Month: January 2020

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Every Day

What Your Most Important Goal Should Be This Year

That would be to save for retirement! But AD, I am only in my twenties and I want to have fun. But AD, I am only in my thirties and my kids are so expensive. But AD, I am only in my forties and I need to pay for my children’s college. But AD, I am only in my fifties, the kids are leaving, and and it is time for us to spend on ourselves. Now I am in my sixties, AD, and I will never be able to retire. I will be working until I die.


In  all my years of living, I have heard it all. There are always excuses and the biggest one is that I have lots of time left to save for retirement. Tell that to all of the seniors who are living on social security only and wondering how to make ends meet, skimping on food to pay for medical prescriptions or going without. They are also wondering if their social security and medicare will be cut because the government spent all the money they put into pay for those things in retirement. Now they say the system is going broke in a couple of years.

Funny thing about time, it flies right by so fast that you really don’t even notice until it is too late. 

Pension plans were a terrific retirement vehicle in my day but they are almost non existent now. Besides so many companies pension plans have gone broke and their retirees have lost everything.

Government pensions plans were better. However take a look at how many states like California and Illinois and many others did not fully fund their employees pension plans while those employees were working. Now they are in the hole trying to pay them. Unless you have that money in your hand, you can’t count on it. These states could easily tell retirees, we can no longer afford to pay you so sorry. Some states have already reduced the amounts the retirees are getting monthly. You can only count on yourself!

I can vividly remember the first time we put money away for retirement. I was 19 years old and Hubby was 20. We are so glad we saved because if our small pension goes away and social security too, we will be just fine.

If you are in your twenties or even thirties, you have a long timeline to invest and be set in retirement. If you are in your 40’s or 50’s, it is a necessity that you save for retirement. You will have to put more away but it isn’t too late. Many retirees ramped up their savings when they were in their fifties and now are living a great life in retirement. Waiting until your 60’s is much harder. You may have to always supplement with a full or part time job. 

For those of you whose  employers offer a match on your 401K, make sure that you are taking advantage of that. If you aren’t, you are throwing away free money.

To go along with this, pay off all of your debt before you retire including your mortgage. The last thing you want hanging over your head in retirement are mortgage, car, or credit card payments. If you have a paid off car going into retirement, start saving to replace that car.

Too many seniors now have debt in retirement. The most recent debt statistics that I could find were for 2016. It shows that seniors over the age of 65 had a median average debt of $ 31,300. That has to affect these seniors mental health. The stress must be tremendous!

Do something to save for retirement now! You do not want to be one of these seniors when you retire.

You
all know that prices go up. We will be retired 19 years in 2020. The
money that we retired with has lost  45.3% of it’s buying power due to inflation since we
retired. An item that cost us $1,000. in 2001 now costs us $1453.15 in 2020. So you have to account for inflation when you are saving for retirement. It is a fact of life.

I hadn’t planned on writing on this today but looking at everyone’s goals on their blogs or on You Tube, only a couple suggested saving for retirement and I believe it is the most important thing that you can do.

Now for an example of rising costs. We got our January property tax bill that I will be paying today. Since we moved here 10 years ago, our assessment on our home has gone up by $ 50,700. and our property and school taxes have gone up over $ 1250.  annually. If we hadn’t accounted for these increases, we would not be able to stay in our beautiful home that we love.

I think back to when we were paying a total of $2500. in property and school taxes in AZ when we moved. That was wonderful. Now we pay about $ 8400. annually here in New York. Yes, moving was our choice. We moved to be near our children and our grandchildren. But isn’t it fantastic that we had that choice!

So please save for your retirement this year! When you are as “young” as me, you will be so happy that you did.

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Every Day

It Was A Very Productive Day

Errand day is always productive! I dropped some paperwork off at the pharmacy, shopped at Aldi’s for chicken(running low) at $1.49 lb. and 4 lbs. of organic grass fed ground beef at $ 4.49 a lb.( I only buy this when it goes on sale), returned bottles and  cans for $ 2.40 in deposits, got the car washed, filled the car up with gasoline using Top’s points, and shopped at Top’s for B1G1F bacon for our Sunday breakfasts. 

Chicken was broken down and frozen into meal portions. 

I cleaned out a kitchen drawer.  

My exercising is done for the day along with most of the cleaning. I am just taking a break right now from purging and organizing the basement. I will be heading back down there to do more in a few minutes.

The garbage will go out to the curb tonight for pickup tomorrow. The chicken for tomorrow night’s dinner is in the fridge.

Our salads tonight will be topped with leftover shrimp, etc. from New Year’s Eve leftovers.

Then I just have my evening routine to do and I can watch some TV and relax. 

How is your day going? 

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Every Day

2020 Goals

In prior posts I talked about a few of these. They are:

1) Eating Down Our Stockpile 

2) Lose 30-35 More Pounds 

3) I Will No Longer Employ Any Servants 

These are the rest of my goals:

4) Only Buy Needs: As I have often talked about, there is a huge difference between needs and wants. So in 2020, we will concentrate on needs. Things like food, personal care and cleaning supplies, taxes, utilities, housing maintenance, basic clothing, cable, internet, telephones, gasoline, a date monthly with Hubby,  travel to see family, and gifts for family and charities are necessities for us. I am sure there are a few others that I am not thinking about at the moment. But I think you get the idea. Expensive toys, eating out every week, coffee at any coffee place, cthotchke’s, and miscellaneous junk,etc. are wants in this household. So we will be ever mindful before we purchase anything as to which is a want or a need.

