Hubby and I had doctor’s appointments today. We try to schedule together when we go to the same doctor. That saves us gasoline and wear and tear on the car.
On the way home, we stopped at Niagara Produce to get a 5 lb. bag of potatoes for $ 2.79, two tomatoes @ $3.99 a lb. totaling $ 6.78 , and a 3 count package of Romaine hearts for $ 2.99. Total cost was $ 12.56.
This was all we needed in the way of produce. We have onions that should last a while, peppers, cauliflower, broccoli, brussel sprouts, corn, green beans, etc. that are frozen. We have frozen diced onions as a back up to the fresh ones. I also have other canned vegetables.
I am finding that the fresh produce from N.P. lasts much longer than what I can buy in a grocery store. So it is worth the higher price.
We will watch the Buffalo Bills vs. Miami Dolphins tonight on TV. We never order out for football games so we decided there is always a first time. I am picking up a Domino’s pizza before the game tonight. That will be a real treat especially since I don’t have to make it. I will be paying cash out of my grocery money to pay for it.
My grocery money has really accumulated since I have not been doing much shopping over the past few months. That is a good thing so that when it is turkey season, I can purchase a few of them and some other items that are the cheapest at Thanksgiving like butter.
Any of you trying to eat down your freezers so that you can have room for the Thanksgiving and Christmas deals?
Early Sunday morning, I went to Top’s to get meat that was on sale for the lowest prices that I have seen in over 3 years. I purchased 2 whole chickens at $.99 a lb., 2 top round roasts and 1 eye round roast for $ 4.99 a lb.
On Sunday, I roasted the 2 chickens in my turkey pan. This pic was taken when they still had 40 minutes to go. I was just checking the temperature. When they were done, I took all the meat off of one chicken and put the carcass and skin in the crock pot and cooked it until about 7PM to make chicken broth. We had chicken sandwiches for dinner and the rest of the chicken I froze in portions. The other chicken had been chilling in the fridge. I took that one out and took all the meat off and saved a portion of it to make my homemade chicken soup. That carcass and skin went into the crock pot and simmered on low until I got up the next morning. I turned it down to warm while I went to a doctor’s check up which went well.
On my way home, I stopped at Wegman’s for a bag of avocados that looked so good. I have not had them in a while because they have been awful for weeks. It was one of Wegman’s new “Hot Deals” that cost $3.99. I also went to town hall and paid our water bill. It was $ 212. from May 30th through August 30th. I was quite shocked because it was much higher than the same period last year. We used a lot less water with our sprinkler system this year because we had so much rain. But then I realized that the crew that built the wall had used a lot of water to mix the mortar and didn’t turn the water off and on. Ugh!
When I got home I strained the broth and took the bits and pieces of meat and threw those in my broth that I was putting in mason jars. Between the two chickens, I got 7 and 1/2 quarts of bone broth. Late in the afternoon, Hubby cut up the celery and I got some carrots and corn out the freezer. Using those, some meat from the birds, some rice and about 1/2 of the broth, I made a huge pot of soup which we each had a cup for dinner. We will rotate it in between roast beef meals this week.
The broth will get used up quickly so instead of canning it, I decided to freeze it. The rest of the chicken got frozen for future meals.
Two of the beef roasts I put in the freezer. One I cooked last night for a roast beef dinner. I again used the turkey pan with a rack to roast it because it allows the air to circulate around the roast. I roasted some baby potatoes under the rack of beef on the edges of the pan. We had green beans with it.
The roast was very tough so Hubby made sure to cut it across the grain. It was made to look like a regular round roast in the packaging but when I opened it, it was long and narrow. It was edible and had flavor but I am hoping the 2 in the freezer are truly top round roasts because I don’t think this was. Do you have any clue what it could be? When I open the next one, if it looks the same, the two of them will get returned to the store. I told Hubby I will go to Niagara Produce next time they have them on sale. They are always good.
