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Grocery tip: Remember you're way more likely to eat from home if you like what you have on hand! I'd usually advise buying cheap staples like rice but that doesn't help if you don't like rice and won't eat it. Instead I'll advise: Make a list of your favorite meals and snacks including all the stuff you usually buy when you eat out. Figure out which of them you're willing and able to cook at home and start your grocery list based on those meals. Don't forget that you can buy generic without sacrificing quality on many packaged food items, and/or look for coupons and sales to save on brand-name stuff. Also I know this will be hard at first but try to avoid buying just frozen prepared meals and stuff; they're often high in fat/sodium/calories or just unsatisfying (lean cuisine does NOT fill you up) and they cost much more than making the equivalent meal yourself in most cases. I sometimes slip up and buy hot pockets as a grab-and-go breakfast item, but as someone on a tight budget, it feels really stupid paying $1+ per hot pocket when $0.55 worth of ingredients will net me a homemade one. Edit: Your budget adjustments for April look good! I hope you do well this month 
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Mar 26, 2016 16:41
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Thanks!! I've been really lucky in that my roommate has generously offered to teach me the dishes he knows how to make and is liberally letting me make use of his ingredients a lot of the time. Not like a super sustainable thing forever but he's pretty open handed when it comes to food which has helped a bit this month! My Bid Idea for April is to bump groceries to like $300, then spend like $200 at Costco early on in the month so I have a ton of cheap chicken breasts and pork chops and what not. Probably bulk pasta and peanut butter and a couple other things too. Then use the remaining $100 to buy perishables throughout the month like stuff for salads and oranges and so on. I'm pretty good about not eating microwavable stuff since I've been working on weight loss at the same time as this budget stuff and I've got a fair bit of a head start there. The only frozen concessions I've got are a couple of pizzas and some fish sticks left over from the last costco trip as like an emergency food supply if I totally run out of non-silly things. The pizzas are my way of acknowledging that I'm way more likely to fall off the wagon if I don't let myself eat some garbage like once a week lol - I tried to get the combination of cheapest/least sodium &c ones at Safeway at least lol Oh one other realization I had is that I can probably just split the reimbursables portion of my paycheck off and discount it too, which should allow me to remove reimbursables from the budget altogether since they're just making everything super confusing. Some months I'll spend like $200 on bridge tolls and other months it'll be like $40 but it all essentially comes out to $0 since it gets 100% reimbursed. And since I set my pay on mint as $3750 a month I think I should be ok. I'm going to readjust March's budget for that next Tuesday and see how it looks when I get the chance.
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Mar 26, 2016 23:42
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ZenMastaT posted:Thanks!! I've been really lucky in that my roommate has generously offered to teach me the dishes he knows how to make and is liberally letting me make use of his ingredients a lot of the time. Not like a super sustainable thing forever but he's pretty open handed when it comes to food which has helped a bit this month! Depending on how much time you have to devote to economizing, you can do better than Costco for most things. For things like chicken and pork, I can do much better by sniping the sales around here. On a given week, there's generally a store around $1.70/lb and never higher than $2.00/lb. Kroger recently had a sale on pasta that blew anything I've ever seen at Costo out of the water. I picked up enough for several months. I generally make an Evernote of what's on sale when the ads come out and hit 2-3 stores on the way home from work each week, sticking to the sale items and other staples. We still get to eat great stuff, but we eat what's in season/on sale. So far this month that means we've moved from blueberries the first week to blackberries the second week to strawberries the third and now melon. Some weeks bell peppers are a steal at the farmer's market and we do a lot of stir fry/fajita type stuff. Last week it was squash, which we've been eating raw and baked. Being flexible in your diet gives you both a ton of variety and saves quite a bit of money. I also find that adhering slavishly to a recipe can be self-defeating when it comes to budgeting. There's generally one or two ingredients that you don't have on hand and aren't on sale. Learning how to substitute different starches and vegetables is extremely useful. With luck your roommate can also help you out with that. Lastly, I've had bad results from spending a lot of any one category early in the month. You're painting yourself into a corner with very little flexibility for the rest of the month. You may come to regret putting all your eggs in one basket by the end.
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Mar 27, 2016 04:11
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What do you use to track sales?
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Mar 27, 2016 07:42
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SiGmA_X posted:What do you use to track sales? Mainly the paper fliers that come in the mail each Wednesday. There are a few websites like this that can help, but whoever runs it only posts the really great deals each week. I still check the physical copy to see if there's something that's not a barnburner, but that I need nevertheless as I'm getting lowish. A few times I've resorted to downloading the sales flier pdfs online, as the mail failed me that week. Between that and building my shopping list by store in Evernote, it's worked pretty well for me. Takes less than an hour a week once you get to know what's a good price and what's a faux-sale. If anybody has a more robust/faster solution, please do tell.
