Saving — 4/27 — Beating Broke

Are You Ready for a BIG Emergency?

June 15, 2015 By MelissaB 6 Comments

Are you ready for a big emergency? Do you have the required 6 to 12 months’ emergency fund?

I can hear your groan now. Who has enough extra money to put aside 6 to 12 months in the bank? If you have expenses of $3,000 a month, an ample emergency fund of 6 to 12 months would be $18,000 to $36,000. Definitely not small change.

An emergency fund is hard to build, and that may be part of the reason why many people never even try.

Big Emergency — Original image credit: https://flic.kr/p/7KLtYi

But there will be an emergency that will occur sometime in your life. You will need that money.

Financial Death by a Thousand Nicks

We relocated to Arizona 10 months ago. Doing so drained our meager emergency fund. For a few months, we were doing pretty good and getting back on our feet until we started facing endless financial nicks—braces for our son, $2,000 in medical and dental expenses, $1,500 in car repairs, etc. The last five months have been financially very difficult.

If we would have had a 6 to 12 month emergency fund, our job now would be to rebuild the emergency fund, not do constant damage control. I think it will be a few more months until we are financially in the clear, assuming no other major expenses come up. Meanwhile, we feel extremely vulnerable financially.

The Big Emergency Worst Case Scenario

However, our current financial difficulties are nothing compared to what others face. My daughters’ therapist is living a financial nightmare. Her husband had a stroke and now has locked in syndrome, which means he has his full mental faculties, but he can’t move his body. He is no older than 40. No one would expect this to happen.

The therapist’s life now is driving to see her husband and advocate for him as well as juggling the finances of losing one income as well as the rapidly mounting medical expenses. She does work but has had to take frequent days off. Even with a Go Fund Me page that brought her nearly $50,000 in donations, I have no idea how she is handling the expenses.

Of course, this is a worst case scenario, but still, an emergency fund to liquidate in this situation would be nice.

Take Baby Steps to Reach Your Goal

Right now, my husband and I are struggling to stay out of debt. So far we’ve succeeded, but we’re right on the edge. Still, our plan is to put a small amount away in our emergency fund, say $50 a month. Something is always better than nothing.

In the next few months, we’ll amp that amount up to a couple of hundred a month and keep increasing as we are able. We won’t have a sizeable emergency fund anytime soon, but we will have some money put aside.

Too often, it’s easy to look at your finances when everything is going right and say to yourself, “We’re doing alright. I can afford to splurge.”

But that’s short-sighted thinking. Look at your finances and ask yourself how would you be financially if you had several smaller emergencies of a few hundred or thousand dollars or if the worst case scenario happened?

My advice is to wait to splurge until you have that emergency fund. Trust me, one day you’ll be glad.

Do you have a 6 to 12 month emergency fund, or do you find it too difficult to achieve?

4 Ways to Spend Less on Groceries Each Month

March 2, 2015 By MelissaB 4 Comments

Are you familiar with the USDA food plans? These plans state how much food should cost a family each month based on four categories: thrifty, low-cost, moderate and liberal. The plans are updated each month to accommodate food price increases. You determine how much your family should spend by choosing one of the four plans, and choosing the ages and members of your family.

For instance, according to the most recent USDA food plan, my family of five (2 adults and 3 kids ages 4 to 10), we should be spending approximately $176.60 a week on the thrifty plan up to $348.90 on the liberal plan. (Am I the only one saying “WOW!” to the liberal plan?)

Recently, I voluntarily decided to cut back on my freelance workload so that I could spend more time homeschooling my kids. We decided to tighten our belt and live off my husband’s income alone while banking the money I’m making.

We’ve been thrilled to spend under the USDA thrifty plan every week, usually by $40 or $50 a week, even though we cannot have gluten, dairy or corn. Here’s how we’ve been doing it:

Stock up when things are on sale. I now try to only buy fruits and veggies that are loss leaders in the weekly ads. When I see things at rock bottom prices, I stock up. Recently, oranges were on sale for 4 pounds for $1. I bought a case, which was 40 pounds. That case only cost me $10, and we’ve had fresh oranges for the last 5 weeks. We have one more week left before we run out. (Keep in mind that some stores will give you a discount when you buy a case, so you can save even more.)

