Coffee heat rising

Budgeting

Budget Micro-smugness

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Yes. Feeling somewhat smug (!) about the new cash-card “envelope” method, which for reasons not altogether clear is working like a proverbial charm. There’s so much psychology involved in the budgeting game that one sometimes feels like one is pulling one over on oneself.

As you may recall, the cash-card envelope scheme entails not using a credit or debit card at Costco, the Empire of Impulse Buys. A substantial part of the stuff that stocks my household and feeds me and the dawgs comes from that budget-gobbling place, so I’m not staying away. But if this business of having to take the annual RMD (required minimum drawdown) from savings a month or two earlier than the prior year is to stop, then a grip must be gotten on the spending!

Since most of the spending happens at Impulse Buy Hell, that’s where the grip must start. So the idea was to figure how much could sanely be spent at Costco in a given month — and also budget a set amount for gasoline, which also comes from Costco because it’s the cheapest supplier in my part of the Valley.

We have monthly allotments of $60 for gasoline and $300 (or less, if possible) for general purchases.

And amazingly: so far this budget is working just about right. Come the end of last month, I had $30 left on the gas card and $4.67 on the general purchases card. That was after spending $90 on a giant bucket of pool chlorine tabs.

We’re now more than halfway through August. I don’t expect to need any Costco items between now and the 31st — all the meat and dog food makings are in hand, all the household products stocked up. Awesome. As of August 15, the gas tank was full and $30 remained on the gasoline card.

Since there’s no way I’ll drive enough to run the car out of gas between now and September 1, that means the gas card may very well have enough cash to buy next month’s allotment of gasoline. All of it. If that’s the case, then the amount slated to be moved out of checking to the gas card for September gasoline can instead be moved to emergency savings. Yes!

Meanwhile, as of  August 15, $17.16 remained on the “general purposes” Costco cash card. On August 17, its balance was $29.44. Later the same day it held $20.66. Yes: three bucks more than it contained two days before. 😀

How, you ask did this sleight of hand occur?

Through the magic of returned merchandise, that’s how!

I’d bought a box of LED lighbulbs that promised “vivid” wonderful glorious light and 15,000 hours of burning time. Well…they were vivid, all right: vivid BLUE! Ugh!!!!!

So I dragged the things back — $12 back on the card.

Meanwhile, running low a few days earlier on the cheddar cheese I normally buy at CC, I’d bought a couple chunks of fancy stuff at a Whole Foods, hoping to avoid another trip to the Queen of Impulse Buys. It was expensive stuff — not as expensive as it would’ve been before Amazon engrossed WF, but pricey. But it looked good, aged and fancy and all that. Next morning when I sliced off a piece to go with breakfast, I found it absolutely flavorless!

Jeez. If I’d wanted flavorless cheese, guys, I’d have bought Kraft. So I schlepped back to Whole Foods and got ten bucks back for that return. Then during the same trip to Costco that clawed back the 12 bucks for the neon blue lightbulbs, I picked up a chunk of their excellent cheddar cheese (which will easily last till the end of the month and then some), plus the blueberries and the tomatoes I’d forgotten during the previous week’s actual shopping trip. Spent less on the cheese and produce than the bulbs had cost, so I ended up with a net increase in the budget’s bottom line.

{Cackle!}

It’s highly unlikely that I’ll need to buy anything more at Costco for the rest of this month . But if I do, it surely will not run more than twenty bucks. Money is budgeted for regular grocery-store purchases, so if I need any other food or household items, that’s where they’ll come from. But in fact nothing like that is needed just now, so I expect precious little buying in those precincts.

An amazing $297.50 remains in the month’s budget — and that’s after all the regular bills (power, water, Medigap and on and on and on) are accounted for. In other words, we have almost $300 to cover the next 13 days, during which no incidental purchases should be needed! That’s assuming no emergencies occur.