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Mar 27, 2016 16:16
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Couponing definitely sounds like a good idea especially for like finding things that are in-season and trying new stuff I might not otherwise do. I think I want like a little more confidence behind the kitchen knife before I start like committing to new things, but I also don't plan to make a costco trip a monthly thing - I kind of just want to try this out and see if it works the way I think it will? Anyway, I'm running into trouble keeping the budget here at the end of the month. With all my categories nearly maxed out, it turns out it's pretty easy to end up going over (lol). Mainly, a friend came to visit for a couple days sort of unexpectedly and my 2mo old cooking skills are really not up to snuff for entertaining a guest, so I ended up eating out like 3 days in a row. A charge for a clothes thing showed up in March that I was thinking would be in April, it's only $20 so nbd but it did push me over budget. So at the same time, since I decided not to try to save the extra $200 a month for the time being, I 'refunded' that back into this month's budget to increase the spending categories in certain areas. I may end up wanting to leave them looking more like this for the future since having friends visit and going out to eat during those times is something I do a fair amount. Anyway this could definitely be construed as cheating the budget but at the same time I think I should be ok since I'm hopefully not actually overspending my income at all. Here's the budget as of the last week of March (Utilities is messed up because mint won't let me split the transaction and mark parts as reimbursable until it actually posts):  So yeah I bumped fast food up and shopping up after taking out the $200 savings goal. I also marked out a bunch of things as reimbursable again so that's why the Everything Else category dropped precipitously. EDIT: Oh also, I applied for the Chase Slate card today to do the balance transfer but unfortunately was only approved for about half my debt. Is there another good 0% APR $0 balance transfer option available? I found this deal through Alliant Credit Union: http://www.alliantcreditunion.org/bank//#filter=credit-cards but I don't know if being a member of a bunch of credit unions is somehow bad? I'm part of Patelco thru my car loan and that 0% APR period is only 12 months vs. Chase's 15, so if there's a better option I'd love to hear it! ZenMastaT fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 19:57
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I think Costco is fine as a base "staple foods" run, you're not likely to get ripped off too bad there. Also frozen pizza is the one thing I will make an exception for on the "no frozen meals" thing.. we make our own including dough from scratch usually but it's nice to have a frozen one around "just in case". Your budget looks all right for a first run but obviously it can be improved the next few months. It looks like you're managing the "eating out" category really well so far and I hope you can keep that up! It would be nice if in a month or two you could add that $200 savings back in. Looking forward to watching your debt go down, too. Re: the Chase card... My personal preference would be to transfer half the debt to Chase which would cut your interest charges in half... and then just keep paying both new and old cards down rather than open a third account. I'm sure someone with better math skills and credit experience than me can break it down better, but the Alliant card also advertises "as low as 0%", not guaranteed. What happens if you apply for the card and don't get approved for 0%?
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Mar 30, 2016 05:38
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ZenMastaT posted:EDIT: Oh also, I applied for the Chase Slate card today to do the balance transfer but unfortunately was only approved for about half my debt. Is there another good 0% APR $0 balance transfer option available? I found this deal through Alliant Credit Union: http://www.alliantcreditunion.org/bank//#filter=credit-cards but I don't know if being a member of a bunch of credit unions is somehow bad? I'm part of Patelco thru my car loan and that 0% APR period is only 12 months vs. Chase's 15, so if there's a better option I'd love to hear it! I would try calling Chase and explaining the situation and seeing if you can get the limit raised.
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Mar 30, 2016 14:31
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I may try to call Chase once the card comes in to see whether there's any flexibility there, although during the application process they do ask you to request a balance transfer, so I think they already know how much credit I was looking for. After some soul searching, rather than try a 3rd account (your point about "as low as 0% APR" was a good one faerunner!) I think I'm going to liquidate the majority of the rest of my gun collection. I haven't bought anything for it in a year, I hardly go shooting and most of the guns I own are either competition guns I never use anymore or collector's pieces when I feel like I'm not really even a collector. Who knows, maybe I'll be filled with regret someday. Regardless, selling them off should easily cover the part of the debt not undertaken by Chase. I want to keep the 0% APR deal with Chase going though since it will encourage me to live under this budget for approx. 6 months to pay the balance off, which should hopefully allow me to build some better life habits. Also, here's March as a summation:  Food & Dining/Shopping are still huge parts of the budget but I managed not to go further into the red at least, while still paying down the debt by about $1200 or so. I think I'll try to stick with this general budget for now while still trying to be relatively abstemious about eating out and frivolities and see if I can't come in under budget for once this April. Heading to Costco in a little bit to lay down some serious dollars. I upped groceries to $300 this month like I mentioned which should make me much more capable of eating at home instead of abroad.
