Coffee heat rising

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.

Place-holder: More food!

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Long day. Lots of scheming while shopping, wherefrom hangs a new story, which I’ll tell tomorrow. For the nonce: three sheets to the wind, having consumed all of 1.5 bourbons & water. Do your drinking while you’re young, ye pups…’cause when you get to be an Old Bat or Buzzard, your boozing days will be over. 😉

The bourbon and the water were guzzled while the guzzler was a-waiting for this dinner to percolate to fruition:

Lemon Chicken

You need (approximately):

dcp_2353-Some pieces of chicken of the sort you most enjoy
-One or two lemons, sliced
-Fresh thyme (several sprigs, leaves removed and lightly chopped) or about 1/4 tsp. dried; or combination thereof
-1/2 onion, chopped
-One or two cloves garlic
-Chicken broth, white wine, or combination thereof (enough to come about 1/2 way up the chicken pieces, once they’re ensconced in a frying pan)
-More chicken broth, more white wine, a slug of Marsala or sherry, or even (gasp!) water
-About a tablespoon of flour
-Some chopped parsley, fresh or dried
-A little olive oil
-Salt & pepper to taste
-A decent frying pan
-A plate
-A mug or measuring cup

Skim the bottom of said frying pan with some olive oil. Cook the chopped onion gently in the olive oil until the onion is tender, translucent, and starting to brown a bit. When the onion is cooked, remove it from the oil and set it aside on a plate.

Now brown the chicken in the onion-flavored oil. No hurry—you can accomplish this over medium or medium-low heat without splattering the stove and countertop with grease. Season the chicken with salt and pepper, as desired.

When the chicken looks pleasingly browned, add the garlic and thyme. Return the onion to the pan and nestle it around the chicken pieces. Pour the liquid of your choice (broth, wine, water…whatEVER) into the pan, so that it comes about 1/2-way up the sides of the chicken pieces. Place a lemon slice on top of each piece of chicken. Drop any remaining slices into the broth. Cover. Simmer. Go away for about 20 minutes (white meat) or 30 minutes (dark meat).

dcp_2355

Shortly before the meat is done, cook some noodles or rice (well…if you’re cooking rice, you ‘d best set it to simmer about the same time as you leave the chicken to finish cooking, since rice will take some 25 minutes).

Remove the lemon slices from the chicken and the chicken broth. Discard. Lift the chicken out of the broth.

In a container such as a coffee mug, combine the flour with chicken broth or wine and a little water. Whap together well, using a fork, to eliminate any lumps.

Turn the heat up under the chicken broth. Pour in the flour & liquid; mix together briskly, and allow to bubble away at a fast simmer for several minutes, until gravy thickens. Add parsley to give a little color and zing.

Serve the chicken and incredible gravy over pasta or rice.

B-a-a-a-d Human Greens

Here’s how you take something nutritious and use it to destroy your body. Pick some greens out of your garden, or scrounge some from the grocery store. (I used beet greens; spinach would do well, as will chard or collard greens.)

Bring the water for pasta to a boil. Place the washed greens in the colander in which you intend to drain the pasta. When the pasta water comes to a rolling boil, set the colander with the greens into the hot water. Allow to cook until the leaves turn bright green. If you’re using tougher greens such as collards, you may want to let them cook until pretty well softened.

dcp_23581

Melt a fine slug of butter in a small frying pan. With tongs, lift the colander out of the kettle and put it in the sink. Run some cold water over the greens to stop the cooking. Drain well. Put the drained, blanched greens into the melted butter in the pan. Cover and allow to braise while you’re finishing with the rest of the food. If desired, sprinkle a little nutmeg over the greens before serving.

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.

Creepy, creepy night

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Three in the morning, how I hate it.

Woke up an hour ago. Night noises. The house creaks, snaps, pops, and crackles all night long, especially when temperatures drop sharply at night. The beams in the attic make bright snapping sounds, and the ductwork grumbles to itself. I’ve lived in houses that made settling sounds, of course. But this one takes the cake in that department. You’d think after 38 years the place would have done all the settling it’s going to do.

Then up pops a real unusual sound: like someone rapping on the door. Three distinct taps: knock knock knock. The dog heard it. Her head shot up, ears erect. She didn’t bark, though; and she is a barker. I figured if anybody tried seriously to get in, she’d fly into one of her yapfests.

Further noises were ambiguous: could’ve been settling sounds. The dog perked up to listen a couple of other times but still kept quiet. By now I was wide awake and listening for every freaking creak, groan, and whisper.

Twenty minutes, half an hour later, along comes the cop helicopter.

He buzzed the alley and yards on this end of the street for about 15 minutes. So, evidently someone else thought somebody was out there.

Charming.

The back door has a single-cylinder deadbolt and a doorknob lock—both highly vulnerable because the door has French-door style lights, pretty easy to knock in. I refuse to have a double-cylinder deadbolt on a kitchen door; it’s unsafe. The door is alarmed, so if anyone breaks in while I’m here, he’ll wake me and the dog and give himself a healthy shot of adrenalin.

The damned sliding doors are old, tired, and broken. Though they also are all alarmed, one of them doesn’t latch at all; another latches but doesn’t lock. They’re “secured” (such as it is) with sticks in the runners.

