All the Things I Forgot to Say.

Note~edited to add the missing link to the knee surgery article

Yesterday Meredith from Like Merchant Ships did a podcast interview of me. It was very cool to actually hear the voice of someone who has become a good online friend

If you have come over here for the first time due to the podcast-WELCOME! I hope you’ll browse around a little and find something that interests you. If you need a place to start, this welcome post I wrote a little while back has quick links to a bunch of my popular articles.

As is the way with things like live interviews, when I was able to hear it as a listener I realized that I didn’t really address all of the questions that Meredith asked. Luckily as a blogger I have the perfect platform to fill in all the things I forgot to say!

Here we go!

Meredith asked how I track my expenses. We were discussing the “write down everything you spend for a month” method and we never got back to that question. In truth, YB and I don’t really track all of our expenses. We sort of subscribe to the philosophy from “The Wealthy Barber”. We take care of our savings and investments, our necessities and bills, and then we allow ourselves some leeway with the money that is left over. Obviously I don’t recommend this method to anyone who is trying to get out of debt-in those cases you do need to tightly track what you are doing. But this works for us-even if it doesn’t seem very frugal. Another way to describe what we do is “budgeting by the force“.

I mentioned a post I had read about a couple renting a cooler thing after the husband had knee surgery, and blithely assured you all that I would post the link. This morning I scoured my blogroll-do you think I can find the darn article? Please, whoever wrote that post, if you see this let me know! Thanks to Tamara I have the link; the article is from Frugal Babe

Meredith mentioned that her weakness is books and asked what mine is. I’m afraid I came across a bit “holier than thou” because I couldn’t really think of any! Honestly, I assure you I have plenty of faults! I gave up buying books years back. I literally (no pun intended) read about a book every 2 days most of the time-it was getting expensive. Now the local library supplies my fix.

My two biggest weaknesses are dollar stores and “good ideas”. It is not unusual for me to go into a dollar store and spend anywhere between $20 and $40 dollars. Granted, they are usually things that I can use, but not necessarily needs. I curb this by trying to limit my trips to once or twice a month. The good ideas are harder to explain. Sometimes I will be seized with the idea to do a specific project. I will have a burning desire to purchase or acquire all the supplies to do it. Then they will sit there for months before I get around to using it (or else not get used). I try to curb the impulse, but it still happens sometimes.

I realized that some of the things I said in regards to our budget and the new house seemed contrary. In one spot I say we are going to fully fund our IRAs, and in another I state that we are stopping funding our retirement. To clarify-we have for the last 3 years been maxing out the additional retirement investment opportunities at YB’s work. That is the part that we have stopped until we get a handle on our new expenses. Obviously we would like to restart that as soon as feasible. The earlier we save, the longer it has to increase.

Moving our shed is another issue that might not have been clear to some folks. The shed in question is the largest sized shed that could be installed on our property without a building permit. You could literally fit two cars end to end in the shed with a little room to walk along each wall. We bought it for storage at the old place (remember, it was half the size of the new) and considering that it was a several thousand dollar investment, a couple of hundred to have a big flatbed truck with a winch move it is very reasonable. I realized that some of you might have been imagining one of those little sheds you buy at Lowe’s and wondering why we were spending so much money to move it

I mentioned planting in hay bales. Here are some articles on that in Hay Bale Gardening Becomes Popular Pastime, Straw Bale Gardens and Straw Bale Culture Techniques .

Lastly in regards to gardening saving us money. I do think it saved us some money-especially since I garden organically. That is to say I’m sure I spent less than if I bought organic produce a the store or farmers market. This is still a work in progress. This year I wound up with canned salsa, zuchinni pickles, zuchinni relish, peach and raspberry jam (those were bought at the market and pick your own respectively-NOT ORGANIC). I froze zucchini, both shredded and sliced (mostly from my friends garden), I froze 3 large batches of tomatoes that I still need to defrost and process into sauce and chili sauce, and I dried a bunch of grape tomatoes and then froze them (those were both from a friend and the CSA), and I froze shredded cabbage and freezer cole slaw (from CSA). We ate a good amount of fresh Chard, fresh green beans (oops, froze some of those too), fresh sugar snap peas, fresh lettuce etc from the garden in season. I also had sage, basil and cilantro growing. Oh yes, and I got free apples from my good friend and made 4 large jars of applesauce. I would have done more, but we were moving-there really is only so much time in a day.

My intent really is to grow more of what we eat, but this year I’ll probably supplement from the local farmers market and friends gardens. My garden always seems to be a work in progress!

Are there any other questions that I left unanswered, or that you would like to hear more about?

Thanks for listening and reading!