Author: Precious

I am finally peaceful because I got some important financial things done this morning. Between those types of things and my recent doctor and test appointments, I have been very stressed out the past couple of months. I don’t have another appointment until May and then one in August. My time is finally mine, Hubby’s, and my sons and their families. What a relief I feel. I should be around here more often too.

This afternoon I cooked up some bacon to make Turkey BLT’s for dinner. That will make them easy to put together.

The middle of last week, I contacted a few companies whose products I buy and whose products I was getting low on. I didn’t know if they would send me some coupons but it was worth a try since paper coupons are rare these days. These all came in the mail today. I am loving all of them especially the free one. The $.50 ones will double at my Top’s. All of them do not expire until the end of December so I will be saving them to combine with a sale. Score!

Some other things that I have done in the last few days are:

I scanned 2 weeks worth of receipts into Fetch.

Instead of paying $ 25. including tip for 2 fish fry dinners at Chiavetta’s last Friday for dinner, I baked some coconut shrimp I found in the bottom of my freezer.

The only waste I had was a slice of a tomato that got buried in the crisper drawer.

I am using up food in the freezer and pantries for the next few weeks so I am only buying sale items that we need or reduced priced deals. Matter of fact I will be going out to shop for my corned beef and cabbage and going to the drugstore for a prescription after I post this. I will also bring a bag of bottles to Fast Cash. My menu’s with the exception of the corned beef and cabbage will be made from what I already have in the house.

I almost forgot to talk about February’s budget. I spent $ 490. of my $534. food budget last month. The remainder will be saved to stock on good deals when I see them. Also we only spent $ 24.92 on fish fries for take out on one Friday dinner. Our gas and electric bill was $ 235.66. We saved $233.83 this past year compared to last year’s bills. That has to be the warm winter we have had and keeping the heat so low from 10PM to 9AM.

What have you guys been doing to save money?

We made all of our meals from scratch except for using the Naan bread as the crust to make a homemade pizza. Our dinner meals starting last Saturday were turkey soup(3 times), pizza, cheeseburgers, strip steaks and baked potatoes, and coconut shrimp. Our brunch meals were eggs and bacon(2 times), turkey BLT’s, grilled ham and cheese sandwiches, hamburgers and broccoli, and eggs and broccoli. We did not go out to eat or get takeout. Hubby made SF pudding with Zero Sugar whipped topping for desserts.

Since we have about 7 dozen eggs, I hard boiled a dozen of them in the instant pot for upcoming brunches and made some deviled eggs for snacks.

I froze a meal of turkey soup for a future meal.

I entered our receipts into Fetch to get points towards Walmart gift cards to use for groceries.

My showers were navy ones and I filled a large 5 gallon bucket with the warm up water. This is used for cleaning.

I did a load of clothing and a load of sheets with minimal detergent in the washer. I used minimal dryer time using the wool balls.

Hubby needed to go to Home Depot to get some parts to make repairs in the house. While he was getting dressed to go out, I loaded up the back of the SUV with 8 bags of returnable bottles. We have been tripping over bags of them in the garage because a large run of them had not been done since the beginning of autumn and we have had a lot of company since then. Both Home Depot and Fast Cash are in the same plaza. He took back 176 returnable bottles for a total of $ 8.80.

At Home Depot, he purchased a Universal Flapper that needed to be replaced in our master bedroom toilet. It took him less than 15 minutes to make that repair. He also bought a package of wood screws that he needed to fix a dining room chair. When he was vacuuming the other day he found a screw under the table. We quickly found out what chair it had come from. He tried to put it back in the chair but it kept turning and wouldn’t screw into the wood. He also found another one had either not been put in the chair or had been lost in some other point of time. So he picked up a package of screws that were the same length but just a little wider. Then he replaced the two screws which worked perfectly. We will save the other 8 screws for future DIY. He paid $ 9.68 for all. He has saved us a ton of money over the years by being able to fix things.

We continued to pull out things we no longer want to sell at the community garage sale.

I sorted my seeds to see if I had what I want to plant this spring. I do so I don’t have to buy seeds.

We had doctors appointments back to back this morning. Afterward we picked up a prescription that I had ordered yesterday. Doing two things on a trip saves gasoline.

I started a stretching routine about a month ago and I can’t believe the difference that it has made in my body. The stretches have made a huge difference in how I feel and how my back feels. I will be keeping this up long term. I am also on the treadmill every other day for 30 minutes.

Before I close I wanted to tell you that the 1 in 11 oven grill pan works beautifully with the air fryer function to grill steaks. They have beautiful grill marks and they were perfectly cooked to medium rare at 450 for 5 minutes on each side. That was after preheating the grill pan. I just wanted to let you all know because someone asked how I liked it. I am using more and more functions and we are loving it.

How did you save money this week?