And of course, the back window: oh, the lovely back window. Whatever possessed developers to install aluminum junk like that? It also is a sliding affair with a flimsy latch—nothing resembling a lock. You can drop a stick in the runner and be damned. The glass is held in place with rubber weather stripping. All you have to do is slip a little slot screwdriver under the weatherstripping, quietly pull it out, and voilà! The glass pane will lift right out. In the wee hours of one morning, SDXB found a couple guys coming in his front window, they having gained entry that way. You wonder why he moved to Sun City?

{sigh} I probably should have security doors installed in back, and get Chip at Freelite to install a new, more secure—and double-paned!—window back there. His last newsletter showed he’s carrying some fairly snazzy-looking security doors with a Prairie School look to them. I really dislike security doors: I feel the bad guys belong behind bars, not us. But if I can find something that doesn’t look like a prison door, well…

Well, indeed…don’t even ask how much such a thing costs. A somewhat nonugly security door for a single opening is amazing. For the double-sized door you’d have to get to go over an Arcadia…OMG! This house has three Arcadias plus the kitchen door. And by the time I’ve spent myself stupid on security doors, I’ll still have the cheesy old single-pane tinfoil door the developer put in and the cheap double-paned Arcadia door Satan installed, a thing for which “low-E” is not an operative term.

It would be cheaper to wait until I’m canned and just take myself out to Sun City. Ugh.

I need to get a shotgun.

How do we deserve these morons?

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Yesterday I heard our new governor, Jan Brewer, the Republican former Secretary of State who succeeded Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano, speaking on the local NPR station. Some of the things she said were breathtaking. It is hard to understand how such retrograde fools get into public office.

Well, no it’s not. One of her proud constituents called in to ask her when she was going to abolish all-day kindergarten, a blandishment Governor Napolitano fought long and hard to establish. He remarked that all-day kindergarten, which has been shown to improve children’s school performancesubstantiallyover the long run, is “nothing but day care for working mothers.”

So, I guess we get what we deserve: we raise up ignoramuses in our third-rate public schools, and we get ignoramus voters and ignoramus leaders in state and national office.

Brewer took several opportunities to repeat the local Republicans’ party line: that all of the state’s financial problems can be laid squarely on the shoulders of former Governor Napolitano. Every economic woe that afflicts us, from the collapsed real estate market to the government’s emptied coffers, are 100 percent her fault. As though no national and international economic crisis ever happened; as though the state of Arizona existsin its own little vacuumindependent of the rest of the world, its fate determined solely by an evil Democratic governor. And as though our fine Republican leadership had never heard the concept that we must work together to solve this mess (they probably haven’t: remember, these are members of the party that elected another governor who admitted to never reading anything but the Bible).

Apparently these people are totally unrepentant, and they are incapable of understanding that their bankrupt and now discredited “philosophy” (not to say “doctrine”) is what led to the collapse of the U.S economy. It would be wise to keep this in mind come the next elections. There are still people in office who have learned nothing from the present disaster.

A note to the governor, sent this morning:

Dear Governor Brewer:

I would like to let you know how offensive and small-minded your comments about your predecessor sound. This sort of back-biting and nastiness is exactly the opposite of the leadership our state needs in these difficult times. When I hear you and your colleagues speaking in this way, I can only conclude that none of you have learned a thing from the fiasco your party’s misguided thinking has caused our country. Frankly, it makes you look not too bright.

Please quit it. And let’s show a little humanity and intelligence, instead of vengeful and nasty meanness now that your party is back in power here and can get away with any damnfool thing you like.

Should I apply for unemployment?

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The Great Desert University has been approved for an unemployment insurance program called Shared Work. Basically it means that furloughed employees can collect unemployment for the unpaid furlough days we’re being forced to take off.

On the surface, it looks like a good idea. But there are some potential drawbacks.

First, unemployment eligibility has been extended to 59 weeks, which is about 14 months. That’s good. Because…this Shared Work program uses up your unemployment eligibility. Between now and June 30, we’re required to take 12 days—that’s 2 1/2 weeks. There’s no guarantee that GDU will not continue this furlough business into the next fiscal year; in fact, most of us think it will be used to engineer a permanent pay cut. If you use up your unemployment one day at a time, by the time you really need it to buy groceries, you could find yourself with little or no unemployment money left.

Many more layoffs are coming. First you get the furlough, then you get canned. It may be better to defer unemployment for the time when you really are unemployed.

Too, this looks like a huge hassle. To get regular unemployment, you can apply online. In Arizona, the Shared Work Program requires you to fill out a hard-copy form and physically file it. And since no one knows when you’re likely to quit or be laid off, it’s logical to think that you couldn’t apply for a whole chunk of projected furlough days. Likely you have to fill out and hand-deliver a form for each and every day.

The amount of weekly unemployment I would get under the best of circumstances is tiny. If and when I’m canned, I’ll need every penny I can scrounge up. If in fact you have to fill out and deliver a hard-copy form every week that you’re furloughed, it may not be worth the hassle to collect the minuscule amount I would get for one furlough day, and, since my position is nontenurable and very much at risk, it may be a bad idea to jump the gun on collecting unemployment.

Should I grab the money and run, taking a chance that I will not be laid off? Or wait and see?