family — Beating Broke

Frugal Tools and Strategies to Help Busy Families Get Organized

March 14, 2016 By MelissaB 1 Comment

If you’re like most families, you’re busy. You spend too much time in your car running from activity to activity, and you spend too much money buying food out on the nights you don’t have time to cook. Your house may be in a state of perpetual chaos.

This upcoming year, especially February through May, my family will be very busy. To make sure that we remain organized, I’ve started using several tools and strategies. Even though we’ll be busy, I plan to still have time to make food at home, keep the house clean, and maintain my budget.

Tools I Plan To Use

Motivated Moms. Motivated Moms is an app or PDF file of a list of weekly chores meant to keep your home tidy. I love that they think of tasks I always forget like clip the kids’ fingernails and clean the toaster in addition to more basic chores like vacuum the livingroom, etc.

I bought the entire year PDF for $6. The chores for each day will be assigned to me and my kids based on level of difficulty. Between the four of us, I’m sure we can knock out the chores for each day in 20 minutes or less working together.

Subscribe to eMeals. For busy families, eMeals can literally save you hundreds of dollars. For just $69 for a 12 month subscription, which averages $5.75 a month, you’ll get a custom meal plan for the week as well as a grocery list for all of the items you’ll need. eMeals has 20 different meal plans to choose from including Paula Deen, slow cooker, Paleo, and many others. Just choose the one that works best for your family. Best of all, most meals are never repeated, so you get variety all year long!

Strategies I Plan to Use

In addition to the tools mentioned above, I plan to implement a few strategies to stay organized.

Get up early. I really don’t like getting up early, but doing so let’s me get some of my freelance work done and also gives me time to exercise. If I exercise early in the morning, I know it will get done. If I wait until the evening, I almost never exercise.

Make freezer meals. In the upcoming months, we’ll have three days a week where we will be gone all day, only coming home in time for dinner. I’ve already started making freezer meals. On the three busy days a week, I’ll simply put the freezer meals in the slow cooker. We’ll come home to a hot cooked meal, eliminating the dinner scramble. On the other days, I’ll use eMeals’ meal suggestions.

If you don’t have a full day to devote to a freezer cooking session, just double the meals you are making for the next two weeks or so and put one half in the freezer.

Make a schedule and stick to it. I plan to make a schedule I can stick to and follow it. That will help me manage my time. For instance, I do one load of laundry a day; I’ll start it when I get up at 5 a.m. so it’s done before the day gets too busy.

Keep a regular sleep schedule. When people get busy, they tend to skimp on sleep. I plan on going to bed no later than 10 p.m. so I’ll be able to get up at 5 a.m. I know skimping on sleep will ultimately make me less productive as the days go on.

Do you have a busy schedule? If so, what tools and strategies do you use to stay organized and resist the temptation to spend money on conveniences?

Long Term Care: Are you Prepared?

September 14, 2012 By Shane Ede 5 Comments

When we are young, our parents take care of us. From the time we are mere babes, they wash us, feed us, clothe us, and give us the love and nurturing that we need to grow up into adults. Even as young adults, our parents are often right there to help us get back up if we fall down.

As our parents age, there may become a time where we have to return those favors, and care for them. For many, this will likely mean an independent living arrangement of some sort that may eventually become a full nursing home situation. Not only can that transition be a very expensive one, but it can also be a very emotional one. While I’m not sure that there is any way to prepare for the emotional toll caring for your parents brings, you can prepare for the financial toll it brings. We’re financially minded folks, after all, and believe in preparation for all financial burdens.

If you’ve ever become a parent, you likely remember the months leading up to the first childs’ birth. Baby showers, shopping trips, and plenty of DIY crib and nursery work. People come out of the woodwork to give you things that “every baby needs” or to give you advice on how to deal with “fussy babies.” All of that serves one real purpose. To prepare us for the coming of a dependent child. But, we don’t have any elderly showers. And we don’t usually know even a month or two in advance to do any shopping or DIY projects when our parents are suddenly in our care. In most cases, we can’t be totally prepared. But, there’s no reason that we should be totally caught off-guard.

