As if life isn't completely exciting enough with all the changes we put ourselves through, we thought we'd challenge ourselves further. By now, you know we like to experiment with things. We love to see how far we can push ourselves, how much we can push the envelope before it's too much.
So we decided, LET'S PLAN AN EARLY RETIREMENT AND SEE HOW MUCH WE CAN REDUCE OUR EXPENSES IN ORDER TO SAVE!
LET'S:
- ...sell our van and go down to one car. Then we can put the sale money into the car loan, getting rid of that debt.
- ...rent out our mostly unused basement thus making a bit of money off our space.
- ...purge more!
- ...cut our eating out budget way down and really appreciate it!
- ...cut our grocery bill way down from around 1000-1200 to 600!
- YEAH! LET'S DO IT ALL AT ONCE!
Where have you heard that before? Haha - right here!
So okay, some things didn't quite pan out as expected, but most did. Here's what we did, and more importantly, why.
"Let's sell our van and go down to one car, put the sale money into the car loan and get rid of that debt!"
So, great idea right? Yeah definitely! Okay, so the truth is, we are a family of five. Most people heard that and thought one of two things: (1) YOU ARE CRAZY. YOU NEED TWO CARS. or else (2) WE WANT YOUR VAN. Hmm. So after a few initial interested parties fell through, and craigslist inquiries weren't panning out, we finally had one guy who wanted to come see it. He showed up with his mom, both of them just lovely, and asked about the van. In was totally weak of me, in fact I am almost embarrassed to say it, but as I was telling them all about it, I started really wanting to keep it. "Man!" I thought to myself, "This IS an awesome vehicle!" Hahaha! Weak! I'm weak!
The van wasn't right for them anyway. And so our van remains ours, and as a perk it has received a really good scrub down and looks just fabulous. We still have yet to decide whether we are still going to pursue going down to one car, something we believe would be a wise decision for this time in life considering I am just wrapping up my life of being on call and needing a vehicle, and Ryan carpools most days with a co-worker, but that's another conversation for another day. Whenever it happens, it will be a happy money-saving move for us to enjoy.
"Let's rent out our mostly unused basement thus making a bit of money off our space!"
We have three levels - picture a typical rowhouse/townhouse and you have our place. It has about 1700 square feet, which sounds reasonable these days for a family of 5. But the thing is, we live on the main floor and sleep in our bedrooms upstairs. The way our home is set up, particularly in the middle of this co-housing community, we don't use our downstairs playroom or TV room much at all. That, and we have ample badly-used room upstairs in our bedroom. (Ryan and I have essentially a double room where two rooms were opened up into one.) So we decided, let's see if anyone wants to rent it out for (a) storage, (b) office space, (c) a space for their teen (without a kitchen), etc. And lo and behold, we struck up a nice deal to rent it out as storage. So while we're living in less space technically, it really doesn't feel like it, and we're able to make a bit of money off of it.
"Let's purge more!"
As you might imagine, clearing out our basement for the storage rental required a little shifting of "stuff". Thankfully we are practically purging experts now, so it wasn't too hard to give away a lot. And it hasn't been hard to see it go. As I said, it was under-used, that basement. And so out it went!
"Let's cut our eating out budget way down and really appreciate it more!"
We are already pretty stingy on this item here simply because we know it's not a good use of money. Really, why go to a restaurant and pay people to bring you food they cooked, when you can just do it at home? I mean, it begs the question... That said, IT'S FUN!! Which is why we kept a bit in the budget. We kept a whopping $200 per month. That comes down to a weekly $45. Not loads, especially because we consider ANY food or drink purchased out to be thrown into this category. Coffee, Timbits, restaurants, you name it. So needless to say, we are very choosy now, and you know what? We all enjoy going out to eat SO MUCH MORE than we ever did before. We didn't eat out all the time, by any means, but we did a lot of little "treats". Ice cream cones here, doughnuts and coffee there, you get the idea.
"Let's cut our grocery bill way down from around 1100 to 600 per month!"
This one is radical, and I feel like I can only now blog about it because we're going on four weeks and IT'S WORKING.
Have I ever ranted about meal planning before? No? Well now it's time.
