What’s Necessary? What’s Not Necessary?
Naomi is trying to get a good picture of her actual spending and is using a very good process to get there. She’s run into a bit of a snag, though.
I have reached a month of collecting receipts and preparing to organise it all in an Excel spreadsheet. Categorising by what type of expense will not be the difficult part for me, however deciding weather it was a ‘necessary’ spend is. I’m finding too many grey areas. For example; it was necessary to eat lunch but instead of having an at home sandwhich, i grabbed one on the go. Or, i needed some new clothes for work and brought a nicer dress than was necessary. Maybe I am overthinking such a simple exercise a little too much, but I would appreciate any direction you could provide.
This is a classic problem that people run into when they’re first getting a grip on their finances. What exactly constitutes a necessary expense? If you don’t buy the low-end garbage bags and instead buy the ones that Consumer Reports calls a “best buy,” is the difference in cost a necessary expense? If you’re caught in traffic and can’t stop at home for dinner before an evening meeting, so you stop at a fast food restaurant, is that a necessary expense?
I can certainly give you my opinion on a lot of such buying situations, but the truth of the matter is that it’s my opinion. I’d call the garbage bags a necessary expense. I’d call the fast food an unnecessary expense, a cost that results from poor planning. And on and on and on…
Here’s the truth. Every single one of us is going to spend money on something that we view as necessary and that others view as unnecessary. Almost all of us are going to spend at least some money on things that we view as unnecessary upon later reflection.
What matters isn’t that we eliminate all unnecessary spending from our budget. That’s impossible. It’s the equivalent of eating nothing but lettuce for a diet – eventually, you’ll either wither or fail.
What matters is that we get a grip on our unnecessary spending, however we define it.
I usually encourage people to be pretty tight with their definition of what a necessary expense is, because the real value in budgeting is to figure out where all of your unnecessary expenses are going. What areas are you dumping money into that, with some forethought and changes in routines, you could improve?
Here’s an example of what I mean. Let’s say you’ve decided to count lunches eaten out as an unnecessary expense. You make a category in your accounting of your spending called “lunches eaten out.” At the end of a month’s worth of receipts, you look at that total. $250? What?
You can reclaim that $250 (or at least most of it) by simply changing one behavior. Stock your desk with the materials for some lunches on the fly, for one, and then get in the routine of brown-bagging it. If things don’t work out with the brown bagging for a day, you have some food in your desk as a backup. Boom! Suddenly, you’re not dumping that money into eating out all the time.
That’s how budgeting is supposed to work. You group all of your expenses into categories and look for ways to sharply cut some of the areas of unnecessary spending (like the lunches) while also looking for ways to reduce the costs in necessary areas (energy efficiency, for example). It is much easier to identify ways to cut your spending if you’re looking at the exact dollar amounts you’re spending in a specific area and are focused on that specific area.
In other words, don’t focus so much on what’s necessary and what’s unnecessary, at least not at first. Just try to group things into piles that make sense to you. Budgeting books often offer suggestions of categories, but don’t be afraid to go beyond them and have categories like “lunches eaten out” or “comic books” or “makeup” or “video games.”
Then, when you’ve got those specific categories and how much you spent in each of them each month, focus on those categories one at a time and ask yourself, “How much of this is necessary? How much can I trim from this?” Different people will come up with different answers here, but the more you cut without significantly altering your standard of living, the easier it will be to find financial freedom.
Continue reading What’s Necessary? What’s Not Necessary? …
From The Simple Dollar.
A couple more ideas for the disater kit …
Well, now. I think we’ve had more than enough tornadic weather in southeast Michigan and northwest Ohio for the summer. On Thursday night, my daughter, mom and I waited out a tornado warning at one of my sisters’ homes with a young nephew and two nieces. And when the tornado warnings came through tonight, my [...]
Continue reading A couple more ideas for the disater kit … …
From Monroe on a Budget.
Summer Meal Series #8: Chicken, Broccoli, and Mozzarella Calzones
This summer, I’m going to be posting a series of fifteen low-cost, tasty, and easy-to-prepare meals that are literally straight from my own kitchen.
Homemade pizza is a big hit at our house (here’s a picture-filled post about our homemade pizzas). We all love our every-other-week-or-so homemade pizzas where we often experiment with ingredients and enjoy from-scratch crusts.
The problem with pizza, though, is that it’s not very portable. It doesn’t make the best picnic food (unless, I suppose, you order from Pizza Hut and take it to the park with you, but then you lose control over the ingredients and the cost).
Our family’s solution is to sometimes make calzones instead of pizzas. For us, a calzone is essentially an inside-out pizza – we just take the ingredients of a pizza we want to make, wrap it in pizza dough, and bake it. It comes out much like a sandwich, which is very portable, indeed.
