Tag: Low-buy year

What I spent money on this week:

(it’s a long list this time)

• Tickets to a show. We have our first child-free weekend coming up (as long as my in-laws don’t call us after two hours and say we have to come back, which feels like a real possibility lately) and we really, really wanted to see some music. But something kind of low-key. And something not far from home. Fortunately a real dirtbag establishment we had a lot of fun at in our before life is having a show that weekend before – get this – closing forever. Perfect and devastating. Have we ever heard of the bands before? No. Do we know what kind of music it will be? No. Is there even the slightest chance we’ll be able to stay awake past the second band? Absolutely not. I can’t wait. $31.
• Remember my goal to not shop online this year? I should’ve included in my exceptions list that I had $200 in store credit at a favorite ethical and eco-conscious (supposedly, anyway) brand that I’ve been saving in case a specific dress ever came back in stock. Well it came back in stock, so I bought it. After store credit: $122.
• Short story submissions at nine literary magazines. $29.
• Preschool waitlist fee at one of the preschools we’re most interested in for next year, which we assume is to deter non-serious applicants from registering. $15.
• The Astros Orbit stuffie my husband found secondhand on Mercari and insisted I buy for our kid. An online purchase, but more my husband’s than mine. I’m just the one with the Mercari account. $19.
• Three grocery store trips for midweek fruit and vegetables and the buttermilk my husband needed for cornbread. It was a lot this week because the pickings were slim when we did our regular grocery shopping last weekend. $64.
• A peppermint tea at the cafe where I spent two hours submitting short stories while my kid was in preschool nearby. $4.50.
• A loaf of olive bread from the bakery, to go with the lentil soup we’ll be eating through the weekend. $10.50.

• A shirt, a set of four beautiful green bowls and a pirate ship from Goodwill. $31.

• One more online purchase, and another that I consider a justifiable exception, but that really starts to be a slippery slope. I bought a coat last November that turned out to be defective, so I attempted to exchange it but they had sold out in my color/size. So I returned it for a refund. The coat came back in stock so I ordered it. It was always my intention to re-purchase it. $123.

So, obviously a lot more this week than the past couple. Some room for improvement, perhaps. The dress and the coat definitely set fire to my intended budget for the month. I don’t have any more big exceptions lined up, so I’ll just call this week a blip in my otherwise perfectly-on-track low-buy year that we’re only three weeks into. I’m fine with all the other purchases. The green bowls will be perfect with the “nice” dishes we use when we have friends over for dinner, the shirt is a lightweight, 100% cotton floral-print button-down that I’ll wear a ton in the spring/summer, and the pirate ship is really fucking cool and a steal at $2.50.

What I wanted to buy but didn’t:

Nothing. Is that a victory, or did I just buy everything I wanted this week?

Frugal wins:

• We had a flight canceled in November and the airline we had to book a replacement flight with charged us for our bags. I finally got our original airline to process our reimbursement, and I also got them to refund me (in airline credit) for the money we had to spend on airport food when the restaurant vouchers they provided didn’t work.
• A couple years ago I bought a decent rain jacket that just never worked for my body. The arms were too tight but the body was weirdly big. By the time I accepted that I just couldn’t wear it, the return window had passed. I finally sold it this past week on Poshmark.

What I spent money on this week:

• Additional groceries: I stopped at Safeway on Wednesday to buy fruit and veggies (and the frozen hashbrowns my husband requested) to get through the rest of the week. I’ve recently resolved to make half of my plate vegetables at each meal (even breakfast!), so this week I found myself needing to buy a lot more. We also purposefully held off on buying kale for the white bean and kale soup we made tonight so it wouldn’t wilt before we used it, so that was part of the trip too. $45

• A cinnamon roll at the cafe by my kid’s preschool. Is this the opposite of spending on extra veggies? I dropped my kid off at preschool and went to the nearby cafe to work on some writing. I had intended to buy a mint tea (one of the cheaper menu items, zero calories, and zero caffeine since I’d already had my morning coffee) but the cinnamon roll spoke to me. I’m not mad about it. $8.50
• A ten-pound bag of brown basmati rice from the chef supply store. We buy staples like rice, beans, oats and lentils from the chef supply store in bulk. I used up all the rice this week so I went out to buy more. I think this is what people envision Costco being for, but in my experience Costco mostly has large quantities of convenience foods. For example, ours doesn’t have uncooked lentils, but they have pouches of pre-cooked lentils. That’s just not how we cook. So for us, the chef store is where we buy our bulk food. $13
• Bread to go with the soup we’ll be eating all weekend, from the local bakery. $11.50

Pretty good! I go to the cafe by the preschool almost every week because I have nowhere else to go on the one day each week I get to drop my kid off and leave. We walk or bike to preschool, so I have to go somewhere nearby, and it’s the only place to go. I consider it a necessary preschool expense.

