"No Spend" Week Two

Day 9-  I went grocery shopping and spent $13 on basics:  milk, cheese, onions, spinach, cream, garlic bread (yeah I know, the bread is probably not a basic).  I tried real hard to keep it at $10.  That garlic bread put us over the $10 mark but it will also be used for 3 separate meals so I'm not feeling too bad about buying it.  I find myself studying prices more than ever (which is half the point of this challenge, I think).  For example, I only needed 8 oz of mozzarella cheese for the meal I was making.  The store had three options:

8 oz brick on sale for $2
8 oz shredded on sale for $3
16 oz brick on sale for $3

I would normally buy the shredded cheese for the convenience but for only $1 more, I was able to buy enough for a whole second meal and at the rate my family goes through cheese, I have no concerns about it being put to good use.

Day 10-  We were doing great this week until today.  My hubby went to see Louis CK and bought a round a drinks.  The ticket was $45 and the round of drinks (for two) was $9.  Man, this hurt.  I really think he should have declined the invite but I think I would have also accepted the offer to go especially if it was someone like Tom Petty or Keb' Mo'.  This show cost us 18% of our allotted budget!  At least he had a good time.

Day 11-  We found out we're having a boy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Yeah!!!!!!!!!!!!  It was hard not to go out for ice cream to celebrate but we went home and I made chocolate chip cookies instead.  It was still special.  :)

Week Two is at a close and we spent another $100 of our $250 budget.  NOT GOOD.  Not good at all.  Here is the breakdown:

$19 Groceries (basics like bread, cheese, and milk)
$27 Gas
$54 Tickets and drinks at Louis CK Show

Take out the show and drinks and we'd be doing pretty good!  I'd say that's not too bad but with only  $52 left in our pockets and two weeks to go, I'm pretty sure we will be going over our $250 budget but we're still sticking with it to see just how close we can be.   

No Spend Week 1

 Hi everyone!  We're finishing up our first week of our "No Spend" Challenge and we're still alive.  It wasn't exactly easy but it hasn't been life altering yet either.

Day 1:  I spend $45 on gas.  YIKES!  That's a lot of our budget spent on the very first day of this challenge and concerns me on how the rest of this month is going to pan out for us.  It really is a huge bummer that I had to spend this kind of money on the 1st day but I really didn't have a choice.  18% of our budget GONE.  On the 1st day!  This might be an uphill battle.

Day 3:  I had to buy a few last minute supplies for card class that I hosted this week.  This included spending $7 on vellum paper and craft bags at the craft store (I used a coupon to save $4) and $10 at Target on candy (it is a Halloween class which includes crafts with candy in them).  While at Target, I spotted a sweatshirt that is perfect for my son's Halloween costume (more to come on that later) and was on sale for $7, that should be all I need to spend on his costume this year, everything else will be from home.  

Day 5: I forgot my lunch at home but took my co-workers advice and bought lunch real cheap at the grocery store using items I had to buy for the weekend anyway (we had company over).  I bought one roll from the bakery for 75 cents, one piece of cheese from the deli for 29 cents, and got a pound of deli ham on sale (doubled as part of a weekend meal) , and a large bag of pretzels (also a double for a weekend meal) on sale for a $1.50.  It was a cheap and satisfying meal at well under $3.

We've had some good CHEAP meals for dinner this week as well.  I made a great twist on sloppy Joes this week.  We call them sloppy J's in this house after my son, Johnathan.  Here is the recipe if you are interested:

Stuffed Sloppy J's
makes 8 sandwiches

1 lb of your favorite Sloppy Joe mix (here is mine from Mel's Kitchen Cafe)
2 tubes of crescent rolls
A dozen Dill pickles, sliced  (if your pregnant make it two dozen)
1 cup shredded cheddar cheese

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees

Flour your work surface and if your child is anything like mine work fast before they fill up on flour.

 

Pinch two triangles together to make 8 rectangles.  

Put meat on one half of each roll, dividing evenly between the rolls.

Top with shredded cheese.

Finish with the sliced pickles.

Wrap it all up and bake in a preheated oven for 15 minutes.

Serve with chips and a veggie of your choice.

This is a great meal that doesn't cost a whole lot to put together and can really help you stretch a tight budget. 