Today Hubby sliced the rest of the meat using our new meat slicer so that we have cold cuts for cold and hot roast beef sandwiches. These roasts at Top’s were not very big but it was all they had.
For entertainment this weekend, we watched our Buffalo Bills play and they won. I am so happy that football is back! They play again this Thursday night which doesn’t give them much rest and they have to travel to Miami for the game. I hope they do well.
It has been hard to get much else done around here because with Hubby’s shoulder healing, I have had to help him a a lot. But it is getting better each day and hopefully soon it will be back to normal.
That is what I have been up to. I will be back when I have something else to talk about.
In the ’90’s both of my sons graduated from their private high school. One son chose to go to a NYS Community College that cost $2500. a semester. He was able to commute and live at home. We paid his tuition as he went. My other son chose to attend an expensive private college doing a 5 year engineering program. He got scholarships for each of his years there. So we paid for his room and board the first year and and an additional $12,500. for his tuition every year. He also took the FAFSA government loans each year with interest that he qualified for. We had too much income for him to get any FAFSA loans without interest. His second year he moved into an apartment with other students and got a job to pay his rent. When we would visit, we would load him up on food at Sam’s Club. He did condo and apartment living until he graduated. My son who graduated from community college chose not to pursue his 4 year degree. Instead he went to work. When he was married and had a daughter, he did what Hubby did and got his degree the hard way pursuing it nights.
Hubby and I worked hard to do this for them. We took our lunches 9 out of 10 days to work. On the 10th day, we would eat from the food trucks near where we both worked. In the winter, we would go out to a reasonably priced restaurant or get takeout Chinese or pizza on one day every 2 weeks. Most of the years that I worked we carpooled. We never really splurged always keeping our eye on making sure all of their tuition was paid before we did. We cash flowed it. We had made a promise to ourselves that we would not use any of the retirement money that we saved for their tuition. Matter of fact Hubby met with people at my son’s college and told them that they had to up the amount of his yearly scholarship or he would have to go somewhere else. He explained that we were retiring soon. They knew that he had been offered 11 college scholarships from other colleges. They must have wanted him badly because they upped the yearly scholarship by quite a bit. Don’t ever be afraid to ask for more than they give your student.
In 1996, the book “The Millionaire Next Door” was first published. I bought the original. It has been published many times since. I read that book cover to cover. It was so interesting. We were well on our way to getting to be one. So we saved every dollar we could before we retired and have saved every dollar we can without going without anything since. We have given our sons and their families money many times through out the years keeping within the government yearly limits.
My eldest son moved to AZ after he married. We had been thinking about retiring for a long time and wanted to get out of the snow and go south. We had never considered AZ. But after visiting our son, we loved it there. The weather was dry and my arthritis loved it. So we had a house built there two years before we retired. I had left my job by then so I was free to fly out and stay for a few weeks at a time which I did a # of times. We had an HOA so my son and his wife made sure our property was kept up. Keeping up two homes with all of the expenses was a pain. Our home in AZ was paid in full by the time we moved there. Our home in the eastern part of NY sold quickly just before Hubby retired. That home had been paid off many years early. We sold it ourselves so there was no commission to a realtor. It was so easy that I think we would do that again.
My youngest son graduated and went to AZ to see how he liked it there and to find a job. I don’t think he liked it there because he did not look really hard for a job. He came back to NY and found a job within days. He still works there. Luckily after he came back, he met his wife. They married about 10 months after we moved to AZ.
Hubby’s retirement party was before we moved. I don’t remember if we moved the next day or a couple of days after. Atlas moved all of our things. We road tripped it there in my car because it was only a couple of years old. I was so proud that I had paid cash for it. Hubby donated his Jeep to the fire department because it had no A/C. We decided we would try to function with one car and we have been doing that for all these years that we have been retired. We had to trade my car when it started giving us problems in AZ. So we bought a minivan and paid cash for that too. We had to get rid of that after we had been here a couple of years. That is when we bought our SUV and paid cash for that. It is now almost 12 years old. We only put about 4800 miles on our car a year. We maintain it well and it is still going strong. But if we have to buy a new one, we will pay cash for that one too.