With any luck, then, if nothing happens between now and the end of the month, I should have almost three hundred buckolas to transfer over to emergency savings on August 31. And that’s in one of the highest-cost months of the year.

Since over the past year or so I’ve been consistently overspending available funds — and running out a month or two before the RMD was scheduled, forcing an early drawdown — that suggests that the “envelope method” works.

It may, indeed, work Big Time…

Crazy Ol’ Lady Day at Costco

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Home, sweet home…

Well, the Costco Cash Card Budgeting Scheme worked out exceptionally well for July. By the 31st — yesterday — I ended up with $54 and change left on the prepaid card for in-store shopping (budget: $300), and about $45 left on the gasoline card (budget: $60).

The gas card held up well because I’d filled the tank right at the end of May — the 30th or 31st — so in fact the $60 budget intended to cover two fill-ups was only needed for one, and that, not a total fill-up. And the three hundred bucks was probably about right for a month’s worth of grocery and sundry purchases, in the absence of the dreaded Impulse Buy.

So today I join my friends and companions in shopping crime for a Costco Run. We get there as the store opens, but it’s still monstrously hot outside, and warm inside the store, too. This particular day, I’ve driven us not to our favorite store on the fringe of East Richistan, but to a more middle-class outlet on the lower edge of Whiteyville, up on the I-17 freeway. This is a good enough store, but what draws me is that they sell propane. For a lot less than regular vendors do. And I’m low on propane. I lash two tanks into the back compartment of the unbeloved Venza, and we’re off.

We circumnavigate the store, but we find it a little frustrating because its layout is nothing like the other two big-box warehouses we frequent. And I’m pretty sure they’ve rearranged everything since the last time I was there…so I’m no help at all, because I have no clue where they’ve put things. NOTHING is in what feels like a normal place. We wander around, perplexed, dodging millennials and their urchins and generally having to walk three times as many steps as we would normally have to do, to find the stuff we normally buy.

In the course of this venture, Mr. Friend says he’s not feeling well and needs to sit down. Mr. F, you should know, is in his 90s, as is Mrs. F. Fortunately, Costco is selling furniture these days, so Mrs. F and I park him in a dining-room set and take off to find the last couple of items we need. But since he has remarked that he’s afraid his heart may be acting up, I’m worried.

Shortly, we head for the check-out. Mercifully, the lines are extremely short, and we get up to the cash register forthwith.

I tell the cash register guy, when he presents me with a bill for $156, that I would like to top up the depleted Costco cash card with another $250, and then pay the bill with the cash card. He says he can’t do that: he can’t add new money to an old cash card.

Huh? That’s not what they told me at the Outer East Richistan store.

But, says he while I’m puzzling over this discrepancy, he can take the $55 off the old card, put it onto a new cash card, and then I can use my credit-union debit card to add $250 to this new card.

It’s hot, I’m tired, and I’m worried about my friend, so I say okay, make it so. We get through the checkout, stumble back out into the heat, collect the propane tanks, and escape.

When I get home, I look at the receipt and realize that what this idiot has done is, yes, filled up the cash card with money extracted from my checking account via the debit card. A-N-N-D…THEN he has drained another $156 from my checking account to pay for the stuff I specifically asked to put on the cash card.

WTF????

So now I have to get into my car and drive through the heat, fight for a parking space, and hike across the parking lot to my local Costco, down on Conduit of Blight Blvd.

God. DAMN. It.

When I get there and explain that with $156 extra taken out of the bank, I won’t be able to pay the utility bills, the customer service lady is flabbergasted to learn the guy told me he couldn’t refill the cash card. Of course he can refill the cash card, said she.

She called over a guy and said “Fix this!”

And he fixed it. What he did, basically, was simply withdraw $160 from the card and had me a fistful of cash.

This worked. I can either schlep it up to the credit union and re-deposit it (oh, goodie! another 40 minutes of dodging my fellow homicidal drivers through 115-degree heat!) or simply use it to buy stuff during this month. Probably the later is the path of least resistance.