Meal planning:
- cuts spending down
- keeps grocery trips short
- simplifies my days
- makes me healthier
- makes me more disciplined
Here's the thing. When I walk into the grocery store, I get excited. If I'm hungry, I get actually emotional about food, but let's take that out of the equation.
Imagine you walk into the grocery store, you've managed to do it at a time when you don't have kids with you, and you wander right into the deli section. Well look! Delicious smelling fries and chicken! Expensive cheeses! Ready-made guac, salsa, and hummus! Mmmmmm! So convenient! So delicious! SO EXPENSIVE.
Then you wander through the aisles and are bombarded with crackers, cookies, chips, flavour packets, cans of vegetables and beans, and all sorts of other goodies that you just can't live without...
Then you get to the dairy section... yogurt, cheese, milk, chocolate milk, cream cheese, sour cream, etc. SO MUCH STUFF TO SPEND MONEY ON.
Now, I'm not arguing that we should stop eating. No no. I love eating as much as the next ravenous bear, but what we have done is simply shop and eat differently.
Do you know how much food used to go bad in my fridge? So much. SO MUCH. It was truly wasteful and a horrible use of our money and the work it takes to produce food. Now, after making the changes we have made, we waste almost nothing.
So here is what we did, and why.
We were aware that our grocery bill was high-ish, although depending on who you talk to, it might seem completely reasonable. That wasn't good enough for us though, of course! We had to test out cutting it way back. We settled on 600 per month. This was somewhat arbitrary, to be honest. We just chose a number that sounded like a huge challenge but that might be still possible on some level.
We multiplied that by 12 months, then divided it by 52 weeks to find out how much we'd have per week to spend. It was 138 and change, so we rounded it up to 140. One hundred and forty dollars per week. In order to test it fully, we decided to do cash only. When the cash was gone, it was gone. No more food purchases.
The next step was to plan meals, meticulously. METICULOUSLY. This means planning meals that didn't ask for expensive ingredients. Less cheesy meals, more bean meals, less meat, more rice. We actually made up a list of enough meals to last us 2 weeks, and decided to just rotate these meals through our weeks, at least for now. We have only a few meals with meat, and we tried to keep them pretty kid-friendly.
Here is our list:
Chicken pasta salad (pre-BBQ'd chicken from the store, bulk pasta, veg, and home-made dressing)
Lentil Soup (with dried lentils, vegetables, and stock made from the rotisserie chicken)
Goulash (family recipe - it's not the soup. It's macaroni and ground beef in a tomato-curry sauce)
Baked Potatoes (potatoes, home-made yogurt, cheese, tomatoes, peppers, black beans with cumin)
Taco Salad (lettuce, veg, leftover black beans, tortilla chips, home-made yogurt, home-made salsa)
Pizza (home-made crusts, home-made sauce, pepperoni, cheese, vegetables, raisins, anything around)
Pesto Pasta (bulk pasta, frozen peas, home-made walnut pesto, lemons)
Chicken Kiev, Rice & Salad (this is an indulgent night, buying the pre-made frozen chicken!)
Tortilla Pie (pretty much a mexican lasagna, using tortillas, beans, and salsa)
Latkes, bacon & fruit salad (using up extra potatoes - and who doesn't love breakfast for dinner?)
Fancy Beet Salad & garlic toast (Lettuce, roasted beets, pears, goat cheese, candied walnuts)
Rice & Bean Casserole (a leftover kind of casserole)
Corn Chowder & Cornbread (a favourite!)
Pancakes & Fruit (another favourite thing to have every once in a while for dinner!)
So, here are the meals. Not too hoity-toity, but there is a good variety, and the whole family can enjoy pretty much everything on the list. The girls even get excited when they can see the meals planned for the week (I post them on a whiteboard in the kitchen for my own brain).
The next step was to make the list. I wrote out the produce and other foods that we needed for each of the recipes, plus a few staple items like milk, bread, coffee, oats and eggs.
The first week, I was scared stiff to go to the store. Thankfully we had a lot of random leftover stuff from previous shopping trips - some potatoes, some other vegetables, some pasta, etc. We made good use of all of it.
