{image source}

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

DanO and I are on a no-frills budget.

Great, here she goes again.

No, but really. We have our student loan debt in our cross-hairs and we have decided to stop living a lifestyle that pretends we don’t have debt. Paying off those loans is our number one financial objective right now and as a result we have changed a lot of things around here. Some of the changes have been so easy that I insist you try them, too. For example:

- Price check your monthly payments. It seems silly to have a bidding war with the garbage company, but one morning I decided to do it. I made a handful of phone calls while the boys were eating breakfast and  what do you know? Next year we will save $7 a month, or $84 overall. Given that it took me less than an hour to do, I’d call that a good hourly rate. We have also switched life insurance companies and looked into our internet costs, too (but decided not to switch).

- Make an “approved purchases” list. At whatever store it is that you find yourself justifying impulse purchases (you know the one) make – as in write down in pen – a list of the items that you do need to buy at that store and then don’t buy anything not on the list. We have done this for Costco because everything there seems like such! a! great! price! and all then suddenly we were coming home with ground beef, eggs, and a toilet. (True story. Toilet in our ground floor bathroom? Costco.) For you it might be Target or Amazon (not a store, but you get me) or Walgreens.

- Rethink where you buy it. I don’t do the extreme couponing thing, but simple store changes have saved us a good amount of money already. We now shop at Aldi for the vast majority of our groceries, ThredUp is the source of most of our boys’ clothes, and Target has been replaced by the Dollar Store.

The Dollar Store?

Yes. The Dollar Store, y’all. I have come to love it.

It is amazing what swearing off Target can do for the budget. That place has a seemingly magical ability to make me want want WANT and need need NEED! On occasion I would take the boys there just to swing by the in-store Starbucks and blow an hour (O, and about $50).

Now when I feel The Bullseye’s pull, the boys and I grab a 5 dollar bill, hop in the car, and go blow it at the Dollar Store. Seriously, even $5 feels like a shopping spree there, and it was eye-opening to see the kinds of things they carry that I always assumed I needed to hit up Target in order to purchase (e.g. toothbrushes and paste). And just in case you are unfamiliar, everything at the Dollar store is… wait for it… a dollar (or less, sometimes).

Now that I know I can buy them for $1, I cannot justify buying the following things anywhere else:

• gift bags, tissue paper, wrapping paper, ribbon
• kitchen utensils (spatula, cookie cutters, ice cream scoops, cookie sheets)
• kitchen wash cloths and rags
• bleach and ammonia
• toothpaste and toothbrushes (name brand!)
• hair binders, bobby pins, headbands
• coloring books and crayons
• tea lights and candles
• office supplies (envelopes, manilla folders, paper clips, etc.)
• small storage (non-food tupperwares and bins)

Believe me, I realize that a cookie sheet from the Dollar Store is not going to be of the same caliber as one from Bed Bath and Beyond, but seeing as how the caliber of my cookie sheets falls actually quite low on my priorities list, I’ll take the $7 in savings over a name-brand cookie sheet any day. If you are a cookie aficionado and a dollar store cookie sheet won’t do, I totally get it. I’m just not, so the Dollar Store fits my purposes fine.

We have goals for our debt in 2012 (namely paying off and extra $__,000 of it) and I am confident these little changes will help us get there.

:: :: :: Let’s chat. :: :: ::

How do you pinch your pennies?

And you know what? I really was ok with that. Sure, the idea of my husband taking a box of Revlon to my tresses makes me more than a little nervous, but I acknowledge that getting my hair highlighted is completely a vanity thing for me. I am happy to swallow my vanity if it means living debt-free. Bring on the box kit.

My sweet friend Cindy knew very little of this when she handed me an envelope as we were sitting in Caribou Coffee.

“I won it at a raffle, but I don’t color my hair, so I thought of you.”

The outside of the envelope read “Complementary Cut and Color, a $135 value”

I started crying immediately.

Because, no, I don’t need my hair highlighted, and no, I would be by no means ‘suffering’ to go without a professional dye job. But, I recognized this as the extravagant love of my Heavenly Father, and the kind thoughtfulness of a friend.