While I was there, I refilled the gas tank, leaving $8.25 of the original $60 cash card for gasoline.

Tomorrow I have to drive to Tempe, so for sure I’m not going to make a whole month on one tank of gas. That’s really pretty unusual…normally I’d have to fill up twice in 30 or 31 days. But still: I’ll only have to put $51.75 on it to top it back up to sixty bucks.

Meanwhile, $40 was left from the rest of this month’s budget, after everything was paid. So I’m figuring if I shifted that over to the Emergency Savings Project, that would help to revive the account to its former glory We put $681 in there, the max I could spare from July’s Social Security deposit and still have enough in checking to live. If no emergencies require withdrawals from that account (har har!!!), then in a year there should be $8,172 for unexpected expenses.

Obviously that ain’t a-gunna happen. But it’s nice to dream, eh?

It would be slightly likelier to happen if at the end of each month I transferred whatever few dollars remained unspent from that month’s budget. Say, $40…multiplied by 12, that would add $480 to the pot. And if $40 is left over at the end of July, the worst month in creation for utility bills, then a lot more would be left over in January and February.

When I got home from the second Costco junket, I realized I’d failed to buy coffee while we were at the Whiteyville store. However, there’s a Costco on the way home from Tempe, on 44th street just north of the freeway. So I’ll have to stop by there tomorrow afternoon. In the heat. Probably in the rush hour, by the time I spring free from the university library.

What fun: three Costco trips in two days! 😀

Budgetarium…

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Naturally, even though I hit “save to DropBox” until I was blue in the face, the Time Machine Mac-reboot demolished my Excel budget sheet. Sooo…this morning I had the ineffable privilege of trying to reconstruct every penny-pinch I’ve indulged this month.

Is it, really, any wonder that most Americans have little to no control over their money? That most of us have little or no emergency savings, to say nothing of enough to live on through our dotage?

On the “fun” scale, budgeting ranks down about where “scouring the toilet” appears. Maybe slightly below that. Depressing, frustrating. and annoying. Especially when your damn computer deletes several hours’ worth of ditz.

Okayy…. So after spending most of the morning wrestling with this sh!t, I was unable to reconstruct all of the month’s record without having to spend even more hours poring over each entry in three weeks’ worth of receipts. So…had to make a few shortcuts. Those skimpy calculations notwithstanding, I did manage to ascertain the following:

• The Costco cash card devoted to in-store purchases still holds $54.
• The CC cash card for gasoline purchases still has its original $60(!!!).
• I’ve managed to hold the AMEX bill to an amazing $277, an all-time low.
• Despite a $237 power bill and a $200 water bill, I’m still $220 in the black (!!!!!).
• I now have $681 in the emergency savings fund, up from last week’s $5.41.
• The Mayo Clinic savings fund holds something over $500 in unclaimed funds, mysteriously: I may be able to afford to have the broken tooth fixed, after all.

Where the phantom $500 in medical savings came from, I do not know. I must have accidentally paid a bill or two out of cash flow. Typically, I charge Mayo bills on American Express as soon as the money comes in from Medicare and Medigap, deposit the incoming funds to a credit union account reserved to hold money for medical spending, and then use that to pay amounts charged on said AMEX bill. But because I hate loathe and despise the ditzy job of scanning and depositing those checks (or of traipsing 40 minutes across the city to deposit them in person), I may simply have spaced a few AMEX medical charges, paying them out of cash flow. WhatEVER…now I can use that to help get the teeth fixed.

Explanation: The Mayo Clinic declines to accept “Medicare assignment.” That does not mean, contrary to the impression many people have, that they refuse to accept patients who are on Medicare. It means only that they don’t accept direct deposit from Medicare or from Medigap insurers. Read: they do not want to pay an army of bookkeepers to deal with the endless blizzard of tiny little payments that Medicare and Medigap emit. If there’s one bill for a visit during which you had, say, nine minor tests and a doctor’s appointment, they don’t write one check; they write ten checks. The amount of paper these agencies vomit out simply defies belief. I have almost an entire file drawer full of the sh!t, and that’s just for one little old lady. One reasonably healthy little old lady.