How do you prepare for the long term care of a parent?

In a way, it’s not that much different from preparing for any life changing event. There are certain things that we can do ahead of time to try and make any necessary transitions as easy as possible.

Know the possible costs.

There are plenty of ways to find the costs. Personally, I’d start with something like the tool below. The costs are going to vary some based on your city and whether you plan on having your parents live in a facility or in your home, but you can get a really close estimate from something like that.

If you think that your parents will need you sooner rather than later, you’ll likely want as accurate of an estimate as possible. Do your research on the facilities in your area, and then call a few of them to get an idea of how much it the costs will be.

Knowing the costs of long term care aren’t the only concern, however. Knowing your parents financial situation, and how they feel about the options they may have is something that you need to be concerned about. For instance, my dad has always said that when it comes time for him to move into a nursing home, he’d rather we just drove him out into the mountains and shot him. That’s an extreme example. A true one, but extreme just the same. But, if you really care about your parents, and want what’s best for them, that has to include what their wishes are as well.

Your parents financial situation can sometimes be a touchy subject as well. It’s something you’ll need to know, though. Someone has to pay for the care, and if your parents aren’t financially stable enough to do so, it’s up to you and any siblings to figure it out. Know what your parents finances look like ahead of time. If there’s any question about whether your parents are getting close to needing care, get involved and get it figured out.

I’m not an expert on the subject. But, as my parents age, and as my friends’ parents age, it’s a topic that is increasingly coming up in my social circles. I do know enough to know that it can get complicated. I’ve seen it get complicated. I’d love to hear from any of you out there who have been through this process and have stories to share with us. Sometimes that’s the best way to learn about something. So, share your stories in the comments below!

Evaluate the True Price of Dining Out to Save Money

August 31, 2011 By MelissaB 14 Comments

Our culture seems to be one that is centered around dining out. When you are younger, you meet friends at a restaurant for a night out and to chat. As you get older and have a family, you may go out to eat because time is short between working, raising a family, helping with homework, and doing housework, among other things. Some people are extreme and eat out for every meal because they do not like to cook or have not learned to cook. This is so commonplace in the American culture, that we don’t often question these expenses. Instead of just assuming that going out to eat or grabbing take out is a necessity, evaluate the cost of your restaurant purchase.

It has been a stressful day, and you would like nothing more than a night off from the kitchen. You decide to buy take out for your family of 4 and spend $25. True, you did buy yourself a night out of the kitchen by avoiding cooking and washing the dishes that you would use. Yet, ask yourself, would you have paid $25 to hire someone to come to your kitchen for an hour that night, make a meal and do the few dishes that you used? No? Well, that is essentially what you did by picking up take out.

I use this way of thinking frequently now to save myself from spending money eating out. My family ate out by habit until I started evaluating the true cost. I recently quit my job and have been doing freelance work from home. Several of my smaller jobs each pay $20 a month. Recently, I wanted to go out for sushi, which is a weakness not only of mine, but of my husband and kids. When our family of 5 goes out for sushi, it typically runs us $55 to $60. I asked myself if one meal of sushi was worth doing 3 additional small jobs to recoup the $60? Although the jobs do not take much time weekly, I would have to do the three jobs for a month to recoup the money spent on sushi. Was it worth it? No. We did not go out that night.

The idea of evaluating life energy for consumption is not new. It was the subject of the book, Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robins. The overall principal is to look at the amount of time and money it would take to recoup an expense. I try to use this in my life normally, but I find it especially effective when considering the often inflated price of dining out. Take the sushi dinner for $60—my family’s weekly grocery budget is $100. Is that one meal worth half a week’s groceries? Definitely not.

I am not saying we shouldn’t go out. My family still enjoys going out, but I am suggesting we should stop thinking of dining out as something routine and to be done daily or several times a week. Instead, think of dining out as a treat and something to be planned and enjoyed.

photo credit: dslrninja