My Monthly Trade-Off: Extreme Frugality in One Area, Overspending in Another

Every month, after most of my bills are paid, the groceries are bought and the last thing that I must pay for before the month ends is a tank of gas, I start reviewing my income and spending. It seems that every month I manage to scrimp and save in one area while I spend more in another. In April, I spent very little on food, but a ton on leisure and entertainment. In May so far, I've spent very little on leisure, more on food than usual, and quite a bit on travel (a weekend in San Diego for Fiance's birthday.)

I already save about 10% of my wages, and by month's end I've usually got some extra income that I can also throw into savings - I'm doing very well in that regard. If I exercised some serious self-discipline, I could easily be saving another two to three hundred a month. Most of my friends consider my ability to hang on to my money something of a feat, but I still look at my ledgers at the end of the month and think "Damn! I really shouldn't have spent $X on Y!"

At the end of the day where I spend and where I save in any given month comes down to a value judgement. In May it was "Do I want beers out at the bar & a bunch of new books or do I want to spend a nice weekend with my boyfriend in San Diego?" I chose San Diego, which turned out to be a great idea. In June, I'll be paying for my share of Fiance & I's plane tickets to North Carolina. I'm a displaced Southerner who hasn't been home in four years, so obviously my $266 round trip ticket is well worth drastically curbing my spending in another area.

As the trip to Carolina, the wedding, and eventually married life come closer, I'm sure I'll need to start exercising the willpower to be mega-frugal in more than one category at a time. So here's my game plan:

(1) Leave my debit and credit cards at home. I already leave my credit card at home most of the time, but unless I need to buy gas I really don't need to bring my debit card to work with me. Sometimes the Starbucks across the parking lot calls my name a little too loudly, especially on my morning shifts.

(2) Make sure I'm setting aside time to pre-cook meals and snacks. For the most part I'm pretty good about this, but this summer I'll be in one pretty intense 4 hours four days a week class, an online class, working full time, and planning a wedding. I won't be able to just throw something together when I feel like it. Also, I'm likely to be pretty stressed out. When I'm stressed I either stop eating altogether, or I overeat. If I've got healthy food readily available, I'll be less likely to cave and make a beeline for Chick-fil-a.

(3) Write notes to myself. For example "If you spend $30, you have to cross out one wedding guest!" or "You need this for RENT!" I'm so disciplined most of the time that I generally have $5-$25 to burn if I feel like it. I can sometimes be flippant about spending a little here and there. Most of the time I fight the urge off, but sometimes I fail. Hopefully having visual reminders in my purse, checkbook, and taped to my debit/credit cards will help.

(4) Keep Fiance in the Loop. The fact that he & I are fairly minimalist frugal mostly-vegetarians bodes well for our marriage. The more in the loop I keep him, the more he can help out by saying, "Ummm, honey are you sure you need ANOTHER wedding planning book?"

(5) Stay home more often. Just walking out of the door and starting up the car is spending money. If I stay home I can cook, keep my room organized, post to BurnFive, do surveys, tons of productive stuff- most of which will save or bring in money, as opposed to spending it.

Hopefully in June I'll be able to keep all unnecessary spending to a minimum, instead of just some of it.

For the Locals: Two Free Tickets to the Pacific Symphony!

Not "click here to WIN two tickets," just straight up free tickets. Go on over to the Orange County's Pacific Symphony website, fill out the form, and you're good to go.

Turn your free tickets into a cheap but classy date (or girl's night or guy's night) by cooking a fancy meal at home and then going out for dessert.

I have no idea how long this giveaway will last.

Google Reader Starred Items Round-Up!

I adore Google Reader. Here are some of the highlights from my starred personal finance item over the last month or so.

Want Some Extra Income? Try Odd Jobs! from The Digerati Life. A wonderful article on bringing in more income without losing your mind.

Are You and Ant or a Grasshopper? from Jason White at Wise Bread. I'm definitely a grasshopper turned ant.

What To Do With Your Economic Stimulus Payment (Or Any Found Money) from Consumerism Commentary. A shakedown of useful ways to spend windfalls.

Healthy, Frugal Eating by Philip Brewer at Wise Bread. "Every so often, I get hit in the face with two facts. First, Americans (even poor Americans) are unbelievably rich. Second, Americans (as a group) utterly lack a cultural tradition that teaches us how to eat a healthy, frugal diet."

10 Ways to Save Real Money from The Consumerist. The premier finance and consumer advocacy blog doles out some great advice on keeping your cash.

The Frugal Lifestyle: Are We Missing Out On Life? from Consumerism Commentary. Personally I'm a big fan of missing out on some things if it means I can go to Paris or not panic when my car breaks down.

Missing Money: Troll the Web for Abandoned and Unclaimed Property Owed to You from Consumerism Commentary again. After reading this article, I discovered that an old apartment management company owed me and my former roommates $475. Now if I can just gather the three other girls, we can cash the check and split the money.

Books For Every Level of Financial Acumen at SavingAdvice.com. A great list of books on personal finance. Many of these can be found at Goodwill, on Bookmooch, or online for cheap. Don't go broke building a personal finance library!