So if you want to do business with…uhm, I mean, get care from the Mayo Clinic, you have to field All…That…Paper. And dig the checks out of the dunes of snail-mailed paperwork. (They’re easy to miss!). And then deposit them to your account. And then from your account, pay the amount due to the Mayo.

It’s a fuckin’ nuisance, and believe me, if there were any other hospital in the Phoenix area that consistently ranks good to excellent, I would take my healthcare business elsewhere. Alas, though, where medical care is concerned Arizona in general and Phoenix in specific are, shall we say, somewhat lacking in the “good to excellent” department. There are specific hospitals here — such as the one about a mile and a half from my house — that you do not want to go to. Hence, a drive that’s halfway to Payson whenever I need to see the doc, and unending hassles with paying the bills.

Truly. If my son didn’t live here, I would be living in Europe right now, today. This country has backslid so far into the Third World, one truly has to question the benefit of staying here.

See what I mean, about how annoying and depressing the whole budgeteering effort can be? If you even begin to think about the absurdity of it all…sheesh!

Where were we?

Yes. Well, despite the crabbiness this endeavor generates, by the time I finished reconstructing the month’s budgetizing record, I felt a lot better about things. With $54 still free to spend at Costco, plus $60 on the gasoline card (I had to buy gas on the last day of June and still have about a third of a tank left — meaning I will have spent only $30 on gas by the end of this month), I should finish this cycle well within budget. Maybe I’ll even have enough to pay the barbecue repair guy next week without running into the red.

The piddling $277 on the AMEX card was a surprise. In a big way. Typically, AMEX runs between $900 and $1200 a month. Why did this happen?

My theory is this:

Dedicating a flat amount to spend in Costco and determining not to exceed it forced me to build shopping lists before each of two Costco junkets. This accomplished two things:

a) Because I did not want to have to go back to Impulse Buy Hell unnecessarily, I thought very carefully about the things I needed. And…
b) Determining to stay within the $300 budget worked successfully to block the impulse-buying habit.

A carefully planned Costco [or Sam’s Club or Aldi or Walmart…] shopping list means you buy most of your needs there. So, you have to buy relatively few last-minute or forgotten items in a grocery store or a hardware store or a home store. That limits another category of impulse buy, of course: the ohhh I must have that [bag of popcorn] [box of clothespins] [overpriced artichoke] [tube of purple lipstick] [can of WD-40]! purchase.

There are a few things I have to buy in a grocery store. Those fancy rolls of dog food I use to fill in when the gourmet home-made food runs out, for example: Costco doesn’t carry those things. Walmart and the uppity AJ’s both carry them — and each charges the same for the stuff. If most of a month’s supermarket and grocery store items are purchased at Costco, then all that’s left to buy elsewhere is the dog food and occasional fresh produce. Walmart’s produce stinks and half the time they’re out of the dog food, so to avoid wasted trips (and wasted gasoline) I buy both at AJ’s, the Jewel of Richistan. But even buying fresh produce and overpriced dog food at that upscale emporium does not run up the AMEX bill the way list-free shopping does.

If these speculations are true, then I should have relatively little trouble staying within what seemed like an impossibly tight budget (given what I have been spending, habitually). Frankly, after the astronomical power and water bills, I was very surprised not to find myself flat broke already.

Now is the most expensive time of year, when it comes to running the Funny Farm. I do not do time-of-day billing deals with the power company (like, yeah: I really want to spend my evenings running the laundry! And sure, I really want the Salt River Project telling me what I can do and when!). Nor do I average out my bills over the year: that would leave me with unaffordable bills all year round instead of just three or four months a year. The result is that during the winter, the power bills in this house are very low. I don’t mind being a little chilly for a few hours a day. Once the sun hits the roof, the house warms right up, even in the middle of January. There’s no reason to heat the entire building when a space heater will make the room where I spend most of my time plenty comfortable. Same is true with the water bills: in winter, the vegetation uses a quarter of the amount of water needed to keep it alive during the summer. As a result, water bills are correspondingly low. This leaves lots more money to spend on my indulgences during the cooler months.

