Freezing in NH

My boyfriend and I don’t eat cheaply.  We believe in tasty food and we eat out far too often.  We do cook dinner in about four nights a week but it can cost as much as eating out.  After some discussion, we discovered that the real problem was that we weren’t planning ahead.  Some nights we ate out because we were too tired to decide what to cook.  Or we decided at the last minute and made an extra trip to the grocery store while we were hungry to get a missing ingredient.

There’s something about the grocery store that makes every trip cost at least $30.  Even if you just go in for milk, somehow you come out with bread, cheese, an avocado and three pounds of bacon.  Or if you’re hungry a bag of candy, three bags of chips, a box of frozen appetizers and a roll of refrigerated cookie dough.

But we don’t always know if we’ll be in the mood for a particular meal, so we’ve resisted doing any real meal planning.  So this week we made a list of possible meals but left off the day.  One shopping trip gets all the ingredients so no extra trips or random ingredients that go bad because we don’t get around to them.  And each night we’ll pick from the list which gives us options but not too many options.  Too many options when we’re tired and hungry is how we end up at the local brewpub. 

And with a list of common dinners, I can start to plan ahead and shop sales.  We’ve already been buying frozen boneless skinless chicken breasts in bulk from BJs, but I discovered they go on sale (fresh) at the grocery store for 30-40 cents less per pound.  That’s worth buying some quartsize freezer bags and freezing them myself. 

After a few weeks of this, we should know which types of dinners we enjoy and actually have time to make.  Then I can stock up on common ingredients when they go on sale.  I do stock up on sale items, but it often means I have a cupbord full of jello in the winter (jello is summer food around here). 

I’m expecting $600.  There are three main categories that you can do with any cash, whether it’s coins picked up the street, salary or windfall.  Those things are save/invest, spend and give away.  I suppose invest could be a separate category if you’re talking about starting a small business vs savings account, and spend could be divided between necessities (food) and non-necessities (going out to eat).  So maybe it’s five categories.

Anyway, before I get off track, here are the first things that went through my head:
Go out to eat
Get a massage
Join a gym
Save – “for the future”
Save – for vacation at the end of the summer
Buy a new vacuum cleaner
Buy part of a share of Berkshire Hathaway
Buy a domain name or two
Donate to charity

I’m probably going to split it three (unequal) ways to match my three categories above.  My general rule of thumb for “windfalls” is spend half, save half.  Spending half still feels like you get to do something special, and saving half is certainly better than none.

I saw somewhere (and I don’t remember where, sorry to whomever it was) recently the theory that by saving you’re not depriving yourself, you’re splitting it with “future you”.  I get this picture of me now handing that $300 to myself at 50 and saying “here, you can retire one day earlier”.  That helps with any resistance I have to saving. 

Anyway, it will probably go like this:
$100 to charity
$200 spend: probably a meal out, and maybe the gym, but I don’t want to commit to a membership until I have a higher paying job.
$300 invest: part into short-term savings like summer vacation and part to potential income generating items like a sharebuilder investment in BRK-A or maybe a domain name for a business idea.

We’ll see if I have any better ideas come May.

Golbguru’s 12 Things I Will Never Spend A Dime On is an interesting post. 

Sometime in the past, we were driving behind a Camaro that had some neon lights underneath it. My wife noticed it and asked me: Why does that car have lights under it?
I still don’t have a good answer for that question, except “to show-off to people who care about lights under a car“.

3. I have to say that I have an electric toothbrush (one of the expensive ones that vibrates your whole head, causing me to think it’s worth the money) but I got mine for free in exchange for testing it and writing a review.

6. I also have a GPS, but the $99 I spent on it was worth it for the many hours of geocaching we did.  Considering that local gyms run about $80/month, I don’t think it was that expensive for something that forced me to hike. 

8. I have several lights on dimmers, and even the expensive fluorescent bulbs make an annoying 60-cycle hum when dimmed.  So the dimmers get incandescent bulbs and the rest of the lights get fluorescent.