This time, we made enormous calzones! (You don’t have to make them this big, of course.)
My intent was to show us eating these at the park, but the weather unfortunately didn’t cooperate at the last minute. We served the calzones with apple slices.
We ended up making six calzones that were approximately that size (two of them were somewhat smaller, about 60-70% of that size). I was only able to eat roughly half of that calzone for dinner. My wife, who is currently breastfeeding and who hadn’t eaten since a very small lunch, ate about 3/4 of one and gave up. Our children split the smallest one and that was about all they could handle.
In other words, this batch of calzones I’m about to describe fed two adults and two children for dinner, two adults and two children for lunch, and two adults for lunch again. Ten meals, in other words. Calzones are great meals to make in larger batches because they’re very good when reheated.
So how did we make them? The first step, of course, is to make the dough.
If you wish, you can always buy pre-made dough at the store. However, making your own homemade pizza dough is so easy, you shouldn’t waste the money on it – homemade dough tastes better, costs a pittance, and is healthier, too, because you don’t have the oils and extra ingredients and preservatives that large food manufacturers toss into the dough.
Here’s how I make the dough:
Four ingredients, plus some water.
4 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons yeast
1 teaspoon salt
1 3/4 to 2 cups water (depending on air moisture in your area)
Heat up the water until it feels warm to the touch, then mix in the yeast, stir, and let it sit for fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, mix the flour and salt together in a bowl. Add the liquid to the solid and mix them thoroughly with your hands (or with a mixer) until it’s all consistent. Then put the dough ball in a bowl, cover it, and put it in a warm place for two hours or so to let it rise (or, if you’re doing it in advance, freeze the dough ball or let it rise in the refrigerator for about 24 hours).
That’s it. Here’s my dough ball.
It hasn’t risen much – it will roughly double in size before I need to use it.
Next, we mix the stuffing. You really can use pretty much anything you can imagine as a calzone stuffing. Here, we’re using cooked broccoli (about a pound), 3 cups shredded mozzarella (we grated ours, you can see the cheese grater in the picture below on the right), 2 cups shredded chicken, and about 1/2 cup pesto.
We actually have much more shredded chicken than we’ll actually use – about two cups’ extra. If you want to get a good amount, you’ll just want to cook one large breast and shred it. We cooked three medium breasts and shredded it all. Why? The breasts were on sale and shredded chicken breast goes good with tons of different recipes and in salads, too.
What happens next is complicated. Take those four ingredients, put them in a bowl, and mix them together. Your mixture is done.
I then took our big ball of freshly-risen dough and split it into six pieces, with two of them being a bit smaller than the others (for a variety of calzone sizes).
After flouring down the table, I got to work. I took one of the dough balls and rolled it out on the table until it was pretty thin and wasn’t rolling well any more. The circle was about the diameter of a fork (or a bit more) and between 1/4″ and 1/8″ thick (half a centimeter or so).
It does not have to be anywhere near a perfect circle. Just get it something that roughly approximates a circle and you’re good.
Next, just take a healthy spoonful of the mixture and put it on one half of the rolled-out dough, leaving a good lip around the edge of it. I also sprinkled a bit more cheese on top.
I put just a bit of water around the entire lip of the calzone, then folded it over to create a pouch with the stuffing inside of it. I then pressed down on the edges of the calzone so that the wet dough would stick together (and spread out a bit), then I rolled up that edge. This keeps the contents from spilling out in the oven.
Like I said, the ingredients above made six of these. Once they were done, I took two baking sheets, put about a teaspoon of olive oil on each one, and spread the oil all over the sheets (to prevent the calzones from sticking). I put the calzones on the sheets…
… made a few diagonal slices on top of each one, brushed the tops with a bit of olive oil, then stuck them in the oven at 450 F (230 C) for 18 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through.
And you have calzones!
Our total cost for materials for this recipe was $9.30, with roughly a third coming from the chicken alone and most of the rest from the pesto and the cheese. The broccoli cost about $1 and everything else was fractions of a dollar.
This recipe made ten delicious meals for my family, which averaged out to $0.93 per meal. That’s a great price for a delicious calzone!
Not only that, this meal is really, really flexible. You can pretty much put in any ingredients that you wish. You can put in all of the traditional pizza ingredients. You can put in nothing but vegetables. You can put in whatever produce is on sale at the grocery store. It almost all works.
Unsurprisingly, this is another big hit at our house, since it’s essentially an inside-out pizza. Everyone loved it and all leftovers were happily consumed.
Continue reading Summer Meal Series #8: Chicken, Broccoli, and Mozzarella Calzones …
From The Simple Dollar.
Programming note: breaking weather
Monroe County, Mich., was hit pretty hard by storms late night night and early this morning. We actually had two tornado warnings to deal with.
