Even for someone as news-phobic as myself, its impossible not to realize that our country is facing an economic crisis.  The presidential election alone brings it into focus, and even I know of the culpability of the banks and the unsecured home loans that are dragging the economy to the ground.  Certainly I can’t fail to miss the price at the gas pump. I know that my mom’s minimal investments for her future have lost nearly 25% of thier value, and that people everywhere are suffering, struggling, even losing thier homes.
Overall, my family is very fortunate. My husband has a good job, and seems in little danger of losing it. We have health insurance, a little money saved, and not much credit card debt. Our home and cars are owned outright. With me a stay at home mom, we don’t have a ton of extra money, so we don’t have any stocks or other investments to watch spiral down the toilet. (Who would ever think that NOT having such things could be a blessing? =p)
Unfortunately, our personal ecomonic crisis is a making of our own. We are still paying on my surgery, and since the only place remotely available in the area was out of network, we did have quite a chunk out of pocket. We just received our property taxes for the year, which of course are based on the original purchase price of our home, instead of what we could get if we were trying to sell today. We also live in a county with extremely high property taxes. This home a mile south or west and we’d be paying a fraction instead of the 7K a year that hit us in the face. We knew that higher property taxes was a penalty of where we chose to buy a few years back, but at the time it seemed worth it for the neighborhood (we live at the corner of 2 dead end roads, in an area that is one of the safest in Portland, bounded by a nature preserve, and with neighbors that are amazingly friendly, and even have block parties and the like) and the schools, which are superior to those in the neighboring counties, if any public schools in PDX can be called superior.
So we need to tighten the financial belt around here. There aren’t a lot of places to cut the proverbial fat, mostly we have to watch the entertainment/incidentals and food budgets. The “entertainment” budget has never been especially large, and all we can do there is be more aware of the money that is going out for incidentals, and throttle off any hemorrhaging there.
But ah, the food budget! The food budget is difficult to trim when you are trying to trim your waistline as well. Eating well is more expensive than not, it just is. It’s more expensive to purchase chicken breasts over thighs,  4% fat ground beef over 15% fat ground beef,  fish and brown rice over hamburger helper, organic items over non-organic.  (Mostly things like pastas, breads, and whole grain crackers and other packaged items. Not because I believe that organic foods are inherently better, but because things that are not organic are full of junk that we don’t want. I don’t personally value an organic apple over a non-organic one. I do value annie’s mac and cheese with no enriched flours and all natural ingredients over kraft, with its flour that was stripped of everything good and then “enriched” so that the gullible or uninformed thinks its the next best thing to sliced bread.) So I’ve been working on finding ways to cut back on what I spend on food, without sacrificing healthy eating.
I’ve started by taking inventory of what’s in my pantry, to try and use up what we have before buying something new. We took a trip to Costco yesterday to stock up on some chicken and fish in bulk, at the reduced price per pound that it brings (while initially expensive, it certainly pays off in the long run). I’d been buying conveinently portioned salmon pieces, which when I actually figured it, came to nearly 11$ a pound. Instead we picked up several fillets packaged together for just under 5$ a pound. I think I can managed to slice them into portions and put them into freezer bags for future use for that kind of savings.  (On a side note, shopping at Costco is so very dangerous for me! It’s difficult to resist bargains, and I have to keep telling myself ‘It’s NOT a bargain if you wouldn’t have purchased it anyway’ and ‘It’s NOT a bargain if you can’t use it all up before it goes bad’. I have to resist the 2 pound jar of olive tapenade, the gigantic sack of bell peppers (but, but they are only 20cents each! ;)), and so on. That’s why I try to drag the Hubby along with me when I go. I’m less likely to lose control with an audience!)  I can be less wasteful in vegetables and fruit by shopping more often. When I try to stock up for a week or more, something always gets buried, something always goes bad before I can put it to use. The grocery that I prefer to frequent is between home and the kidlet’s preschool, so I can combine the trips and manage to shop more often without expending gas for separate trips.  I’ve also resolved to be better about using leftovers, instead of packaging them up and letting them sit until they’ve worn out there welcome and hit the trash. Finally, I’ve located the online versions of weekly ads for several grocery stores in this area to watch for the so called “loss leaders” — the item(s) they advertise at big savings to draw people in, hoping they will stay and do all thier shopping there.Â
So hopefully putting in the extra work I will be able to continue to prepare healthy meals, and still spend less on the grocery bill.Â
“He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.” -Albert Einstein