I hope as an adult Gavin enjoys looking back through this blog (I keep a copy backed up) and comes to better understand his parents through these posts. As such, I thought I should write a little about one of my passions in life. I love financial matters. It's hard to say if it's genetic or learned behavior, but it definately runs on my mom's side of the family. I love making budgets, analyzing investment strategies, and doing taxes. Yes, I find doing our taxes to be interesting and fun. Often times when I'm bored I will play with an online amortization calculator or mortgage payoff calcualator to run "what if" scenarios. I enjoy a good financial management book too. I have ordered many from our library. I find it interesting to learn different philosophies on money management and apply them to our life (at least in an excel spreadsheet) to find which strategies work best for us. I haven't yet gotten into specific stock market theory, as my mom likes to follow, but maybe I will one day. I can remember as a child in our little house in the country having to change the channel to CNBC so my mom could check on the market. We'd have to wait for the ticker to go by on the bottom of the screen to get the info she wanted - before the internet life involved more patience. My mom taught me that the job description of a stay-at-home mom includes saving money however you can. I also love frugality. My own version of frugality. Which to me means spending money on things that are important to us and skipping everything else. And spending as little as possible on those things that are important. We don't do cell phones, except for my pre-paid for emergencies. We do have dish network and a dvr, but have the cheapest plan available. We drive 2 paid off cars, and won't be buying another one until we have to. We do eat out sometimes, but only at inexpensive restaurants. We order pizza almost every week, but Jake gets a large pepperoni and breadsticks for under $7 with a military discount at Little Caesar's. I do buy fresh produce and mostly healthy food items, but almost always on sale. I will spend a buck or two occasionaly on a diet coke when I'm running errands and really thirsty. We go out for ice cream sometimes, but usually only to McDonalds or Sonic. We are paying $65 a week for Gavin's swim lessons, because that is important to us. I only buy clothes that are on sale and stock up on Gavin's clothes when they are really cheap - I already have all his 3T and 4T clothes bought from Sears.com at $1-$2 per item. I have all Gavin's Christmas and birthday toys for the next year or 2 already bought, when they were on clearance. I get $10 haircuts. Our only debt is our mortgage. And we plan to keep it that way. One way I save money is through couponing. I started doing this a couple years ago and really enjoy it. I would call it one of my favorite hobbies. I combine coupons with store sales to get our groceries, cleaning supplies, diapers, and toiletries for as cheap as possible at grocery stores and drugstores. There are many websites devoted to this, my favorites being southernsavers.com and moneysavingmom.com. When items are on sale I stockpile them so that I won't have to ever pay full price. It has worked out quite well for us. My goal is to save at least 50% off my total on each visit to the grocery store through buying items on sale and using coupons. I usually reach this goal or come close. Today I spent $68.74 at Kroger and saved $80.69. That is, I got $149.43 worth of groceries for $68.74. Saved 54%. My favorite part is the free stuff. I haven't paid for toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, razors, or body wash in over 2 years. Almost every time I go to the store I get something free. Here are today's free items:
That toothpaste - usually $2.59 each. It was on sale 10 for $10, which really means $1 each. I had 3 coupons for .$.50 cents each, which Kroger doubles, = 3 free tubes of toothpaste.
I could have gotten as much free toothpaste as I had coupons for. On the websites I frequent people were reporting getting 20 or 30 tubes at a time. But I haven't yet figured out how to get a bunch of free coupon inserts from the Sunday paper where we live. If I ever do, we won't have to buy any more blocks for Gavin, because he could just use all the free boxes of toothpaste and kleenex. And as an added perk, I noticed today that the back of my Kroger receipt has 2 free adult buffet coupons for Stevi B's, our local pizza buffet. That is where Gavin enjoys dipping his breadsticks in ice cream. As Jake is fond of saying, "Bonus!"