5) Carve Out Me Time: I think this is so important. We all are all so busy doing for our families whether it be for kids or grandkids, hubbies, extended family or friends, or even writing this blog that we forget that we need some time for ourselves. I will be carving out a day and a time every week, that I will put in my planner, to do something for myself that I enjoy. 

6) Clean Out All The Clutter: I have always been pretty good at keeping our home free of clutter. But our basement has gotten messy this past year. It is so easy to bring a box down and just put it anywhere. We also have many boxes that I need to go through and determine whether we need to keep the items in them any more. Clutter causes so much stress. Every time that I go down to the basement to work out on the treadmill, I see the mess and it drives me crazy. So this will be my rest of the winter project. While Hubby is installing the walls and laying the carpet in the pantry, I will be working on this mess.

I have already gotten rid of years’ worth of paperwork and tax returns that we don’t need. I threw out a queen size blow up bed that hasn’t held air in years. Why it wasn’t thrown out a long time ago, I have no clue. I found another bag of summer clothing that is 5 sizes too big for me. That will be donated to Goodwill.

If you have a cluttered area or areas in your home, make this a priority. It will free up so much stress. I have heard people say that they don’t know where to start because it is so overwhelming. Just pick one room and pick a spot in the room to start and then work your way around that room. Even an hour a day will make a big difference. It doesn’t need to be done all at once. Just make it a priority!

7) Invest At Least 60% of Our Income: AD, are you nuts? Nope this is a priority for us! We are retired but have some income every month that needs to be invested for a purpose that is close to our hearts but that I will not share. This is doable for us because we have kept our expenses low.


These are all of our goals that we have for 2020. It is a lot but we will do our best to keep them.

Did you make any goals for this year? Please share them with all of us! 

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Every Day

Nothing Like Starting The Year Off With A Screw Up

Well, I screwed up today really bad. In case you don’t know it, I write a lot of my posts ahead of time and schedule them to release on certain dates. Being so busy over this holiday season, I got my dates mixed up. Today’s Frugal Things post was not supposed to release until Friday. So I have just gone in and changed the paragraph about the lamb chops which we have not actually eaten yet. We know they will be good!  We love lamb!

I had planned on having you read the Rest of my 2020 Goals post today. Because we took some family to the airport at 5AM this morning, I was also sleep deprived so I never checked the post until after my nap that I got up from a few minutes ago. That is when I realized that I put up the wrong post on the wrong date. I will leave that one up.

However since I screwed up on this New Year’s Day, look for the Goals post in a little while. So you are getting two for the price of one today.

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Every Day

Frugal Things This Past Week

These are the things we have done frugally this past week:

1) I am using an old field notebook, which I put in my purse, to track every penny I spend when I run errands, get gasoline, go out to dinner or for some other form of entertainment. That way I won’t forget an expense and I can easily put them into Quicken when we get home.

2) I purchased 5 rolls of Christmas wrap, 2 sets of gift tags, 2 cookie boxes, 2 sets of dinner napkins, 4 Pantene gift sets, and some Lifesaver Gummies at the after Christmas 50% off sales. I didn’t go hog wild; just got things that were needed. 

3) I cashed in some Fetch rebate points for $ 20. worth of Walmart gift cards. I used some of it for the after Christmas things that I purchased at Walmart. Most of the after Christmas things were purchased at Dollar Tree.

4) Hubby loves lamb chops. I went at opening on the day after Christmas to get him some($ 7.99 a lb.) on the mid week sale at Aldi’s. We are grilling a couple today. They will be so good.

5) Hubby has been wanting a new Dell computer. His is old and starting to give him problems. He has been watching prices for a few months now. He finally pulled the trigger when he saw the best price ever two days before Christmas. He won’t get it until January 8th but that didn’t matter because it was a necessity not a Christmas gift. 

6) My treadmill has been coming up with an error code. It was going to cost us $ 274. for a repair person to come out to our home. YIKES! I asked my son when he came out for breakfast to look at it. He owns a treadmill and is pretty knowledgeable. He did and recalibrated it. Then he told me to get a silicone kit to lubricate it. Between the calibration and the maintenance, it is working perfectly; no more errors. Yeah! He saved us a lot of money. Most importantly, I can continue my 30 minutes a day on it.

7) I am still going through my books to see what I will keep, give away or sell. I want them all out of the bookcase in my pantry.

8) I won a 4 piece chicken nugget in the Wendy’s Instant Win Game. When I get the coupon for it, Hubby and I will share it for a snack. 

9) Hubby buys all of his clothes at LL Bean. He has been losing weight and will need new clothes soon. So I jumped on a deal for a $ 50. giftcard for $ 40. at Amazon.

10) I had a Top’s supermarket point that I cashed in. I was able to get a $ 50. Home Depot card for $ 40. I have now cashed in for 3 of these cards. Hubby will be getting the materials for the walls in the pantry soon.  So those discounted cards will save us money.

11) We are working on using  up items from restaurants and fast food that were extras with our meals or in our bags. We don’t go out to dinner very often and rarely go out for fast food, so you can imagine how old these are. We were saving them for when we travel in the car but we haven’t done that a lot lately. So before they are no good, we are trying to use them all up. 

12) We got our heat and electric bill for the past month and it was right on target even though we did a lot of cooking and baking for the Thanksgiving holiday. It also pays to close off two bedrooms when they are not in use. 


What did you do this past week to save some dollars?