Mid-year Austerity Plan!

...like the European ones but without the riots.

So, there are a lot of things I need to be saving up for on the horizon: car, kids, projects around the house, September vacation, and student loan debt (this last one is more of a looming cloud than something on the horizon). I've decided I've been spending too much money on stuff. Also, I had a crapload of money at the end of the 2009 Year Without Shopping. It all went into my down payment on the house, but it's still kinda painful to see my account balance. I need to start making a "equity in the house" statement every month and sending it to myself, accounting for the rise/fall of our house value. Thankfully we bought at the bottom of the market, so now we have a 2-bedroom condo with a $90,000, 15-year mortgage. Actually, $90,000 was at the start a year ago. Now it's like $86,000. Boooooo, interest.

Anyways, we need new plan. At least until the State of Maine drops off some kids at our door, rings our doorbell, and runs. Hopefully we'll be home at the time.

*Eating restaurant food is back to the 2009 plan: one dinner and one breakfast/lunch/brunch a week.

*Buying stuff: clothes, books, and STUFF is out. No knick-knacks, no decor. Stuff for around-the-house projects is okay. No more plants either, I think. Went a little crazy with the backyard there.

*Groceries: one trip a week to Hannaford, Whole Foods, and the Farmers Market (each gets 1 trip/week). I'm thinking of instituting a hard $80/week grocery and toiletries budget for 2 people. I think this is highly doable. I'm not even sure we spend that much now, actually.

*Exceptions: stuff for our backpacking vacation in September (gear only, no new clothes and nifty gadgets) and on a related note, 3 automatic cat feeders. Also, dance-related shoes at some point. Oh, and maybe running shoes.

*Entertainment: I'm thinking no rule is needed here. We're too freakin' tired these days to go out to shows and movies much, so it's not a huge part of our spending.

Okay! I feel good about this! Gonna miss the second-hand stores and the flea-marketing but those always provided me with too good of an excuse to buy crap we don't need. Although angry fisherman lamp is here to remind me of why I love flea markets so much:

New Ideas?

Some ideas that we had thrown around for 2009 and 2010 that never came to fruition:

(1) buying only food items at the grocery that have a minimum % of your RDA of vitamins/nutrients (like each item must have at least 30% of your RDA of any one vitamin, mineral, protein, fiber, etc). This was vetoed by Elliott. I think we would have been so miserable our relationship might not have survived it. Also I'm not sure how it would have worked mathematically-- like, I wouldn't be allowed to buy cocoa powder because it doesn't contain any nutrients even if I plan to have it in soy milk, but I could buy chocolate soy milk b/c it's already combined?

(2) All non-consumable goods purchased must be second-hand. This was almost our pact in 2010 after we discovered the Brunswick "Antique Mall" (read: dead grandmothers' attics). In some of the booths you can still smell grandma. Dead grandma.

There was also the Second Time Around Annex on Fore Street where tops were $5, pants were $10, and jackets were $20. Of course, it closed about 2 weeks after I first discovered it. Hey, I'm currently wearing a sweater I bought there.

I think the second idea is still doable. Maybe we'll start the year in March. Or wait until 2011. Thing is, we bought a condo in August and we're still tweaking/insulating/decorating. I'll post some pics of my favorite flea market finds, including our angry fisherman lamp.

How Far Did Your Food Travel-- Winter Edition

This is my second winter in Maine... snow has lost all novelty, I've completely wiped out coming out of my office TWICE (this winter), and I hear there's a brutal cold front coming in. Winter, which I used to think consisted of December and January, is losing its appeal. Or, has lost its appeal. Its' only saving grace is that winter is citrus season, and I love blood oranges. Cara cara oranges are a distant second, and anything in the tangerine/tangelo family is up there too.

Anyways, MSNBC has this slideshow of which foods travel the farthest in winter. Basically it's a list of non-winter produce grown in South America and Asia so that the rest of the world does not have to deal with seasonality in their diets. The slideshow only deals with traveling distance and not growing conditions, and as someone who bought strawberries earlier this week, I have to wonder about the energy used to grow stuff within the US but in greenhouses. Like the Backyard Beauty tomatoes that are ubiquitous in New England year-round and are indoor-grown in Maine. What's the carbon footprint of THAT?

How Did We Do?

On the major elements:

(1) Not shopping: great, until mid-December. The only notable purchases before December were 2 shower curtains (for a clawfoot tub) and a portable dishwasher ($125 from Craigslist), both when we moved into the new apartment. Oh, and 2 Halloween costumes purchased from Goodwill (and returned to the Goodwill bin, so the money spent was pretty much a donation, I think).

(2) Buying US-grown groceries or organic: okay. The organic exception was supposed to be for coffea/tea but I ended up using it more than I expected, which really adds to your grocery bill. But it takes about 5 seconds to look for an organic label, it takes about a minute to see if something is actually US-grown. Except for produce, usually the answer is unclear anyways. This was by far the suckiest part of the experiment. I thought we'd get into a groove of what we could/could not eat but even at the end I was still constantly checking labels.

(3) Not driving less than 2 miles: pretty good. Only major exceptions were late at night when I didn't feel safe walking home and maybe a couple of times last winter when the sidewalks were like skating rinks.

