Author: Precious

This week Top’s had a coupon item for a 6lbs. + mega package of 80/20 ground beef on sale for $ 2.99 a lb. I picked up a package that was just about 7 lbs.

Today, Hubby and I spent some time preparing it. I canned about 4 lbs. in pint mason jars with my Instant Pot Max which has a canning program. It was just staying warm until we finished watching NCIS and NCIS Hawaii today that Hubby recorded last night.

Hubby made a big pot of chili and then put it in the crockpot to cook all day. That will be dinner for many nights this week and if there is any left over or we get sick of eating it, I will freeze the rest to use on hot dogs.

I just took the jars out of the canner. They are so hot that they were still boiling. These 4 jars will make 8 meals for Hubby and I . We will use them in casseroles, spaghetti sauce, soups or tacos.

Since we are reading in the news that the UN is telling us that there will be a food crisis in less than 10 weeks, I am taking them seriously. I know that wheat and corn are in short supply. So many products are made with those items. Meat has gotten so expensive that unless you can get a deal on a loss leader, it is almost unaffordable. There are chicken shortages because of the bird flu so that has become expensive also.

Hence I am canning any deals that I find on meat or produce. Even if a crisis does not occur, I will have purchased and put up some food at cheaper prices. It will eventually get eaten.

I hope all of you see what is coming and have stocked up some food for you family.

Here is an example of how we are using our food for dinner tonight. I had two boxes of open pasta. One has a little rotini and the other has pennette. We had a small bag of homemade meatballs in our freezer. The meatballs will be heated up in the sauce in the microwave after I get done cooking the pasta in there. Lastly we will be melting mozzarella cheese on top. I have a small container of leftover mushrooms so they will get heated and put in my bowl. Hubby hates mushrooms. We have a few black olives left from our dinner salads last night so they will be put into the bowls too. I think we will have enough for tomorrow night also.

I try very hard not to waste any food especially since prices are so high. If I can’t use something up right away, I freeze it. When I find food that doesn’t get used before it spoils, I could kick myself.

Hubby and I have been saving money for two outside projects for a couple of years and finally reached our goal. We debated whether we should get them done now or put them off. One is two new garden projects, two new trees planted including a peach tree, a stone wall around our grilling patio to keep the wind from blowing the grill over, repair work on our patio and steps(after 12 years it has settled), cleaning of our stone patio and sealing it, a repair of our patio in our seating area out front, and repair of one of the garden walls. The other project is a total tear out of our asphalt driveway and have it totally redone- gravel basis and two coats of asphalt. These projects are costing us a fortune- many thousands of dollars. Things like this were always expensive but they are extremely expensive right now. We decided to contract it out to two different local companies because we feel prices will only continue to rise and will never go back to where they were. Next year it would cost us even more.

Other than those two projects, we are not spending on anything else except tires. We have plenty of clothing. Hubby needed new jeans this spring so I ordered them from LL Bean with a coupon code. Last winter we stocked on really warm clothing and blankets in case we have any power outages next winter. I am repairing clothing the old fashioned way when it needs it by sewing them.

We keep our SUV really clean and make sure to wash it all winter at the car wash( getting a free wash every 6th one), even the undercarriage, to get all of the salt off. For a 2013, it has no rust and is in excellent condition. It only has $40,000. miles now. We have gotten some items like windshield wipers and tire flat repair kits while we can still find them. Hubby is looking into new tires. We have a local garage that takes care of oil changes and everything else. We plan on keeping this car for many more years.

We are cleaning our own furniture and carpeting which will save us from paying someone else. We are doing our own spring cleaning and window washing little by little. It is time consuming and I tire more easily these days but it will get all done.

We still continue to try to lower our natural gas and electricity usage. We have been doing that every month and being very successful at it. Every day we think about how to cook things to use as little power as possible. Now that it is grilling season, we will cook outside a lot. Propane is expensive but not as bad as the inside power. We never turn lights on when the sun is shining. They do not go on until it is dark outside. We still have our heat on because the nights are cold here. However it looks like we may to be able to turn it off for good next Wednesday or Thursday. We don’t plan on using the A/C a lot this year except when it gets humid. Fans and open windows will work most of the time.

I continue to get gasoline with gas points or at the cheapest station. I was able to fill up last week using $.50 off a gallon in points. When I don’t have points, I fill it up at B.J.’s. They are so much cheaper. I only run errands once a week. If I have a medical appointment, I combine the errands with that. We don’t go driving just for a ride. We keep the tires inflated and don’t carry any unnecessary things in the car so that we get better mileage. Our car is averaging about 24 miles a gallon these days.

We are again paying the yearly premium for our dental insurance. It has not gone up in cost from last year and it has saved us so much money.

That is it for now. I need to start dinner soon. I will continue this post tomorrow.

I hope you all have a great evening!

UPDATED: When I wrote this yesterday, I made a huge typo. Our assessment was raised by $ 140,000. not $ 40,000. It has been corrected! Now you see why we were so SHOCKED!

Bank Of America’s Global Fund Manager recently said that professional investors are growing increasingly gloomy about the future with the majority now predicting that stocks will fall into a bear market this year and the U.S. economy will be plagued by stagflation. Stagflation means high inflation and slow economic growth.

The Federal Reserve is trying to prevent this by raising interest rates. Will it work? I’m not sure because it could cool the hot labor market. Time will tell. I am just hoping that we don’t go back to the high prices of the 1970’s. Prices are high enough now and affecting the every day lives of Americans in a bad way. Now the government wants to print more money to advance quantum technology. Up go the prices again! Ugh!

