So along comes the AMEX bill. Thought it might be a little high…but I didn’t have in mind twice the monthly freaking budget!!!! Yesh: $2200, payable forthwith. Luckily, there’s plenty of money in the bank, so I’m not flat broke. But I surely will be, if these shenanigans continue.
Except for the swimming pool filter fiasco (four trips by guys from two pool companies), no serious unexpected expenditures have happened — for the first time since the beginning of January. I figured the puppy would run up the bills, since she has to have a seemingly interminable series of puppy shots, plus the dog food’s not cheap. And there was the run on Nordstrom’s Rack: spending money to save money, uh huh. Figured to run over budget: maybe fifteen, sixteen hundred bucks. But twenty-two hundred dollah? Whaaa?
An analysis reveals the following guilty parties:
Costco: $567
Dogs: $195 (in addition to Pup, Cassie conveniently had an eye infection)
Clothing: $287
Pool: $388
Total overrun: $1437
Hm. The Costco runs would have included some normal living expenses, mostly food. But that’s about $270 more than I’d normally spend there in a month. Mostly the reason for that is meat for the dogs.
When Pup discovered that Cassie gets real food, she launched a full-out rebellion against her fancy, ludicrously expensive kibble. To persuade her to abandon the hunger strike, I added a little of Cassie’s food (real meat, real veggies, real starch such as sweet potato or oatmeal) to her radically pricey kibble. She ate the food and ptoooied the kibble out onto the floor.
{sigh}
At this age, pups need to eat as much food as a grown dog, or more. Her caloric needs are vast compared to Cassie’s And while she was refusing to eat, she was losing weight. So I took to giving her a substantial amount of real food mixed with about 1/3 cup per meal of the kibble. That disguises the fake stuff well enough that she’ll eat it — and presumably gives her a dose of whatever vitamins are in the fake food. At noon, she gets 1/8 pound of this rolled dog food from Whole Foods (available at Fry’s and Petco, I’m told) that contains nothing but real meat, real veggies, and real starch plus a long list of vitamins.
So the upshot of this is that I’m buying about twice as much chicken, hamburger, and cheap pork from Costco. Oh well.
The clothing bill of nearly three hundred dollah definitely comes under the heading of “extraordinary cost.” My normal clothing bill is $0. At most, I’ll spend $20 bucks on another pair of Costco jeans or a shirt from My Sister’s Closet.
However, this fills out the wardrobe, which was devoid of clothing that fit. Now I have casual and moderately dressy clothes — some of them very cute, indeed — that do not fall off my body. I shouldn’t have to buy any more clothes for several months, possibly not for the rest of 2014.
Pool? Grrrrrrr! Who knows? I think I’m being shepherded toward a new, expensive, high-efficiency pump, which I do not wish to buy. The filter thing is weird — I’m dead sure something is out of whack, but the guys claim it’s OK. I call bullshit but there’s nothing I can do if they refuse to come clean … uhm, or to make it come clean. This summer I’ll have to engage an ongoing fight against algae, and in the fall I’ll have to drain the pool and refill it (which, come to think of it, I was supposed to have done last fall). Oh well.
Here’s what I think: a grip must be had on the Costco frolics. Today I purchased a lifetime supply of cheap pork and a lifetime supply of not-very-cheap-but-very-convenient hamburger. Just now they reside in the freezer. I’m going to write down when I open them and write down when the last of the stuff is consumed by the hounds. This will reveal how long two packages of meat persist. From there I should be able to extrapolate how much is needed to feed the dawgs for one month.
With that bit of information in hand, the Plan will be to limit Costco visits to one (1) per month, trying to buy all the absolutely needed Costco items (lifetime supplies of toilet paper, lifetime supplies of paper towels — which I’ve also used in excess, since Ruby is determined to cover the world in dog pee — a package of their wonderful Campari tomatoes, a giant slab of pretty damn good cheese, a giant package of shredded Parmesan, 18 months’ worth of Pantene shampoo…). All other food and household goods, then, will have to come from Sprouts, Target, Ace Hardware, and waypoints.
Clothing bills go away, from now until the after-Christmas sales.
That leaves only two categories that will not and cannot go away: Dog and Pool.
Should be manageable. I hope.
We’ve always done a once per month Costco adventure, which I think saves us money and sanity in the long run. I complain sometimes because we’re in the Bermuda Triangle of Costco’s where we have three of them all located precisely 7-8 miles away from us. I think that the distance keeps us in check with our once per month goal.
Hah hah! The Costco Bermuda Triangle: where money mysteriously disappears into the air! Here, too, we have several Costco’s within easy driving distance…whatever you’re on the way to or from, there’s a Costco on the way.
Problem with Costco is that it’s Impulse Buy Heaven (or Hell, depending on your point of view…). It’s like walking through a medieval bazaar…soooo many goodies, soooo many temptations. The other downfall is that many of the wonderful products they sell are packaged in ways that cause you to buy features you don’t need — or you get two objects when you only need one.
Case in point: those Braun electric toothbrushes. At Costco, you get the Whizbang Edition, for a hefty price. But you can walk across the parking lot to Target and find, for a fraction of the cost, just one ordinary Braun toothbrush, with no whizzes or bangs. Which, of course, was what you wanted in the first place.
If you don’t have time to traipse from store to store, you end up buying what’s at hand at Costco — and spending a lot more money than necessary.
It’s an epidemic….My CC’s came in higher than usual this month…prescriptions for DW and insurance bills on some of the rentals. Knew the bill was gonna be a bit higher BUT to see it in black and white…OUCH…