Crunching the ca$h...

I remember when I used to borrow money from my mom back-in-the-day. The amounts would vary and I'd always pay her back, usually on payday. When I'd drive over & hand her the cold hard cash, she'd respond in the same way every time. She'd say: "Ohhh, here we are, Ang... with our high finance again!" and she'd chuckle & take the money from me. I'm not quite sure what that meant but it always struck me as funny too so I'd laugh as well.

I've been thinking a lot about those days since the beginning of this new year. We had a lot of medical bills come up from Oct'09 through Oct'10, the biggest two being my abdominal surgery in Dec'09 (~$34,000) & my bat bite with subsequent rabies vaccination series ending in Oct'10 (~$8,000). Yes, we have insurance but boy, it's not nearly as good ($4,000 deductible) as it used to be & we're paying more for it now than in years gone by. The same ole story for most things we purchase, I suppose. It seems the gap in agreement between insurance companies & medical providers is getting larger & more cavernous by the year. Regardless, when the bottom line is stated it's stated & that's what you owe. Period. The nice thing is that most hospitals have a timed payment plan with no interest accrued. See, there really IS a silver lining to most clouds!

Add the medical bills to the fact that my husband didn't get a raise (no one did, at his place of employment) in 2008. His bonus (which is supposed to compensate him for the miriad of overtime he works on a weekly basis & which we use every year to play "catch up" on any medical bills or outstanding charge card balances) in 2007 was used for our oldest daughter's wedding... then there was no bonus either (in addition to no raise) in 2008... and both the 2009 & 2010 bonuses were used to pay off my mother's funeral (in 2008).

All these things added together mean only one thing: it's time to crunch the numbers & go down to "bare bones" to try & have some $$ leftover at the end of the month to begin to chip away at the outstanding bills that have accumulated. So that's been one of my main focuses, as chief cook & bottle washer & money manager around here, since we rang in the new year of 2011.

The ideas I've come up with & things I've started incorporating into our home & my routine are really nothing foreign or new to me. I had just sort-of laid some of them aside, for various asundry reasons. Luckily I didn't forget where I put them :-) so they were very easy to find once again. I'll share a few of these things with you, in case you might like to try them yourselves. WARNING: some of these things are really rather 'back to the land' - type stuff, which may appeal to you or may not. Take what you can use & let the rest blow away in the wind. Someone who lives downwind will catch what you've cast aside & use it for themselves, so don't worry.

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1. I'll get the most shocking one out of the way first... I've stopped driving! *gasp* I drove one time this year & that was January 3rd. I haven't driven since. I am simply at home. Our youngest daughter went from being homeschooled to attending a church-based learning co-op (which uses A.C.E. paces for their curriculum) from Sept'10 - Dec'10. The co-op being unsatisfactory in every aspect of education, we switched her over to a parochial 'regular' school in the middle of Dec'10 & which she continues with today (& loves). But with the switch from homeschooling to out-of-the-home schooling, my hypertension (which I've had almost all of my adult life) went caflooey with my blood pressure skyrocketing & my head feeling like a solid rocket booster waiting for take-off! Too much tension, too much running, too much everything... and my body began sending out a warning that something had to give. I discussed it with my husband (who works from home - same company for 29 yrs & does same work but from home now instead of at the division building that closed back in 2008) and so now either my husband or our 23 yr old son has taken over transportion of Caboose. They also do any shopping I need done or any errands I need run. Which basically means that only the very minimum of trips are made, off the homestead here, because I don't know about your men but my men don't like going anywhere with a list in their hands. With gasoline over $3/gal now, that translates to less gas used than when I used to drive and also less $$ spent. The men get what's on the list: no more & no less. If they're sent on an errand, it's to accomplish that errand & get home. Period. Which leads to....

2. I'm back to using food & supply storage, buying staples in bulk, making the majority of our food solely from scratch, using dehydrated fruits & vegetables rather than fresh, always eating at home, etc. I was first introduced to this way of living back in the 1980s, when it was most popular for my generation. There were many magazines being published, at that time, that helped women learn to do such things as bake bread, store flour & sugar bought in #25 bags, and find beef by the quarter or half steer for the deep freezer kept in the garage. I soaked up the information like a sponge & never released it, even though I may not have always used it. I had indeed forgotten though the joys of: a.) eating good bread whose number of ingredients you can count on one hand b.) always having toilet paper in the house rather than running out after using the 4-roll pack just purchased a week ago c.) not going into a panic because we're down to the last quart of milk (in the middle of a snow storm) and just whipping up another gallon from the milk powder on the shelf d.) simply having the safe & secure feeling of knowing that my family has everything they need under our roof, to exist comfortably for quite awhile, without having to run to the grocery store first and e.) being self-sufficient in a small sense. Which leads to...