I also found organic potatoes 5 pounds for $2, so I bought 40 pounds. Same for cabbage at 33 cents a pound. I bought 6 heads.

Inevitably, there are weeks where there are no good sales, so we eat from the pantry. This week is one of those weeks, so we will be eating a lot of meals with cabbage and potatoes.

Make your menu plan based on the items that are on sale. I’ve always made a menu plan. (If you don’t, start now! It’s such a money saver.) However, I made my menu plan first and then went shopping. Now, I do the opposite. I find out what is on sale, and I make my menu plan based on those items.

Make freezer meals based on low cost items. When I have extra time or extra groceries, I make freezer meals. Then, if there’s a week where we’ve run out of grocery money or there’s nothing good on sale, I have at least a week’s worth of meals in the freezer.

Be disciplined when going to big box stores. I love shopping at Costco, but I’m very careful to only buy what is on my list. I can get organic carrots 10 pounds for $6.99. I can buy a 2 pound bag of organic greens for less than $5. These prices can’t be beat! However, if I stray from my list and spend on impulse buys, I’m not saving any money.

What USDA plan is your weekly grocery spending closest to? What other tips do you have to save money on groceries?

Living on What You Earn Can Make You Feel Broke, and That’s a Good Thing!

February 23, 2015 By MelissaB 4 Comments

Living on what you earn can be a difficult thing. For many, it seems like a little like a foreign language; difficult to learn to do, and backwards. But, if you can learn it, and transform your life into one where you’re living on what you earn, it can make a whole lot of difference. You’ve got to start somewhere, though. I, like you, haven’t always lived on what I earned.

Almost all of my life, I’ve owed someone something. When I was 19, I needed a car. My parents, tired of having me call them late at night after my old, beater car had broken down—AGAIN!—, decided I should buy a new car.

I didn’t qualify for a loan yet, so my grandpa lent me the money, and I paid him back with a small amount of interest, which was less than I’d pay borrowing from the bank and more than he’d make in a safe investment.

Soon after, I went away to college and took out student loans and started running a balance on my credit cards.

By the time I finally paid off my student loans a few years ago, my husband had his own loans that we had to pay.

Can you see me, just like the proverbial hamster running on the hamster wheel?

I owe, I owe, it’s off to work I go.

Until one day, I said, “Enough!”

No more.

Time to live on what we make.

Time to stop borrowing.

Time to start saving.

And that’s when the real challenge began.

Our society is built on borrowing. Borrow for school, borrow for a car, borrow for a house, rent to own, pay in 10 easy installment plans.

I’m done living that lifestyle, but in turn, I’ve picked a much more challenging lifestyle—living on what we earn.

Cutting Until There’s No Room Left to Cut

The first thing I did was develop a frugal, written budget. That meant taming our grocery budget from $700 to $1,000 a month to $500 a month to feed our family of 5 with gluten, dairy and corn intolerances. It isn’t easy, but we’re doing it.

The next step was to keep a record of everything we spend. Honestly, I hate keeping this record, so that alone is incentive to spend less.

I spend an hour or so every week, reconciling the budget and making sure we’re on track.

I also started regularly saving for irregular expenses. Every other week, I put $120 in an account earmarked for utilities. In the winter, our utilities fall far below that, but I still keep saving the money for the expensive summer months. This way our utility costs are the same all year long.

Handling Unexpected Expenses

While the new budget can feel somewhat restrictive, what I find most difficult are the unexpected expenses. Just recently, I found that two of my kids have cavities (quite a few!), and the price for fixing them is around $400. I have money set aside in a medical fund, but filling the cavities will just about wipe that money out.

The problem is that we have many other medical expenses–$188 for my son to get new glasses and an eye exam and a pending $3,300 expense for him to get braces. I could put his braces on an interest free payment plan, but we don’t do payment plans anymore, interest free or not.

Instead, we had to make hard decisions like canceling our trip to see family this summer.

Living on cash is definitely not easy, but I know once we get through the next couple of years, as our income increases, it will get easier.

We are, as Dave Ramsey says, “Living like no one else so later we can LIVE like no one else.”

Do you eschew debts and payment plans, or do you use them in moderation to meet your goals?