(4) Eating out at restaurants: limit was one breakfast or lunch and one dinner out per week. This rule didn't apply to Elliott, but even so I think we did pretty well. This is definitely one cost I think we should cut down on in the following year. The thing is, when you limit going out to eat, you feel entitled to spend more than you normally would. So you don't feel so guilty about ordering that extra drink or appetizer, or dessert, even if you normally wouldn't. Plus if you're not eating at a big chain restaurant, you tell yourself you're helping the local economy!

I'd say most dinners cost us around $30-40 total and breakfast probably around $20-25. So per year, a low estimate is $2,600; a high estimate is $3,380. That's a lot of money.

Mall!.. and other shopping...

To sum up the last 2 weeks in December:

I bought Elliott's x-mas present: 1 stainless steel water bottle ($13) and a pair of house slippers ($24). Elliott went the more eco-friendly, non-consumerist route and got me tickets to Diavolo at Merrill Auditorium.



I bought $78 worth of stuff at Swimoutlet.com-- 2 swimsuits, 1 pair of swim trunks for Elliott, a swim cap, and goggles. Actually, it was $58 because I returned one of the swimsuits.

We bought a 12-piece Pyrex storage set and 4-cup measuring cup at Bed, Bath, and Beyond ($32 minus $10 coupon minus $5 rebate = $17) and threw out a lot of the plastic ware. I'm really bad about re-using takeout containers; I can't bear to throw them out or recycle them. So this is a step in the right direction of not giving ourselves cancer.

Anntaylorloft.com had this buy one get one free sale (I get their promo emails to my hotmail account-- big mistake!). They also had this navy blue trench coat I've been eyeing ever since Meredith wore one on this episode of Grey's Anatomy waaaaay back. So I got one in navy blue and my sister got one in khaki for a total of $140.



The day after Christmas we had to kill some time while in Ellsworth so we stopped by the LL Bean Outlet there and bought: 1 sweater for Elliott ($20), 2 sweaters for me ($12 and $15), Bean bag ($7), and a Stonewall Kitchen gift basket (for us; $12).

And the one trip that occurred January 1 (no rulebreaking!): I got this $50 gift card to the mall from work. I'm very proud to say even though I've lived in Portland for over 1.5 years, this was my first time actually in the mall (okay, one time I went into Linens 'n Things to buy one item and one time we went to Macy's because Elliott had a gift card, but both times were before this experiment and we didn't actually venture into the mall part). Anyways, it reminded me why I don't shop at malls. Eighty percent of the people were middle and high schoolers killing time and the other 20% are people walking slower than molasses in January... in Maine... northern Maine. We spent what seemed like forever there but at the end of the day I had an additional two pairs of office-appropriate pants plus a sweater ($40 + $14 + $25 - $50 gift card = $29). Elliott got 2 pairs of pants for $25 (total!), which were put on a gift card. I never thought going shopping at a mall would ever be an "event" in my life but... here we are. Oh, and the car wouldn't start when we were trying to leave the mall; I can't figure out if this was the mall gods trying beckon us back in or the anti-mall gods punishing us. Thankfully a good samaritan gave us a jump.

$1000 per week?!?

WaPo has this story today about the Wheelock family in Alexandria, Virginia, not spending money for 2 weeks, including groceries (everything but bills and the mortgage). Apparently they didn't stock up beforehand, they just went cold turkey one day, which I think is impressive. Here's how it went:

One of the saving graces of the experiment, they said, was their decision to keep up with their prepaid weekly fresh milk and egg farm co-op vegetable deliveries. Other than that, they ate out of the fridge. Katy Wheelock took the breadmaker out of its box and began baking bread, substituting honey for sugar when the sugar ran out.

They dug through mysterious packets of meat in the freezer -- finding a leg of lamb that saved them one night when they had to entertain -- and finished all those dusty cans of black beans, olives and soup and packages of pasta, rice and weird taco seasonings stashed in the back of their cupboards.

"The first week was pretty normal," Austin Wheelock said. "But the second week was," he paused, "a little leaner."

But by then, they were hooked on not spending. Finding savings provided the same feeling of instant gratification that a little retail therapy does, Katy Wheelock said.

It was agonizing when, with the help of mint.com, a free money-tracking software program, she tallied the family's expenses. In October, the Wheelocks had spent $844 eating out. In November, $200. In October, they had spent $1,171 shopping, and for the life of her, she can't remember what they bought. In November: $224. And in the "personal care" category, they'd spent $313 in October. In November, $0.

By using mint.com to track their expenses (and non-expenses), the mom of the family estimates they saved $2,000 over the course of two weeks. This seems to me a little insane for a family of four...

I'm out.

Yeah, I've been eyeing several winter coats for a while now and there's this one I like-- classic but not boring, synthetic insulation, hood, long length, not too sporty and not too dressy, and age-appropriate for someone coming out of her 20s.



Anyways, the available sizes seem to be disappearing fast on several sites, which really had me worrying. So yeah, I bought it. Got a pretty good deal, and I also got something for Elliott so he wouldn't complain.

The way I see it, my current coat is too thin, too short, too "I'm in my early 20's," and someone else could probably use it this winter. I've had a good 7-8 years with it. So hopefully it'll find a good home.