupon was for .50/1. So I got 2 packs of pasta for .19 each. 

They also had a sale on Kellogg's cereal, buy 4 for $10, that sale in itself isn't all that great. But, you can make it pretty good. Whenever I see Kellogg's on sale I always check Kellogg's.com for coupons. I found that they had a .40/1 Raisin Bran coupon and a .50/1 Rice Krispies. Well, my husband likes Rice Krispies and I like Raisin Bran, so that was perfect, I printed off 2 of each. So I got 4 boxes of cereal for $6.40, but Shaw's made the deal even better. They were giving away a gallon of milk with every purchase of 4 Kellogg's cereals. So I got 4 boxes of cereal and a gallon of milk for $6.40 or $1.28 each. Now these were full sized family boxes, not the small ones, so this was a pretty decent deal. 

I know a lot of people think, I just don't have time for all of that. Well, 30 minutes on a Saturday afternoon saved me $43.83, which is $87.66/hour. I don't know anyone that makes that amount per hour. To show you that I really did save that much, and that I saved more then I spent, I've put the receipt summary below. 

3 - Things I do to Find more Time in My Day

I'm a working mom, I clock forty+ hours a week and take care of my munchkin. My husband is very helpful, but he also works long hours. In order to do all the things I want to do and get done, I've had to get creative with my time. Working from home has been very beneficial to this, it allows me to do a few things on my lunch break, like the dishes, change the laundry, fold clothes, and other little cleaning things that add to the time I have later in the day. I make a daily list of everything I want to get done, usually it's a list of 10-20 things, which only 2-4 get done.

As any mom or dad of an infant knows, you jump when they cry. So, my to do list seems to keep getting longer and longer but as long as my house is sort of clean and my son is fed, bathed and happy, it doesn't matter. Now, some of the creative things I've done to find the time:

I purchased a baby carrier. The one I got was a MO+M carrier you can find it here on Amazon. I really like this pack. It is easy to use and allows me to work around the house while my little guy is able to have mommy time. He has even fallen asleep while I'm working around the house. I do struggle with trying to pick items up off the floor, but that is also due to having extra weight on my front.

I've also started trying to monetize my crocheting. I make little gum cleaners for babies. They are made with soft cotton and slip on your finger to clean your babies mouth. To do this, I need both hands, so, one place I've found time to do this is while traveling in the car. When my husband drives, I can crochet my finger covers. I've listed them on Etsy, you can find them here, hopefully they'll have some success.

If I don't have a set plan, I can be very loosey goosey and not get anything done. So, to combat this, I make lists, and once the list is done, I create a game plan. In my mind, I try to figure out the fastest way to get everything done. So, if my list has laundry, dishes, clean off the kitchen counters, sweep, hand wash the bottles, and make dinner. I start with laundry because it's a quick hit and the washing machine can be running while I get everything else done. Then I do the dishes, I want to be able to have them off the counter so I can clean it. Also, just like with the laundry, the dishwasher can run while I'm working on the next project. I usually jump next to hand washing the bottles, that helps with my cleaning off the kitchen counters, because it's hard to clean them off when the dirty bottles are some of the things sitting on them. Then I clean the counters, I want to make sure that they are clean and wiped down before I make dinner on them. Then I get dinner going, once it's whipped up and cooking, I do another quick clean of the counters. Then boom, sweep the floor and I'm done. I always sweep the floor last because even when you try to be careful, some food crumbs or stuff from the counters will fall on the floor.

Working to be self-sustaining

Today, I'm going to be talking a little more about our gardening plans and some of our goals with the garden. For us, part of saving money and becoming frugal, is becoming more self-sufficient. We want to not only have fresh veggies and fruits during the summer, but be able to preserve them for the winter as well. To this end, we are putting our large yard to use for us and planting as much as possible. Our big project this year is to expand the raised garden by 12 square feet. I know it sounds like a lot, but in order to make this feasible, we need the space.

Today, even though there is still quite a bit of snow, we set out our plans for this year.

Last year we planted 2 apple trees, we'll probably plant 1-2 more this year because we want to start being able to dry, can and freeze the apples. We're going to be trying to preserve as much as we can for use throughout the year. We'll be documenting everything as we do it, from the beginning.

We tried gardening last year, but with the pregnancy and my husband working extra hours, we weren't able to harvest and preserve a lot. This year I'm working from home, I won't be pregnant and my husband won't be working crazy hours, which will allow us time to make our gardens work for us. In addition to expanding our raised garden, we'll be re-arranging the flower garden to insert some herbs and veggies. I'll be adding tomatoes and peppers to the flower garden to maximize our growing space and potential.