Or to set aside in savings. 😉

$$ Hair $$

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LOL! Once, within living memory, it looked like this! Don’t even ASK what it costs to maintain this style…

So before choir starts, along about the end of August, I’ve got to get the hair trimmed. My long-time stylist, the ineffable and much-beloved Shane, charges $80 for the privilege. And that is marvelously incompatible with the present Anchorite Budget.

Turns out there are several beauty schools in town where you can get your hair coifed for a very modest price. Appears to be in the range of $10 or so. One of them is right up the street, amazingly enough!

About $260 is left to live on until the end of the month — and we’re only at the 13th of said month. Just about every regular bill is paid, including the exorbitant power and water bills. Today I’ll pick up about $20 worth of items from Costco, but those also are, in effect, already “paid for”: their cost will be covered by the $80 remaining on the CC cash card I bought two weeks ago, leaving a $60 remainder on that card.

Gasoline is similarly already “paid for” with a dedicated Costco cash card. I’ve only used about half a tank of gasoline so far — which I paid for with a credit card before the “cash card envelope” scheme came to mind, so there’s a good chance I’ll only use about $30 of the $60 I put on the Costco gasoline card. In fact that’s just another Costco cash card, so in a pinch some of the “gas” budget could be used on food or other necessaries from Costco. But truth to tell, I don’t see that happening.

In theory, I probably could afford to pay Shane eighty bucks to trim the magnificent locks. But that presumes no emergency or extraordinary costs arise between now and the end of the month.

Drive out to Scottsdale and spend an hour socializing with Shane, and you know what’ll happen?

• The car’s battery will die. Oh, heck, no: it’ll probably explode.
• The toilet will plug intractably.
• All five electric fans in the house will quit running at once.
• The dog will eat a dead bird and develop ptomaine poisoning.
• Gerardo will figure out where the leak is in the irrigation system and rack up a $350 bill to fix it.
• The microwave will short out and fill the house with smoke.
• The dishwasher will grind to a halt and flood the kitchen with hot soapy water.

All of those will happen. Trust me: I know. And peals of divine and angelic laughter will be heard echoing down from someplace behind the Pearly Gates.

God and Her Angels have a twisted sense of humor.

The last time my hair was this long — about halfway down to my waist — I was much younger and could trim it myself. In those days, we had mirrors that would allow me to see the backside of my bod’, which made it possible to manipulate hair and scissors by myself. And I could reach the backside of the bod’. That is not so much the case in my dotage.

Used to cut it in three or four layers, progressively longer from the inside to the outer, surface layer. This would make it tend to curve under, in a kind of natural page-boy. But it was shorter then. At its present length, layering it would be redundant. Besides, I wear it up most of the time. At this point, all I really want is to get the split ends trimmed off, so as to make it easier to comb.

I’ve never had my hair done at one of those beauty schools, mostly because I don’t trust some budding stylist not to screw it up. Professionals have screwed it up so many times, why would I trust a kid? And of course, because I’ve had Shane. For many, many years. But at this point the hair is so long that even if she cut off two inches in the course of dorking it up, I could run back to Shane and have him fix it.

In that case, I’d have to pay $90 instead of $80 for the privilege of getting rid of the split ends. And he’d probably cut off an ear, too… 😉

It’s just not that hard to do a blunt cut.

But then….a lot of things are not that hard. And look what happens with them…

Long hair on an elderly woman is an eccentric luxury. Most older women wear their hair short: first, because that is what is expected; second (I imagine), because it’s easier to dye or bleach “blonde”; and third, because they (incorrectly) imagine it’s easier to care for.

