Beating Broke

3 Big Steps to Fight Off Rising Produce Costs this Summer

February 20, 2012 By MelissaB 10 Comments

My family has been increasingly consuming organic produce because we are trying to eliminate all food additives, preservatives and pesticides from our diet. If you are trying to feed your family the recommended five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, you may be spending more than you would like on produce, regardless if you buy organic or not. Just for my family of 5, meeting the USDA dietary recommendations means feeding us 25 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, or 175 servings a week! Here are steps you can take now to save money this summer on fresh produce:

Grow a garden. If you have the space, consider growing your own garden. You will have an abundance of fresh, organic produce growing in your back yard, and food doesn’t get any fresher than that. Eliminate the chemicals and the long transportation time that your produce often endures to get to the grocery store shelves.

If you live in the city or don’t have room to grow a garden, consider getting a plot at a community garden. Community gardens are designated locations that usually have 15 to 40 plots available for members of the community to garden. You use a plot and plant what you would like. You just have to agree to maintain your plot and water it at least once a week. There is often a small fee. The community garden I plan to use this summer charges $20, but that money is refunded at the end of the season if you have tended your garden throughout the season.

Subscribe to a CSA. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Many CSAs offer organic produce and deliver it to a location near you every week. Programs often let you choose between a 1/2 bushel and a bushel of produce weekly or every other week and typically run for 18 to 22 weeks.

In return, you must pay for your share upfront, usually before May. In larger cities CSAs fill up quickly, so you may want to begin looking for a CSA in your area this month or next month. You also usually are not given much say in the produce you receive, so being open to trying new vegetables is necessary.

Freeze Your Excess. If you have grown your own garden or have a share of a CSA, you may find yourself with an abundance of fresh produce during the summer months. Rather than letting it go to waste, consider preserving some of it. True, you could can some of it, but I have done that before, and it was a miserable time. (This is just my experience; you may enjoy canning.) Instead, take advantage of your freezer. Shred the excess zucchini and put it in the freezer in small bags. Puree excess squash to sneak into baked goods during the winter. Make Jamie Oliver’s pasta sauce and freeze it for future spaghetti or pasta meals.

With careful planning during the rest of the winter months, you will be able to not only enjoy fresh produce during the summer and slash your grocery bill, but you will be able to save some of that produce for the fall and winter months, effectively lowering your grocery bill for produce all year long.

photo credit: Martin Cathrae

Are Electric Cars Worse for the Planet?

February 15, 2012 By Shane Ede 23 Comments

Not content to upset the recyclers in the community (See: Is Recycling Bullshit), I’m moving on to electric cars today. Rob at Say Anything Blog had an interesting post the other day citing a report from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that talks about how electric cars might be worse for the environment than their gas guzzling counterparts.

To summarize the report, electric cars seem to be more hazardous to the environment because a majority of the electricity that they consume is created in fossil fuel burning electric plants. Rob points out that the study was done in China where a very large proportion of electricity is produced by coal powered plants, and that a smaller proportion is produced that way in the Unites States, but that the proportion still isn’t small enough to negate the negative effects of the increased pollution from production.

I think this is another case where the technology just isn’t advanced enough to support the new initiatives. Cleaner electricity production would, obviously, help the situation, but many of the clean energy production methods just aren’t mature enough to support themselves, let alone a growing fleet of electric cars.

Combine that information with the added expenses in maintenance of an electric car, and they begin to look downright unattractive. Not to mention that they have yet to create an electric car that is capable of reproducing the power that is needed for them to become mainstream in smaller cities and rural areas.

What do you think? Are electric cars an already dying breed? Should we continue to support them in hopes that electricity production technology catches up eventually?

photo credit: kevin dooley

Creating a Simple Budget the Beating Broke Way

February 13, 2012 By Shane Ede 36 Comments

One of the most important parts of paying off your debt and becoming financially independent is creating a budget. At the very least it gives you an outline of where your money goes and where it should go. At it’s most extreme, it serves to create strict limits for your spending. How lax or strictly you adhere to the budget is up to you and how die-hard you are about your budgeting.

One thing remains constant however. When the end of the month comes, the ending balance should be 0. Money in – money out = 0. If you have a deficit, you overspent and need to compensate for that by either reducing budgeted amounts in another category or by reducing the available money for the next month. If you have a surplus, (good for you!) then you need to budget that money until your end result is 0. Most of us looking to become debt free will budget any surplus towards excess debt payment.

Here’s how we have things set up at the Beating Broke household.

Income. We keep a very simple income spreadsheet. It lists the sources in Column A. The amount in Column B and any notes for the income in Column C. All of that gets totaled at the bottom. That’s all we do with our income. It’s the expenses that we really need to focus on anyways.

Expenses. The expenses spreadsheet is a little more complex. I have a field for the income that I carry over from the income sheet. I also have a field for a total of all budgeted amounts. I then have a few calculated fields. The first is a field that gives me the budgetary deficit or surplus. I get that by subtracting the total budgeted amount from the income. A second calculated field gives me the true deficit or surplus. This is calculated by subtracting the actual amounts spent from the income. This field is really only useful for balancing at the end of the month, but if you’ve done your budgeting properly, the amount should be small and easy to take care of.

The meat of the expenses spreadsheet is everything else. Column A holds the categories. I’ve broken them down into header categories and sub categories. For instance, the Health header category has sub categories for Health Insurance, Aflac, Prescriptions, and Medical Bills. I could go even further and list each bill, but that would greatly increase the amount of time I spend on my budget. I want it to do it’s job (keep my money in order), not take up hours of my time. Column B holds the budgeted amount for that sub category. Pretty simple really. Column C is the amount that I’ve spent to date on that category. Column D is the % the budgeted amount is of the income/budget and Column E is the % that the actual spent amount is of the income/budget. I’ve also thrown in some totals for each header category as well as the % of total for those as well.

Each week, we go over our checkbooks, credit cards, and all other financial happenings and enter them in the appropriate places. By doing it every week, it keeps the task down to a half-hour or less which helps with reducing the stress level of working with your finances. Especially if they are a little wonky to begin with.

Budget deficit and surplus. Occasionally, we get to the end of the month and we have a surplus or deficit. We’ve either spent less than we budgeted for or we have spent more than we budgeted for. The latter is a little rough, but the first is always fun. Because we don’t usually figure out the overall surplus/deficit until the month has ended, we can’t budget for the surplus/deficit in that month. So, I’ve thrown in a field on the Income sheet that is titled “Carryover” and one in the expenses sheet that is titled “Shortfall”. If we have a deficit, the carryover value is 0 and the shortfall amount is the amount of the deficit. And vice versa. This helps with taking the surplus and budgeting it as an extra debt payment or in accounting for previous months deficits.

Most of these ideas are pretty basic budgeting principles. We’ve tweaked them around a little to fit our financial style and to be loosely based on the Dave Ramsey system. If you’ve got questions on budgeting that we might be able to answer, drop us a line and we’ll try and answer them as soon as we can.