Frugality Success

Hah! I've finally managed to convince the three couples we're closest friends with to not exchange Christmas gifts. We've all agreed that we'll just spend time with each other over the holidays and only buy for the kids, which in this group consists of only one so far, and she's only 16 months old, thus pretty easy to satisfy.

It certainly helps that we all now have or are about to start mortgages, and the three sets of them either got married in the past year or are getting married this year. Nothing like excessive financial strain to get people on board with saving money.

So that's $75 successfully knocked off our Christmas budget. I'll leave it as a buffer for now in case we overspend on a few people. If not, I'll ship it into Hubby's student loan in the New Year.

Sweet.

Christmas Spending: Gaining control and keeping it

'Tis the season for spending money. Since everyone is probably well into the mindset of the holidays, I thought I might share how I try to keep control of my spending as I gear up for Christmas.

Christmas is the big buying holiday that my family celebrates, but it can work for any of the other religious or cultural annual events as well. If you celebrate Diwali, Eid, Hanukkah, Kwansaa, Winter Solstice or anything else I've left out, adjust accordingly for your traditions, be they gift-giving, wearing new clothing, giving charitable donations, holding a feast, or otherwise.

Step 0: Start doing everything that follows in January so you can save up for it and take your time.
I’ll assume that you haven’t done so this year (usually I have, but this year I stupidly didn’t), but that you’ll think about doing it next.

Step 1: Figure out who you have to buy for.
My list consists of my parents, my grandmother, Hubby’s parents, brother and two surviving grandparents, my niece, our eight closest friends, two children of friends, and whoever’s name I pull out of the office Secret Santa hat. Don’t forget that you’ll probably send Christmas cards to people you don’t send gifts to, which naturally involves postage.

Step 2: Figure out how much you can afford to spend.
This may be a very different amount from what you wish to spend, or what you spent last year. I’m hoping to spend around $500. I’d been planning on $1000, but since I became pregnant my financial priorities have changed significantly. Sorry to my family for the cheaper gifts, but you’ll have the grandchild you’ve been harping about for eons sometime next June.

Step 3: Divide your total spending budget among your recipients.
Keep a reserve of extra money for those ‘great deals’ or ‘oh, it’s perfects’ that’ll otherwise blow the budget. I’m planning on breaking up the bucks along these lines:

Mom & Dad: $70
Granny: $25
In-laws: $70
Granny-in-law: $25
Grandpa-in-law: $25
Brother-in-law: $15
Couple friends 1: $25
Couple friends 2: $25
Couple friends 3: $25
Single friend 1: $20
Single friend 2: $20
Niece: $25
Friends’ kid 1: $15
Friends’ kid 2: $15
Secret Santa gifts: $15
Christmas cards: $10
Stamps for cards: $30
Wrapping paper: $15

Total: $470; $30 worth of breathing room.

Step 4: Start coming up with ideas.
Brainstorm with your partner if you have one. Check catalogues and flyers. Browse online. Ponder your recipients personalities, hobbies and upcoming life events. Think about your beliefs and values. Try to put off strolling the mall until absolutely necessary, unless you have the willpower of a saint and a lock worthy of Fort Knox on your wallet.

Step 5: Take advantage of your skills.
Can you bake? Sew? Knit? Paint? Are you an amateur photographer? Good with wood? Like scrap booking? $10 worth of ingredients can be turned into a fortune in cookies if you have the know-how and a recipient with a sweet tooth. Same goes for yarn and blankets or scarves. Lumber and furniture or frames. Creativity and time can make an inexpensive idea really mean something to someone. But keep it appropriate. No fudge for a diabetic, no mittens for a snowbird.

I’ve made pies in the past. I’ve found cheap photo frames and filled them with a montage of old family photos I dug up from the basement. I’ve decoupaged Gladware (hint sandpaper the outside first) into holiday cookie containers and filled it with yummies. All of these take time and effort, but save money.

Step 6: Use child labour if it’s available.
No. I don’t condone sweat shops. Trent at The Simple Dollar mentioned picking up end rolls from your local newspaper for a couple of bucks and letting your kids loose with the holiday crayons or markers as a way to make cheap and personal giftwrap. I think it’s a brilliant idea, though I of course haven’t tried it yet. You can probably do the same with thick cardstock to make your Christmas cards.

If you’re artistic yourself (which I most certainly am not), you could make cards and/or wrapping paper in a similar (if more elegant) way and have them be much lovelier than what you’ll find in stores.