Carnival of Personal Finance #153

This week's carnival is up at Money & Values. Tons of great articles, as usual. Go check it out!

The Battle of the Air Conditioner, or 5 Ways to Beat the Heat

If you live in Southern California, the most painful bill to pay in the summer is the electricity bill- the dry heat out here is awful. The other day one of my roommates and I had the on/off battle of the air conditioner. She kept turning it on, I kept turning it off. To be fair, her room is on the second floor, covered in windows and has a ceiling fan way too high to actually circulate air around the room, it's pretty much a solar oven up there. But we live on a lake, so once you get the windows open and a fan that actually moves the air around, not so awful. What we really need are fans that will fit in the windows, especially in her room.

What struck me the most about our air conditioner battle (and I use the term battle loosely, we weren't really fighting), was that when we finally crossed paths I pointed out that running the AC would add up - our energy bill could easily be $100+ higher than the $120-$150 we've been cruising at for the past three months (for a four bedroom house with three adults and a kid in Southern California, mind you). Her response was "It's so hot, I don't care how much it costs!" She wasn't being a baby or anything, it was terribly hot yesterday- but because the rest of us are content to put on a tank top, open the windows and turn on a fan, we'd have been pretty bitter about that extra $100 on the power bill. I handed her the biggest fan in the house and sent her back upstairs with instructions to open her windows and crank the fans.

To be sure, there was a time in my life (about three apartments ago) when the cost of running an air conditioner didn't matter to me. Utility bills are one of the easiest ways to bleed money: running the AC at full blast because it's hot, using the dryer instead of hang drying clothing, running the dishwasher instead of just washing dishes by hand - it is very easy to disconnect from the actual cost of running an appliance if it makes our life easier.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but I'd rather keep the money in my pocket and take ten minutes to hang dry my clothes or three seconds to turn on a fan or open a window than pay an extra $100 a month in bills. To that end, here are a few tips to on keeping cool:

(1) Open your windows! When air can circulate through the house, it stays cooler. Use fans to help it along.
(2) Drink water! The more hydrated you are, the less hot you'll feel.
(3) Fill a spray bottle with water and keep it in the fridge. Every now and then, spritz yourself. This might actually be better than air conditioning.
(4) Fill up some water guns and go outside. Try not to run up your water bill too much, but having a water fight will cool you off considerably. The water bill will almost always be less than the power bill, even if you set up a Crocodile Mile for an afternoon.
(5) Wear less. Tank tops and shorts are your friends. Even if you're alabaster white like me, who cares? The fashion police probably won't beat down my door for wearing cut offs and a tank top around my home when it's 90+ degress outside. And who cares if they do?

Vegas Will Probably Begin To Look Good Soon

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I got engaged on Friday and I'm in the "OHMIGOD I'm going get married!!!" phase. Luckily, I knew it was coming (though he still managed to surprise me with the proposal). I set aside a little money and a ton of bookmooch points for when I finally had a ring on my finger. I've got about 11 books and 2 planners now - all for less than $20. The initial "ohmigod I need books!" phase could have easily run me more than $100 had I just waltzed into Borders and bought out the Wedding section.

Now, of course, it's time to start figuring out how on earth we're going to have a big wedding in Southern California without going into debt. Folks have suggested to me that I could have "something, small. Wouldn't that be cute and inexpensive?" To that all I can say is "Have you met me?" - I'm not really the small wedding type. So over the next year I'm going to have to figure out how to balance the scale of the wedding with the size of our budget. Yikes.

We've already determined that our biggest priority is Not Cutting the Guest List. And I know for a fact that I won't be spending $1000+ on my gown alone (it frightens me that people do this!), though how I'm going to go about keeping those expenses low I'm not sure yet. We're lucky that we've got six (2 from him, 4 from me) supportive parents who will be helping us offset some of the costs, and I've got my obsessively organized younger sister as the Maid of Honor - no need for an overly particular wedding consultant with her around! Still, most of the expenses will be covered by Fiance & I. Yikes.

Carnival of Personal Finance #152

Money Under 30 hosted Carnival of Personal Finance this week and included my price book post. Here are the editor's picks from this week's carnival!

* You Don’t Need That! 8 Tricks for Impulse Control
* 10 Steps to Avoid Becoming a Millionaire
* From a Yield of -99.79% to +9.99% This Year So Far
* The Problem of Accounting and Budgeting For Cash Expenses
* Are You Ready for a Disaster?

I Was the Last to See Juno...

Possibly the most difficult aspect of living within my means is controlling my impulse buys. After years of not policing myself at all, I find myself in a position where I can got out to dinner and a new release movie AND drinks afterward if I so chose, and I do sometimes. The catch is that I now find myself honestly distressed when I know I've paid too much for something. Roommates, Boyfriend and I went to see a movie a week or so ago, and even with a student discount my ticket was $10. I could have seen THREE movies at the second run theater with that. I try not to think about it.

