Grownupish

A place where I can build my best 'adult' life, even if I don't feel like one yet.

Tag: Money

  • Five Frugal Things: There’s no crying over spilled laundry detergent.

    There was nothing this week that was massively frugal, at least – not for me. But here are five little frugal things I did to save money this week.

    1. Shopped the ‘clearance’ aisle at the grocery store. This week I got some Gum Recession toothpaste for 25% off. I just went to the dentist this week, and gum recession was a discussion. I can feel like I’m doing something about it.
    2. I ate only leftovers for lunch for the last four days. I go back and forth on leftovers. I always feel virtuous if I eat leftovers for lunch (or breakfast, or dinner) but many leftovers just aren’t as good as they were originally. One of my favorite things to do is look at the list that’s on the fridge and see if I can give leftovers an upgrade.
    3. I planned three dinners that use food that we already have in the house, specifically from the freezer.
    4. We had an, only funny in hindsight, accident earlier this week which ended up with about a gallon of laundry detergent on the floor of my laundry room. Instead of mopping it all up and using new laundry detergent, I wiped it all up with rags and have been putting one of these ‘detergent rags’ into each load as I’ve needed to do another load. Just because laundry detergent was on the floor, doesn’t mean it can’t be used. It’s a little like the 5 second rule…for detergent.
    5. I waited to go grocery shopping until I had to drop The Kid off somewhere else, saving gas by only doing one run.

    These are all little things. But that’s the point. I have been working for a while on making little decisions that support my goal of wasting less money.

  • Money Mondays

    The original plan was to make this a money blog. But, honestly, I don’t feel like quite enough of an expert to make every post about money. Plus – I just wouldn’t be as good at it as Matt and Joel over at How to Money. (Seriously, if you’re looking to get your money life in order, their podcast is fantastic!)

    But, I also want this to be a place where money is a large part of the conversation, because money management is a big decider in whether you get the life you want or not. I want to have (eventually) enough money advice/information here that if someone stumbled upon my site and read through some posts – they’d be set on the right path money-wise.

    So, I hereby declare every Monday will be Money Monday!

    Today I wanted to talk about the first and most important rule about money: Spend less than you make.

    Easy to understand. Not always easy to put into practice. In order to do that you have to 1) be making money 2) know how much your spending and 3) ideally, only be spending money you already have ‘in hand’ and going into debt.

    When you’re a New Adult that’s a lot harder than if you’re older like I am (I like to think of myself not as old…but a Veteran Adult). When you’re fresh out of school, or even still in school, you have a very small income, you ‘need’ a lot of stuff to get started in life, and the world is much more expensive than you expect it to be. A budget will really help here, but we’re going to talk about budgets later on, they can be scary.

    If you’re me, every month, I put a set amount of money into four different ‘not spending’ buckets – College kid tuition, Little Kid future college tuition, a car savings account, and a retirement account, because these are my four major savings goals right now. That money goes out of my checking account – and I don’t think about it anymore. I can’t spend it because I already earmarked it for something else. You don’t want to start big like this – having money to save gets easier the more money you bring in, but you have to start somewhere. It’s like building muscle – you don’t go into the gym and come out 5 minutes later looking like a bodybuilder. You do some exercises with small weights – but you do it bunches and bunches of times, and eventually you do start to see muscle building up.

    If you are already putting something aside at the beginning of each month, bravo! This is the most important think you can do to have a healthy relationship with money. If you aren’t I challenge you to try the following. This month, (right now even) take $5 and put it aside somewhere and don’t touch it. Ideally, this somewhere would be a savings account where it’s accruing interest, but it could be in a drawer, in a jar, in a piggy bank, under the couch cushions, anywhere – so long as you know where it went. You aren’t allowed to touch that $5, except for emergencies. You know, real ones.

    If you do this every month for a year, you have at least $60 (more if you put it into a savings account that gets interest). It’s not a lot, but it’s a start, and an important one.