One Week’s Food

I came across this photo essay on the time.com website a while back. It shows a picture of a family and the food they eat in a week, along with the price and a few of their favorite foods. You can find the link here. It’s well worth a look.

A few things surprised me when I looked at this. I actually read through it a few times.

Is this how much people typically spend on food? I’ll have to admit that for a very long time I never paid attention to the food bills. I just bought what I wanted at the grocery store, usually going without a list, and then paid at the end and never tracked what I spent. As Melissa and I chose to live fully aware of our spending, we started tracking our food bills very closely. On an average week, we live on about $75 worth of food. When the month is tight, we can pull that weekly total down to $50 (and have managed to get it down to less than $40 when we had to). Some families (granted, there is going to be some difference based on currency exchange) spent nearly $500!

The American family from North Carolina had virtually no fresh food. I see some meat up front, a few tomatoes, and some grapes. The rest of it was processed food and fast food. Their expenditure for a family of 4 was nearly $350! In the US, to eat cheaply is seems that you have to buy processed food (you know, the kind that’s always on sale and has really good coupons). In our case, our most expensive weeks are when we have the most fresh food. There are never coupons for the fresh food. One thing I did notice was that there was a lot of fast food and that isn’t cheap. Their food bill is $1400 a month!

Another thing I noticed was that in many of the photos the families had large amounts of soda. Soda is an expense that is completely unnecessary in my book and it holds zero nutritional value. I wish I could convince Melissa of this but she just won’t give up her soda.

Some of the poorest locations had the most fresh food. The people from Chad had nearly nothing. The people from Ecuador had almost exclusively fresh food. The most healthy way to eat, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, was enjoyed more by the poorest countries, and less by the wealthiest. Why is that?

The discrepancy in costs was also amazing. The people in Germany spent $500 a week on food, while the people in Chad spent $1.23! That’s an enormous difference. I know there are reasons for the differences, but it still shocked me. Honestly, if I were spending $500 a week on food, I don’t think we’d be able to afford it! That’s $2000 a month (roughly). That’s double the house payment!

I also found it fascinating to see what people in different countries eat. I had no idea that frozen pizza was so popular around the world. Or that people drank quite so much soda. Just seeing the volume differences was interesting too.

Overall I just found the photos amazing and really appreciate that Time did this photo essay. Once we move I think I might try to put together a photo of what our family eats in a week and the total amount of money spent. I think that would be pretty interesting.

Tightwad Wednesday - Fog Free Mirrors & Laundry Pretreatment

Each week, I will test out two tips from the The Complete Tightwad Gazette, and on the following Wednesday I’ll review how they went and evaluate if it is worth my time/effort/money to continue with it.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I want to apologize to everyone for getting this tightwad Wednesday up a day late. Yesterday blew by and between the blinds shopping, meeting with the foreman, and cooking for Thanksgiving, time got away from me. Better late than never, right?

Fog-Free Mirrors

Even though I’ve heard of tricks to keep mirrors fog free I’ve never actually tried them.

On p. 402 of the Tightwad:

To make any mirror fog-free, you need not purchase the expensive anti-fog products. Simply use liquid soap; spread it on glass with a cloth to cover completely, then polish dry with another cloth. This lasts for a long time.

It worked! I was reluctant to spread soap on my clean mirror but to my surprise the soap buffed off nicely and left a shiny mirror. There was no haze like I was expecting. I used cheap hand soap thinned with a little water for my experiment. I then instructed my husband to take a long shower so the mirror got nice and foggy.

Afterwards, I checked on the spot and sure enough, it was fog-free! It worked! And it is still working several showers later! I would definitely recommend this trick if you are battling with foggy mirrors as you get ready for the day.

Laundry Pretreatment

I have to admit that I’m terrible at laundry. It seems about 1/3 of Eric’s shirts have little spots on them and so far no pretreatments have worked to remove them completely. Thank goodness Eric gets a free shirt from work pretty often so we can replenish his “nice” shirt supply.

Anyways, whenever I find a recipe to fight stains I’m likely going to try it since I haven’t had much luck so far. When I saw this one in the Tightwad I added it my list.

On p. 402 of the Tightwad:

1/2 cup vinegar
1/2 cup ammonia (sudsy or plain)
1/2 cup Wisk
1/2 cup water

Spray on grease or food spots, or dirty collars and cuffs. Wash garment as usual.

Pretreatment - Before I followed the directions except I had to substitute Tide for Wisk because the store was out of it. The mix smells repellant with the ammonia but that doesn’t matter if it works, right? I’ve never used ammonia before this experiment so now I’ll have to find uses for it. Luckily, it was only a dollar.

I found a ratty shirt with a stain on it and instead of spraying it I poured it on. I didn’t want to search for a spray bottle and I was hoping more might work better. I let it sit for a while, then put it in a load of laundry.

