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Food Futures! Three-month stash grubstaked

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The plan to store and keep on hand three months’ worth of foodgot fully under way with a day-long voyage to every food and junk emporium within driving distance.

A week ago, M’hijito and I picked up the freezer at Costco, and he helped get it out of the vehicle and into its place of honor. Yah, I know: would’ve been cheaper to buy it off Craig’s List. But that would have a) entailed traipsing 30 or 40 miles across the Valley and b) left me with an unknown quantity. For a reasonable price—two hundred bucks—I got a brand-new unit with a warranty from a retailer that will take practically anything back.

Next steps were to estimate about about how much I would need to create a three-month stash of food and necessities, and then to reconnoiter to see how much was already on hand. I created an Excel list of all the storable supplies I could think of and estimated (sometimes wildly) how much would be needed for one month and how much for three months—the one-month guesses because there’s no way I can afford to buy all of three months’ supplies of everything I use from day to day. Here’s a PDF of the result.

A check of the refrigerator’s freezer revealed a surprising amount of meat—over a month’s worth. Of late I seem to be eating less and less meat, partly because in the absence of a gas grill it’s more trouble to cook than it’s worth. My stash was heavy on pieces of steak and light on fish and chicken, so I decided to pick up some of those at Costco, where both are already packaged for freezing.

Based on how much I already had in the house, I made a shopping list in Word showing how much of each item was needed to supply one month’s needs and how much for three months. Some items were likely to be found at more than one vendor: some things Safeway carries, for example, might be cheaper at Target or Food City. And some items that I would like to buy in lifetime supplies don’t appear at Costco: demerara sugar (shown on my list as “crunchy sugar”) is one such. In those cases, I listed the possible sources in separate columns. Then I had Word sort the table first by Vendor 1 and then by Vendor 2. This grouped all the things I needed to purchase by the stores where I thought I could find the stuff.

And then it was off to the high seas of commerce! M’hijito, having nothing much better to do with his time and needing to go to Costco anyway, joined the expedition as sherpa-in-chief. Thanks goodness! I don’t know how I would have hauled all the junk myself, or even stuck with the plan: it was 2:30 in the afternoon before I got home, and I’d left around 9:30 in the morning.

Surprisingly, this enterprise cost nothing like what I expected. I’d planned to spend about $500 for the initial grubstaking of the project. But the grand total of charges from Costco, Safeway, Sprouts, and Target came to $375.36, only $75 more than my usual weekly budget. I still have to buy gas, which will cost about $25—but that’s still only about $100 more than I normally spend every week trotting around to supermarkets and big boxes. For that amount, I got a full month’s supply of food, and then some.

But the truth is, the food alone cost significantly less: about $322. As part of the junket, I bought a number of nonfood items: storage jars, baskets to organize goods in the freezer, antibiotic ointment, trash bags, sponges, seeds for the garden. Three hundred and twenty-two bucks is not bad, for putting in up to three months’ of food.

Now we’ll see if this works! Can she stay out of grocery stores?

jul8yarnell1It would be ideal if I could cut trips to grocery and box stores to no more than two a month, after a first-of-the-month stocking-up foray. Because I have some produce growing in the garden—chard, lettuce, carrots, beets, onions, herbs—this just might work. It would be like living in Yarnell, my sun-parched brain’s idea of Bali Hai: clinging to the edge of the Mogollon Rim, you couldn’t very well drive 60 or 80 miles one-way to buy a few convenience items, and so you’d learn to make do between monthly expeditions.

In addition to the obvious savings from simply staying out of stores and having to plan each shopping list carefully, I believe that storing up a cache of food and household supplies, which undoubtedly will grow as the months pass, will create a hedge against the inflation we can expect to come down on us with a vengeance. Whether that happens or not, at the very least it will be a safety net in case of a layoff, or against the time when I retire and see my income drop by about 60 percent. Any way you look at it, this appears to be a good idea.

The grocery pool

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The pooling scheme I came up with for budgeting has worked exceptionally well. In short, all inflowing cash goes into a single checking account at the credit union. From there, the amount needed to cover recurring monthly expenditures, such as utility and insurance bills, goes into an account from which EFTs are drawn, automatically paying my various creditors. Another amount, currently budgeted at $1,200, goes to a money market checking account, where it is held to pay the monthly American Express bill; I charge all expenditures other than regular bills on this card and pay it off at the end of each billing cycle. Three hundred dollars goes from the “pool” into an escrow account each month, to pay annual property tax, car insurance, and homeowner’s insurance. And finally, $400 a month (soon to drop to around $100, thanks to the furloughs) is transferred to savings.