So we are trying to get ready to survive all of this. We are doing many things to try to spend less than we ever have before which is not easy with so many things increasing in price. Hence we have to tighten where we can. We are retired so we only have so much money to work with and it is getting devalued every day just like every other American.

First let me tell you what we can’t do anything about. I told you yesterday the town we live in raised our assessment again. After a few years of $30,000 and $40,000 increases, this year they raised us by $140,000. We were shocked. Everyone in this neighborhood was raised but no one but us was raised that much. From the research that Hubby did, the seniors who live in here were raised more proportionately than anyone else. That is because most seniors live in ranches and those are the homes that increased the most. Many people must have complained to the town to the point they felt they had to send a letter out to all of us explaining that it should only be a 15% tax increase when all is said and done. Well Hubby checked ours and our increase will be over $750. and that is just the property tax. It will also affect our school taxes in September. Our total combined taxes will be almost $12,000. We fought our assessment last year and got nowhere. What had happened to all of us in here is that a new builder came in and is building homes extending our neighborhood. They are still building but about 70% of the neighborhood is finished and they most likely will finish the rest within a year. So the town took our 12 and 13 year old homes and increased us to their prices. My home has no other one that even comes close to being like ours so they just seem to randomly raise us. Ugh! Those new homes sold in the high $ 400,000.’s to $635,000. range. I wonder when the housing market crashes if they will lower us.. I doubt it! I have also realized that our homeowner insurance company will raise us next March to the cost of rebuilding the house. They do this every year. It just went up almost $100 this past March along with our automobile insurance which went up by $63.

However, we are tracking every penny we spend and lowering bills where we can. We are cancelling subscription services that we have deemed unnecessary. I lowered the Netflix service plan that we pay for Alexa after they raised their prices.

We are eating much simpler meals more like when I was living with my mom and grandparents. My grandmother, grandfather, and their children survived the Great Depression by watching the size of portions, making lots of casseroles and soups, and doing all of their cooking from scratch. If cooking from scratch and eating 1/2 of a boiled potato, a couple of tablespoons of a vegetable, and a very small piece of meat was good enough for them and while I was growing up, it is good enough today. I was never overweight when I was growing up so they fed us properly. People today eat way too much food. We only had some chips and popcorn as a treat every other month. Sure, I like junk food too but we rarely buy it anymore. It’s expensive and has no nutritional value. Soda came in a quart bottle and we made it last at least a week or two. If you were thirsty, you could have a glass of water. We have cut our portions of all foods including meat and try to make as much food as we can from scratch. We now have a meatless meal at least twice a week if not three times. We are getting our protein from meat, peanut butter, vegetables, and beans.

We purchased one beef tenderloin a month or so ago and had it cut into filet mignons. It is grilling season and we will make it last all summer. We purchase no other steak. I only buy organic ground beef when it is on sale at Aldi’s and I buy it in bulk. I just purchased 13 lbs. this past week. I have quit purchasing chicken unless it is on sale and looks good. The chicken at Top’s has gone way down in quality and so we don’t buy from them anymore. I try to get chicken legs and thighs when I can. We eat 4 oz. portions of meat or poultry. We buy salmon and haddock when it is on sale at a good price. Right now we have haddock but no salmon.

We are not adverse to eating tuna, canned chicken, beef, pork, and turkey when the price is lower than fresh. Frozen meats are almost as expensive in my area as fresh. A pound of ground beef makes two meals for us. Four small chicken legs go into the air fryer and make a meal for us. I buy reduced price meat when I can find it. That does not happen often these days. But I always look for it. We rarely purchase cold cuts but when we do we buy them at Niagara Produce because they are much cheaper and fresher there. They are usually used in a Chef’s salad. There will be lots of salads for dinner this summer.

I have so many more things that we are doing including making our own Keto ice cream but this post is getting long and I have to do some prep work for dinner. This post will be continued tomorrow.

How are you guys saving money these days? We all learn from each other.

We were getting low on bread here because Hubby made French toast for breakfast recently. So yesterday he made a loaf of cinnamon bread in our bread maker. It is cheaper to make it in that machine rather than turn on our natural gas oven. We will have it this week for breakfast with our eggs.

Thinking about the eggs, I need to freeze a few dozen that are in the fridge. I will put one or two eggs in baggies and lay them flat in the freezer. The one egg bags are for baking and the two egg bags are for easy over or scrambled eggs.

For dinner last night, I decided to make a big pan of my grandmother’s recipe for Bacon & Macaroni Goulash. I purchased a 3 pack of bacon at B.J.’s Warehouse Club last week. It is the cheapest price I could find for really good bacon. It was $ 16.97 for the 3 pounds.

I cut up a pound of the bacon and added a cut up onion to cook them together. I used my large electric fry pan because it takes less energy than the natural gas stove top. I not only want to save money on food but I would like to lower my utility bills whenever I can also.

While that was cooking, I cooked a pound of cavatappi pasta in the microwave because that is cheaper than boiling water and cooking it on the stove top. I drained the pasta and added it and some spaghetti sauce to the onion and bacon. When it was hot, all we had to add was some Parmesan cheese and a side salad.

It was delicious and from the leftovers above, we will have a few more meals of it. We just have to dish up our future plates and heat them in the micro.

Moral of the story: Take the time to quickly think about how you are cooking each meal and with what appliance. I always try to do it the most energy efficient way that I can. Our last couple of monthly utility bills have been so high and I expect the one I get next week may top $300. Ugh!

As you can see, I also like to cook in large quantities so that I spend less time in the kitchen cooking different meals. Hubby and I don’t mind eating the same meal a few nights in a row.

I know that each time I do all of this that it is a little bit of savings. But all of those little bits add up to big dollars in the long run. And all it costs me is a little brain power!