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Monday, January 12, 2009

Jan. 12th - only 19 days left this month

This is such a hard challenge but I can honestly say we are on target for this months budget. One good thing happened to me recently:

My camera was returned and refurbished! See originally I thought I spent $90 for the repair shop to only say they couldn't fix it but they sent it back to Kodak who sent us a refurbished model. I'm so glad I held out over the holiday's by borrowing my work digital camera and avoiding all the big sales to get a new one. Having money to blow at one point in my life has made it really super hard to resist the pull of sales. I wanted to badly to just run out and buy a new camera but I kept telling myself to wait for the camera to be returned and then call Kodak for my options. And they sent me a refurbished model! Yeah!!!

Weird wacky ideas we've come up with for saving money on food:

1. I've made homemade tomato sauce since leaving home. It's my mom's recipe who made Spaghetti every Friday night while I was growing up. For the last 3 years I've bought tomato products in bulk at Costco and they run $7.99 per pack of 6 cans. This month husband bought 5lbs of fresh tomatoes for $6.99. I diced them and cooked them down for 3 hours on a low temperature on the stove and then blended them. It made about the same quantity of tomato product as buying the cans so after saving a dollar, we have non-pasteurized tomato sauce. It's very tasty. Next step is to find a farmer's market with cheaper tomatoes.

2. We've started eating soups almost every night because it makes meat last longer. Monday night I made an amazing ham and white bean soup. I got confused and bought a 1 pound slice of ham when I was supposed to get ham on the bone and let it cook off. So I can make this dish even more economical. The best part is this also saves on the calories because eating soup for dinner is less consumption of quantity of food.

Well that's all for now. More as ideas I have go into fruition.

2 comments:

Jan said...

There are a lot of little things you can do to save money and the first thing is to forgo restaurant food and processed food. But that requires making a list, shopping, and cooking. Not always convenient, and not always easy. But worthwile.

Rachel M. said...

Hi Jan thanks for stopping by! I totally agree with you! I love cooking but it takes supreme discipline. One of the reasons husband I got so off track with our budget is I would come home from work late and automatically opt for take out Indian food ($24) or any number of options. Now we have an iron clad pact to not eat out unless it's a planned event and budgeted for!