The upshot of this is that there is always enough to pay the bills. And then some: because the de facto pay cut created by the switch to bimonthly pay forced me to live on $220 a month less than I used to have, the two so-called “extra” checks this system presses on us go unspent. Over the course of a year, the equivalent of two net paychecks has ended up in savings.

Here’s where I’m going with this: Why couldn’t you do something similar with grocery and household supplies?

Suppose you took a chunk of savings, as I did when I originally bankrolled the “pool” account, and used it to buy a full month’s worth of groceries and cleaning supplies. Wouldn’t that have the same effect as “pooling” your income? Over time, it would create a fair amount of savings. Here’s how:
1. Given that the original month’s grocery stash would include a lot of staples (things like flour, salt, sugar), you probably wouldn’t use it all during a month. So, if you repeated your first stash run at the beginning of the second month, by the start of the third month you would always be way ahead of yourself. In other words, after the first two months, instead of buying a whole month’s worth of goods at a time, all you’d be doing is restocking, and you would never drop below a month of supplies in your stash. Over time, you likely would find yourself having to restock less and less.
2. Because you rarely would be in any hurry to restock—this assumes you keep an eye on what you have and become aware that you will need x or y before you run out—you could wait to make purchases until you found the items on sale or until you had time to drive across the city to retailers with better prices than those available at closer-in stores.
3. Three weeks of every four, you would stay out of grocery stores! We’ve already seen that simply not going into stores saves a surprising amount of cash.
4. It would force you to plan and to write lists; once you arrived at a store, you would be very focused on acquiring only the things you needed, and so you would be less tempted to make impulse buys. As commenter Anne reported, research by the supermarket industry has shown that a list is one of your most powerful money-saving tools at the grocery store.
5. Think of the amount of time it would save! I dunno about you, but I spend half of Saturday or Sunday driving around to grocery stores, searching for products, and standing in line at check-out counters. That doesn’t count the time spent stopping by a store on the way home to pick up things I’ve run low on or forgotten during the weekend expeditions. Shopping is far from my favorite pastime. Imagine having your entire weekend free to do what you want to do!

I’m going to try it.

Here’s my plan:

First, use some of the savings I’ve stashed over the past few months to buy a freezer ($200 at Costco).

Next, clean off some shelves in the storage room and in the garage to make space for dry goods, cleaning supplies, and personal items (such as shampoo, contact lens solutions, soap).

Third, compile a well thought out list of all the stuff I need over the course of a month.

Fourth, buy some airtight containers for grain products, such as flour, cornmeal, and oatmeal (or make room in the freezer for them).

Fifth, buy some wire baskets to organize goods in the freezer.

Sixth, reallocate the AMEX budget, which currently is divided into four equal “chunks” allowing about $300 a week for food, gasoline, household and yard goods, pool supplies, pet costs, and incidental expenses. Front-load the budget to allow about $500 in the first week (this will cover gasoline and a few other items in addition to a month’s worth of groceries), and cut the amount available in the other three weeks.

Seventh, download or clip coupons to assist in getting better buys.

Eighth, on February 21, which is the first day of the billing cycle (the food & incidental budget runs on the AMEX billing cycle, not from the first to the last of each month), spend the entire darned day running around buying enough to stock the first one-month stash. Package and store things so they will keep and can be accessed from the oldest stuff to the newest.

Ninth, keep a running list of items that need to be replenished. Try to refrain from buying these things until the next shopping expedition.

Tenth, on March 21, make a second run on the stores. In addition to replenishing things that have run low, purchase a second full month’s worth of stash goods. This will enlarge the stash so that at any given time it should contain well over a month of food and household goods.

Freaking brilliant, isn’t it? Sometimes I amaze me.

It has several golden advantages.

1. Over the long run, it should save a lot of money on groceries.

2. It forms a kind of “emergency fund,” in kind instead of in cash. Should I lose my job (a prospect that looks less unlikely as the days pass), I’ll have enough food in the house to last for several weeks. During that time, I should be able to earn enough to get a grip on making ends meet. Not having to buy groceries for a month will make that challenge a lot easier.

