Your Frugal Friend--Your Frugal Tips

We like to eat out occasionally, but with some family economics creeping in (kid needs braces), we're cutting back on some things. One of them is the eating out. Instead of once a week, I am trying to cut it to once a month. I just find that sometimes it feels so much easier to go grab something from some local restaurant and not have cooking dishes to clean up. We also suffer from the "What's for dinner" syndrome, where I come home and Mr. Wild says, "What do you want tonight?" One of the ways I try to alleviate this is to come up with 4-5 meals that we can buy groceries for and then Mr. Wild can pick one for that night and work on it. It is much better for my overtaxed brain after work, than trying to think about what food to make right when I arrive back from work. We only do 4-5, because we want to leave a night or two to allow for a leftover meal. No reason for all that food to go to waste if there's extra.

Any of you have suggestions for quick and tasty, kid and adult friendly meals that can make little mess (that may be a more difficult challenge) and be done quickly? If you have recipes for one dish meals, or the like, please leave them in the comments section. We will all appreciate it! I'll do a follow up post and get you all to vote for your top three-five, maybe post a five day planner of our favorites.

Have at it folks!

No sleep

I hate colds. I hate cold medicine.

I tried using Alkaseltzer Plus Cold Medicine. Last year it was a pretty good standby. But yesterday, I had ringing in my ears. And I couldn't sleep last night (this morning? right now?), which used to happen with Sudafed (which actually seemed to make my heart race). The ringing in the ears is listed on the package and says I'm supposed to stop taking it and call the doctor. Like I have time for that. Doctors are only available during working hours, but what am I doing then? Working. So I have to carve out a bit of time to call. Then I'll get a triage nurse, who will take my problem down and then I wait while at some point she talks to the doctor and then calls me back later to tell me if I need to do something different or if I need to set up an appointment.

I have a feeling they'll just say, stop taking it. Ugh. So now what do I do to clear up my sinuses? Yes, I'm drinking hot liquids and taking hot showers. I suppose we really ought to pull out the humidifier.

Meanwhile, I am awake right now at 5:30 am. Well, I've been awake since 3:50 am. And not really tired. And now I'm hungry. I am supposed to get up at 6:30 am (usual time). I don't think I'm going to be sleeping for an hour. If I went back to bed, I would probably toss and turn.

Lack of sleep will not be good for my cold. I worry if I'm not careful, I will get an ear infection. Which adults don't usually get. I got one about 7 years ago, much to my surprise and the doctor's. I had a fever and my ears were hurting after all the nasty draining and plugging of my ears. I went in and the doctor looked in my ear and says, "Well, you have a raging ear infection." She sounded super surprised. I'm thinking, "No, sh*t, sherlock," because it was hurting badly. Ever since then, when I hear the goop slopping around in my head, I worry it will infect my ears again. So maybe it's good I'm upright and drinking hot liquids.

At least I'm getting some blog posts in.

High school reunion

Lots of action on my Facebook account as we start to slide into the 20th year since I finished high school. Wow, what a difference 20 years makes! Just amazing. I am really enjoying Facebook, because there are some old high school friends that I've really enjoyed catching up with. So, friends and acquaintances are posting old photographs (I really need a scanner, considering all my photos then were taken before digital), and everyone jumps on the bandwagon to make comments. It's fun to read and ponder. In one of those comments sections I saw an interesting tidbit about an old junior high and high school classmate of mine. I didn't know her really well, but we'd end up in the same circles occasionally. Someone mentioned she had a bead shop in Wisconsin somewhere, so I thought I would look it up.

Meant to Bead is the name of the shop. If the shop itself is as snazzy as the web site, it looks like loads of fun. I'm not necessarily an avid beader, or even a beader to begin with, but the projects on her website are so gorgeous, I wish I was an avid beader and could start making such lovely things. I especially like the earrings featured on her site. So, I think, good for her and how fantastic for her! I hope her shop does fine in these tough economic times, because I am sure it started as a hobby for her and grew into a business. Nothing like doing something you love. You can tell from the customer comments that she takes pride in what she does. If you like to bead, she has an on-line store as well, and appears to have a gorgeous selection of beads. I hope you enjoy looking as much as I did. I don't know if she'd remember me.