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Apr 1, 2016 18:58
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Got super busy yesterday so I'm a day late posting my weekly update. Apologies to my future self reading this if I ever notice lol Most things are looking alright with the one major exception of a ridiculous costco trip that was supposed to be <$200 and ended up being like $350 instead. I'm not used to shopping on a budget or like mentally keeping track of how much money I'm pushing around in the shopping cart and then I'm way too embarrassed to be like 'ohhh I better put some of this stuff back' at the register haha So I upped my grocery budget for the month since, even spending that amount at Costco I still have stuff I need to buy from the supermarket during the month. I should be good with frozen meat and the like for a long while now however. I also recently got a raise at work which will hopefully help me keep ahead of things. Plus I sold like $5k in guns over the weekend so as soon as my dumb chase card actually gets here and the balance actually gets transferred, I can pay off the rest of the Visa!
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Apr 6, 2016 15:38
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Is that your budget for the month of April? As in, you spent $344 out of $300 of your monthly grocery budget in the first 6 days of the month and then upped your grocery budget to $400, leaving with you with $56 for the next 24 days? Places like Costco can save you money in some ways, but they can also cause you to hugely overspend because you go in with the mindset that everything is cheap, so you buy as much as possible to "stock up" and feel free to buy things you otherwise wouldn't. If there is something that you like or regularly use/consume and it is on sale or in bulk, then that's great! But if you are just buying tons of stuff because it's "cheap" and end up blowing your budget in the first week of the month, then you should probably reconsider how much money a place like Costco is actually saving you. Frozen meat "and the like" will still be there in two weeks. You are not going into a survival situation so you don't have to buy everything at once but can instead build a sense of sale cycles and what stores offer better prices on things you like (places like Costco aren't the cheapest option for everything). Mentally, you're making things more painful for yourself to develop good habits. It's really, really hard to blow one category in the first few days of a month and then restrain yourself for the entire rest of the month. Especially when you are just starting out with a budget and are not used to telling yourself no, it really taxes your willpower to spend several weeks living off $56 and one shopping trip's worth of staples. Then at the beginning of the next month, you tend to go a bit crazy again because it took a huge amount of restraint getting through those weeks denying yourself (or you just ended up blowing the budget even more). You're making it really hard to stick with your food budget from the very beginning. The "stock up to save money" idea is a good one, but you have to balance that with your budget and with making it as easy as possible for you to be successful in sticking with your budget. It's hard to go from spending money when you feel like it to telling yourself that you can only spend $18 next week on food (which is already more than you originally budgeted for). All that said, you're doing well overall with everything. Huge congrats on selling the $5K of guns! That is a huge step, and it will feel great to have that Visa paid off. Also congrats on the raise at work. I'm sure you've read enough of BFC at this point to know the risks of lifestyle creep, but it's definitely something to keep in mind while you're still trying to work off debt.
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Apr 6, 2016 16:20
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Thanks for the advice! I definitely don't think I'll be making any more mistakes like the one at Costco any time soon, in fact I don't know that I'm planning any more trips there for the foreseeable future. I should have enough from that trip to provide the base for most of the meals I plan to make this month, although they may end up getting a bit monotonous by the end. I definitely want to make things as easy on myself as possible haha One other thing that is like a hidden expense, sometimes I'll go out to eat and then a friend will pay for it and we'll put it in like a ledger since theres a bunch of money flowing back and forth for utilities or whatever. Is there a way to add a transaction on mint so I can still keep track of stuff like that? Like it says I've only spent $12 on restaurants this month but I've really spent like $40, it's just hidden.
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Apr 6, 2016 19:38
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Yes: Don't do this. Just tell your friend you're trying to better account for your money so do you mind if you split the check? Or trade meal-for-meal.
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Apr 6, 2016 20:12
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I'm curious, what all did you buy at Costco?
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Apr 7, 2016 15:40
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Mostly a whole lot of meat! Meat is expensive, it turns out - who knew! I should be good for this month and into the next at least if I'm judicious. My roommate and I share a bit of food tho so I could be wrong about that. I do my produce shopping more locally and I do tend to buy organic free range stuff out of habit and a vague sense of moral necessity. I'm almost out of salad stuff but one trip to the grocery store today should take care of that for the month and then I think I ought to be set until May! I could be wrong again of course, learning to cook and budget the food itself is also a learning skill for me so I don't have a tremendously accurate picture of exactly how much I need to buy of whatever yet.