Step 6: Hit the stores, either online or in real life, with your budget and idea list in hand.
Obviously the earlier you start this, the more time you’ll have to find the perfect gift at the perfect price. Try to be firm. That $85 sweater may be perfect for your sister, but if you’ve only budgeted $50, it’s going to cause a problem. Keep the sweater in mind. You can probably find something similar for cheaper somewhere else. And if you’re lucky it’ll be even more perfect.

Step 7: Don’t resign yourself to it if you’ve blown it.
In a moment of weakness you’ve spent three times what you were supposed to on a massive snow globe for Uncle Mort. You have three choices.

Option 1: Suffer through it, cursing yourself when the Visa bill comes in January.
Option 2: Head back to the store and return it.
Option 3: Futz with the budget and spend less on everyone else.

Obviously I recommend option 2, and suggest option 3 only if the store won’t take it back. Which reminds me: make sure you know the exchange and return policies. You can get great deals on Final Sale purchases, but you better be sure you really want them.

Step 8: Enjoy the conclusion.
Okay. You’ve finally purchased everything you need. You’ve wrapped it all, sent off the cards and the distance gifts, had the big day, stuffed yourself with turkey and/or ham, given out some of your gifts in person, received some in return.

Whew. Glad that’s all over and done.

It’s time to analyse a few things:
How’d it go overall?
Did your recipients like your gifts? If not, why not?
Did you stay on or near budget? If not, why not?
What went well and what went badly?

Once you have the answers to those, you’ll be able to start getting a handle on next year. Christmas stuff is usually on sale and some great bargains can often be found during Boxing Week and early January. Just don’t forget to plan all the steps that come before the buying stage, or you’ll still end up with the brutal Visa bill.

What? You just finished Christmas? You’re far too tired and emotionally wrung out to start preparing for next year right now?

Fair enough. Solution? Take a month off and start in February. $10 saved a week starting in February will give about $470 (plus interest) by December 25th. That’s my whole budget for this year. If you can save more, great. If you can save less, great. Knowing way ahead of time what your budget will be gives you more time to find gifts at the prices you want.

Hopefully next year I listen to my own advice.

Best of luck!

Holiday Frugality Roundup – Mid-November Edition

Several finance bloggers out there have started to write about the upcoming money-draining season, AKA the holidays:

Trent at The Simple Dollar has Eight tips on kids, Christmas and frugality. One of these we’re already doing (LED lights), others I have plans to do once I have a child that’s old enough (wrapping paper made with child-labour, open-ended toys).

J.D. at Get Rich Slowly has some basic advice on discussing gift exchange plans with family and planning now what you’ll do with any holiday bonuses you may receive. Way to resist those comic books, J.D.

Steve (who you may know from Brip Blap) wrote a useful guest post on what you should think about before giving to charity over at Consumerism Commentary. It covers thinking about what the charity stands for, how it’ll spend your money, how you’ll contribute, and whether you can receive a tax deduction. That last part is US-oriented in Steve’s post, but you can find a link to a listing of charities registered with the Canada Revenue Agency here. You can also find riveting subsections of the Income Tax Act at the CRA site. If you’re from elsewhere a quick search of your country’s tax bureau’s website will probably lead you to a similar listing and set of rules. I’m sure they’ll be every bit as thrilling to slog through as the Canadian ones, so don’t feel left out.

Feel free to add any other holiday frugality tips/links that I've missed in the comments.

Fun: Cheap and Easy

As Hubby and I start to cut back on our expenses we’ll be looking at a few cheap or free ways to entertain ourselves over the coming months. Winter in Canada always makes for an interesting challenge. Often it’s far too cold and/or icy to go for a hike or to spend significant time outdoors. Or maybe that's just because I'm a temperature wuss.

We already enjoy a few things that don’t cost anything:

We play board games with our friends on a semi-regular basis: Taboo and Cranium are the usual favourites, though we’ll throw in Trivial Pursuit or Scene It for variation from time to time.

Hiking: There are some beautiful mountain trails around here which are lovely in the summer, gorgeous in the fall and completely inaccessible in the winter.

Skating outside: Once you own the skates and know how to use them, this is free. If you’re on a body of water rather than a backyard rink, make sure someone in authority is overseeing its safety.

Tobogganing: There are some great hills around our city. Sleds, disks or Krazy Karpets are often very cheap, and you can’t beat the adrenalin rush.

Sadly, skating and tobogganing are going to be out of the question this year. No careening down hills or dodging mini-Gretzky wannabes while pregnant for me. No beer with the board games either.

I seem to have gotten the raw end of this deal...

Trent at The Simple Dollar has a couple of good lists of stuff to do for free here and here.