The Sunday morning budget blogging is, well, on standby while I help my colleagues at The Monroe Evening News deal with the breaking news.
I can confirm three coupon packets in the [...]
Continue reading Programming note: breaking weather …
From Monroe on a Budget.
Keeping Your Home Cool
In just a few days, summer will be rearing its ugly head and the weather will change from mild warmth to extremely sweltering. In the area where I live, the heat has already begun to exceed the milder weather and it got me to thinking of ways I can keep my home cool without cranking up my air conditioner. Here are a few ideas I am going to implement this summer.
- First and foremost, I am going to keep the doors closed and the shades drawn. My house is not that well insulated, so by doing this, the house will stay cooler and I can keep the air conditioner turned down to a lower setting.
- In the evenings, we will open the doors and use our fans to cool it out. This also cuts down on the cooling bill.
- I think I am also going to buy some low-e film to place over the panes of glass.
- If you are using just fans and don’t have an air conditioner, you can hang damp towels in front of the fans to cool a room out faster.
- Be sure and use your ceiling fans as much as possible. Make sure when using them that you have them turned the correct way to bring in air and not suck the air out.
- I am going to keep the cooking to a minimum during the summer. I use my grill and slow cooker quite a bit during this time.
What are some ways that you keep your home cool during the summer?
Continue reading Keeping Your Home Cool …
From Econobusters.
And The Winner Is. . .
WOW! You guys have come up with some wonderful comments regarding camping! I am amazed at the tips we received, 216 to be exact.
Hopefully, we can get all of those tips compiled in a neat little .pdf and give to each one you soon. If you cannot wait, then just scroll through the comments and read them. They are amazing.
Here’s the moment you have all been waiting for. Are you ready to see who won?
The winner of the $50 Wal-mart gift card is (drum roll please. . . . . . . . . . )
Comment #34 Kimberly Hupp!
Congratulations Kimberly (YAY!)
Here is what Kimberly had to say in her comment:
Kimberly Hupp Says:
The best camping tip I have is just relax and have fun with your family because you can’t control the weather. Rain or shine you will make memories for a lifetime. Some of the best camping memories with my family were on the trips when it poured buckets of rain. Putting tarps up in trees to keep some of the rain off us, sitting around the campfire dripping wet making smores, laughing ourselves silly trying to keep the fire going, walking back from the shower house and getting more mud on you than before you went in. Camping is one of the best things our family has invested in.
Kimberly, please email jennifersikora@econobusters.com with your mailing address so we can get that right out to you!
Continue reading And The Winner Is. . . …
From Econobusters.
Get Ready For Grilling Season – Tidy Tuesday
My dear Hubby has decided to put hamburgers on the grill tomorrow – a treat we haven’t had for a while. Although we grill most of the year, we’ve had some cold days this winter and got frustrated trying to keep the grill hot enough to cook. That meant ignoring the grill for a couple months.
When he announced his intention to start grilling again, I thought “oh oh… I wonder if the grill’s in shape right now.” I pulled it out today and started going over all the parts, cleaning and scrubbing. Then I remembered I should probably share this little task with you!
I’m actually sharing the grill cleaning post I did last year. Nothing’s changed in the way I clean my grill, so I imagine this information will do just fine a second time around. I’ve added a few links for fun cleaning tools at the end of the post just so you can see what’s available to help with this chore. The following is what I consider standard maintenance for any grill and was originally published last year around this time.
Judging by the aromas wafting through the evening air in my neighborhood, I’d say grilling season is here.
Our family grills out most of the year because our weather is temperate, but there are many folks who put their grill away during the colder months and wait patiently for that first sign of spring. And, when they finally get the chance to grill out again, some are so anxious for the grilling to begin that they don’t take the time to check and clean their grill.
Whether you use your grill year ’round or bring it out only when the weather is balmy, you need to treat your grill at least as well as you do your kitchen stove, if not better. Grills, both charcoal and gas, fall victim to harsh elements and neglect far too often, causing a host of problems, from irritating dilemmas like sticking food and smoking, to serious issues such as leaking or plugged gas lines. So, before you grill your first hamburger of the season, you need to do your chores.
Start by inspecting your grill for rust, clogged gas connections, loose parts, and any other issues that would cause concern. Repair the damage you find. If you have lost your manual, go online to the manufacturer’s website and you’ll find the information you need to maintain your grill.
Get out a big tub, fill it with dish soap and water, and start soaking your cooking grates. If you have a gas grill that uses metal “cooking bars”, go ahead and remove those and scrub them in soapy water, rinse, and be sure to dry them well. Do not allow them to drip dry as they may rust. If your grill uses briquettes or lava rock you may need to replace them. Brush and wipe off all the area around and underneath the heat source. Don’t forget that little “grease catcher” underneath. Wash or replace it regularly.