Those of you who have been following me since I started blogging pretty much know what those years were like in AZ. I started blogging 6 years after we moved there. We loved it there. We had a beautiful home and pool. We had planned on staying there forever.
My granddaughter was born there but unfortunately my son and DIL moved back to the eastern part of New York when she was almost 2 years old. I was heartbroken. Hubby and I decided we would not follow them. A couple of months later my other son called us to tell us that they were having a baby. That was it. We were moving back to NY. Even though it was the 2008 housing crisis that had made the housing market extremely bad in AZ, we decided we would sell. But first we came back to NY to find a house that we loved. We found a builder in this area and contracted to have our present home built. We looked in the Eastern part of the state also but there was no one building there at the time because of the housing crisis. We went back to AZ and called a realtor. She told us it was taking about 9 months to sell a home in their terrible market. There were houses all around us that had been for sale for months and some for a couple of years. We put it on the market and it sold in 36 hours for the price we asked for. It didn’t hurt that it had been showcased on the Phoenix News a few years before.
Then we had the problem that our house wouldn’t be ready till months after ours closed. But that didn’t deter us. We hired Atlas to move our things cross country into storage for 4 months. We road tripped it to this area and had rented a two bedroom apartment and lived there while our home was being built. That way we were here when West was born. Finally we moved into our home. But we had to wait about 2 weeks for our furniture to be delivered. So the first few days in our new home, we slept on an air mattress on the floor. Our sons came out that weekend and moved all of the furniture that we had used in the apartment so we had our bed and a living room chair. Then we went shopping in Rochester to buy furniture that we needed in this home. We had sold some furniture to the buyer in AZ. Furniture that we would not need here.
The rest you have all seen on the blog ever since.
Do we continue to save? Yes, we do. But we live well, eat well, and are happy! We don’t go without what we want but we have few wants. I am one of those people who leave things in online carts for a few days before I buy them. Most of the time, I end up emptying the cart because those items are no longer important to us.
We have reached the age that we no longer do airplane travel. I have been to Disney enough over the last few years and I am done. We will road trip it to travel and to do day trips.
Now I will let you decide if we are now the millionaire next door and or how many millions we have. I am not telling! We do have a small pension and now get Social Security but we have known that both of these things could go away at any time. So we have never relied on them. Nor should you especially if you are younger because I do not believe SS will be there for you. Over the past few generations, people are having less and less children or no children so it isn’t sustainable.
The reason I tell you all this is so that you will know that if you save all your life or even part of your life that your dreams can come true too. It is never too late to pay off credit card debt, mortgage debt, student loan debt, car loan debt, or to start saving for your retirement or any other goal.
I realize that these are tough times right now. But we have had many tough times especially during the Carter administration and many recessions all during our life. There seems to be something every decade. Don’t worry about what is going on around you. Do what is right for you and your family! Take care of your money and it will take care of you!
You all know that I have an old meat slicer that I would cut up cold cuts from meats that I would roast. I didn’t always have big boneless roasts that I could cut them from. So while we were waiting for those roasts to go on sale, we would buy cold cuts just like everyone else especially if we were having company for any length of time. Or when we would be having a large party.
This article disgusted and sickened me. Mold and mildew and bugs everywhere. So I told Hubby that we were never going to buy another cold cut anywhere whether it is Boar’s Head or any other brand. I was going to make all of our own cold cuts and never buy them at a store again. He agreed but he had one request. He said our meat slicer that we have used for years had served it’s purpose but he wanted to buy a commercial meat slicer that would not only do meats but slice our homemade bread. I agreed.
We picked out the one pictured above at Amazon. It was $348. plus 8% tax. Knowing how outrageously expensive cold cuts are, it will pay for itself pretty quickly. Plus I will have the peace of mind that I am not buying something that could potentially kill us.
