Frugality has suddenly taken a new focus in our lives.
I posted earlier in the week about rising interest rates and how this will affect our aim to pay off our house - our first - in twelve years. Well, a letter from our bank a couple of days later informed us of further changes to our home loan which sees us falling even further under our benchmark. The mortgage is being paid, as are the bills and we even have some leisure spending, but this week has left a decidely bad aftertaste in my mouth.
We’ve both been merrily cruising along, satisfied that we were on track, even if we weren’t going at the same sprint rate as the intensive savings period I mentioned in my previous post. After this week’s events though, I’m beginning to see that we really need to pull our socks up. We’re not extravagant people but on the other hand we haven’t really considered every dollar of our expenditure for quite some time, so I know there’ll be plenty of leaks we can plug.
Starting with porridge, LOL.
I had to pick up a few things at the supermarket this morning. Boofah, our highly-sensitive and very intelligent middle child had informed me earlier in the week that we needed the oats for the beta-glucan. He asked for some of those expensive flavoured packets of microwaveable oats and I’d told him they were very bad value and we were going to get the same old jumbo box of quick cooking oats we always got (see - I have some redeeming frugal features, LOL). We talked about cost per serving and I mentally ticked off a box on my internal Sensible Parenting Chart. But this morning in the supermarket, as I was reaching for the familiar red box on the shelf, I happened to glance at similar products on the shelves around it. The big red box costs upwards of $5. It holds 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) of oats. If you think that’s extravagant, well, we’re in Australia and that’s just what brand names cost in Aussie dollars, LOL. If you look at the other boxes of cereal on the shelf, $5 is a rough average for anything with a decent sized box. It never bothered me to be spending this really, as compared to the alternatives, oats are chock full of nutrition. And you get more serves in a box.
But there I was, hand on the red box, and I glanced down. A 1.1 kilogram (2.4 lbs) bag of ‘home brand’ quick-cook oats on the bottom shelf cost just $2.35. I checked the labels - both were simply oats, nothing else added. The sodium content was similar. I could have smacked myself in the head due to my own stupidity, LOL. I’m a smart person. I know the ‘look high, look low’ rule. I know generics are cheaper. But somehow I had fallen into the habit of always picking up the same brand.
It didn’t end there. Don’t laugh, but when I make soup at home I’m a total cheater. I use pre-packaged liquid stock (and the entire internet collectively gasped). 1 litre (almost 34 oz) of ready-made Idiot Brand (not it’s real name, LOL) costs me $2.75. I need 2 litres to make my ‘usual’ soup. The stock alone therefore costs me $5.50 and that’s before I add anything to it. The whole recipe usually costs around $10 for 10 serves. Still cheaper than canned soup but hardly ‘cheap’ overall. Soup should basically be free! Now, I won’t pretend I’m yet up to making my own stock (though that is on the drawing board) but a couple of days ago I was browsing the best scratch cooking site on the web, Hillbilly Housewife, and happened upon this article. I’d read it before but it was the advice about boullion cubes that reminded me there was an ‘interim’ step. Today I picked up some stock powder and some cubes (MSG free and low sodium) for a saving of at least $3 per batch of soup and I’ll be road testing my usual recipe with it this week.
I’m also re-examining my grocery/household budget. In the past, I have included just about everything in with the grocery spending - paper products, toiletries, anything that can be bought at the supermarket or the nearby chemist (drugstore). This obviously makes the total astronomical. I think it’s time to separate the components. I re-did my Master Grocery List, including only food items and eliminating everything that I knew I could make myself with a bit of effort. The list went down by a full third. What I was left with was a core list of food products I know I use on a regular basis and those should really form the basis of most of my meals. Menu planning will now take on a somewhat different form as I stick to recipes which re-use these same ingredients in new ways or at the least, only require one or two extra items that can be purchased cheaply. And I’ll be paying far more attention to stocking up and buying loss leaders. A trip to a stand-alone fruit and vegetable shop on Wednesday netted me two bags filled with vegies for just $15. The same items at the supermarket would easily have topped $30. Such little things, but they make a huge difference.
Time to get my game face on!
For more Frugal Fridays participants, head over to say hi to Crystal at Biblical Womanhood :)
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