We'll be planting a lot of herbs this year, we want to dry them for use throughout the year. Not only are herbs and spices expensive, but by growing them we can know where they came from, how they were handled and make our own spice blends.

We're using the same thought process for everything we'll be growing. We want to try to get a large yield of everything to get us through the as much of the winter as we can. The less we have to buy the less money we have to spend on food.

We're also going to be planting a large wildflower garden in a corner of the yard because we want to entice honey bees to come pollinate our gardens.

If we have any money left over, we'll be redoing our compost bin. Unfortunately, the one we inherited when we bought the house is not working out well. It's not large enough and it's not animal proof. We've had a few uninvited guests that helped themselves to it by ripping through the cloth sides. We'll be making one out of wood and chicken wire. We want to design it to have a small swinging door at the bottom to easily remove the lower layer of compost.

We're funding most of our projects by using the rewards points from our credit cards. We have credit cards that accumulate points that can be redeemed for gift cards and other items. So, we get gift cards to the hardware/gardening store, for us it's usually home depot, and voila! we have money to fund our garden projects. The points take a while to accumulate because we aren't (usually) high spenders. So, I've been planning this for a while. That's a key to being frugal, plan, wait and feel the rush of we did that.

Not planning is detrimental to being frugal, if you just wing your spending you'll never have enough and your budget will never balance. Well, I hope you enjoyed the photos of some of the wildlife near us, see you tomorrow.

Budgeting

I am not proud to say that my husband and I are living at the edge of our budget. We decided to take a mortgage that was a little higher than we were comfortable because we found our dream home. When we purchased the house we knew we were going to need to purchase an SUV because of where it was located. During our process of making the decision to take the mortgage and purchase an SUV, we were not planning on having a child. We had tried for six years to get pregnant and were feeling like it wasn't going to happen for us. As fate would have it, we found out three days after signing the paperwork that we were expecting our first child.

As you can imagine, after trying for so long we were absolutely ecstatic! But now, we're working diligently to pay off our student loans, mortgage and the car payment, all while having the expenses of a newborn.

This is why I've started writing this blog. I want to chronicle our journey to getting out of debt. We're going to be setting financial goals and trying to meet them. We don't like feeling like we are living paycheck to paycheck and not able to save anything.

My first order of business was to complete a financial review. I went through our credit card statements for the last three months to find out where we are spending our money and where we can cut out spending. Then I completed a budget. This may sound daunting but just take it piece by piece.

We thankfully only have three credit cards and never use our debit card for purchases. So, I started with one credit card and went thru three months of charges. I separated each store or purchase type and added up each one for that month. I listed some categories I used below:

Example Categories:  

Walmart
Dinner out
Grocery
Gas Station
Car Maintenance
Pharmacy

You'll need to tailor the categories to fit your personal purchasing patterns. I did this for all three of our cards and then totaled all the categories up to find out between all three cards what we spent. When listing out all the charges, don't skip one 'just because it'll never happen again' be honest wit your budget and yourself. If there is an expense that you won't be making again put it in a generic category. For us, the generic one was the part we bought for the dishwasher, we won't be buying it again but it was important. So, I put it under household maintenance.

This will give you a base line of what you're spending and where. This is really important to see where you can "trim the fat" or how much you need to budget for essentials. Out of all the times I've tried to budget, I've found this is the most important step. Without knowing what is being spent and where it's going you'll never be able to stick to your budget.

There are tons of sites that you can get free budget work sheets or even some that you can buy. I've tried some of the free ones, but I've never had any luck with them. So, for me the fastest and best way is to just put it all in an excel spread sheet.

Once you've done this you're halfway there! Don't give up and don't stop. Now go through your fixed monthly expenses, fuel, gas (for your car), mortgage, rent, etc. Once you've got all of these written down and added up you need to list out any and all expenses you have that are yearly, bi-yearly or quarterly, such as dog licensing fees, insurance, water bill, sewer bill, etc.

For those expenses you'll want to separate them to calculate how much you'll have to save each month to make sure you have them when they're due.

Next I calculated our monthly income. Once I have all the numbers, I subtracted all the monthly expenses, including the amount needed to be set aside for the other expenses, and found the amount we have left over at the end of every month. This is the amount we have to put in the savings account or to make an extra payment on one of our loans.

I hope this helps you, not only get motivated but maybe help you to get over that hump to get yourself financially motivated.