I was pleasantly surprised when I opened our Top’s ad that starts this Sunday and saw beef Roasts on sale for $ 4.99 a lb. I have my choice of sirloin tip, top round, eye round or bottom round. I will be getting a top round since it is the most tender. We will roast it, chill it, and cut it up on the new slicer. Then I will put some in the refrigerator for next week and food saver the rest into small portions to pull out for sandwiches when we want one. Roast beef cold cuts cost between $11.99 to $18.99 at the grocery stores in my area.
It has been another busy day of errands, post office, drugstore, library, etc.
After I got home, Hubby went outside to weed some more gardens. He quickly came back inside after he took a header onto the ground. His head and, arm, and knee were bleeding.. I patched him up but he has been complaining about his left shoulder since it happened. I tried to take him to Well Now to get it looked at and possibly Xrayed but he refused. If it is not better in the morning, he is going whether he likes it or not. I am keeping an eye on him.
I hope to be back with my married life series tomorrow.
In the late 1970’s, our house seemed to have shrunk. Two boys meant we needed more square footage than we had. We went out for a drive one Saturday afternoon and found a road we had never seen before. We drove down there and found that a builder was putting up homes. They had a model home so we stopped in to see it. We loved it. It had 2350 sq. feet, 4 bedrooms, 2 and 1/2 baths, a large living room and dining room, a family room, enormous kitchen and a full basement. It backed up to woods. It was perfect for us.
We went home and went over the budget numbers and decided we could have one built. So later that week we signed the paperwork. When we applied for the mortgage( 8 and 1/2%) we told the bank that we did not want escrow for the school and property taxes. We had paid our own taxes twice a year on our prior house and have done the same with every house we have owned right up to today’s. When we first started doing that in the 1960’s, they were not paying interest on escrow. We liked controlling our own money. We liked earning the interest on that money rather than the bank using our money all year long. The interest rate was high on this house because of the many years of inflation we had with Jimmy Carter as President. Friends of ours had a home built near ours a few years later and they paid 16%. That is when we came up with plan to pay it off early. It was an expensive time to live but not as bad as now. They have kept the interest rates down now but that is a mistake. You can’t get rid of inflation by doing that. You must have an approach that cools government spending.
We had the builder put in the bare basics which meant linoleum floors in the kitchen, and to only finish 1 and 1/2 bathrooms, and put in mid range carpeting. We told them to only plum in the master bathroom. We had the other full bath just down the hallway that we could use. Hubby put the entire master bath in himself a year or so after we moved in. He got very good at tiling the walls and the floor. He put in a walk in shower and a toilet. One upgrade that we did have the builder do was put a fireplace in the family room. We had had one in our first home and we had such a crappy utility company that we were out of power many times over the winter. So we knew how much comfort it gave to have a secondary power source.
In the 1980’s, we did a lot of upgrading including a paver patio and and an in ground swimming pool and fenced the yard. Hubby built a shed to house the pool motor and chemicals we needed for it. That pool turned out to be the best investment ever. Our boys learned to swim quickly at the ages of 7 and 5. Their friends just about lived in it with them and Hubby and I used it all of the time. It gave us many years of paid for entertainment. We lived in this home 20+ years until one boy had graduated college and the other had one semester left to finish. We paid that mortgage off when we were in our forties by always paying extra on the principal. All of those years our first priority was to pay ourselves first.
As the boys grew up in that home, expenses for the boys grew and we made choices for their schooling that we have never regretted. They both went to an all boy private military academy. One went there for 6 years(jr. high and high school) and the other went for 4 years of high school. The tuition was very expensive along with all the other things like uniforms, etc. that we had to buy. That is when I went back to work to pay for that and for their college. At first, I only worked part time but then I worked a couple of full time jobs. By me going to work, we never had to touch a dime of our savings and our taxable retirement money that had grown and grown over the years as we kept adding to it.