Your Frugal Friend--Stuff you need to know

Economic Stimulus Plan: Do you know what's going on? I'm not sure I know or understand all of it. But Skywriter over at November Fifth is putting together a nice summary. But beyond the summary, she asks you, the reader, to look it over as well. So I have. And I think I need to read it through more carefully. I have some thoughts on the economy that I'm working on for a post. I am not an economist by any far stretch of the imagination, but I can tell you what I see and what I think from my view point, here in small town midwest.

Do yourself a favor and instead of ignoring the politicians, pay attention. And pay attention to your representative. And start making comments to him/her. If you're on-line reading this, then you probably have email and email isn't that hard to use. Many people spent the last eight years ignoring. The new administration is promising transparency, so demand it from your government.

No, you may not get everything you want or believe in, that's why there is compromise, but also, don't sit and hrumph around just because you didn't get what you wanted, keep talking (and not shouting and not accusing and not participating) or life will move ahead without you and you'll wonder what happened.

Your Frugal Friend-Tip Three

Money saving tip #3: Don't spend more than 25% of your monthly income on your housing.

Housing=mortgage payment+taxes/12+home insurance/12+private mortgage insurance (try not to have this though) or monthly rent+renter's insurance/12

Bankers want you to think you can spend 28% or 30% or even more on monthly housing. Or at least they used to. When we went for our first home mortgage, I was shocked that they would let us have a loan that would end up costing us 36% of our monthly income. Needless to say, we looked for a cheaper house that would get us down in the 25% range. I think we were closer to 28%, but I was at least still more comfortable with that. When we moved out of the Chicago suburbs, we had a nice tidy sum from our old two-bedroom house that allowed for us to put down 40% on our new four bedroom house, making our monthly payment within the 25% of our new one-income budget.

Where did I get the 25%? Good old mom! Yup, when she was getting her degree in Home Economics, one of the things she learned was that housing should be no more than 25% of your income. Sure, that was in the late 1960s. But why should that advice not continue to work now? She gave me that piece of advice at some point. It stuck.

How can this translate for you? Well, check what your current housing payment, plus a twelfth of your insurance and taxes is at the moment. Is it around 25%? Maybe a little higher? Maybe really high? If it is really high, it might help to think about refinancing, which will work if you plan on being in your home for at least another five years. A lower interest rate can really help to bring down the costs. Also a re-evaluation of the equity you have in your home might also get you off of private mortgage insurance, which will also bring down your monthly payment. But you also should have cash for the closing costs. Rolling it into the mortgage can cost you lots more in the long run. On our first house, we did refinance and brought down our payment by $400. That was a huge help.

Hmmm...maybe we need to bring Home Economics back. It seems lots of people have ended up on the ropes, because they don't understand how to manage their own home economics. They aren't learning it on their own either. Maybe it should be in schools again. And not just the sewing and cooking, but the managing budgets. If they had forced us all to take something about managing budgets in junior high or high school, maybe the average person's economy might be doing better.

Grrrr...finally

Opened up yahoo to check home email. Saw an article about executive compensation and its maximum limits. About time!

Was listening to NPR yesterday and all I could think about was how much money people at the top of these companies are making. It's just insane! True Blue Texan did a good job of sharing her sentiments, which happen to be similar to mine. I took a cut in pay for a job with more responsibility (not to mention our household went from two to one incomes), yet managed to purchase a four bedroom house and send my kids to soccer and dance. Ok, maybe our vacations consist of the yearly holiday trek to our families' houses, but hey, we need to see them and we get to enjoy time with them and have great home cooked meals. Still, we have computers, a cell phone, satellite, and sometimes take vacations other than seeing our families. We try to save for our retirement and college (though using the stock market was maybe not the best bet, but we'll see). We also have a good sense of deferred gratification. There are things I do wish we had in life, I'd like to travel to Europe once a year, and the Rocky Mountains once a year, and wish we had a cabin of our own on a lake somewhere. Maybe someday, maybe not. But my life is still complete without them.

