Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Mixed Results

Well, it worked. Sort of. As of yesterday (Tuesday), we are broke. Actually, I have two dollars in my wallet. We have groceries. The gas tank is full. My husband has his weekly $20 for lunches on the road.

In addition to the planned costs, I bought a second audiobook, and got my and my daughter's hair cut. Waited until Monday to do the haircuts and yesterday to buy the book. It's not great, but it's better.

We will spend less time broke than usual, but there is still plenty of room for tweaking. I love to listen to audiobooks while I work around the house, but they are stinking expensive. I'm going to have to find a work around for that. I'm going to have to pay off our big overdue bill at the public library so I can access the audiobooks they have there. I will only use the ones I can download online (assuming I can figure out how to use their complicated-looking system) then when I get my laptop fixed, I will check them out, download the book only my laptop right there in the library, then turn the book back in. It's just better if I don't borrow expensive things from others. It's too easy for me to mess things up.

I also think I'm going to have to come to terms with the grocery bill. No matter what I do, I can't seem to get things much below $200/week. I keep banging my head against the wall trying to get it lower and it just seems to hover there. It seems like a lot of money. It is a lot of money. But I've seen some stuff online lately about the "Food Stamp Challenge" being done to raise awareness of hunger in America and I realize that we are really not that far off from doing the food stamp challenge every week, even though our family does not receive food stamps. For the Food Stamp Challenge, a person attempts to feed themselves and/or their family on the average food stamp allowance. They generally aim for $3-4/day per person. That's the average, so it works on the assumption that you are paying for part of your groceries out of pocket. That makes the challenge a little inaccurate, but not by a whole lot.

In my state, for example, the maximum food stamp benefit for a family my size is a bit over $900 a month. So it would be more accurate to call it $5/day. That would be $210/week for our family. We are actually doing pretty good because our $200 includes all household spending, including cleaners, paper products, toiletries, and pet food/kitty litter. So I probably need to just accept that it's a reasonable amount to spend and live with it. I know I could get it lower if I could cook stuff I would eat, but when you have people with autism in your household, you have to work with that.

I will keep trying to do the best I can to keep our food expenses down, but I'm going to stop driving myself crazy with it and just budget $225 for food and household expenses. I will, instead, try to work on quality, ease (I will be returning to school in August and time will be at a premium), and using my ability to plan, etc to avoid eating out.

Anyway, I feel a little discouraged because, though I do need to make some cuts on the non-food spending, it's not realistic to reduce spending on our biggest expense - food. I feel vindicated because the reason I'm having trouble reducing it is because, objectively, it really is hard to do, not because I'm a loser spend-thrift (well, at least not on groceries).

At this point, I believe we have cut our fixed expenses to the point that they can reasonably cut them. This allows me to get a realistic look at our budget and, even if I don't like how it looks, I can see where we are in relation to where we want to be. I'll be honest, it's not looking good for the home team. Even doing everything right, our retirement income is going to be low. The odds of Social Security being viable when we retire is also looking grim. And the scary part, to me, is that we are lucky. There are many, many people much worse off than we are. By retirement, our home will almost certainly be paid off and we, hopefully, will have something put back for retirement. For a lot of people, this just isn't possible. There aren't enough jobs and the jobs there are don't pay enough to live on.

Okay. I'm going to stop thinking about this for now. I'm going to put on my headphones, listen to my book, and wash the huge pile of dishes left over from attempting to make homemade Hot Pockets yesterday.

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