3. Since my men (I think like most) don't particularly relish being sent on errands with l-o-n-g lists in hand, I've been using Amazon.com quite a bit for my bulk buying. If some of you haven't tried them yet, for groceries, I sure wish you would. The bargains are tremendous (much cheaper than the grocery store, for most things I order and, if not cheaper, then exactly the same) and your groceries get delivered right to your door... for free. They have a beautiful organic section too. I still belong to a food co-op (that uses United National Foods Inc.) which I get many perishable items from like eggs, milk, cheese, yogurt, 25# bags of flour & sugar, etc. But for the other things such as dish soap, bar soap, laundry soap, toilet paper, paper towels, cereal, tea, coffee, waxed paper sandwich bags, shampoo and many other things, I use Amazon exclusively. For my dehydrated fruits, vegetables & milk powder I use Emergency Essentials. Their Provident Pantry-brand of powdered milk is the best we've ever tried! Our 23 yr old son, who is the milk expert in the household, can't tell the difference... and went out of his way to tell me so.

4. Back in the 1980s I learned how very important it is to drink fresh, clean, pure water. If our nation's water supply was polluted back then, imagine what it is now! *sigh* We have well water where we are, out in the county, that I refuse to drink out of the tap. I don't think drinking water out of the ground is good for anyone living anywhere these days. So for the last several years we've been drinking distilled water through a delivery service, which comes to the house here every 2 weeks with 5 gallon containers. It's good water & I feel good about myself & my family drinking it... but it's horribly very expensive... over $100/mo. for the water plus the rental on the dispenser. We're going to be phasing out that delivery service since we just invested in a Berkey Water Purifier, which I remember reading about in my early back-to-the-land days in the 80s. I did some research and it seems that the Berkey filters are just as good today as they were back then, if not better. Gravity drip filtration with no electricity used, which is a plus as well.

5. We're in the process of deciding what to do about these cell phones of ours. Yes, they're handy but are they necessary? Are they worth the cost? I've never seen any statistics that show how many adolescent or adult children have been saved from their kidnappers by being able to use their cell phones from their captor's car truck (which is the scenario we envision when we see our son heading out for the evening or learn of our married daughter walking out to the parking lot after working late). All I ever hear on the news is that police have tracked the cell phone "pings" to specific areas and then lost them, after the person is kidnapped, or they've found that the victim's cell phone has been turned off & therefore is no use to those searching. The only thing we use our cell phones for is to text our youngest, from us in the living room to her in her bedroom, telling her it's time to get ready for bed... or hubby to call me from the grocery store because he can't find the specific item I have on the list he's holding on to for dear life... or son to text me about a song that just played on the radio that he's sure I would absolutely love... or Facebook to update youngest daughter with the lastest news on which one of her friends updated their status last. The only time I can honestly say I was grateful to have my cell phone with me was when I spun out on the highway in Jan'09, with 4-month-old grandbaby in the car, & we were buried deep in a ditch in the median. I called my husband, barely able to talk but physically unharmed (as was grandbaby), and he in turn called the police. I suppose though, if I hadn't had my cell phone, I would have simply done what I would have done before cell phones even existed: I would have rolled down my window, waved a white napkin retrieved from the glove compartment, and waited for a trucker to call the police on his CB radio. The weather was horrible that day, with multiple spin-outs, so the chances are good that a policeman going by would have seen me before the trucker would have even had the chance to call. Our monthly cell phone bill is $145 (no internet, no apps, no games... just plain phone with unlimited texting, free incoming calls, free evenings & weekends, $10 per line after the 1st line) & it kills me every month when I pay it. Our house phone is $32/mo., including tax. Why do we need anything more than that?!

That's where we're at for the time being. We're only 3 weeks into the new year so I'm sure I'll figure out more ways to "cut the fat" around here. For now this is enough. Maybe I'll hunt up my "Tightwad Gazette" books. I know they're around here somewhere.  I love those things... and I love Amy Dacyczyn!