Doubling Everything But Your Money

I promise I'll have some cute kid pictures soon, but I'm still reeling from my most recent trip to my friendly neighborhood grocer.

You have to understand how I grocery shop--I don't go every week.  Here's what it looks like at our house:

Every six months we go to Costco and spend about $300 on big bags of flour, rice, beans, and sugar, and cases of canned milk, canned fruit and veggies, pasta, coffee, and Nutella.  (Everyone needs some luxury on their toast.)  Every year we spend about $700 purchasing an entire cow from a rancher, having it slaughtered, and wrapped for our freezer.  This takes care of a large bit of our dry goods and almost all our meat for about $1300 per year.  As we eat down the beef I buy and freeze butter 4 lbs at a time.  Cheese I could theoretically freeze, but we eat it too fast for that.  (Roughly 5 lbs of cheddar alone, per month.  Seriously.)

But in between, we need milk and eggs and salad greens (the season here lasts about a month and greens can simultaneously have bolted and be frost-nipped, so no, I do not grow all my own) and bananas.  So for a few things, I shop like normal people, just once every two weeks or so and for the same items.

This week I needed some things that we usually store in the pantry--ground coffee, for one.  It's been at least 2 months since I bought ground coffee at the grocery store; then a can of Folger's cost $5.99.  This week it was $9.99--on sale for $1 off--and the can is smaller.  I have an old one (Miss Boo likes to freestyle drum with it) and compared.

I don't like buying bread but with my sciatica, we were--the bread that was $2.50 last time I bought it is now $4.25.  The price of milk is holding steady, but 5 measly chicken breasts cost $12.95--more than two bucks a cutlet, my friends.

And then we got the phone bill and found that, through adding 40 cents to a tax here, and $2 to a fee there, our flat rate has gone up by $28 per month.  Now, $28 per month is not going to break us, but I still wish that they had mentioned something about these coming fees *last* month.  As it is, I can make it break almost even by cancelling our long distance plan that we never use, and using cell phones instead.  (We need the landline to get the internet, or we wouldn't have a house phone at all, I think.)

What do these trends indicate?

Well, I said in my last post that a lot of people are finding they should spend less this year.  I think this confirms it: when folks are making less money (for instance, the Husband's company has frozen raises for the last couple of years, from the CEO on down--and they are furloughing workers during shutdowns) and necessary things like bread and meat are getting twice as expensive, then it's time to batten the hatches a bit.

Just a bit, if you are squeamish or fear that I'm going to make you eat mashed turnips.  I mean things like why not invest in one of those re-usable cups-that-looks-like-a-Starbucks-cup that I see popping up in Target/Walmart/Kmart, and take your home-brewed coffee to work in it?  From a distance, you'll still look like you're spending $6 for a cup of coffee, if you care about that sort of thing.  (Remember, I was shocked that a whole can of coffee that makes 120 cups cost $9.99--I'm trying hard to be sympathetic to those sensitive to coffee peer pressure, but I'm failing kind of miserably.)

I sort of like the frugality game, so we're returning to basics at my house.  I'm making bread again--with the mixer that the Husband gave me for my birthday it's practically effortless--and after figuring out that disposable diapers for Bud + disposable training pants for Miss Bo = at least $160 per month, I pulled out the cloth diapers again.  (Lazy, what can I say.  Being pregnant/morning sick/sciatica-ed kicked my behind.  But I am feeling better for the moment.  And Pullups are way, way expensive.)  For the last two days we've made the cloth diapering/cloth training pants a point.  Miss Boo has decided that Diapers Are For Babies, Not Girls and Mama has rediscovered that it's really not that hard.  And I'm calling the phone company in the morning.

I tell you all this, instead of just pretending like of course we never fell into the disposable diaper pit, so that you don't get discouraged with your own attempts to be good stewards of your money.  So you knew better and you didn't do it.  So what?  Fix it now.

One thing I should point out, though the tail end of a post probably isn't the place--don't stop tithing just because you have less to tithe with.  God still wants you to take care of the needy, and if you have a computer screen to read this on I'm betting you can find people who are more needy than you are.  Maybe you can't give them money, but you can always add a little water to the soup, right?  Make sure your elderly or alone neighbors aren't lonely and cold this time of year, especially if you've got the woodstove burning anyway.  Invite them over for a chat, or go to their house with a plate of gingerbread.  For the price of a little molasses, you might save a life--and you'll make the Lord smile.

Cheers,

Breanna

EDIT: The Husband kindly corrected my math.  It isn't $700 total for the cow--that's just what we pay the rancher--the cut and wrap is another $350 or so.  So our meat for the year (and some to give away because of the size of our freezer) is about $1100, give or take, bringing my figure to around $1400.