The same cleaning system goes for charcoal grills. Be sure to brush out and discard any remaining charcoal and residue from the insides. Go ahead and scrub the inside of the grill with hot, soapy water, rinse and dry well. If you have a little “ash catcher” underneath, give that a good scrub, too.
Now that your grill is sparkling clean inside and out, put your grill back together. Be sure you have rinsed and dried all your cooking grates thoroughly. If you have cast iron grates, you may need to re-season them. Again, follow the manufacturer’s instructions on how this should be done.
Cleaning a grill is relatively simple if, like most cleaning jobs, you do it routinely. After you cook, and when the grill is just warm to the touch, wipe down the cooking surface and lid, inside and out. Use a stiff brush to dislodge any burned-on food. It’s a whole lot easier to remove food from your grill when it’s still warm than after the grill has cooled down completely. Do this every time you grill and time spent maintaining your grill will be cut considerably. Don’t forget to take care of all your grilling accessories and tools in the same way. And, please get and use a cover!
Typically speaking, discarded grills are grills that were not taken care of properly. Your charcoal or gas grill should last a good, long time if you treat it well. Now, you can get out your favorite recipes and grill up a masterpiece!
p.s. For some interesting grill cleaning tools, click on the links below:
p.p.s. Click here for even more Spring Cleaning Tips for Mom and the whole family to get ready for the lazy days of summer!
Continue reading Get Ready For Grilling Season – Tidy Tuesday …
From Hillbilly Housewife Blog.
Plant An Herb Garden And Save Money – Frugal Challenge
Even though planting a garden isn’t always the most frugal adventure you can have, I am a firm believer in planting as many herbs as you can possibly grow. The reason? Herbs for cooking are very, very expensive no matter where you live.
Whether you buy dried herbs or fresh, you’ll notice the price can really add up. And, if you like to cook like I do, those herbs can take a big bite out of the grocery budget.
What happens to me, is that I sometimes eliminate the herbs in a recipe just to cut costs. That’s not much fun and also changes the results of whatever dish I’m making. For instance, the thought of eliminating oregano from something like Eggplant Parmesan just seems like a culinary crime. But, fresh oregano was $2 in my grocery store for a few little sprigs.
So, this is what I’m suggesting. Plant yourself a little herb garden. It doesn’t have to be big or expensive. If you don’t have a large garden space, or your weather is a bit iffy for the herbs you’d like to grow, consider an inside garden. Many herbs don’t need a lot of room. In fact, you can usually grow a little selection of herbs right on a windowsill.
I’ve also found some pretty sophisticated multi-pot herb gardens. Take a minute to look at this clever design by clicking on this image:
In just a little space (even hanging it) you have herbs to use to your heart’s content. And, just consider the wonderful aroma that will be wafting from this pretty array of plants!
Having even a few of the basic herbs you like readily available to you can make a big difference in your cooking.
Take a few minutes this week and get yourself a little herb garden planted. Gardening, even a little bit, is a fun hobby which yields tasty results. Get your youngsters involved too and you may even enjoy some great family moments together.
Continue reading Plant An Herb Garden And Save Money – Frugal Challenge …
From Hillbilly Housewife Blog.
Moving Houseplants Outdoors: Tips
Most houseplants love to go outdoors for a vacation in the summer. When the weather has settled down and the nights stay warm is the time to put the plants out. Look them over first to see if any need to be repotted in larger pots. Don’t plant them right into the soil–they might grow [...]
- Also See These Tips:
- How To Pot A Plant: Gardening Tips
- Houseplant Care & Growing Tips
- Easter Lily Care & Tips For Transplanting Outdoors
Continue reading Moving Houseplants Outdoors: Tips …
From TipNut.com.
Your Backyard Oasis – Fuzzy Wuzzy Wednesday
Some of you may remember a post I did some time ago called “Carve Out A Personal Oasis In Your Backyard.” You can take a look if you click on the highlighted title.
I’ve been busy as can be sweeping and cleaning up after a long winter. Once I got my porch and patio swept, I looked around again and thought it’s time to refresh my backyard oasis.
Winter takes its toll on my backyard. Sometimes when the snow melts, I wish we would get another blizzard just to cover up all the damage! It’s nothing serious, just a lot of branches and yard debris. The grass is trampled and brown, and it’s hard to imagine setting up any sort of oasis in that mess.
What I’m suggesting today is using your imagination to envision a great outdoor oasis for yourself. You may not be able to do a lot of work on it yet. The weather isn’t quite cooperating in our neighborhood, so for now I will just do a little cleaning and a lot of planning.
Grab one sunny corner today, pull up a chair, and imagine your own backyard oasis. Have a wonderful Wednesday!
Continue reading Your Backyard Oasis – Fuzzy Wuzzy Wednesday …
From Hillbilly Housewife Blog.