If I'm out running errands and I find myself getting hungry, I might buy a muffin or something. I can certainly afford this, but again - knowing that I could have made at least 6 muffins at home for the price of one bought ready-made? Totally stresses me out. When I go out the the bar and order a $3 (plus $1 for tip!) beer, all I can think about is how that's half a six pack.

This fussiness extends to those around me too. When I see someone paying more for something than they have to, I feel my bossypants-know-it-all tendencies beginning to twitch. Most of the time I keep my mouth shut, but sometimes I can't help but blurt out "Oh my god! You could have gotten that for at LEAST $5 less!"

But even though these purchases stress me out, I still find myself making them from time to time. Luckily most of my impulse buys are well under $20 (most are $10 or less), and I don't make too many of them. I might spend an unplanned $10 a week, usually on entertainment/books/beer. That's $520 a year!

Even if I'm still making impulse buys, I try to be certain that I'm getting the most for my money. When I talk about trying to slash my spending there are folks who laugh at me, but to be honest I'd rather spend $9 on a six pack and a second run movie theater ticket than $15+ on a beer in a bar and a new release movie ticket. If I'm going to spend $520 a year on entertainment - I better have been entertained as much as possible, dangit.

A Universal Casserole Recipe

In The Tightwad Gazette III, Amy Dacycyzyn gives a universal casserole recipe, sent in by one of her readers.

Universal Casserole Recipe
1 cup main ingredient
1 cup second ingredient
1-2 cups starchy ingredient
1.5 cups binder
.25 cup "goodies"
seasoning
topping

She suggested mostly meats for the main ingredient (tuna, chicken, turkey, ham, seafood), but you could also use vegetarian options: kidney beans, tofu, even veggie dogs. Her suggestions for a second ingredient were celery, mushrooms, peas, & chopped hard boiled eggs, but this could really be anything. Starchy ingredients could be potatoes, noodles or rice. Suggested binders are soup or sour cream. Mix your ingredients, place the mixture in a casserole dish and then bake at 350 degrees for 30 - 45 minutes.

My favorite variation on this is what I call Quasi Jambalaya Casserole (emphasis on the quasi). The main ingredient is a combination of shrimp/chicken/sausage, the second ingredient is a combo of diced tomatoes/celery. My starchy ingredient, rice. I usually use a combo of tomato sauce and sour cream as the binder. I season it with cayenne, paprika, thyme, oregano, some onion powder, and a pinch of ground bay leaves. For the topping, I'll make a small batch of biscuit dough or cornbread batter and spoon it over the top.

It's fairly easy to take this universal recipe and use up your leftovers or random packages of food given to you by sympathetic parents/teachers/neighbors. Heck sometimes you just have random food sitting around - a casserole is a great way to make sure those foods don't go to waste.

Knowing how to make a casserole might not make you hip (in fact, it might be one of those things that officially qualifies you as an adult on some level), but it'll definitely use up the last chicken breast and the last bit of that package of frozen cauliflower you'd completely forgotten about until it resurfaced on top of the ice cream. It's a perfect cheap meal for weeks when the bills swing your bank account just a little too close to zero for comfort.

Save a Ton on Food with a Price Book!

In April, I started putting together the beginnings of a price book for grocery shopping. I recorded the lowest price per unit for every item I might need to buy in May at three different stores, two near my house and one near my work. Buy researching prices before I shopped, saved anywhere from 5 cents to over a dollar per unit on nearly every item. My May shopping haul should keep my basics stocked for a month or more.

To make your own, make a list of the items you buy the most often (save your grocery receipts to help figure this out). Make a seperate list for each store you plan to shop at. Record the price of the item, the weight, and the price per unit of weight. For items like bagels, use 'bagel' as the unit of measure. Sometime packaging can be tricky, a 10 pound bag of flour might cost more per pound than buying two 5 pound bags. Buying items based on unit cost rather than total price gets you far more for your money. By the same token, buying TOO much of something because it's cheaper per unit can be a bad idea if you won't use up the item before it expires. Once I gather the data, I use Excel to sort it; first by item, then by unit price.

I did my shopping last week using my price book. I was able to reference it when confronted with a sale price - even though cheese might be 25% off at one store, its everyday price might be still lower than that at another store. If a price went up between my price survey and my actual shopping day, I could use my list to determine whether to go ahead and buy the item or if I should wait and buy it for less at the next store.

The cost in gas was probably negligible, Fresh & Easy and Stater Brothers are less than five miles from my house and Food 4 Less is less than a mile from work. Eventually I'm going to see if the money I save comparison shopping is negated by the gas mileage I use by shopping at three different stores. I've got a sneaking feeling that I'm still saving money.

My impulse buy was three 10 packs of Jalapeno & Cilantro Tortillas at Fresh & Easy. They were marked down and 50% off, making them not too much more than a 30 pack of plain flour tortillas at Food 4 Less. This came out to about a $1 splurge. Even though I bought a slightly more expensive item, my price book told me just exactly how much more I was spending.

The initial gathering of price data for a price book can be a pain in the butt, but once you've gotten it once, you can keep it updated using your grocery receipts. It may seem like a lot of work, but when you make $1400 a month, every little bit counts!