Pretreatment - After Well, it didn’t work. In fact, the stain recipe I tried a while back worked better on getting rid of the stain but it made the colors bleed (that shirt is now lighter in places).

I don’t think this pretreatment formula really did anything to remove the stain. It seems hard to believe the trick is using Wisk specifically but I suppose it could be brand specific. Unfortunately, this one appears to be a loser.

Stay tuned for next week’s Tightwad Wednesday challenge when I will be testing out:

After Thanksgiving Soup p. 72
Low-Pay Non-Stick Spray p. 639

More Big Purchases - Window Coverings

These bad boys can get expensive!! There seem to be a lot of big purchases that have to occur when you buy a new home. Many of them are things you don’t necessarily have to worry about with an existing home. We’ve planned for pretty much everything, but it can still be overwhelming to see all that money flowing out after saving it up for over a year.

Our latest battle has been with window coverings. We’ve been shopping around for the different kinds of window blinds that are offered.

We need blinds to keep some of the heat out during the summer months. It can get pretty intolerably hot down here. We also like the blinds for the privacy they give. And they can’t have any strings for tilting or raising because our cats are mischevious. We have learned our lesson with that one.

We’ve worked with three people directly to get quotes, and we’ve done some estimating on our own from catalogs and information from local stores. The last person didn’t work out due to some family problems she has been having, so we’re really stuck with 2 quotes to choose from. We checked some other local places and did our own estimates on how much it might cost there (based on catalog prices), but were never given a formal quote. We feel a little crunched for time because it takes a while to get the blinds into the house once you get the windows measured and the blinds ordered.

With this purchase, we don’t feel we have the time to search for the absolute best deal. I think if we felt we could spend another month getting people in and comparing prices,we might be able to find an even better deal than we have now. The problem has been that nearly everyone wants to come and measure for themselves before they will give a quote. And even if we find a better deal, for a month’s worth of time it had better be a really fantastic deal to justify the waiting.

We decided today to go with the best deal we’ve been able to find so far. Although I think we might find a better price if we shop around a bit more, we’re pretty comfortable with the price, and it’s beaten the others by a significant amount of money. The place was also much more professional, and offered much faster time frames than anyone else to get the blinds in. Faster and cheaper kind of sealed the deal for us.

Now the final decision we have to make is do we pay for it up front in cash, or take advantage of their financing and 1 year no payments and no interest? I really don’t like the idea of going into debt, but I see this more like the credit card arbitrage game. We’ve become very, very disciplined with our spending over the last year and I think we can handle it. We have the cash to pay for them (we anticipated this expense and have been saving for it) but the idea of getting to earn the interest on the purchase for a full year sounds good to me, too. We would put the cash aside and invest it in CDs or money market funds to get as much interest as possible before we have to use it to pay off the purchase.

Does anyone have an opinion on the one year no payments no interest arbitrage deal? I’ve personally never done it, but it sounds like a good deal as long as you remember the date things are due and make sure that you pay it off a little before that deadline to be safe.

PS - If you came looking for Tightwad Wednesday, it’s going to be posted tomorrow. Melissa wants to do some more work on it before it’s ready to go up and she’s busy cooking and preparing for Thanksgiving tomorrow. Check back in the morning for the post!

Image Source: markhillary

So, What Did We Buy?

Elizabeth at Suburban Wife’s Daily Dollar Diary asked me to reveal what appliances we chose in my post yesterday discussing my latest purchases for the house. Thanks, Elizabeth, I think that is a good idea. Here are the appliances we decided to purchase this weekend after considerable thought and research.

Refrigerator

OK, so I wanted a Sub-Zero or a Viking but that just wasn’t gonna happen, except maybe in my dreams. Setting aside those champagne wishes we started seriously looking at the GE Profile 25.5 Cu. Ft. French Door Bottom Freezer model. I liked the layout of the fridge (especially the large deli drawer) and the fact that it had separate compressors for each section. The best price I could find was $2295 which was a little pricey for us. It included things we didn’t particularly feel was necessary like water/ice through the door. But the rest of my appliances are GE Profile so the styling and stainless would match if I got this fridge. Again, matching my other appliances was nice but far from critical.

Samsung Fridge After discovering that Samsung actually made that fridge and that the GE Profile version was only slightly different, we started looking at the Samsung models. We found a fridge with the exact same layout but without the water and ice in the door (it has an icemaker in the freezer). The Samsung 25.8 Cu. Ft. French Door Bottom Mount Freezer was $1594. We decided that the GE labeling/styling and the ice/water in the door were not worth the extra $701 dollars it would take to get them and we went with the cheaper Samsung.

I feel our frugal side triumphed in this purchase. We decided to pass on the features that would have been nice but weren’t requirements. This helped us save a lot of money while still getting a nice stainless steel fridge. The kitchen is so important to me that I’m surprised I was able to pass up the “best” for what simply fit our needs.