The problem is that Hubby is easily bored. When he becomes bored, things like video games tend to be purchased. I’d like to avoid such things in the future, so I’m looking for new ideas.

So, the question is: What do you do for free or cheap fun?

The joys of grocery shopping with your spouse, or, Why I’m an idiot.

Last night on the way home from work we went grocery shopping. This was necessary, since food level in the house was getting low, particularly perishables.

But I must confess that I’m an idiot. Why am I an idiot? There’s actually quite a lengthy tabulation of ways, but only a couple are pertinent to last night, the first of which is that I went to the grocery store while hungry. And not only was I hungry, but my husband was hungry too. Everyone who’s ever done the remotest bit of introspection knows that two hungry people going to the grocery store is a colossally stupid idea.

Edit: To see a collection of things that may help you lose weight, see Brip Blap's 101 Thoughts on losing 100 pounds. A few of them will also save you money. Note number 75. Let that reinforce the idea that I am an idiot.

I had a shopping list.

It was a good shopping list.

If I’d stuck to said shopping list, I’d have saved myself about $30.

I decided that instead of making macaroni and cheese from scratch, we’d try the fresh tortellini with cheese sauce the store had on sale. I’ve always thought it looked good and have been wanting to try it for a while. Because it was on sale, it wasn’t that big a splurge. It cost about $7.00, which isn’t too bad considering the mac and cheese would have cost about $4.00 to make, what with all the cheese. Not the most frugal choice, but I could have lived with it.

If I’d stopped there.

But instead of stopping I made my second idiotic move of the night. I let these five words escape my mouth: “Do we need anything else?”

Why, yes. Yes, we did.

We apparently needed some fresh crusty bread for the pasta. We also needed a frozen pizza, some pop, some chips and dip, some crackers and some cookies. I caved on each of these except the crackers, which were wholly my idea.

This falls safely into the category of ‘you win some, you lose some’, right?

We’re moving on today. I have a lunch of leftover pasta and bread. We’ll be having the pizza tonight and while it’s cooking we’ll put the ingredients for a nice, hearty, frugal beef stew in the crock pot so it’ll be all ready to go tomorrow morning. Thursday night we’ll eat out somewhere inexpensive as we have a pre-natal class which starts too early to go home in between.

And on Friday we’ll make homemade macaroni and cheese with four dollars worth of ingredients which we already own.

The ever-dreaded Christmas budget

I’ve been pondering our Christmas budget this year.

This is the first year that both my husband and I have been employed simultaneously with decent jobs. The decent is of course relative, but for us it means each job A) required those expensive pieces of paper we have hanging on our wall, B) provides benefits like dental and/or a pension, and C) pays significantly better than we were making when working retail.

Since this is the case, I’d planned on being more generous with the Christmas spending than we have been in the past whilst starving students.

However, now that we’re pregnant, my priorities have changed. Now I want to maximize our debt repayment and savings because my income will drop when I go on Canada’s (much appreciated) year-long parental leave.

So, it’s with somewhat heavy heart that I’ve budgeted a mere $500 for Christmas shopping. This includes our four parents, three surviving grandparents, a brother, eight friends (six of whom are couples and therefore cheaper/easier to buy for), a niece, two kids belonging to friends, and my father’s and grandmother’s birthdays.

That being said, I won’t be too upset if we go a bit over budget here and there, but I think we can get reasonable gifts for these amounts. I’ll be starting to look online this weekend.

How much are you budgeting this Christmas (or other holiday) season, and how many people are you buying for?

Healthy (well...Healthier) Food Cheap and Easy – Tuna Kraft Dinner

I can’t say this is healthy food, but it’s definitely healthier than the original version. And it certainly is cheap and easy.

1 box regular Kraft Dinner [Kraft Macaroni and Cheese to non-Canadians]($0.99/800 calories)
250mL (1 cup) frozen peas ($0.49/110 calories)
30 mL (2T) fat-free sour cream ($0.15/30 calories)
Splash of skim milk ($0.05/15 calories)
1 (170g/6 oz?) can of tuna ($0.79/200 calories)
Salt and pepper to taste (negligible/negligible)

Boil the noodles according to package directions. For the last 5 minutes, add the frozen peas. Drain and return pot to burner. Turn off heat. Add sour cream and powdered cheese, stirring until smooth. Add small amounts of milk until desired consistency is reached. Stir in tuna. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Makes 2 large servings, or 4 side dishes. I usually split it into three, taking the third to lunch with me the next day.

This costs me $2.47 to make the whole thing. Since I split it in three, that’s 82 cents a portion. I've quoted the regular prices at my normal store. Both KD and tuna are often on sale, making this dish even cheaper. If you like the generic brands of macaroni and cheese boxes, this will be an even cheaper meal.