• I never do what is expected. My philosophy of life is keep ’em confused!

• I do not apply any chemicals other than shampoo and conditioner (and water) to my hair.

• And long hair is ridiculously easy to deal with. Very short hair is also easy to care for, except that it has to be trimmed every six or eight weeks, which amounts to a gigantic and expensive PITA.

My mother hated her hair. She used to permanent it and dye it and even sometimes cover it with wigs. Turns out that was amazingly…weird.

When she was dying  (as in “RIP,” not as in “don’t it make my gray hair brown?”) — a process that took some long, grim months — she was in so much pain she couldn’t sit up long enough to have her hair cut. She certainly couldn’t ride in the car to the salon, and she couldn’t have sat in a chair long enough, either, even if my father had thought of hiring a stylist to come to the house to cut it. Which of course he did not. So over that time, her hair grew out to about shoulder length.

And in the nursing home where we finally had to take her when my father could no longer cope, the staffers would occasionally coo to me, “Oh, her hair is so beautiful!” They marveled at its wavy heft.

As it develops, once it grew out her hair was almost exactly like mine, except for the color. She had thick, naturally wavy hair.

It was a dull mousey color by this time — she was 64. Starting some years before, it had gone to mostly gray, no doubt because of her excessive smoking. And heredity, I imagine. Her mother was blonde until she got scarlet fever in her twenties, which caused all her hair to fall out; it grew back in very dark. Her grandmother and aunt were natural platinum blondes whose hair went straight to white without pausing at gray. I always believed she damaged it with the hair dye and especially with the harsh permanent solutions. It was pretty frizzy until it grew out…and turned into a faded version of mine.

Like my father, in my old age I’m only just beginning to go gray. My father, who was largely Native American, had black hair. Well. He called it “brown” by way of passing for white, but you and I would call it “black. ” It stayed dark until he was 80 years old. In his late 70s his hair was just slightly graying at the temples. After he had his heart attack, at the age of 80, he did get a lot more gray. But…at 80, I don’t suppose you’d need a heart attack to achieve gray hair.

My hair is chestnut brown with red and blonde highlights — still, after all these years! Now it has a few silver highlights, too.

So if those women thought my mother’s faded mouse-brown hair was “beautiful,” mine must be pretty awesome, eh? 😀

Now here’s my idea of DIY hair styling:

The Miracle of the Costco Budget

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Yes, mirabilis! A miracle took place at Costco this morning, when I went over to the store on the fringe of Richistan to buy a $300 cash card with which to buy this month’s collection of goods, as per my latest budget scheme. As you’ll recall: the idea is to get a cash card that probably will cover a month’s worth of needed purchases and then STOP SHOPPING THERE if and when the cash runs out.

Because I had to buy a 50-pound bucket of chlorine pool tablets, I figured this trip would consume the proposed three hundred buckolas, and then some.

But…here’s the miracle: I actually overestimated what this month’s Costco shop would cost. I figured it would run about $230. Actually, knowing the way Life goes, I expected it to go higher than that. In fact, it was $220 — including a year’s worth of chlorine for the pool.

Item after item cost less than expected, starting with the chlorine itself: $80, not $90. The bathroom towels needed to replace the frayed, shredding set I have: less than $20, not $30. Pork loin: $12, not $18. I figured the total would come to around $228; it was actually $208. Well. Plus $11.52 in tax.

That was with the $80 bucket of chlorine plus the 8.6% tax on the stuff!

Without that once-a-year pool chemical purchase, a similar shop would have cost about $135, well under two hundred bucks.

This morning I bought a $300 card for in-store purchases and a $60 card for gasoline. Since I recently bought gas, at most I’ll spend only $30 of that $60…but possibly not even that. Last month the car ran for a full 30 days without a refill.

So. I may be able to get by with a $200/month Costco budget, and maybe even a $30 to $40 budget for gasoline.