(a friend that I totally started crying in front of in a coffee shop and I think maybe she got a little misty eyed, too.)

I am leery of the message that if you are wise, faithful, and generous with your finances that God will bless you with financial security or earthly possessions. We are not promised security or comfort. I think what really happens is that because you are living intentionally (being wise, faithful, and generous) you notice God’s blessings - whatever form they may take.

Tuesday night, my blessing took the form of some hair dye, aluminum foil, and a fun conversation with a sweet expectant mama who did an impossibly good job with my color and cut.

{sorry for the blur, but look! pretty hair!}

If you live in the Twin Cities, Meranda at Studio Bodair in Lakeville did a fantastic job on my hair. I highly recommend her!

:: :: :: Let’s chat.:: :: ::

How have you experienced – or given! – extravagant love?

I have started and not finished so many things that one of these times when I tell DanO about something new, I half expect him to laugh and nod and pat my head. Silly little wife and her dreams.

But you guys, he never does. He dreams with me, he supports me, he believes in me.

I have mentioned that we are dramatically changing our money handling here in This O House, and that has included the grocery budget. Starting in October, we cropped $100 off of our budgeted grocery amount and I am working on fitting what we need into that smaller number.

One of the things I have been doing is making our buns, rolls, cookies, and bread from scratch instead of buying them packaged. Sure, you can get a $.99 loaf of bread, but the nutritional value thereof is going to be severely lacking. The bread products we buy tend to be whole grain, often organic, and can be pricey. I checked a few cookbooks out from the library and have been having some great success.

{one pound loaf that we had with dinner yesterday}

Except. Confession time. I have never in my adult life owned or used a mixer of any kind. I feel like most people get their mixers as wedding gifts, but we didn’t register for a stand mixer at our wedding because I thought that those $300 could go elsewhere that would be more needed by us (and at 20 and 21, we needed a lot of more essential things). Why we never picked up a hand mixer in the last few years I’m not sure, but everything I have ever mixed has been by hand with one of our two whisks. Then, with all of this bread business going on, I bent one of the whisks a few weeks ago.

Here’s the other part of this story: Way back in August when I decided to run a half marathon, I set up a reward for myself should I finish. Kind of like some women give themselves “push gifts” – items (purses, shoes, jewelry, etc.) they will get once they are done pushing in labor as a way to be motivated – I planned on getting a “finishing gift”: a nice stand mixer. Keep in mind that this was before our budget lock-down, and even before the bread making. I wanted this mixer because they’re nice and hey – I like to make cookies as much as the next lady.

When October, our budget, and the half marathon came, the mixer was off the table. It just wasn’t feasible anymore, and I was ok with that. I finished the race all the same and the pride in my accomplishment is no less than what it would have been with a new appliance on my counter.

Then yesterday DanO walked in the door from work holding this:

I screamed and giggled and clapped.

Then I cried.

{and made cookies}

To me, the image is painfully beautiful. It’s elaborate love. It’s seeing a desire of his beloved’s and satisfying it. It’s believing that I will follow through and continue to make our own bread to the extent that this will be a worth-while investment. It’s extravagant, sacrificial love.

If you can’t tell, it’s not really about the mixer itself.

It’s the gift of being believed in, of being supported and loved.

And for those of you thinking, ‘But, uh, Allison? Budget? Living like no one else? The whole Dave Ramsey thing?’: It was a craigslist STEAL and was purchased with unexpected income.

PS: if you’re wondering that, you missed the point.

It’s a blessing I don’t deserve from a husband I don’t deserve.

{here’s the recipe for the loaf in the picture seen above}

Whuuuuuut? Silence around here for nearly 2 weeks and then 2 posts in one day? What in the blogosphere has gotten into me? (I don’t know, friends. I really don’t know. Thanks for bearing with me, though.)

And here’s where I wax loquacious about zoos, budgets, credit cards and veterans.

A few resources we’ve found useful from Dave Ramsey’s website:

A short (and really good) video lesson on eliminating credit card use

PDF budgeting forms (we use the monthly cash flow form)

The debt snowball method (this is how we plan to sack our student loans early and live debt free)

Sign up for the Getting Started emails

Dave Ramsey’s radio talk show

{have a great weekend, friends.}

::stares at computer screen like Dora, waiting for your answer::

Good!

