Frugal Intuition

So my grand holiday plan of having a family drawing so that everyone was buying one gift and that was it–we were all going to focus on the food?

Totally went kablooey.

The family was all “oh what a good idea” and then everybody backed out.

So we are back to the drawing board about how to afford Christmas.  As I’ve said before, I’m a huge fan of gifts from the kitchen, and I think that’s going to be our saving grace.   So in honor of that concept, I’ve gathered up some websites providing suggestios for exactly that:

Gifts From Your Kitchen

Food Gift Recipes and Jar Mixes for the Holidays

For the not cooking inclined 10 No-Cook Food Gift Ideas

A Homemade Christmas

Gifts From Your Kitchen: Personal and Delicious Ideas

Healthy Holiday Gifts From the Kitchen

Teri’s Kitchen: Recipes for Gifts From The Kitchen

There are lots of other make it yourself ideas for holiday gifts, and I’ll address some of those as the holidays get closer.

If you’ve got any other great links for homemade gifts, do share!

We’ve got family in town for a full week.  I will save my plots on how to get guests to leave before they overstay their welcome for another post.  Today I want to focus on how you feed a pack of people for a week without breaking your grocery budget.

The key is, of course, to find a way to stretch your most expensive grocery commodity: meat.  Below I’ve got a bit of a recipe round up for 7 days of dinner for guests–all you’ll need is a whole chicken, 1 pound of smoked sausage, and 3 pounds of ground beef:

Chicken Loaf : a poultry variation on your mom’s classic meatloaf, this simple casserole stretches chicken with rice, breadcrumbs, eggs and a can of the eve-present cream of mushroom soup.

Shepherd’s Pie : another casserole classic, you can stretch your ground beef with the addition lof lots of veggies (healthier that way too).

Stuffed Bell Peppers : another ground beef stretcher calling for rice and mushrooms

Black Beans and Rice : 1 package of keilbasa or smoked turkey sausage takes center stage here with rice, rotel, black beans, and a few other pantry staples.

Taco Soup : our current guests requested this one–it’s a family favorite.

Spicy Corn Chowder :  this one uses no meat at all, but is very very filling

Chicken Pot Pie : another crowd pleaser

Today’s post doesn’t have much do to with saving money. Well, depending on how prone you are to believing the forwards that land in your inbox, I suppose it could, but I’m thinking about this more in terms of time savers and courtesy. Forwards are, as far as I’m concerned, one of the banes of email. To me they are just a lazy person’s way of sending some communication and say to me “You aren’t important enough to me to actually take the time to write a personalized and real letter.” Call me old fashioned if you will. Now I’m willing to admit that some of the ones out there are pretty darn funny or cute (I have a weakness for cute puppy and kitty pictures), and those aren’t the ones I’m talking about today. No, the ones I want to talk about are the ludicrous, alarmist forwards that proclaim that there’s some huge computer virus coming, that if some dude approaches you in the parking lot of the mall and tries to give you a business card the drugs on it will absorb instantly into your system and knock you out so that you can be kidnapped and brutalized, etc. My mom sends these to me all the time, and it drives me NUTS.

So for those of you who aren’t already familiar, I want to introduce you to Snopes.com. Snopes is this really awesome website where you can actually verify the truth of the rumors running rampant on the internet. Whenever my mother or someone else sends me a forward (assuming I haven’t deleted it without reading in the first place), I immediately check it out here, then reply to sender that the claim in the forward is bogus (100% of the ones I’ve ever gotten are). Sometimes there’s a grain of truth to them. The one she sent me yesterday (which prompted this post) was about a drug recall. It was alarmist, in big, bold, red font claiming that there was a drug recall on a long list of OTC medications containing some chemical I can’t even pronounce. The forward claimed it had been verified by Snopes and you should pay attention. Naturally, I went to check it out. And color me surprised, it was a legitimate drug recall…

8 years ago. As it turns out, there were methodological issues related to the study that the FDA based the recall on and the risk was incredibly low.

This idiot forward has been making the rounds of the internet, cluttering up people’s inboxes, wasting their time for EIGHT YEARS. Now add that kind of time to all the OTHER forwards out there and you start to realize what an incredible TIME SUCK forwards are. Even if you don’t read them, they take time to delete. So do us all a favor and don’t send them. Or if you do feel compelled to share one of these, take a moment to check that it’s a legitimate claim before wasting anybody else’s time and adding to the general hysteria.

You know that old adage “waste not, want not”? Wise words. Because so many of us don’t plan well, we wind up spending all this money on groceries only to have things go to waste. One of my resolutions this year has been to be better about meal planning and making sure that I use perishables before they have to be tossed out. While I still haven’t seen much improvement when it comes to salad greens, I have come up with ways to use up a few other things.

Bread

I love fresh bread from a bakery, but I often don’t use the entire loaf before it goes stale. Some things you can do with it:

Make crustini for bruschetta. This fantastic appetizer has you toast up bread until it’s stiff and crunchy. Perfect use for stale baguette.

