Fun Stuff > CHATTER
Making ends meet
valley_parade:
Never planned on having offspring.
Then again, all my money goes to my record collection. :psyduck:
Papersatan:
Bulk food buying is great. With a baby I'm sure extra time is not a thing you will have a lot of, but you can save a lot of money by taking the time to package stuff yourself.
We buy massive packages of chicken breasts and I cut them in to strips and cubes and freeze them on a cookie sheet. Once they are frozen I put them into ziplocks. This way when I want to add some diced chicken to our pasta, bam, there it is. Also it made it so I used less chicken, because I could just take what I wanted instead of using it in one breast increments. I do the same thing with beans. I buy them dry soak and cook and then lay them flat to freeze. It is a pain in the ass, I won't lie, but I never used a whole can before so I was just throwing half of what I bought away. Now I am paying the same price from a gallon bag of beans as I was for one can.
Bulk is great, but only if you will package, and or use it all before it goes bad. Case in point for us, celery. Steve puts it in his chili (as a low cal filler) and I use it in soup. But even if we plan to cook in the same week we can't use a larger one, so we pay 10 cents less for half the celery. It is more per pound, but less money overall. If there is something you use a lot of though, your local farmer's marker is great for bulk veggies. You would be amazed how cheap some things can be there, especially in season. I can spend 10 dollars and come home with bags so heavy I have trouble getting them up the stairs.
Also, baked potatoes are the shit for cheap food. Steve and I have baked potatoes a few nights a week because they are cheap and filling. A potato is like 20 cents or something. Coat in olive oil and kosher salt, bake at 425 for 45 min or so and eat. We put butter and cheese on ours. If we are very hungry we put some chili on top, either the homemade stuff Stephen makes, or Hormel canned chili (1.49 a can, 4 servings in a can, so even with chili and a little cheese and sour cream it is well under a dollar a person).
As far as non-food savings, I second shopping around for car insurance, you might be able to save a bit. Also, if you are not already, get better about turning lights/tvs off when you leave a room. Dial your heat/air down/up a degree or two, and make sure you have them on an automatic thermostat so if you get cold and turn it up, it will turn back down later, so if you leave you are not heating the house all day.
Do you have a local university with a medical school? If so I would see if they have any medical studies for pregnant women/new mothers or newborns. Medical studies are not as scary as people think. Many of them are not giving you anything new or untested, they are just studying you to look for a correlation between symptoms or behaviors. So they just have you fill or diaries of symptoms and give blood, or keep track of your breast feeding, etc. The compensation can be anything from a 5 dollar gift card to a few hundred dollars. Just make sure you read everything and make sure you understand the study.
David_Dovey:
Kill two birds with one stone: California Cheeseburgers
(too soon?)
Elysiana:
Wow everyone, this is really helpful! I am taking copious notes. The food stuff is especially great because while I do know how to cook, I honestly don't know how to cook on the cheap, or how to buy that way. Money hasn't really been tight for me before, so I'm kind of freaking out.
Katherine - I almost wish we had extra expenses like that so that I could cut them haha. We did both get rid of our WoW accounts. We don't have cable TV. We are paying quite a bit for internet ($70/mo) but with four people in our house we need the higher speed. Um, only other thing I can think of is our phones, but Ryan uses his for one of his jobs so we can't really cut that down any farther.
TSK - I do hate refinancing because it means we'll be paying more interest and for longer, but that extra $100/mo would help so much. I'm pretty worried that we'll be overspending our paychecks if we don't have that extra bit.
Barmymoo - thanks for the congrats! I've actually been thinking about cloth diapers because I've heard mostly good things, and the cost especially is insanely cheaper, but I'm afraid I'm going to try them out and then not like them. I actually put up a blog post about it yesterday (link if you're interested). I would definitely love to hear more info about them (and anything else baby-related that you think would help) though.
I don't think the US really has a childcare finance plan. I haven't heard about one anyway, and I've been looking for answers on how people afford it. At $400/mo I'm actually getting it CHEAP, believe it or not. A lot of places I've read about charge $800/mo and up.
If Ryan had more stable hours I could drop him off in the mornings and then go pick him up, but right now they're all over the map. But, with the acquisition, that might be changing. Right now he works about 30 miles from home and I work about 20 miles from home. It's better than it was - I used to work 85 miles away.
Keep 'em coming, folks. I'm hoping this will help other people too, not just me!
<edit> Dovey: You are a butt and your post is also a butt :P </edit>
pen:
In Boston, you're lucky to get full time childcare for $1200 a month. But there sometimes are financial aid programs that you can apply to that are associated by state. I'm not sure what your state regulations are, but it's definitely worth looking into. The ones in MA are linked with welfare programs, so whichever dept handles that in your area might know where you can call.
Use your library. Libraries often not only carry things you can borrow, but they offer GREAT discounts on local museums and other activities. You don't have to cut out all of your leisure activities when you're poor. I use our library all the time for tickets to the aquarium, science museum, the zoo, etc. It's a phenomenal resource.
For food, plan a menu. I find that if I plan my meals ahead and know what's on my grocery list, I spend a lot less on crap that I just think "hmm, that looks yummy" and then gobble it up between meals. Figure out what you NEED. Try to spend less on junk food, or make junky food from scratch. Bake a cake from a box for $2. It'll last longer than a box of oreos.
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