¡Bueno!

I’ve missed you!

¡Te extrañé!

Hey, remember how we quit cold turkey from spending money on food from restaurants (or fast food joints (or coffee shops))?

Yea, I do remember. So, how’s that going AllisonO?

I’m glad you asked! It’s going well. It’s not going perfectly, but it IS going well.

My first slip up occurred on the 11th of this month, when I bought a $3.05 chai tea latte at a cafe downtown.

First slip up AllisonO? As in there have been multiple slip ups? And I thought you said it was going well?

Ok, so maybe let’s back up to the successes then, before cataloguing the failures, shall we?

I did successfully do “Once A Month Cooking”, or a subset thereof. I made 15 meals in one day and stuck them all in the freezer. It worked incredibly well, actually. I grocery shopped the night before (after bedtime to so I could go by myself without burdening DanO), did all of the chopping and prep in the first half of the day, and then assembled all the meals during nap time. It means that I have meals on hand and (permitting that I remember to take it out of the freezer in the morning to thaw) all I have to do is heat them up (via grill, oven, microwave, or crock pot). This has been the most helpful thing I’ve done to help us (mostly) succeed.

Packing a lunch (straight out of grade school: pb&j, a nectarine, oreos and wheat thin crackers) has saved me 3 times. It’s not a glamorous life, but it’s an on-budget one.

I have also needed to be flexible with my concept of dinner, meaning left overs, breakfast for dinner, or sandwiches are all fair game. It’s food, eat it and be sustained (again with the glamorous life thing).

Ok, so about those other failures. They were actually two in close conjunction, because I was out of my house for 14 straight hours. (True story.) I DID eat breakfast before leaving, pack a lunch and even copious snacks, but it’s darn near impossible to last that long without more sustenance. (This is the part where I skip over the tiny little detail that I was “forced” to tag along on a shopping/girls’ night adventure during which I “had to” eat Swedish meatballs at Ikea and then “pressured” into ordering a ($4) appetizer pizza at a nice restaurant. It’s a rough life, but someone has to live it.)

So, in all that, we (and by we I mean I) have spent almost exactly $15 on eating out this month. To be fair, DanO and OBaby ate out on Friday (while I was gallivanting around Ikea and stuffing my face with lingonberry sauce) but DanO’s brother picked up the bill. (Thanks, Paul!)

But, y’all. It’s the 21st of the month, and we’ve only spent $15 on eating out.

THAT DESERVES APPLAUSE.

(Or maybe that deserves Chipotle burritos being delivered to my front door. I’ll let you decide.)

(Carnitas, extra rice, black beans, cheese, sour cream, guacamole, and lettuce.)

(Please.)

We eat out a lot. I don’t mean like sit-down restaurants with huge portions, I just mean we seem to do it on-the-go or at coffee dates or lunch dates or sometimes it’s take-out or coffee drive-through or take’n'bake pizza or coffee from the cafe in Target or food courts while shopping or a craving for Chipotle burritos or a craving for an iced venti decaf white mocha with a half a pump of hazelnut. Hypothetically.

But something about it not being those sit-down restaurants made us feel like it was ok, you know?Like as long as it’s not the Olive Garden we’re not wasting our money. We’re not being extravagant, we’re just being busy (and other lies I tell myself…) but then we took a closer look at our budget.

You ready?

We spent almost $600 on food last month – eating out and grocery store.

Holy crap, guys. HOLY CRAP. Granted, some of that was spent while we were traveling or out of town which is somewhat inevitable (hello, NYC and Oregon trips) but $600 is completely unacceptable for a family of 3 (2.5 if we’re honest) to spend on food in a given month. This has got to stop.

In reality, we’ve known it needed to stop for a while now. But summer is summer, you know? We’ve been to several states and on several trips and all those yummy iced coffee drinks (excuse excuse excuse…)

…I don’t care if summer is summer, a budget is a budget. And we were breaking ours.

So, September 1st has been circled on our calendar for a few weeks now. It is O My Family’s day to change. For the entire month of September we will not pay a single cent to eat out.