I cut every corner that I could frugally without cutting down on our quality of life. When the boys were around 8 and 10, we raised our grocery budget to $180.- $ 200. per month. I stuck to that grocery budget for years even when we were living in AZ. I did everything I could to stick to that budget including using coupons, markdowns, and eating from our shelves and freezer. When the boys were small when we first moved to that home we found in the seventies, we bought a 27 cubic foot freezer that I kept stocked with meats, veggies, fruits, etc. when they were on sale. Much the same as I do now. Then we just made meals from the things that we already had stocked in our home. I had Hubby build some wooden shelves in the basement where we stored things that we purchased all the time on sale.
We didn’t make frivolous purchases or spend money on useless crap. We didn’t spend money we didn’t have via credit cards. We used credit cards for convenience and to this day we pay them off when we get the bill. The boys never went without anything they needed. But we did not spend to excess.
The boys got paper routes when they were 11- 12. They worked various jobs every summer when they were old enough. When they turned 16 and got their licenses, they bought their own used cars with the money they had saved. We paid their insurance. This helped us out because then they could drive to their private school where they both played sports. They could stay late for practices and Hubby didn’t have to pick them up. The school was just under 25 miles from our home. They had taken a school bus that was provided by our public school, which we paid hefty taxes to, until they had their own cars.
By having them do paper routes and then work jobs in high school, they learned the value of a dollar and the hard work it took to get it. They never thought money grew on trees. It is a lesson that sticks with them today.
I will write the post on the ’80s and ’90’s tomorrow. It has been a crazy day.
Hubby had an appointment to get our car inspected and an oil change this morning at 8am. My plan was to go to Top’s because it was senior 6% discount day when he got home. Meanwhile while he was gone I took a cup of coffee out to our seating area in front to see our neighbors get on the bus since it was the first day of school. They are 2nd grade and younger. One of them was going to kindergarten and was so excited. They were all so cute.
When Hubby got home I asked him about the appointment and he said all went well. I asked him because I was curious how much the NYS inspection is now. He looked at the bill and did not see it on it. He assumed that they had just done it and that they would have told him if there was a problem. I told him to go out to the car and see if the new inspection is on the car. It wasn’t. They never did it. He went right back with the car and they apologized and took it right back in to inspect it. Moral of the story is you can’t trust anyone anymore. Go over any bill with them to make sure you get the services you requested.
After Hubby got home for the second time, I got ready and went to Top’s. I got a bunch of bananas on sale for $ .44 a lb, using a super coupon which cost me a $ 1.10, a bunch of celery for $ 2.00, and a half gallon of half and half for $ 5.99. My total after a 6% discount was $ 8.54. Every penny always counts. By the time I got there, the store was so crowded that I couldn’t wait to get home. I was in line for quite a while because they had no express line open. The self service checkouts are now cash only and I wanted to pay with cash. That will be all the shopping I do this week.
Hubby and I had a peaceful weekend watching college football, grilling outside, and just relaxing for a change. I also visited a friend who has had long Covid for 3 years now. I hadn’t seen her in a while. We had a nice chat and caught up on our lives.
I also went over our budget for August. We got our school tax bill the end of August and I paid it the same day. It was for $ 5961. This is only for our school district. Our property taxes for the county will be billed January 1, 2025 and is almost as much as the school taxes. NYS taxes are horrendous but we choose to live here to be close to our family. But this payment took a big chunk out of what we saved this month. That and a couple of large purchases that we made this month too. I will talk about one of them by the end of the week.
We grilled filet mignons, made chicken stir fry, and had chicken parm over the long weekend.
Hubby and I are about to go sit outside for a while today before we grill hamburgers with sauteed mushrooms for dinner. But I wanted to let you know that we saved $ 4354.49 this month towards our goal.
How did you do with your savings or debt payoff in August?
I will be back tomorrow with the continuation post of our life. I promise.