Reaching the La-La-Land budget goal of $1375/month is out of the question. Costs on the house plus doctor bills, vet bills, dentist bills, car mechanic bills, and whatnot push average monthly spending to $1750 a month. But even if that’s the case, in theory by sequestering Social Security and staying within that $1750 monthly goal, some 10 grand would be left to rebuild the now vacant Emergency Savings fund. Keeping Costco spending under $200 a month and not buying a lot of groceries elsewhere should go a long way toward making that possible.

I hope.

Cash Card as Budget “Envelope”

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Okay, so tomorrow is the first of July, which we hereby call the first day of a new budget cycle…even though, infuriatingly, credit-card billing cycles do not coincide with the first or last of a month. Couple of weeks ago, I came up with the idea of using Costco cash cards as metaphorical budget “envelopes” to help get a grip on my spending in those Elysian realms. And just a day ago, I also had the bright idea of using my credit-union checking and savings accounts as another type of “envelope” in which to organize the annual required minimum distribution (RMD) from the 401 K and the monthly Social Security income into categories:

  • cash-flow money,
  • emergency savings, and
  • set-asides for the upcoming year’s tax and insurance bills.

Hm. Sounds plausible, doesn’t it? But…how will that work, in practice?

The RMD came in last week: a couple months early since I’m running out of cash. Forthwith, I transferred the tax-and-insurance set-aside — 8400 freaking bucks! — to savings, and I set up the checking account to automatically transfer Social Security deposits to another savings account, where the money (barring any immediate catastrophes) will accumulate to create an emergency fund.

This leaves a rather limited amount to live on over the next year: a little less than $1400 a month, about $365 less than average monthly 2018 spending.

That is going to represent a significant cut in spending. How to pull it off?

Come to me, come to meeee….

Well, the big challenge (IMHO) is Costco, lovingly known as Impulse Buy Hell. Even when I go in there with a list, I still come out with a bunch of junk (no, valuables!) I had no intention of buying. Consequently, a $300 tab is not unusual, and a cash-register bill in excess of $200 is pretty routine. To get a grip on this predicament, I had the idea of purchasing a cash card on the first of the month and using it to buy as much as it will bear, and then when it runs out…well…STOP buying at Costco for the rest of that month.

Two cash cards, actually: one for in-store shopping, and another, to the tune of about $60, for gasoline and propane.

But…how much to budget for Costco in-store spending?

Since I buy most of my groceries, all of my household goods, and much of my personal-care products at CC, $200 is probably not enough. On the other hand, presenting myself with a prepaid card for $300 may do nothing to resolve the diddle-it-all-away issue.

While studying this conundrum, I remembered the box into which I toss Costco receipts. Costco will take anything back and fork over a full refund. Often they’ll do so without a receipt (because, like Big Brother Himself, they have a detailed record of everything you’ve ever bought, and when), but it expedites things to have the receipt. Wouldn’t a fistful of these paper scraps contain a record of how much my various regular purchases cost? And with that in hand, wouldn’t I be able to calculate what any given shopping list of Costco items would cost?

Well… Yes. And yes! Rummage through a few months’ worth of yellowing receipts, and here’s what you come up with:Yea, verily…  😀

Now we have a clue to some of the things I buy all the time, some things I rarely buy, and a couple things I’ll never buy again (bear spray?). Some of these prices you can find at Costco’s website, but of course they don’t list produce prices (because they can’t, in any sane way, without updating pages about every day).

With this in my computer, now I can know about how much a given shopping list is going to cost! Woo-hoo!!

POWER!

So. On Monday, when I intend to make a run on the Costco in outer Richistan, where they carry the fancy products I crave (you can’t get pomegranate juice at the Inner City Costco down the street, for example), I will have a clue:

Tax is about 10% here. Not everything on the list is taxed at that rate; food is a little lower, but things are considered “food” in highly erratic ways. So it’s safest to assume all purchases will be taxed at 10% and then be pleasantly surprised.

