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September $20 Stock The Pantry Challenge

For September I decided not to wait until the end of the month to head to another store as I learned my lesson last month. You just never know what life might throw at you and since I had the money and I happened to be near an Aldi, I took the extra time to stop in and spend my $20.

As you may remember, last month’s $20 stock up challenge was at Dollar Tree.

As mentioned above, this month, I visited Aldi and here is what I bought:

1 6 pack of Ramen Noodle Soup, 13.5 oz, $1.88

1 Cafe Bustelo, 10 oz., $2.82

1 Pure Aqua Belle Vie berry sparkling water, 33.8 fl. oz., $ 0.55

2 Frontera salsa, one mild and the other medium, 16 oz., $3.47 each

5 Simply Nature sun-ripened diced tomatoes, 14.1 oz., $0.99 each

2 Happy Harvest sliced carrots, 15 oz., $0.45 each

2 3 packs of Baker’s Corner active dry yeast, .25 oz/pack, $0.89 each

Total $19.82

This is a wrap for September and I am already trying to decide where to go for October! 🙂

We would love to hear about any stock-ups you have been able to do for you and your family. Please share in the comments section.

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10 Reasons You Need to Set-up a Pantry

I started writing this blog post way before covid19 became a household word. Why did I start writing it?  Because this is a subject near and dear to my heart.  I truly believe that having what we call a “deep pantry” is one of the things that helped us win with money.  Just like having an emergency fund set aside in case of a true need, a pantry helps provide stability and peace of mind in case of an emergency.

First, let me start out by listing the top 10 reasons we believe that having a pantry is so darn important.

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Book Giveaway Time

As a HUGE thank you for blessing us with your visits, we are giving away your choice of one of the three financial books that I have done a review on for IG. Please know that these books were purchased used and then read again, so they are extra loved.

The winner’s book will be shipped via USPS media mail and we cannot guarantee that you will receive the book. Due to high shipping costs, we are so sorry, but this is only open to US residents. This giveaway is not associated with any author or Instagram.

All you need to do to be put into the drawing to win is:

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Reflection on our low-spend February

We did it, we completed the low-spend February and now that we are on the other side of it, I wanted to reflect upon what we learned as a family through this experience.

We saved a total of $285.00. That’s it. Why? Because we figured out this month that we truly are Seriously Frugal. If you look at this recent post, you’ll see that we are pretty hard core about saving money in all aspects of our lives. There is only one area of our spending where we could cut back, and that would be groceries. But, we eat at home almost almost 100 percent of the time and, with 4 teens, food goes fast. Plus, living with chronic illnesses, many of the less expensive foods, like grains or packaged foods with lots of additives or preservatives, I simply cannot eat.

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Seriously Frugal Endeavors

Being right, smack, dab in the middle of our Low-Spend February, it got us thinking about all the ways we have tried to save money over the years. Some of our endeavors were wins, some were things we tried two or three times, and some are things that we continue pursuing to this day.

Over the years we have engaged in some Seriously Frugal endeavors to help stretch our dollars, pay off our debts and become debt-free. We are currently debt free except for our mortgage, and we are now working on paying off the house, saving for retirement and saving for college for our four teens. We cannot place money in so many baskets without living frugally and, although we touched on some of these frugal ways in an IG post, we thought we would expand upon them here.

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Celebrating Christmas on a Budget

It’s not about the money we spend…

Budget.  That is not a word that most people like to use when they discuss their holiday plans.  Our society constantly shows us that the holidays are meant for excess in every single way; gifts, meals, celebrations, excursions, decorations, desserts and adult beverages just to name a few.

We have come to a point in our society that we need to step back and take a good look at why we are taking a religious holiday and turning into a circus. The holy days are such a beautiful time in the year and can be enjoyed while creating wonderful memories, even on a budget.

While raising our kids, we have always been on a budget, trying to dig ourselves out of medical debt and now our mortgage. So, over the years, I’ve needed to be creative and come up with ways to enjoy the season without breaking the bank.

I have shared many of the ways that we celebrated the Christmas season with our family in our new book, “Frugal Seeds Christmas Edition: 101 Ways to Celebrate the Holiday Season on a Budget”.  It is available on Amazon in both paperback and ebook and can be read for FREE with Kindle Unlimited.

Wishing you a happy and budget friendly holiday season.

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who doesn’t love a list?

“Failing to plan is planning to fail”
– Unknown

There is something about lists that make me intrinsically happy. I actually enjoy writing down what I hope to accomplish over a specific period of time, be it that day or 5 years from now.

These lists allow me to plan and to dump all the thoughts bouncing around in my mind and free up space. But what I enjoy doing even more than writing out a list is crossing things off. Yep, I actually get a small rush of happiness each time I take my pen and make a horizontal line through the achievement written on my index card, which is now my preferred way to write out my lists (using both sides, of course). Sure, I could create a list on my phone but then that would deprive me of drawing a line, and that is more than half the fun of creating a list in the first place.

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Home Again, Home Again (and Again, and Again)

Home is where the heart (and most of the expense) is.

Of our many mistakes with money, one that is particularly ironic has to do with housing. The irony is due to the fact that our mortgages have been, by far, our largest debts in our lifetime. Yet, by having had so many of them — each with a break in between — we’ve been temporarily debt free several times.

By the time we had been married for 20 years, we had purchased our fourth house with our fourth 30 year mortgage. It’s not like we’ve ever had to move due to some compelling outside reason like a job transfer or being closer to an ailing loved one. In fact, none of our homes has ever been outside a ten-mile radius from our first. Each time, we had different reasons that prompted us to leave. They were generally the wrong reasons and, being honest with ourselves, they generally shared a common theme.

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It Never Looks the Same Twice

When you look at an intricate painting, you tend to notice different things, depending upon your present perspective and what element currently holds your focus. I’ve learned that hindsight is very similar; events look very different as the lens through which you view them evolves. When I started sharing my experience leaving a pension behind, I ended with the question “would I do it again?”. In that post, I was focused on the long-term financial impact. I do realize even pensions aren’t guaranteed; in fact, the one I left had already ended as a benefit for new hires, though it is still in force to this day for those who were already covered. This knowledge made gauging the financial impact of leaving pretty straightforward. Even though financial ramifications are certainly of great import and, likely of great interest to those reading this blog, they are just one piece of the puzzle.

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Unintended Consequences

While cashing in the 401k was probably the most blatantly stupid financial decision, another decision Mr. Frugal Source made for the wrong reasons is in competition for the greatest negative impact on our ability to retire “early”, and possibly eclipses it.

When I was a relative youngster (mid 20s), I found a secure job writing software for a bank. This was the same job I left just before cashing out the 401k. The cash-out notwithstanding, the decision to leave that employer, in it’s own right, hugely impacted our retirement timeline. Why is that? One word. Pension.

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