What I Wanted to Buy but Didn’t:

I don’t really have a laptop/commuter backpack. I just have a few travel backpacks, and they’re bigger than this. I’ve been running into instances where it would be nice to have something smaller and less “I just left a hostel,” such as taking my kid to preschool and then spending a couple hours at a cafe writing. I might buy it eventually, but not right now.

Frugal Wins:

• A while back I tried a recipe for pho broth that tasted decent on its own but, with noodles and veggies added, was far too bland. We didn’t like it as soup, but I had a ton left over so I froze the rest. I’ve been meaning to fish it out of the deep freeze and just throw it out. But this past week I decided to use some of it as cooking liquid for rice, and it made pretty tasty rice.

What I spent money on this week:

• Medication. I’ve been sick, and went to the pharmacy for Sudafed and NyQuil. I’ve never actually bothered to get Sudafed before, settling instead for DayQuil, which has been found to contain an ineffective decongestant and never does seem to do much. Sudafed has helped. $34.
• Dog medication. I picked up a new bottle of ear drops for my dog, who is prone to ear infections. $27.
• Additional groceries. I ran to Safeway yesterday to buy cauliflower, collard greens, kale, an onion and bananas. We always go grocery shopping over the weekend with a meal plan in mind, but often run out of produce midway through the week. Usually I need to buy more fruit than that, but I’m trying to use up some frozen fruit this week. $23.

That’s it! I consider all of those items to be necessities, so I’m pleased. Regarding my midweek produce runs, I’ve learned something VERY exciting (to me lol) – the Asian supermarket just down the street that closed about seven years ago is finally going to reopen, as a different Asian supermarket. Given that my husband and I share a car and he needs it for work most of the year (he bikes in good weather), it’s going to be really nice to have a walkable grocery store again. Asian supermarkets usually have a great produce section, so I really can’t wait for that. I’m eager to see how their fruit and vegetable prices compare to Safeway and PCC (which is also walkable, but just barely, and their produce is expensive so I usually don’t shop there unless they’re running a coupon).

What I wanted to Buy but Didn’t:

I already have a pair of convertible gloves (fingerless gloves with a mitten flap, and the thumb also folds back) from this brand and they’re the only pair of gloves I wear. They’re great for dog-walking, because I can free my fingers and thumbs to work with a bag, and they’re also great for whenever my kid does something dumb like dump grapes all over himself, which is often. They’re not very warm, and they’re also starting to show some separation where one of the flaps meets the glove, so I was thinking about buying this insulated pair. I like that the company uses recycled materials. I will probably buy these eventually, or maybe add them to a Christmas list. But for now, if needed I’ll try to mend the ones I have.

This bag comes in 6L and 11L, and this is the 11L. I have the 6L and use it as my everyday purse. It fits my waterbottle in the external pocket and my keys, battery pack, kindle, packable grocery bag, wired earpods, chapstick, floss and mirror compact internally. However, it wouldn’t fit any packable outerwear if I needed to take off a layer (when I’m doing something active I like to wear layers of packable outerwear, so this isn’t entirely imagined), and it wouldn’t fit a snack (I don’t like to go anywhere without an apple), and the exact bag but larger would do those things. But for now, I always have a diaper bag with me anyway, and those things can fit there.

Frugal Wins

• I took my son downtown on the train for an appointment this past week, and after the appointment I realized one of my gloves was missing. I suspected it’d been dropped at the playground we’d stopped at earlier, which was in the wrong direction and we were running short on time. Immediately I thought I’d just have to order a new pair. However, I decided to walk back to the playground, and it was sitting there sopping wet, having languished in the sleet for an hour. Glad I didn’t have to buy a new pair, glad the pair I have didn’t wind up separately in the trash.
• I switched my phone service to Mint, which I’d already been planning to do, on a day my credit card happened to be giving 45,000 bonus points for making the switch. So on top of saving $65 a month on my phone bill with Mint, the points equate to $45 off an upcoming travel expense.
• Speaking of travel expenses, we booked a pretty nice hotel suite (a separate room to hang out in after the kid’s 7:30 bedtime is a must) on the Olympic Peninsula for my birthday weekend this summer, entirely with points. We also recently booked flights to San Diego using companion fare for one ticket and miles for another, so for the three of us it was only the cost of one flight plus fees.