Total calories:1155. Split into three that’s 385 calories per serving.

The best part about this recipe for me is that I always have all of the ingredients in my pantry. The only thing I’m occasionally missing is sour cream, in which case I’ll use butter, margarine or just extra milk. If I don’t have or don’t feel like tuna, I’ll add half a pound of cooked lean ground beef instead, although this increases both the cost and the calorie count.

If you’re pregnant, please remember that tuna should only be eaten occasionally. It’s an oily fish, and as such may have relatively high levels of mercury in it. The guidelines change regularly. Health Canada’s 2007 fact sheet on mercury in fish advises no more than 150g per month of fresh or frozen tuna, and no more than 2 cans a week of albacore or white canned tuna. Other types of canned tuna may be safer, as those species generally have lower mercury levels. Check with the health agency in your own country as your fish populations, sources or guidelines may differ.

Be aware that price and calorie count will of course vary by region.

Prices are in Canadian dollars, which on the date of this post were worth US$1.07, ₤0.51, €0.73 or AUS$1.16.

My One Day Commitment - How'd it go?

Yesterday I made a one day commitment not to spend any money needlessly. All in all, I think I was fairly successful.

I had breakfast and dinner at home and didn't stop at either Tim Horton's or McDonalds. Approximate savings: $9.
I packed a lunch from home rather than eating in the company cafeteria. Approx: $4.
I stuck to my grocery list and didn't let my husband con me into buying chips and dip. Approx: $6.
I bought gas at $1.02 a litre for my empty car. Boooo.

I spent most of the night curled up with a book. That was nice. However I failed to go to sleep especially early because House was on. It's my favourite show, and with the writer's strike currently happening I may not get to see it for a while after they run out of scripts.

So, all in all I'd call my first foray into frugal commitments a success. Next time I'll see if I can get my husband to join me. He spent yesterday drinking a Starbucks Cappuccino Venti and eating lunch at a restaurant with his coworkers. Approximate cost: $25.

Sigh.

The One Day Committment

Today I’m not going to spend money needlessly.

That’s it. No long-term plan. No cutting the extras out of my life permanently. Just today.

This is by no means an original idea. The Simple Dollar has discussed it. I’m sure countless others have as well.

This morning, I didn’t stop for a muffin and tea at Tim Horton’s or the cafeteria downstairs. I packed a lunch from home, so no hitting the cafeteria at noon either. I will be stopping on the way home to make some purchases, but they will be groceries that we need (got my list) and some gas for the car (sadly empty).

After the groceries and the gas station, I’m going to go home and make dinner rather than stopping by McDonald’s as has become my habit lately. Cheaper and healthier. After that, I’m going to curl up with a book I’ve been meaning to read for ages and haven’t quite gotten around to. I paid for it months ago. Actually, come to think of it, I bought it with a gift certificate I was given as a house-warming present, so it didn’t even cost me any money back then. Sweet.


Also, I'm exhausted, so an early night with no TV will be good for me.

As for tomorrow, we’ll see what happens. One day at a time, right?

Healthy Food Cheap and Easy - Cheese and Egg Pasta

170g (6oz) multigrain macaroni ($0.85, 620 calories)
250mL (1 cup) frozen corn ($0.62, 160 calories)
2 medium-sized eggs ($0.32, 130 calories)
Salt, pepper, oregano to taste (negligible, negligible)
125 mL (1/2 cup) shredded cheddar cheese ($0.90, 230 calories)

Boil pasta according to package directions. During the last 5 minutes, add frozen corn niblets.

Turn off the burner. Drain the pasta and corn and then return the pot to the hot burner. Crack the eggs into the warm pasta, and add the spices and cheese. Stir briefly and then put the lid on the pot. Allow the heat of the pasta to cook the eggs and melt the cheese, approximately 2 minutes. Serves 2.

Total cost per serving: $1.34. Calories per serving: 570


Prices and calorie counts will of course vary by region and brand.

If you’re serving more people simply add 85g (3oz) pasta, 125mL (1/2 cup) corn, an egg, and 63 mL (1/4 cup) of cheese per person.

To make it lower in calories, substitute light cheese for the regular cheddar. You can also use frozen peas and/or carrots instead of corn, but I’d recommend switching the herb to thyme rather than oregano.

To make it cheaper, try substituting regular pasta for the multigrain, or use less cheese.

Prices are in Canadian dollars, which on the date of this post were worth US$1.07, ₤0.51, €0.74, AUS$1.16.