We've spent a total of $98 (39% of our budget!) in our 1st week of our "No Spend" Challenge, here is the breakdown:

$45  Gas
$17  Card Class Supplies
$7    Clothing
$5    Eating out
$24  Groceries

Let's hope we worked out the "bugs" during this 1st week and we fare better during on next 3 weeks because at this rate we are definitely going to fail this challenge.  

"NO SPEND" Challenge

Call me crazy but the hubby and I are attempting a "NO SPEND" month for the entire month of October. By "NO SPEND" I really mean "almost no spend". The idea came from a

pinterest link I saw on a friend's account. Rachel Meeks from the Small Notebook blog  explains how this has become an annual tradition in their house. She says they budget $400 a month (currently, when she started it was only $250) to spend on themselves like food, gas, clothes, household items, and fun. Excluded items are: rent and bills, insurance, health care, business expenses, and gifts for others. In other words there is NO UNNECESSARY SPENDING.

At first glance this seemed easy to me so I showed it to my husband and asked, "Do you think we could possible do this?". Without hesitation, Mr. Cheap pants replied, "I can". Of course I knew that was going to be his answer before I even asked him. We agreed to try this with a $250 budget for this month. We decided on $250 because that was what Rachel's budgeted when she first started this challenge in 2007.

I'm expecting to see this face a few time this month

 Looking at our budget, this will be no easy task. We tracked every single penny we spent during the month of August and here are some examples of what we spent in different categories:

August 2012 Spending

Gas:  $148

Groceries: $260 (lower than normal)

Eating out: $235 (higher than normal)

Crafts: $102

Not spending money on eating out is going to be the toughest (for all three of us), me especially. I HATE packing a lunch. HATE IT. It takes so much work and planning, both of which I don’t want to deal with in an already stressed morning routine and I never feel like getting my lunch packed the night before, I just want to sit and relax at the end of the day. “But this was your idea”, said smart cheap husband. Yes. Yes it was. I’ll find a way.

Yeah, might see this one too!

So here are the top three reasons we are going to attempt this “NO SPEND” month:

1.Christmas is less than 3 months away and we always need money around Christmas time. I thought if we limited our spending in the month of October, our holiday spending in November might be a bit easier on the budget.

2. I like a good challenge. I am extremely competitive and I don’t like to lose at anything. Hopefully this challenge will help me use my competitive nature for good rather than for evil {insert evil laugh here}. Hubby rolls eyes and says, “Yeah right”.

3. We’re expecting baby #2. YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHH! When our newest bundle of joy arrives in February 2013, they will be putting a squeeze on our already squeezed budget. Day care alone for this new little worm will come with a cost of $310 a week. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not burying $1200 in the backyard every month just because I got nothing else to do with it.

Johnathan practicing being a big brother

I’ll be blogging weekly about our progress and how we’re doing towards our “NO SPEND” goal.  It will be hard, and it is going to require sacrifice. I’m hoping it will free up some time to work on those new year’s resolutions that I made but have not gotten around to. As the old saying goes, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”. We’ll see if that really holds true for this family of three (soon to be four).

September 2012 Blog Hop

Here is my September 2012 Papertrey Ink Blog Hop design.  The challenge this month is about gift packaging with fabric or felt.  I spent way more time than I should have creating this tiny little number.  Each leaf is die cut from felt and hand stitched because I wanted a rustic look.  All products (except ribbon and thread) are from Papertrey Ink.  

This little sucker is going on a good bottle of wine and is going to a good friend who will appreciate the hard work I spent on creating this little piece of art (at least maybe while she drinks the wine).  Enjoy!

Green Gold

I volunteered to water the garden at my son's school for the summer.  The benefit of volunteering was that you get to pick whatever is ready to be harvested in the garden.  I was smiling ear to ear when I arrived to find beautiful basil plants ready to be picked.  I came home with at least 24 cups of basil and it didn't even look like I touched the plants!

 

Look how large the leaves were!  This was like no basil I've seen (or grown) before.  This was basil on steroids.  Of course, basil like this needs to be put to good use as a nice yummy pesto.  I got enough to make myself 5.5 pint sized jars of this liquid gold.  If you have never made pesto, you really should, it is so simple.  Here is a super easy recipe adapted from Martha Stewart (I like more garlic):

BASIL PESTO
4 cups (washed & dried) basil leaves
1/2 cup of pine nuts
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese grated
2 cloves of garlic
salt (lots) & pepper
1/2 cup olive oil

 Dump all the ingredients in a food processor except the olive oil.

