November 8 2018

Saving for the Holidays

Today, I want to talk about saving money during the holidays. Some families are large and some are small. If you have a list a mile long of people you want/need to buy gifts for, you need a plan to make that work.

First, grab some paper and make a list of all the people you need to buy gifts for this year. Do you have a budget so you know how much you can spend on holiday-related things? If not, that’s fine for this year, but hopefully, you will have a better handle on it next year after you read this.

Next, you need to remember what the holiday season is all about. It doesn’t matter which holidays you celebrate most of us believe the season is about being thankful and not just about doing all the things and buying all the gifts. It’s not about the gifts or the decorations or the food, well, maybe the food. Just kidding. The holidays are a time to get together with friends and family and celebrate spending time together and being grateful for everything you have in your life, including those loved ones.

Set an amount that you will spend on each person that fits in the budget you have without going into debt. That may be $1 per person or $100 or anything in between or maybe you are independently wealthy and the sky is the limit. You know your finances and what you can afford without going into debt. If you budget is tight, maybe you give gifts by family group. Maybe you pull names and each person buys for one other person. Maybe you play a game often referred to as Dirty Santa or White Elephant. The point is if it is too much either cut the amount you spend on each person or cut the list down to the number of people you can afford or some other creative way to stay within your budget and not dread the credit card bills that will be coming in January if you use plastic to stick to someone else’s idea of what a gift needs to cost.

Perhaps you are great at baking and want to make trays of cookies to share with each family or a loaf of banana bread or even a fruitcake, though that wouldn’t be my first choice on either the giving or receiving-end of things. Maybe you could make coupons or gift certificates for something you can gift without cost (your time) for things like babysitting, back massages, manicures, oil changes, car washes, house cleaning, taking down holiday decorations, you get the idea. There are things YOU can do that someone on your gift list would really appreciate having done for them. Maybe it is one on one time with a niece or nephew, maybe it is helping grandma clean out the attic or garage. You could record yourself reading a child’s favorite book so they can hear it every night without their parents’ sanity on the line.

Like to encourage reading? Find the perfect magazine for the people on your list. The subscriptions can often be less than $20 a year and then the recipient has future issues to look forward to and something new to talk about when they see you again.

Maybe a young family is struggling and would really appreciate a family membership to the local zoo or children’s museum. Maybe a teen would like movie passes or fast food gift certificates. There are so many things you can make or do for others that requires little more than your time and attention.

Make memories, not messes. Before giving gifts, consider whether the person will want to find room to store the thing and dust the thing you gift them. Consider giving clutter-free gifts. Gift certificates and food gifts are great because they get used up and can be a great idea again next year. Ask for ideas if you aren’t sure what to give someone. Maybe they would rather you donate in their name to a favorite charity instead of giving them a new sweater or tie.

Whatever you end up giving this year, keep track of it and think about how the amount you spent fit into your financial means. Should you cut back next year? Could you afford to do more if you planned better? Total everything up, and I mean everything that isn’t a part of your regular monthly expenses. Special clothing for holiday photos, special food for holiday gatherings, baking supplies, office pitch-ins, gifts for co-workers, greeting cards, stationery, postage stamps, decorations, live garlands or trees that can’t be reused safely next year, seriously everything. How much did it cost you? Can you afford that amount? Now, when do you want to start shopping for everything next year? August, October, November? Doesn’t matter when; that is up to you. Just figure out how many months you have between January 1st and the time you want the money to be in place so you have it to shop with. If that is August 1st, then you have seven months to save. Divide your budget number by the number of months and make yourself save that amount in an account that you don’t touch except to buy holiday gifts. It is that simple.

If you want to get even more budget conscience, add in the amount you need to cover the cost of birthdays and other celebrations for the entire year. Take that new year-long total and divide by 11 because you will have the money saved a little early and if you save 1/11th each month for the entire year, you have a little extra padding in your budget for things you forgot to add in or to splurge a little on yourself.

Here are a few resources I’d like to recommend:
FlyLady’s Holiday Control Journal
FlyLady’s Holiday Cruising Missions 
FlyLady’s Holiday Cleanup Missions

If you have other ways of budgeting for the cost of holiday celebrations or inexpensive gift ideas, I’d love it if you shared them with all of us in the comments below.

