If you've got great tips on budgeting please let me know! Also, if you've got great budget friendly recipes send them my way...especially ones without meat. (I feel like we have so many dishes that center around meat and meat tends to be expensive.)
Also, I want to share a tip with you. Have you happened to notice that your dishes are coming out of the dishwasher with white spots recently? I had a friend over for dinner and I was apologizing for the sad state my dishes were in and she told me she had been experiencing the same thing. Thankfully, her husband was listening to the radio and just happened to hear a discussion about why this was happening. Cascade has stopped putting Phosphate in their detergents. Apparently, it's not very good for the environment so several states have banned the use of it. And since phosphate was the ingredient that made our dishes look clean we are all left with a nasty residue on our dishes. However, there is a product called Lemi Shine you can add to your dish washing detergent that works wonders!
I'll try to only put in every other few loads so I'm not completely ruining the environment. YAY for clean looking dishes!
5 comments:
We have found that it is helpful to keep track of EVERY penny as it comes in and as it is spent. Of course, not keep track of every single little item, but generals, such as: $50 Shopko, $25 eating out, $30 misc. .... etc. This helps give you an idea of where your money goes and how you can cut back to stay within your limits.
If you ask Jeff about budget I'm sure you'll get some Excel garbble. He is such an excel nerd. But I think that everyone is an excel nerd. (It comes with the territory). But I have no advice.
We like omelets because they have no meat, well bacon if you count that.
We like to do french dip sandwiches. You can get a roast cheap and there are tons of leftovers. Good leftovers.
Good luck in the land of penny pinching
SWeeT! We made the blog! Did you happen to see my status on FB about lemi shine? Another friend of mine (who had been a faithful cascade user for years) mentioned that she had that problem and discovered that it was easily fixed by using finish detergent! After my lemi shine is all gone, i'm switching to finish. I'll let you know how it turns out. Heaven knows that while you're pinching pennies, it doesn't help to have to buy $4 lemishine! PS..we've been budgeting for at least a year now and it kind of stinks. We still have a really high grocery bill and can't quite figure out how to get it down. Let me know what good tips or recipes you come across and I'll do the same!
Oh yeah..we do have a tip for you.
it's called, www.mint.com
GREAT tool for budgeting. JJ and I spent a whole year keeping every single receipt just to find out that there's such a wonder as mint.com. It keeps track of and charts out your monthly expenses vs. monthly income. It helps you make goals and all that fun stuff.
The first post was by Greg, this is Stacey. I've been pondering this since Greg and I spent 6 of the last 10 years on a very tight (sometimes almost non-existant) budget. What advice to give...hmmm. The first is to step back and think about what is a NECESSITY versus a WANT. Believe me we don't NEED a third of the stuff we have convinced ourselves that we need. Second, if you find something in the store and you think you're in love, leave it and come back in a couple of days. If you haven't forgotten about it, then you can probably fit into your budget, if it's gone, it wasn't meant to be. Third, think of sneaky ways to save money (I am not talking about stealing). For instance, I would buy a five pound roll of hamburger and split it into 3/4 lbs. sections. That way when recipes called for 1 lb. of ground beef, I'd only use a 3/4 and got one more use out of my meat. It makes a little more exciting. Last of all, figure out what your luxuries are and decide when and how often you're going to splurge on them. If you know you can and you've got a plan you'll feel a lot less depraved. Have fun! Just be glad you don't leave in the 1930's when you had to drink out of orange juice cans because you couldn't afford to buy cups.
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