The amount these executives are getting and I am just imagining all the things all that money could go to. Such a selfish culture, these CEOs of big companies or CFOs or COOs. When your company is tanking, real leadership would be to say, hey, I need to take a pay cut, especially if I ask all my worker drones to take a pay cut and/or must lay them off. How many workers could stay on if the salary of the executive was cut? Gasp! More people are still on the pay roll to get the job done. Productivity and morale might still be up.

And I hear all the business boards crying, we can't get good talent if we don't pay this. Hmmm... what if all the boards, together, decided they should cap executive pay. Then, CEOs won't leave, because, oh, Company Y is paying the same as Company X. Incentives should be based upon performance. Hey, incentives in stock might help (especially if they aren't allowed to sell off for a certain number of years after leaving), because your fortunes would ride on your stocks. OH! So your company has to perform well to be a top stock! Gasp, that's bonuses tied to performance! And yeah, duh, how come shareholders have been so left out of this loop. I don't understand much, but it seems people on boards in publicly owned companies also get large amounts of compensation. What are their qualifications and how do they get to be there? And why don't shareholders get to know more about their companies? Because it's dang hard to understand.

So the same old people run all these corporations and have played with all our money. And then they screwed up, lose our money and have the gall to go to the US taxpayers with their hand out. So I am glad that compensation is being limited for those companies that will ask for a handout from here on out. It's too bad this didn't happen with the first half of the rescue package.

Just like government, maybe we need new fresh blood in these leadership positions in companies. I wonder, how many of the CEOs are in my generation, Generation X as we're called. I bet very few Fortune 500 companies have Gen Xers in the driver's seat, if any. It would be nice if someone could give us a chance, us and our younger counterparts. Sometimes experience is good, but sometimes mixing it up with different generational viewpoints is good, too.

There's so much that could be done with education, health care, infrastructure, job creation, if the money wasn't tied up in so many executive salaries. They aren't giving much of it away. Now, are they going to help spend us out of this crisis? I don't think they can. I hope a new day is dawning on corporations, taking out the craziness and putting in responsibility and accountability that should have been there all along.

More Blogroll Amnesty Day

Stealing an idea from True Blue Texan, where one is supposed to talk about some of the smaller blogs out there, I want to introduce you all to L and her very new blog, How Did We Get Here? I know L through graduate school. I went through the same program she did, only she did it later than I did. I think perhaps her class visited my site where I worked at the time her class was going through the program, so to get wonderfully fun world experience, or some such, or maybe not. The ol' brain just can't remember these things anymore. At the very least, I have seen her at the alumni gatherings and we have served on our alumni board at the same time.

L has just moved to the city of my birth, Des Moines, Iowa. She and her significant other, K, are both fairly new to the city and they started the blog to share what they do in Des Moines, Iowa with their family and friends.

I remember the Des Moines of my youth, some of it brought back to me in the book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson, also a native Iowan. But Des Moines has grown up. Look at all the fun things a cute 20-something (I think they are) couple can do in Des Moines, Iowa. And it makes me also long for my home state. I do miss it at times. So she has provided me some first class entertainment and some ideas for what I can do with my family if we finally get the chance to move back to the great state of Iowa.

Don't get me wrong, the midwestern state I currently live in is just as great as Iowa. But, somehow, I think I will always have a soft spot for the land of my birth.

My tiny little contribution to the blogosphere, pointing you in the direction of potentially interesting blog content. I have found in my forays that I have yet to find a blog I didn't like. My blog following list is really huge. I am going to have to cut back some. I really need to spend more time with my kids.

Oh, I'd also like to say I'm glad L joined my followers list. I was getting a little antsy about having 13 followers. I almost made a post asking for more people to follow me publicly. Whew! I feel better now.