3. It saves a phenomenal amount of time and, three weeks out of each month, relieves me of a tedious chore.

4.Over time, the stash may accrue, just as money in the “pool” checking account accrues. In a year or so (assuming I keep my job and so can continue the monthly purchasing), this strategy could result in my having a lot of food, household supplies, and personal goods stored in the house. Effectively, it will grubstake retirement. When I do retire and see my income drop drastically, I will not have to worry about where my next meal will come from.

Got a freezer? Now’s the time to stock up

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beansIt looks like this is the time to hoard up some food, if you havesomeplace to store it anda few extra bucks. CBS MarketWatch reports that deflationary pressures have pushed prices about as low as they’re likely to go. Everything from soup & nuts to automobiles is marked down.

Earlier this week I found some very nice seven-bone chuck roasts at the Safeway: $1.47 a pound, a buck less than hamburger. I bought two and had them ground into burger (I’m not nuts about stewed beef; and I can feed hamburger to the dog as well as to myself).

If you have some money or some credit, now is the time to buy a car or a house. I sure can’t afford that and don’t know anyone who can…but somewhere there must be a retired banker or two who could manage it.

Seriously: As the piper comes around asking to be paid for all the rescues the taxpayer is subsidizing and for all the money the government is minting to engineer those subsidies, we’re likely to see some serious inflation. If prices go up and none of us can get work, we’re all going to be in deep trouble. Helle’s Belles: if prices go way up—or, to put it another way, if the value of the dollar goes bust—it won’t make much difference if we are working, because our wages won’t buy us a heck of a lot more than unemployment benefits will.

This weekend I think I’ll see if I can find a small freezer that will go through the door to the spare bedroom I’ve devoted to storage. It wouldn’t take a lot of extra freezer space to hold at least a couple months of food for me and the Corgi. Then as food comes on sale, I’m going to start buying, wrapping, and storing.

It looks like I’m going to need a new washer one of these days—have you seen the prices on the frontloaders at Costco? They even have one of those top-loading high-efficiency washers with no agitator at an almost affordable price (good-bye wadded up sheets and ripped shirts!).

The problem with buying a big-ticket item before one really needs it is that in these uncertain times it feels like a real bad idea to part with whatever cash you’ve managed to sock away in savings. And you can be darned sure racking up debt to take advantage of rock-bottom prices is a bad idea. But…if things get as bad as they could get, a freezer would pay for itself. So would some “futures” in rice, beans, and canned goods.

Do no-buy days work?

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For a while, I’ve suspected that “no-buy days”—days in which you deliberately stay away from merchandisers of all kinds—would cause you to spend less on those days but create a pent-up demand that would predispose you to more spending and stimulate impulse buys on the days you allowed yourself into the stores.

In the wee hours of this morning, as I was wondering how I could get around what is now a migrating closing date on my American Express account, it occurred to me that instead of “no buy” days, you could establish set “buy” days during a given billing cycle, and otherwise letevery day be a no-buy day. In other words, you would not set foot in a retail establishment or click on a Web store’s site except on specific days set aside to make purchases. This thought drove me to Quicken as dawn was cracking.

There I discovered that over the past year I’ve tended somewhat in that direction: more and more no-buy days and fewer and fewer days in which I do purchase things. In January 2008, for example, I made 16 trips to various food purveyors, dropping an astonishing $734.33 on groceries. In January 2009, I made 10 trips and spent $333.99 on groceries.

Evidently, fewer trips to grocery stores mean less cash spent on groceries.

Now, in January 2008, my German shepherd was still living. She ate a lot of food, and that may account for some of the whopping bill. But what really accounts for it is that I was in the habit of stopping by Trader Joe’s or AJ’s (a local “gourmet” market) on the way home from work, where I would regularly buy a snack and beer or wine. I’ve almost stopped doing that. To the extent that I buy beer or wine—which I’ve also almost stopped doing—I buy it at Costco, where Corona is to be had at a significant markdown over the grocery-store price. And I’ve been sick for the past month and haven’t felt like eating…that could have to do with the drop in spending.

The December grocery bill was a hundred bucks more than January’s, but then I did throw an expensive Christmas dinner party.