Cold turkey, friends (and I’m not talking about the lunch meat in the fridge). No more. None. No coffee, no Noodles & Co., no Jimmy Johns, no Papa Murphy’s Pizza. None of it. For a month.

As I write this, I am in a bookstore cafe and I promise you, the toffee mocha frappuccino and Chonga bagels are calling my blessed name. This is not going to be easy. I can count on both hands the number of functions and events we have at restaurants this month where we may be the only ones not ordering something. This is not going to be easy. Lately, this chasing a toddler thing has me plum tuckered out by 4:00 and I have little oomph left to make dinner. Usually we resort to take out at that point. This is not going to be easy.

So far I have thought of a few plans to help our family succeed at this challenge:

-Once a month cooking (on a smaller scale): I have never attempted OAMC, where you spend an entire day in the kitchen preparing meal after meal (but it’s more efficient because you prep and clean once, and often dishes have similar ingredients that you prepare together) and then freezing them. Then, the night before you plan to eat it, you take the meal out of the freezer and put it into the fridge to thaw (or put it on the counter by 9am the day of). Now, I don’t think I can handle a whole month at a time being that I’ve never ever tackled something of this magnitude, but I really want to try a 2 week version. I hope to do that this weekend which should help with O crud, it’s 4 and what’s for dinner? O’clock.

-Grocery ready-to-go’s: I don’t know if this is technically cheating, but in the back of my mind I anticipate buying a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store on one of those nights that we would normally resort to Chipotle. A frozen pizza or 2 will probably sneak its way into my freezer as well.

-Bringing snacks with us: I already do it for OBaby everyday – I have enough on hand for him to constitute a meal when we leave the house. Some snack sticks, some fruit, water, sometimes I even bring a small cooler bag (the one that came with my breastpump) with cheese sticks and hard boiled eggs in it. I need to start including enough for myself (and DanO if he’s with us) because being out and about and hungry is our main down fall.

-Avoid, when possible: yes, social functions often occur at eating establishments and yes I will continue to be social, but when it’s within my control this month, I will try to avoid cafes and stores with food courts as playdate settings. I will opt instead for libraries (although those increasingly have coffee shops and in-house restaurants), beaches, houses, and parks.

Sure, I’ve thought of some strategies but friends, (say it with me:) this is not going to be easy. But neither was looking at our budget last month. So.

Do you have any help/tips/advice/encouragement/motivation/experience to share? I could use it, because… well…

This is not going to be easy.

Ok, ok I know that last time I did a Not Me! Monday post a few weeks ago it was about the ridiculous lump of cash we forked over for a new rug (Have you rug shopped lately?! I need to start making area rugs and get in on that racket!) but this time I’m going to highlight just how frugal I can be when the mood strikes.

You should probably start out by knowing that I am not usually so cheap about hair treatments that I go to various local cosmetology schools for my appointments. Plus it’s not like I’m only willing to pay to get my hair touched by a professional like 3 times a year, or anything.

On Friday I was flipping through the channels over nap time and saw a local celeb and the owner of a ritzy salon chain here in the Twin Cities talking about a promotion that his company was doing this weekend. They were supporting and restocking the local food shelves by offering free haircuts to clients who donate 3 cans of food and $10-$20.

A $10 super awesome haircut from a fancy super awesome salon? I so did not call to book my appointment before the segment on TV was even over. In typical fashion, I called Mrs. Flipping Couple (aka Cindy) to see if she wanted to get her hair did for cheap too. Not that she’s also stingy when it comes to beauty budgets, or anything. We coordinated appointment times and carpooled (O man, we are SO FRUGAL I can’t even STAND IT).

Upon arriving at the salon, I did not throw a gown over myself and my bruple skirt and then shamelessly snap a picture in the dressing room mirror.

Say “Hi!” to the sexy Fabio-haired guy over my shoulder.

{Hi Fabio haired guy!}

The appointments began as to be expected, consults, swivel chairs, yummy smelling hair products.

At one point, though, I looked over my shoulder to where Cindy was, and what did I see in place of the stylist holding scissors to her hair? I did not see the salon chain owner himself, going to town on her sassy red bob like a true artist (he was not making very focused facial expressions). “That’s totally the guy from TV!” I thought.

