Comments | blueninja1026: Writer's Block: Small Economies

blueninja1026

Writer's Block: Small Economies

Dec 16, 2008 16:00

For better or worse, we didn't have much to cut from our budget. More than a year before the economy started to tank, I'd lost my job. So we've already tightened quite a bit. But I'd be hard-pressed to define luxuries that we had to eliminate.

I can count on one hand the number of times per year that we go out to movies and/or dinner, as a ( Read more... )

spending, writer's block, thrifty habits, budgets

Comments 6

crankyoldgoat December 16 2008, 22:48:59 UTC

taters are also good, and fairly cheap.

Note that eggs are high in protien so you can use them in place of meat. Throw in lots of onions (also cheap) and Jalapenos, tastes pretty good.

Monnettes has really good prices on fresh veggies, fruits and such.

dropping the soda may have another effect: weight loss. Unless DH loads his tea with sugar, the switch could lead to a weight loss for him. Dumping my daily Doctor Pepper helped me cut off 40 lbs.

An eight mile walk round trip to Sautters? Didn't think it was that far, though it is about a mile & half from here (part of my nightly walk; plus a goal: dark chocolate Lindor raspberry truffle).

Not taking the class isn't the same as stopping karate; you know the routines, you can make room in the garage and keep up. You just lose the social aspect of it, but you keep the practice.

blueninja1026 December 17 2008, 03:04:56 UTC

I don't mind eggs myself, but the kids aren't too crazy about them and DH has high cholesterol already, so we tend to avoid eggs unless it's egg white. But, yeah, scrambled eggs with onion, tomatoes, peppers...good stuff ( ... )

crankyoldgoat December 17 2008, 12:45:05 UTC

ah, you're married - you've got a built in punching bag.

and he has to take it.

been adding a variant walk taking me down to Harroun road in the evenings. That makes a total round trip of about 70 minutes.

Goal is to walk to Ciao's some saturday for supper.

In general, if you're substituting eggs for meat, you're balancing the cholesterol intake. Can't do eggs, homefries and sausage, but you can do eggs and homefries.

though they do taste better in sausage fryins than in oil.

avengangle December 16 2008, 23:25:44 UTC

You know, it still seems to me that the majority of your cutbacks were more related to your freelance status than the month of October. I mean, in a way, you said that things got better when gas and interest rates dropped. We're in the same boat, in that we don't have a significant amount of money in the stock market, and we'd already made a few cuts last year (that gas thing) and this year, so we could afford to get married (mostly grocery-related ( ... )

blueninja1026 December 17 2008, 02:48:26 UTC

Yes, as fate/karma/irony/divine intervention/dumb luck/unbelievable coincidence would have it, we'd already implemented a lot of changes before the general economy got ugly. So I guess we were ahead of the curve a bit, and then when gas prices dropped and interest rates dropped, it provided additional breathing room ( ... )

blueninja1026 December 17 2008, 02:56:18 UTC

And I can't even imagine trying to find a loan for a lot of stuff right now...for a bit we toyed with replacing my car but scrapped that idea pretty quickly. I'm not doing a lot of driving so the Corolla will do. We're kind of "idling" right now, not planning any major changes...just riding the storm out, as it were. Both kids will be in school full time in the fall and I can re-evaluate my job situation then. If I had absolutely NO freelance work between now and July, we'd still be solvent. Taking a vacation to California? No way. But solvent, yes. :-)

Nah, law school is definitely not something on which you want to compromise or "settle." :-)