I’m going to have to buy chlorine tablets for the pool, now that the water is getting tropically warm. Until recently the granulated stuff from Leslie’s was working fine (though it, too, is spectacularly expensive). But with summer definitively here, I need the tablets’ stabilizer to keep levels steady under the merry ultraviolet sunlight. At Costco, ninety bucks (plus 10% tax…) will buy you 40 pounds of the stuff. Leslie’s will sell you 35 pounds — some 12 percent less — for the same price, unless you want to fart around with finding a coupon and making an extra trip to an extra store to apply it.

My feeling about that: Hey, guys. If you think $72 (about what you can bring it down to) is a fair price for your product, then that’s the fair price, and I shouldn’t have to be jacked around with stupid coupon bullsh!t.

Truly. I do hate coupons. As I hate “membership” cards at grocery stores. Just charge everyone a fair price and quit the crap.

Where were we? Fifty pounds of chlorine tablets last exactly one year. (Hence, you could argue, if I’d had any sense I would have bought a bucket of the things when I ran out last winter, instead of stupidly waiting till the middle of the summer when the power bill is hovering in the stratosphere….) Thirty-five pounds will last less than a year, plus I’ll have to put up with marketing bullshit or let Leslie’s rip me off on the cost by about 12 percent. Conclusion: Buy the damn things at Costco.

That purchase will push this month’s bill to something around $290.

While the chlorine tablets are an “extraordinary” buy in the sense that the purchase will not appear on any other bill over the next 12 months, note that this month I’m not buying either beef (about $45 for a package) or fish (around $20 to $30, typically). Or shellfish (neither shrimp nor the beloved scallops). So in other months when I would not buy chlorine but would have to buy meat, that cost would keep the total right about where it is for this month.

That suggests that I should budget around $300 for in-store Costco purchases. At the end of a month, I reload the cash card to top it back up at $300 for the following month. So if, say, this month I really do spend only(!) $290 on food and household products, $10 should be left on the card come August 1. So next month I will only have to put $290 on the card.

Now, what about gasoline?

A glance at last month’s Visa bill shows that I spent only $30 on gasoline over the past month.

Freaking astonishing! Especially since if you’d asked me I’d’ve said I spend upwards of $60 a month on gas.

The car’s computer claims it can run another 51 miles, enough to get out to the coveted Paradise Valley Costco. As a practical matter, though, I think I will buy these cards and fill up with gas tomorrow at the Inner City Costco, which is closer to my house and whose gas prices are usually lower. Then I’ll drive to the store in PV or up in Whiteyville, where I can get the upscale products I crave and walk across the parking lot in reasonable safety.

Why did I spend so little on gas last month? Several reasons:

  • Choir season is over, so that eliminates two round trips to the church per week.
  • I stopped driving halfway to Blythe to attend monthly meetings of my favorite writer’s group.
  • And I quit attending the weekly Scottsdale Business Association meetings when they started convening at a Denny’s on the border of the Pima Reservation, halfway to freaking Tucson.
  • And I haven’t had to drive out to the Mayo this month — halfway to freaking Payson.

One or two doctor’s appointments will cause the car to soak up a fair amount more than thirty bucks worth of gas. Same would happen if I chose to drive to My Sister’s Closet or Nordstrom’s Rack in Scottsdale to shop for clothes — unlikely, but both those establishments display the best of their products in Inner Richistan. There’s hardly any point in going to either of those stores at their uptown Phoenix locations.

So I’m thinking it would be best to put $60 on the gas card. And the same will apply: if I don’t spend that much, it won’t take as many dollars the following month to top it back up.

Setting a rule that I have to quit buying when one of these cards runs out will at least stop me from spending more than $360 a month at Costco. I may just run over to Safeway to buy whatever the CC budget cannot sustain. But…maybe not. If a purchase isn’t urgent, I may just defer it to the following month.

And since the bulk of my buying occurs at Costco, that should help to keep 2018/19 spending under control.