Make your own breadcrumbs. This is a great use of any kind of leftover bread. If you have a loaf that got a little moldy, slice off the moldy part, dice the remainder and toast it at 250 degrees until crunchy (honestly, I have no idea how long I do this…I just check it periodically–but it’s low and slow, so perhaps an hour). Then run the chunks through your food processor or blender until you achieve the consistency you desire. These keep in an airtight container for months and can be used for breading on meat or fish, in casseroles, and a variety of other dishes.

Bananas

Everybody knows this one. When your bananas are past perfection and all brown and kind of mushy on the outside–they’re PERFECT for making banana bread. This bread is massively popular in our house for breakfast, snacks, or dessert.

Apples

If your apples are starting to go the way of the bananas and get bruised before your household finishes with them, peel those suckers and make your own homemade applesauce . You’ll never want to go back to store-bought again!

Milk

If you don’t wind up using that full gallon of milk before it spoils, never fear. You’ve got the basis for one of my all time favorite foods–Irish soda bread . The spoiled milk (hey, what did you think buttermilk was?) reacts with the baking soda to make this moist, dense, wonderful bread rise. This is a fantastic accompaniment to soup.

Leftover veggies

If your family isn’t big on leftovers and you find yourself tossing out the last of a pot of vegetables from dinner, stop! Throw those green beans or lima beans or whatever into a gallon freezer bag. Keep adding to the bag. When it’s full, brown up some hamburger meat, add a can of diced tomatoes and the contents of the bag, and leave it in your slow cooker all day for some fabulous beef vegetable soup. And the juices from those leftover veggies? I’ve heard you can cool them down and use them to water plants (though I can’t say I’ve ever tried this).

So that takeaway message here is that there are plenty of alternative uses for stuff that’s a bit past it’s prime.  You just have to get creative.

Okay folks, for those of you who plan to bake or make candy, you’re going to need gift containers.  This is the time to go out and hit places like The Dollar Tree or Dollar General.  I picked up 8 snowman tins at The Dollar Tree this afternoon.  Last year I waited until December to look and there were no inexpensive tins to be had.

If you do happen to wait, there are options.  You can always purchase inexpensive plasticware containers and decorate them with paint (even if you’re not artistic, you can manage a Christmas tree or Christmas balls).  There’s also the classic of wrapping your goodies in celophane and securing it with pretty ribbon.  Another classic, goodies in a cheerful Christmas mug.  Again, The Dollar Tree has a great selection of cute mugs.  A good gift idea is making up homemade hot chocolate (there are a zillion recipes online using inexpensive ingredients ) and putting a serving of the mix in a little plastic baggie with marshmallows (and possibly a few chocolate candies) in the mug with a curly ribbon.  For extra flair, you could also tie on a Christmas ornament.  Also popular, gifts in a jar .  At the end of the season, stores will be marking down their leftover Mason jars from summer canning.  These can also be painted and decorated. Last year I made hot chocolate mix and shortbread cookie mix and painted on the directions on the jar.  Tied a ribbon around the top and it was a hit! Anyway, the variations are endless.  The point is to check out your dollar stores now, while supplies are high so you can stock up on packaging for your goodies at a good price.

The holiday season is upon us (and has been for a month if retailers are to be believed–Christmas stuff out before Halloween–c’mon guys!) and with it comes the headache of shipping.  This means that you have to package your stuff to ship, take your happy self to the nearest Post Office, where you’re likely to face long lines, eating up your precious lunch break and leaving you entirely cranky the rest of the day.  Maybe that’s just me…

In case you can’t tell, I hate going to the Post Office.  There’s not one that’s truly convenient for me, and it’s never a zip in and out sort of prospect.  The reason this is on my mind today is that I have my first book to ship for Bookmooch, which I talked about this weekend.  I was convinced I was going to have to go to the post office to ship it, as I have never before been able to print a shipping label for media mail from my home (or in this case, work) computer.  But ah, then I discovered Stamps.com.  With their Postage On Demand service you:

• Eliminate gas-guzzling trips to the Post Office.™
• Save over 80% compared to a postage meter.
• Make mail look more professional.
• Never overpay for postage again.
• Print on envelopes, labels or plain paper.

I was able to print my media mail label for $2.41, and I’ll be able to drop it in the outgoing mail for work.  No extra gas.  No waste of my lunch break.  I was forced to buy the delivery confirmation for $0.18, but given how things tend to get lost in the mail these days, that’s not a bad idea anyway. It was absolutely worth the avoidance of a headache.

And then I went to read the details for this post.

I discovered that there is a $17.99 monthly charge for this service.  Apparently in my haste and excitement at having found somewhere to print media mail postage, I missed that part.  Oops.  So I logged into the account and went to cancel the service.  Of course I had to call customer service to do so.  I will say that their customer service was prompt, incredibly polite, and a pleasure to deal with as far as customer service goes.  They do have a cheaper plan that’s $9.99 a month, and for people who actually do ship stuff on a regular basis, it might be worth looking into.  As this is the first thing I have shipped in months, it’s not practical for me.  The upside, I canceled within what was apparently a 4 week trial period, so no harm done.