If you have been reading this blog very long it probably isn’t a surprise that I am pre-writing the November Thursday posts so I can focus on writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days (NaNoWriMo). Stay tuned and add yourself to the email list in the near the upper right of this page so you can be notified by email when I post something new and can read it right in your email if you choose.

Category: Money Saving, Planning | 1 Comment on Saving for the Holidays
October 11 2018

Dressing Recipe

Dressing Recipe

When I was growing up, there was a dish my mother made that I always loved. She called this dish dressing, but others might call is stuffing. It took a long time to make because we couldn’t make it until we had enough bread heels saved up in our deep freezer. We never ate the two heels at the ends of the loaves of bread and that was just fine with my mom. She would throw them all into the basket in the deep freezer and when the basket got full, we could make a nice big pan of dressing. You are probably wondering what made this dressing so great. Maybe it was just because mom made it and there was a lot of it when she did.

I am going to try to share the recipe with you, but there was never a set recipe. So, to start, we always got out the metal cake pan that was the typical 9” x 13” x 3” deep pan. The bread would all be taken out of the freezer and allowed to thaw. One of us kids would be given the task of tearing the bread into small bite-sized pieces and tossing them into the pan. Mom would get a medium yellow onion and dice it up and toss it in. She may have even used the dehydrated onions on occasion if fresh wasn’t an option. She always kept the dried onions on hand just in case. Once the pan got full, she would add a bunch of ground sage (this is commonly found in the larger bottles in the spice aisle of the grocery store). She also added a generous amount of ground black pepper. Then she would add the chicken broth. As I recall, she used Swanson’s chicken broth in the big cans (about 46 ounces?) and usually one big can or maybe two was enough to moisten all the bread. It got stirred around until everything was mixed well.

If it was too soupy, we added more bread. If it was too dry, we added more chicken broth or if we were out, water worked too. She would taste it to decide if the seasonings were right and add more of something if she deemed it was needed. Once it was ready, she popped the pan in the oven, uncovered and baked it for about 30 minutes. I am guessing the temperature of the oven was most likely 350°F. It is a very easy and forgiving recipe. The only thing that needs to really cook is the diced onions.

When it is finished cooking, it smells and tastes wonderfully savory. It looks rather like a casserole I suppose and could actually be made more presentable for a potluck by baking it in a casserole dish instead of the huge metal pan, which never looked presentable or new for as long as I can remember. Whatever wasn’t eaten the night it was served would be put into the refrigerator. The next day when you wanted some, you just cut a piece much like a cake and put it in a microwavable dish and reheated it. Very easy. There is not much to spoil in it so it kept until it was gone and was a very inexpensive dish to make.

This was also an example of not wasting anything. You can use any kind of bread that is leftover to make it. When bread gets stale just toss it in the freezer. I have been known to make it with fresh bread and just used whatever we had on hand or bought the cheapest white bread from the day-old bakery outlet. The bread can be cut instead of tearing it up, I’m sure mom just wanted us to feel like we were being useful. When I got married and had a household of my own, we ate a lot more wheat and oat bread instead of just plain white and I noticed the different kinds of bread gave it an even better taste. If we had been one of those households where the mom cut the crusts off the sandwiches, I’m sure the crusts would have been saved to use in the next batch of dressing. We were not that type of household, we learned to eat things like bread and pizza crust. This was likely Mom’s way of making something delicious and filling out of old stale bread, but to me it is comfort food.

Category: Money Saving, Recipes | Comments Off on Dressing Recipe
September 13 2018

Saving Money on Food While Traveling

Last month, we went to an intense 3-day workshop in Atlanta that we knew would have long hours. We were also trying to continue eating reasonably healthy and trying to save money at the same time. So what did we do you ask?

Breakfast

Well, before we left home we were drinking green smoothies every morning for breakfast anyway, so I just made a few extra batches of smoothies and put each serving into a quart-sized zip-top freezer bag and put them into the freezer flat to freeze with the name of the smoothie and calories on the label. These did a dual purpose because they also acted as ice packs in the cooler on our way to Atlanta. They were only partially thawed, so when we got to our room, I left the next day’s smoothie in the refrigerator and put the rest in the freezer. Each morning we added a straw and drank our smoothie then pulled the ones for the next day out so they could thaw. That is how we dealt with breakfast, and it worked out very well.

This post contains some affiliate links for your convenience.
Please see this site’s Policy & Disclosure Page for more info.

