New Year, Old Goals

My goals never really seem to change from year to year – spend less money, lose more weight, be a better person … you know, the usual stuff. Every year it’s pretty much the same goals – goals that are rarely reached and usually forgotten by the end of January. If I do happen to reach any of them, it’s strictly by chance that I accomplish anything I set out to do at the first of the year. The older I get, the worse I seem to get at this, too.

Even now, based on circumstances, goals are falling by the wayside, forgotten because of this constriction or that necessity. But I realize that even though they are often pushed aside, these goals I set every January aren’t unimportant. Quite to the contrary, they are usually very important. Case in point, spend less money. This is important for several reasons. One, Chris isn’t currently working. He’s looking for a job but so far he hasn’t found anything. Second, I could find myself either out of a job or with a greatly diminished salary (I have been appalled to find that jobs in my line of work that were paying up to $120k last year are often topping out at $70k). And finally and perhaps most importantly, we are not rich. This one is a bit of a shock to me – not that we aren’t rich, per se, but that the salary I bring home today isn’t worth a lot more than the salary I was bringing home ten years ago. I’m doing about the same with $80k a year that I was with $40k a year in 2000. That’s a bit disheartening, isn’t it? Actually, I think it’s possible that I’m not doing as well as I was back then.

And that’s what led to the discussion with Chris yesterday about saving money. Or at least, not spending as much on frivolous items. In this instance, frivolous items can be anything from gourmet cheese at the grocery store to cute fabric I just have to have for my stash to the latest in video games for the XBox. So we sat down and came up with a plan to save money and now we’re putting it into action. These are the basics of The Plan.

Grocery Store – Chris thinks we can do this on $50/week. I think he’s smoking something, but then I realize that he hasn’t been to the store in ages, so probably doesn’t realize how much it costs these days. I made a comment last week that my grocery bill has increased a LOT lately and the service manager replied that families are seeing increases of as much as 30% since September.

• Purchase enough meat for one week’s worth of meals. Choose these meats based on what’s on sale, not based necessarily on what we would like to eat.
• Lunch items for Chris and me.
• Breakfast items for the teenage boy.
• Weekend food items for lunch & breakfast to avoid the desire to run by Taco Bell or Whataburger.
• Staples like onions, potatoes, rice, flour, sugar, etc.
• For things like fresh veggies, we’ll make stops at the store as wanted/needed – this is to eliminate waste of items that don’t get used and instead go bad

Eating out/ordering pizza

• We have been eating out every Friday night, but now we’re cutting that back to twice a month. A typical meal out for three of us runs about $40; for all four of us (less common) it’s closer to $60.
• No more ordering pizza if we don’t feel like cooking. That usually costs about $30 … instead, I’ll stop by Walmart and get one or two of their take and bake pizzas, or we will make our own pizza at home.
• No weekend lunches instead of eating at home. Yep, we seem to do this far too often.

Other

• I agreed to give up my monthly quilt fabric budget in favor of using my stash, but with the cavaet that if I need to buy a filler piece or two, I can.
• We cut out the movie channels on the cable – I thought we’d already done this but apparently it didn’t go through. That will save us $44/month alone.
• I have two EverQuest 2 accounts – I’m cutting one of them off and keeping my main one active. Now that you can buy virtually unlimited slots on an account for a one-time fee of $10, I’ll do that when I want to expand my array of playing characters. This will save us $15/month and also the upgrade fee of $50 next month. Considering that we have four other accounts that will be upgraded, that may not seem like a huge savings, but it is our primary source of entertainment and about the only thing that truly isn’t up for a budget cut. I mean, if we HAD to, we would but … we don’t HAVE to at this point.
• We’re looking into purchasing a few things for the kitchen that will either 1) save us considerable time (like a pressure cooker) or 2) make a job easier (like cutting french fries). These one-time purchases should pay for themselves many times over.

So now, the only thing left to do is implement the plan, hone it and try to live by it.

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