All is not lost!

Well, as I said, there is a 4 week trial period, so if you have access to a Pitney Bowes machine or scale to weigh your packages without going to the P.O., you could still sign up at Stamps.com to print all your postage for the holidays and mail stuff.  You just have to remember to cancel the service at the end of the trial to avoid the monthly fee.  

That having been said, the actual U.S.P.S. website allows you to print postage as well for first class, priority mail, and express mail–without a monthly fee, so if you want to ship that way, you can still avoid the hassle of going to the P.O.  This whole quest started for me because I wanted to ship something media mail, which the U.S.P.S. website doesn’t appear to allow for reasons that escape me.

If anybody out there knows of a way to do this without having to pay a fee, let me know!

So I don’t know what happened to yesterday’s post.  There was text.  It was an impassioned plea to find support when you’re feeling like Sisyphus with your debt load.  Too bad I can’t duplicate it.  Oh well.

Today I want to introduce you to a new website I just came across.  Bookmooch is a site where you give away and receive books.  It operates on a points system.  You earn 1/10th of a point for every book you list to give away, 1 point for sending a book someone requests (in country–you earn 3 if you ship to another country), and 1/10th of a point for acknowledging when you receive a book you’ve mooched.  Each book you mooch costs you 1 point.  According to their rules, you have to maintain at least a 2 (mooched): 1 (given) ratio in order to remain in good standing.

The reason I like the idea of this is that my used bookstore won’t take all books.  And when I look up the value of those books on Amazon Marketplace or Half.com, people are selling them for $0.01 (and please, tell me, what is the POINT of listing a book for $0.01 when Amazon charges a $0.99 fee?), so there’s not really any point in listing them there.  Bookmooch allows me a venue to list the books I no longer want and earn what amounts to credit toward mooching books I do want.  It seems like a pretty good deal to me.  Of course, you may have books that nobody wants, but it’s worth listing anyway.

A lot of people will tell you about how to write a budget all in one big long post.  I’m going to break it down because writing a budget–a realistic, good budget, takes some homework and effort.  If you’re one of those people who doesn’t write any of your purchases down, you’re really probably going to struggle with this.  But I promise you, the effort is going to pay off in lots of ways when you’re finished.

Your homework:

For the next 30 days (yep, that’s what I said, a full month–they say you need to repeat something for 3 weeks before it starts to become a habit), I want you to do these things:

1. Keep a small notebook with you at all times.  Any time you spend anything, be it cash, credit, debit, or check, I want you to write it down.  Write down how much you spent, on what, and make a notation of how you paid for it (cash, credit, etc.).
2. Keep all your receipts, no matter how small.  Have an envelope in your purse or wherever is convenient for you.   When you get a receipt for something, stuff it in therefor the 30 days.
3. Keep all your bills.  A lot of people habitually pay a bill, then toss the statement.  This is a bad habit.  We want to break that.  So save all of your bills for those 30 days.

At the end of the 30 days, I want you to come back here, and I’m going to tell you what to do with all this paperwork.  We’re going to analyze your spending habits and talk about where you can make some adjustments.

I guarantee you, you’re going to be surprised where a lot of your money goes. Writing everything down is one of the things that separate savers from spenders.  Savers are much more aware of where ever penny they spend goes.  The goal of this exercise is to turn you from a spender into a saver!

Holiday meals are some of the richest, most sumptuous, most wonderful food we eat all year.  I’m salivating just at the thought of my grandmother’s dressing.  They’re also often some of the most expensive.  We have a tendency to buy food and ingredients around the holidays that we don’t bother with the rest of the year, which often makes those grocery trips where we’re stocking up for Thanksgiving or Christmas seriously hard on our wallets.

But there’s good news.  A bit of pre-planning allows you to spread out the cost of those ingredients over several weeks, so that your bank account doesn’t take such a hit.  You’ll still likely spend the same amount, but it should hit on different pay periods.

Take the time, right now, to plan out all the special things you’re planning on cooking this holiday season.  Start with the menu for Thanksgiving dinner, work your way through all the gifts, party food, and Christmas dinner.  Now make a list of all the ingredients you’re going to need for those dishes, dividing everything into perishable and non-perishable.  Add a couple of those non-perishable items to your weekly shopping list.  If you’re picking up holiday baking ingredients such as flour, sugar, baker’s chocolate, spices, (the stuff you’re probably seeing in big displays in the center of grocery aisles), this is the time of year to stock up.  These items are considered loss leaders–meaning that grocers are willing to take a loss on those items as they hope we’ll plunk down money on more expensive, full-priced food items while we’re there.  The trick is not to fall for that.  Make a list and stick to it.

Coming Soon: I’ll be talking about ways to take the stress out of prepping for holiday gatherings.