I went to the produce market (where produce is cheaper than the grocery stores) and with each item I chose, I compared each "kind" and chose the cheapest. (i.e. 6 types of apples, I chose the least expensive.) I didn't over-buy, but produce, particularly fruit, is one of our HUGE staples, and so I did buy a lot. It had to last the week after all. Oranges, apples, bananas, melons, pears, nectarines, plums, plus all the vegetables I had on my list. Success! I spent under $50. Could hardly believe it!
Then I went to the grocery store, and honestly, this was the big question mark! I wasn't going to be bringing a calculator around, so as much as I tried to add things up as I put them in the buggy, it was really hard to know how much it would really come out to.
Here were a few rules of thumb I went by:
1 - Buy as much from the bulk bins as possible. This means if I needed black beans for a recipe, I'd be getting them dry, not canned. Yes, they need to be soaked for a couple hours beforehand. No big deal.
2 - Buy as little meat as possible (this truly comes into play in the meal planning). Have you seen the price of beef lately? The drought has driven the prices up!
3 - Buy cheaper bread. Because there's a difference between $5 and $1.50 per loaf.
4 - Avoid the middle aisles unless completely necessary. Need soy sauce? Okay, go in. But except for those few important items, keep out of the centre of the store. Aisles are where all the packaged, expensive food is, and you want to avoid it!
5 - When it comes to dairy, keep it simple. I'm a serious cheese lover, and it is SO expensive to buy cheese in Canada! I know people who cross the border just for cheese! But I don't. I just keep it simple. I have a neighbour who sometimes gets me reasonably-priced cheese at Costco. I also buy nice cheeses here and there to eat slowly and carefully. Yogurt? Don't buy it. Make it. Way cheaper. Way more delicious. (This is Ryan's specialty.) Sour cream? Use your home-made yogurt instead. Cream cheese? Don't. Just don't. Butter is one thing I won't skimp on. No margarine for me. I just go for the cheapest salted butter blocks I can find, and only get one because it's only for a week.
6 - No extras! Don't buy the pack of gum! You don't need it! Don't bother with the crackers, or the chips, or the chocolate bar! These things just cost so much to add, and they cost your happy, healthy body something too.
And what happened on that first shopping trip? I was, wait for it, $40 under budget. No joke! Now, I attribute some of this to the food we had left over from before, but it still felt really, really good! We have done it twice more since then and have stayed under budget by 5 or 10 dollars each time. This week we spent every penny, but no more! So it's possible! SO exciting!
Of Note:
- Ryan makes home-made yogurt. We use it on all sorts of things from oatmeal to baked potatoes to just on it's own with a bit of honey mixed in. It's delicious!
- Sometimes basic items are needing re-stocking (flour, sugar, etc) and this is just part of reality. Choose cheap, and don't stress over it.
- It's hard for me to remember that I need to shop ONLY for a week. I'll see the black beans at a good bulk price and want to load up on 3 weeks' worth. It's not necessary, and it skews my weekly spending.
Some questions that have arisen are - what about breakfast and lunch? Do you just plan for dinner?
Answer: well yes, technically, but the basic items I mentioned kind of cover our other meals. We have simple breakfasts (toast, eggs, oatmeal, fruit), and fairly simple lunches (leftovers from last dinner, sandwiches, etc), so dinner is our main meal. That said, we are just starting a new Sunday tradition that came out of our church having such a late-morning start (11:15). We were finding ourselves grumpy and famished on the way home, so we're starting to bring sandwiches to eat on the drive, then coming home and having dessert. YUM! So that will be added to the weekly plan - a dessert recipe.
And in all this, what have we gained? We figure we are gaining a pretty penny in savings, a little more in rental of our basement, and we've reduced my stress at 4:30pm when I need to come up with a dinner plan. We have gotten more "stuff" out of our house, and we are only occasionally going out to eat, and enjoying it so much more than before! I have to also add that I feel more disciplined. It's a good feeling to deprive yourself, to feel a desire and deal with the frustration. I would LOVE a nice big piece of chocolate cake every night, but that's not realistic, nor is it in the budget. I live with that frustration. :)
Grrrrrrr.