Lunch

Lunch was not much harder. We use a lot of the Ole Xtreme Wellness High-Fiber Low-Carb Wraps in place of bread in our house, so we threw a pack of those in along with cheese sticks and sliced turkey lunchmeat for wraps. We tossed in the avocado we had in the refrig so we could use it up. We also prewashed and bagged baby carrots, cherries, and pretzels in individual servings. This meant each morning all we had to do to pack our lunches was make our sandwich/wrap and bag it, then grab the additional things we wanted to have to round out our lunch that day. We also had a small selection of Clif Bars and some prebagged Orchard Valley Harvest Snack Packs Trail Mix. We had a couple of single serving sized bottles that we could fill with our own water or iced tea each morning to add to our lunch bag. Everything fit nicely in my Thirty-One Lunch Break Thermal bag and was enough to feed both of us.

This particular event offered lunch tickets for $20 a person to go through a buffet and fill a styrofoam carryout container to bring back and eat in the meeting room. Nobody really wanted to drive somewhere to get fast food because once you were parked you didn’t want to have to give up your parking space for the day as they really had a shortage of parking at this particular event center. Needless to say, Hubby and I were thrilled that we had been cheap and planned to pack our lunches and thus avoided the additional $120 it would have cost us to eat that buffet lunch for the three days of the conference. I’m not going to even pretend we didn’t think of that as a huge win! Continue reading

Category: Money Saving, Travel | Comments Off on Saving Money on Food While Traveling
June 14 2018

Chicken Noodles & Veggies

I have been working on using up everything in my kitchen pantry in preparation for the great pantry clean out. I mean, obviously the less there is to remove from the shelves, the easier and faster the job will be when I finally get to it, right? So I was looking at the various things in there and found a few things I could use up and make a good dinner at the same time. So, I figured I should take time to show you what I used and the final product.

I should probably warn you I used an 8-quart pot and it was full when I was done.

So, here is everything I used to make this big meal:

4 (12.5 oz) cans of chicken breast 2 (24 oz) bags of frozen noodles 2 (29 oz) cans of mixed veggies 2 (32 oz) cartons of stock

Continue reading

Category: Money Saving, Recipes | Comments Off on Chicken Noodles & Veggies
March 9 2018

Saving for Big-Ticket Items

When you need to save for a big-ticket item, like a trip to London, or a really cool new camera, or something equally cool that you wouldn’t normally get a loan for like a new car, how do you save the money for it? I do all sorts of things, whatever it takes really, if the goal is truly important to me, so I will share some ideas below.

The very first thing I would do is to set up a separate account to put the money into so you can be motivated by the act of saving and watching the account balance grow. Once you’ve done that, try any or all of these ideas to help you meet your goal.

  • Save all pocket change, roll, and deposit. I saved pennies in one 16.9 oz Ice Mountain water bottle and nickels and dimes in another. I am told if you fill one with just dimes, it will hold about $100. We deposited over $130 in rolled coins to start our account this way, though admittedly, it was mostly quarters and we had been saving them a long time.
  • Choose NOT to do something, then transfer the money you would have spent on the thing you chose NOT to do, into the account for the big-ticket item. In our case, this was going to a cabin in a state park over New Year’s weekend.
  • Cook at home instead of eating out. Watch your food budget get lower and save the difference. Note that you pay extra for convenience foods, so make as much from scratch as you can, or buy extra to stock up when you find a good sale price on something you use.
  • If you really want to eat out, use a 2 for 1 coupon and save the difference, or if you are eating out alone get the second meal to take for lunch or eat for dinner later in the week.
  • Make your own iced tea, coffee, hot tea or whatever your beverage of choice is. Save the money you would have spent and put it into the big ticket account.
  • Give up paying for drinks if and when you go out to eat. We all need to drink more water. This can save anywhere from a dollar to several dollars per person, and let’s not even think about buying alcohol out, get it from the liquor store and drink at home you will save so much this way.
  • Save all overtime pay or freelancing money in the big-ticket account.
  • If you pay off a debt, take the amount you used to pay toward that debt and save it for the big ticket item or pay that amount extra toward the next debt so it gets paid off earlier and when the debts are paid, ALL the money formerly used to pay these debts can go toward the big-ticket item. Dave Ramsey calls this the debt snowball.

 

Continue reading

Category: Money Saving, Planning | 1 Comment on Saving for Big-Ticket Items