Yes, the owner of all 8 salons was not cutting her hair! In other words, Cindy was not receiving one of the most expensive haircuts you can probably get in the Twin Cities FOR $10 AND 3 CANS OF FOOD.

{No, he does not have a mohawk.}

I did not ask permission from my stylist to scurry across the salon to snap a picture of Mr. Hair Himself working his magic, because that would have been really awkward. He was not totally cool about it and did not strike a pose for me.

For the rest of the time, though, I was not sitting in my swivel chair receiving my plain old normal hair cut thinking “NOT FAIR! I’m the one who invited HER!” (Which did not remind me of the time I went to a wedding expo and invited a friend to come along and then said friend won the door prize raffle for a $300 pearl necklace and earring set [HI CASS!].) Why do these things always happen to me?!

Anyway, in the end I did get over my haircut jealousy enough to take an after picture in the dressing room mirror.

{Hello, creeper, over-our-shoulder, sexy-haired Fabio guy!}

It’s crawling boot camp around here. We haven’t quite figured out the forward motion thing, but boy are we trying hard.

Watching my little one army crawl his way around our living room has made me want to keep those edible little knees protected but still dress him in less restrictive clothes. Baby leg warmers came to my attention as a great way to protect the soon to be crawling knees from hard wood floors, make diaper changes a breeze, and keep little chunky thighs nice and warm, all without getting in the way of progress.

Except, O My Budget Breakers, that’s a lot of money for a little bit of fabric. And aren’t they pretty much just knee socks without feet, anyway?

Yes, yes they are. So, one nap time this weekend, I decided to take the feet off of some knee socks  and make some O original baby leg warmers. I bought some knee-highs in boyish patterns at Target. Then, while OBaby was sleeping, I did this:

{I cut the feet off of some knee socks.}

{I realized that I was totally going to score some crew socks out of the deal. I put these away in my sock drawer.}

{I turned the tubes inside out and ran a seam about 1/2 inch from the cut side of the sock.}

O, and I was done well before nap time was over. So stinkin’ easy.

Et voila, I had 6 pair of baby leg warmers for the cost of one.

Please don’t be intimidated. I’m not a very skilled sewer. My seams aren’t perfect. In fact, even if you don’t have a sewing machine you could definitely make these with just a needle and thread. You might not finish 6 in one nap time by hand, but each pair really only needs a few inches of sewing and it would be totally doable. I’m still amazed at how easy these were to make and how adorable, cheap and functional they turned out!

I tried to get a good picture of a pair on his legs, but…

the boy

simply would not

sit

still.

Look what someone found in the clearance section of Pottery Barn last week:

Basically, each book was only $7, which is good because then I won’t feel so bad about drooling all over them.

“What did I do today?”

It’s rough, having a list of tasks that you’ll just have to rinse and repeat the next day. Everyday. For the long foreseeable future. Laundry, dishes, cook, feed, change. Shoot, even working out and showering are getting repetitive.

So, what did I do today? A whole lot that I’ll have to do again tomorrow.

Then my wise and thoughtful MIL/FRIEND shared something she did when staying home with my husband (a then-toddler) and OBrother (a then-infant. O did I mention she did the whole two-under-two thing?):

“I tried to do one thing each day that I wouldn’t have to do again for a while.”

The woman is brilliant. Amazingly high-energied and brilliant.

And so the natural response to a challenge like that? Why we canned tomatoes of course!

11 one-quart jars of tomatoes. It was wonderful and I had no idea what I was doing, but now I could can with the best of them!

But not tomorrow. Or for a very long time.

To answer the question of what I did today last week:

I took 20 pounds of organic tomatoes that I special ordered from our crop-share farm…

Performed all sorts of domestic arts on them (as instructed by MIL/FRIEND)…

And ended up with enough gorgeous cans of tomatoes to last us the winter…

Which the Farmer’s Almanac tells me is going to be one of the coldest on record (global what-ing?). I tell you this so that you can prepare now for the moaning and complaining that will fill this page come February. You have been warned.

But hey. We’ll have tomatoes.