Turn your machine on.  Add 1/4 cup of the olive oil in a steady stream. 

Stop your machine and mix the contents (there is always one lone basil that hasn't been chopped up).  There is a life lesson to be learned from that lone basil :)

 Close up your machine, turn it on, and slowly add the remaining 1/4 cup of olive oil.  

THAT'S IT.  You are done!  So easy!

I am storing mine in pint sized glass jars in the freezer.  A pint should be just enough for a pound of pasta.  We like to saute mushrooms and chopped tomatoes in a pan and throw them in with the pasta for a complete meal.  Yum!

Sew Fun

Any ideas what this picture could be of?  It doesn't look like much, but trust me, it holds a secret.  I'll let you think about for a few minutes while I catch you up on the last few weeks of my summer.

I've been exhausted.  It is my busy time at work (my real job, not all this fun blog stuff) which means when I get home I'm too wiped out to do anything.  I've been too tired to cook nice meals and certainly way too tired to clean my house.  This all means, I've also been too busy to blog.

With the start of the school year means the start to some normalcy and more importantly a schedule in this household.  That means more time to craft and hopefully more time to blog about it. 

Speaking of the school year, here is my cutie on his 1st day in 4K.  Don't you just want to pick him up and squeeze him?  He is so darn cute (yes, I'm biased).  He's so happy to be back in school.  The transition to a new schedule has been a breeze for him, hopefully that trend continues. 

Alright.  Now that I left you are all in suspense for awhile, let me get back to the purpose of this post.  Any guesses as to what my latest sewing project was?  Couple hints.  It is for a one year old.  It has a multipurpose. It was super duper easy.   

It is a bag that holds a tea set and all the accessories needed to hold one fine afternoon tea party with all your doll friends.  When folded out the bag also turns into a double sided tablecloth for those high noon parties.   

I found some cute fabric at Joann's that had several different coordinating fabrics and picked out the three that I liked best (picking out only three of these cute fabrics was really the hardest part of this project).

Here are the coordinating cloth napkins.

And some placemats I made out of some pink felt.

My cats missed the memo that this was only for "pretend" and they were looking for actual tea (and the yummy food that usually goes with it).  Silly cats.

This was a lot of fun to make and a lot of fun to give as a gift.  If you want to try to make one yourself, check out Prudent Baby for all the details and great instructions. 

If you are looking for this tea set, it is from Amazon (B&N carries it too).  Two things that make it great:  it is made from recycled plastic and it doesn't have any "characters" on it so it will grow with the child longer. 

See you soon!  I'm going to go make myself a nice cup of {real} tea.

Summer Eats

Wow.  Summer has gotten crazy in this household.  I've been exhausted!  Too exhausted to post.  I've thought about it.  A lot.  I've taken lots of pictures but at the end of each day, my energy was all gone.

But I'm back.  I'm back with a food post.  Last weekend when I was helping my baby sister try on wedding dressing (YEAH!), my dad gave me a TON of food from his massive garden.  Among the beauties that I got were these tomatoes.  What do you do with a ton of tomatoes when you're too tired to cook?

You roast them.  You roast them with their friends, onion and garlic.  I roasted these for about 2 hours at 350 degrees.  I then added oregano from the garden and roasted them for another 45 minutes at 425 degrees.  Not a lot of work involved here.  Well, not a lot of work for me, my poor oven on the other hand, I wasn't sure she was going to make it.  She stopped working part way through but I've learned if you hit enough buttons and hold them down long enough, she'll start working again.

After all that time in the oven, they look something like the above picture.  I then threw them in a food processor (skins and all) and blended them until they were nice and smooth.  I put them in a pan and simmered them with 1/2 cup of white wine. That was it for that night.  I put the finished sauce in the refridgerator for the next night's meal.  Before you all decide to give me a "mother of the year" award for making homemade tomato sauce, let me fess up and tell you this:  my son was eating Ramen noodle soup while I was busy being Betty Crocker.  Yeah, go ahead, give me that award now.

The next night I breaded some chicken tenders with Panko breadcrumbs and assembled the meal all together.  It was delicious but I have another confession to make, it appeared my son enjoyed the Ramen noodle soup more.  Kids.