Washer/Dryer

Our current washer and dryer still run but we knew we needed to move to larger front-loading models. I have to wash pet beds frequently and the agitator in my current washer makes it very difficult. We wanted to make the jump to front loaders to make my large laundry loads easier.

I went into looking for these appliances with no preconceived notions of what I wanted so I started searching Consumer Reports first. From there I learned what features to look for. Based on the ratings and reviews the LG TROMM Steam washer and dryer seemed like a good set for me. I liked the idea of being able to sanitize cat beds with steam in the wash. The latest model washer runs about $1359 in blue.

I did a bit more investigation and found that the previous version of the TROMM washer was basically the same model except it had a slightly slower max spin speed and it didn’t have the trilingual LCD screen. I didn’t think those things were worth paying the extra money for so I set my sights on the previous version. Now I had to decide color.

LG TROMM Washer I must admit that the shiny red option beckoned to me. It was a sparkly candy apple red and it seemed to make laundry less boring. I was really leaning toward it, despite it costing $200 more. It took Eric to snap me out of the red daze though. Eric said the extra money it would cost to get the red wouldn’t be worth it and after a few weeks those shiny red units would still just be my washer and dryer. He then reminded me that the laundry room was closed off and I would never even see them. I had also read that the cherry color didn’t come with a porcelain top like the white did so that was that. I swallowed my irrational desire for the pretty shiny version and got the previous model in standard white for $1104.99.

As for the dryer we got the matching version in gas. We feel gas is far cheaper than electricity so we want to stick with it even though the gas model is more expensive initially. Also, every appliance we got is Energy Star qualified. That was an important factor. We wanted to make sure everything we purchased was energy efficient and was something that was built to last. Not only is that good for our wallets but it is good for the environment.

Big Purchases Need Big Research

I’ll take the white one, please This weekend Eric and I made some rather large purchases for the new home. We purchased a refrigerator and a washer and dryer. After about a week of researching and kicking tires we finally felt ready to buy.

Big purchases shouldn’t be made haphazardly. For me, there is definitely a correlation on how much money I’m about to spend and how much research I need to do to feel confident that I’m getting the right product at the right price. When thousands of dollars are involved you can bet that I’m going to try to be as knowledgeable as I can so I make the best decisions.

Here is the process I followed to help me figure out what I wanted and where to buy it:

1. Narrow the field. First, I developed a general idea of what I wanted. We currently have an old side-by-side refrigerator and it frustrates me that I can’t fit a pizza box or other large items in the freezer. It was time for a new style. After looking at fridges in person and learning about the pros and cons of the different configurations I felt a bottom freezer was a good choice for us. I liked the look and functionality of the french door/bottom freezer style best so I focused my search on that.

2. Research the brands and models. I started comparing the various brands/models online. This helped me compile and prioritize my preferences. To help me determine the top performers for my style I decided to sign up for Consumer Reports online. It costs money to subscribe, but having access to that information can be very valuable when making large durable good purchases. I was able to read the ratings and reviews and learned what to look for in a fridge of this type. Many of the models I considered hadn’t been tested by Consumer Reports yet but by reading reviews on other models I could get a feel for that brand’s overall performance. After doing plenty of research online I picked a few models that I wanted to get to know better in person.

3. Know your prices. With printouts of our favorite models in hand, we drove to the stores that carried the brands we were considering. We took careful notes of the model numbers, prices, discounts, price-match policies, and financing offers available in each store. We made sure to avoid the sales pitches and left without buying anything. We knew we needed to go home and compare the sales carefully to figure out who really had the best deal.

4. Go after the deal. After comparing the deals we decided that Best Buy came out ahead. They offered to price match the best deal we could find (including prices found up to 30 days after the sale), free delivery and installation, and 18 months no-interest financing. Most of the stores did price matching and had some sort of no-interest financing but Best Buy also had a rewards program that would give us about $85 back on the purchase. The other stores couldn’t beat that. The next day we approached the appliance supervisor, showed him the competition’s prices, and got the deal we were after. He kept saying that I “drive a hard bargain” but really I didn’t. I only made an educated purchase that gave me the best deal possible for what I wanted.

Now I’m sure you are wondering why we went back into debt by financing it instead of paying cash. I don’t like the fact that we have a balance on a store card of all things but this will allow us to continue to make interest on the money over the next 18 months. We set up automatic payments so we don’t miss any then set up notifications two months prior to the balance being due so we can pay it off in full. We have done this before and never had a problem with it. The important thing is that we didn’t use credit to buy something we couldn’t afford. We have that money already sitting in the bank so we might as well earn some interest on it as long as the rate on the card is at 0%.

Image Source: SqueakyMarmot

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