The truth is, it looks like staying out of grocery stores cuts one’s bills significantly. With a little tinkering—establish specific days for shopping, build a week or ten days’ worth of menus beforehand and attack the store with a carefully crafted shopping list, and shop more at Target or even (ugh!) Walmart—it ought to be possible to reduce the grocery bill to a sane level. Three hundred and thirty bucks for one old lady and one small dog is not sane.

The trouble with grocery shopping at Target is that Target is a dangerous place. The last time I saved a bunch of money on grocery items, I spent $150 on sheets and bedding that I really didn’t need. I also spotted a $250 bicycle of the type I covet, available at other purveyors for $400 to $700. Ditto Walmart: they have the minivacuum cleaner I want, the one with the electric cord. Every other store carries only the cordless variety, which won’t run long enough to vacuum an entire houseful of tiled floors. All the big box stores—Costco, Target, Home Depot, and Walmart—pose the same threat. You go in to buy necessities, but they offer so much other tempting junk that it’s very, very difficult to get out with your wallet intact.

But I will say: last year at this time I was spending way too much at Trader Joe’s and AJ’s, emporiums that sell almost nothing but groceries and household items.

Here, apparently, is the key to surviving on a reduced income: plan, plan, plan! Plan specific shopping days and gasoline-purchase days. Plan purchases carefully, using lists and resisting unplanned buys. Defer impulse buys until the next scheduled shopping day, to give yourself time to think it over. And plan to make every day a no-buy day except for the scheduled shopping days.

Flummoxed!

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bikeFor quite a long time, I’ve wanted to buy a three-speed or ten-speed bicycle. I have a coaster, but it’s no use for what I want to do: take long rides along the canal. Salt River Project has built a long, narrow park along the Arizona canal, with underpasses running under the main drags so people can go for mile after mile after mile safely. I live within walking distance of this convenient source of exercise and sightseeing entertainment. While I really do need the exercise, hauling my heavy coaster up from the bottom of those underpasses is not quite what I have in mind. I have to get off my bike and walk it out of the underground tunnels, a major pain in the tuchus. I love bicycling, though, and have thought that if I had a bike with gears, I could use it every day or two to get out of the house and also get some good exercise.

Wrong.

Yesterday I paid a visit to the bicycle store that, in years past, has sold me other bikes. Prices for multispeed bicycles range from $450 to $700!!! An ordinary cruiser with no gears and pedal brakes costs $350. Three-speed bikes cost more than 24-speed numbers. I don’t want 24 speeds—I’d never be able to figure out how to operate such an array.

I looked on Craig’s List and found the prices comparable for anything that appeared to be in decent condition. The rate of bicycle theft around here is phenomenal—at one point, a ring used to go onto college campuses in trucks and take bolt-cutters to the locks and just load the things up. So I’m kind of afraid to buy one second-hand, for fear of getting stolen property. Besides, the newer bikes are so involved and complicated, I would have no way of knowing what I was getting or if anything was wrong with it.

How disappointing. I guess I won’t be losing any weight that way. {sigh} It was probably a bad idea, anyway. What on earth would I do if I blew a tire ten miles from home? I wouldn’t have a clue how to fix it, and I sure don’t want to have to push a bike eight or ten miles.
🙁

Trade Made: Discount scored

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sanitasYesterday afternoon I took the Sanitas back to the Shoe Mill in lovely downtown Tempe (for those of you who haven’t been following along, these pain-free shoes are made by the original makers of the formerly glorious Danskos, which are now manufactured in China thanks to a corporate change of hands). This put $129.72 back on the AMEX card. Then I ordered an identical pair from Footprints.com for a total of $79.95.

Tax on the local purchase was $9.72. Shipping for the online purchase was $10. So even though the tax was on a larger amount, I see that as kind of a wash.

My savings on this transaction: fifty bucks.

One thing I’ve discovered over the years is that you can return most things to most stores. If you find a better deal somewhere else before you’ve put any wear on an item, take the thing back to the higher-charging merchant and buy it where you can save some cash. Ditto if you realize you don’t need something after you’ve made an impulse buy. Obviously, you shouldn’t abuse this—buying a dress or a jacket to wear to a wedding and then returning it to the vendor is exploitive and dishonest. But if you haven’t used it at all, there’s no reason not to return it.