I will only be tracking on here some of the categories because the large ones like insurances, cable TV and streaming services, etc. pretty much stay the same. However, I am tracking everything in my actual budget.

This month I spent $ 384.58 on groceries(just food). There were 3 Walmart delivery orders and 1 Amazon that was food also. I did not show you those. So I was $ 149.42 under budget. That has been rolled into my February budget so that I can stock up some beef and other meats in my freezer.

We spent $ 259.13 on electricity and natural gas.

I only filled up the gas tank once for a total of $ 36.00.

Our medical drugs and co-pays came to $ 272.80.

Miscellaneous was $ 15.10 for Christmas cards purchased at 50% off. And I spent $ 66.00 for a 100 count roll of Forever stamps.

Gifts were $ 110. We had one birthday and I tipped my grandson $10. for doing some work in the house for me.

I needed to get 2 pair of flannel pants to keep me warm and one bra because one was totally warn out for a cost of $ 39.21. That comes out of the clothing budget.

I stocked batteries, those LED small lights for closets and cupboards for a total of $ 72.08 from the household budget.

We paid our property taxes which totaled $ 4788.15 and the yearly bill for this coming season of lawn fertilizer which totaled $ 445.83. They gave us 3% off for paying early.

What we spent no money on in January was eating out. We had no fast food nor did we go to any restaurants to eat. That saves a fortune. All food was made at home. We also did not spend anything on entertainment outside the home.

How did you do in January? Care to share?

Unless you have so much money that you don’t care about the grocery prices, you know it is getting harder and harder to buy groceries every week. It seems they go up at least a few pennies a week and some go up by $ .50 to a dollar. Every time I hear our government say that inflation is cooling, I want to tell them that food and energy costs aren’t. But those items are not in the inflation numbers and they know that. I don’t know about you but food, gasoline, and natural gas and electricity are the most important numbers for us today. I try really hard to keep those numbers down.

The other problem is the shortages. Foods are disappearing off our shelves at a rapid rate. I have placed grocery orders over the past 6 months that have had up to 1/2 of the items out of stock. It’s just crazy!

So I have decided that this month, I am not going to deal with the craziness. If we absolutely need something, I will buy it but I think we can pretty much eat what we have in our pantry. I might run out of something we are used to getting every month but I will just make substitutions or make something else that I do have ingredients for.

There will be one BIG exception this month! I will be using my grocery budget to buy meat. Beef has been in short supply for over a year and the prices have surged. We have very little beef in our freezer except for some organic 85/15 ground beef that I buy on sale at Aldi’s and a couple of roasts and a few steaks but that it it. We have not been buying a lot because the prices have been so high.

That said the predictions are that beef prices are going to go much higher than they are now. I would like to have a few things for grilling season. So I will be looking for sales.

Yesterday when I went to another town for a medical appointment, I stopped on the way home at Niagara Produce to buy some meat that they had on sale. I like to spend my money at small family run businesses when I can.

They had a weekly sale on 85/15 ground round for $ 4.79 a lb. I had purchased some a while ago and Hubby said he loved it so I had been looking for a sale again. It popped up this week. They also had beautiful rib eyes steaks for $ 15.99 a lb. This is their regular price for now but it is much lower than I have seen at my other available stores. So I purchased 2 thick cut ones just like Hubby loves. They had a nice fat cap and were well marbled.

The ground round was a total of $ 51.25 for about 10.70 lbs. The rib eye steaks cost 33.98 for about 2.13 lbs. My meat total was $ 85.23.

When I went in the store, I looked in the meat case and was disappointed because they had none of the ground round but you could see a large space where they had been. So I went to the butcher counter and asked if they had any more. The butcher seemed surprised that there was none in the case because they had fully stocked it that morning. I guess other people like it too and knew it was a good price. He said I will check to see if we have any more ready. He came back with 3 huge packages and asked how many I wanted. I said I will take all three.

At home I used my food saver to package all of that meat up and marked it with the date and what was in it. I always food saver each package of ground round into approximately 1 lb. packages because we make two meals at a time out of it. Then it went into the bottom of the freezer. It will keep a long time. The ribeye steaks were big enough that Hubby will grill one at a time and we will split it for a meal.

By the time I did that I was beat but I still had to go back out to run another errand. When I got home, I took the rest of the day off to rest my back and watch some shows on Roku with Hubby.

For dinner I cut up some chicken breasts into large cubes. I was not up to making an elaborate dinner so I cooked it in a little olive oil with some Keto Chicken Seasoning that I had purchased a while ago at Big Lots. I just sprinkled it all over the chicken while it was cooking. I served it with a small scoop of mac and cheese that we had leftover. I didn’t even bother with a veggie which Hubby was quite happy with. It was delicious and we have some leftover for lunch today.

Are you doing anything different with your grocery money this month?