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Apr 7, 2016 16:49
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ZenMastaT posted:Mostly a whole lot of meat! Meat is expensive, it turns out - who knew! I should be good for this month and into the next at least if I'm judicious. My roommate and I share a bit of food tho so I could be wrong about that. I do my produce shopping more locally and I do tend to buy organic free range stuff out of habit and a vague sense of moral necessity. I'm almost out of salad stuff but one trip to the grocery store today should take care of that for the month and then I think I ought to be set until May! "Salad stuff" is probably not going to last 20+ days. Fresh produce gets decidedly less fresh fairly quickly. I'd recommend buying no more than a week's worth at a time. In such a situation, you'd be buying 3 more times this week. I.e., only spend a third of your remaining budget each trip.
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Apr 7, 2016 20:57
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$350 of meat that "should" last the rest of this month and hopefully part of next month is a bit crazy. That means every 4-6 weeks you'll be spending $350 on meat. There's no way you'll be able to stick to a $300 (or even $400) grocery budget if you're going through that much meat all the time. Doing some rough math can help figure out your predicted spending and give you a better idea of where your money is going. Say $350 of meat lasts 5 weeks, which is generous since you predict that it should last the next 3 weeks of the month and possibly into next month but might not because of your roommate. That means you'll spend $3640 on meat in a year. I know not all of that trip was meat, but you said it was mostly meat, so we could could go with $300 of meat for 5 weeks, which is $3120 per year. Just on meat. Your original grocery budget for the month was $300, or $3600 per year. That's 87% of your grocery budget going towards meat. You'll either die of ketosis or blow your budget. Planning meals and grocery shopping on a shorter term basis can help you reduce your spending on food. You can plan meals around what's on sale at the time rather than feeling you must work through a giant meat horde. Meat is the most expensive part of cooking, so eating lots of meat every day is really going to hurt financially. If you and your roommate share some food, at least make sure you're not the one buying all the meat. Also possibly look into expanding your cooking horizons or finding ways to use less meat and more produce per meal. Obviously this is all rough math based on one shopping trip, so it's not precise. However, extrapolating your current spending habits can be useful in seeing where you could make changes. Hopefully this post doesn't come across as too negative because I don't think you're doing badly. Quite the opposite, but playing with numbers can help a lot, especially when you want to get out of debt quickly. edit: meat meat meat meat
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Apr 7, 2016 22:06
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Enfys posted:edit: meat meat meat meat I hear it's what's for dinner.
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Apr 7, 2016 22:17
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Haha yeah it's cool that's all good advice! I mean I also got like 4 loaves of bread and a bag of onions and oranges and grapes and stuff too but all the high dollar stuff was meat, probably $200 of the $350 or so. Still $2080 a year which is more than half the budget and not a good idea! But this last Costco trip was definitely not a sustainable idea - if I'd been paying attention I'd have never let myself get so crazy, I've just never been to Costco on a budget before and it shows. Learning to cook more things is definitely in the cards. I've basically learned everything my roommate knows how to cook but he's not really into cooking cheap and generally buys the finer ingredients, plus he's like trying to gain weight on a weightlifting regimen while I'm trying to lose it so I should definitely be trying out some other things. I'm not really a coupon clipper but I could definitely start down grading to not-the-most-expensive option every time. Bulk cooking is also something I'm trying to learn a bit more of and I have a friend who is going to show me how to cook a vegetable stir fry which should be cool. Anyway I'm feeling pretty good about all this. I didn't have super high hopes for myself but just packing a lunch every day is a big change that hasn't proven super hard and I'm now reasonably confident I can live within my means once the debt is paid off. Which should be sooner rather than later! Just have to keep on it and not get complacent or relax back into old habits.
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Apr 7, 2016 22:19
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I haven't found Costco to be that much cheaper for meat if you're checking to buy stuff on sale regularly in your grocery store. Meatbrag: I got a bone-in ham on sale for $8.50 and it made us dinners for a week for two people, including a dinner party where we tried to fob off ham steaks on everyone, plus a nice corn chowder with leftover ham bits that lasted another week of dinners. What's the definition, "eternity is a ham and two people"? Ham is incredible. Glad to hear you're packing lunch every day. That's a great habit to get into!
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Apr 8, 2016 01:38
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Meat sale chat. 90 dollars in ingredients for chili that lasts me 10 days. This includes a loaf of bread and some butter. Catch the sales for meat, unless it's a special occasion or a reward for something.
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Apr 8, 2016 01:48
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Pffft, our chili recipe lasts two of us a week eating it 2 meals a day, and we only spend like $30 on it. We add a lot of beans to our chili (if you don't like beans in your chili you are a heathen). T, congrats on the gun sales! That's a big step to take and paying off the Visa is gonna feel so good!
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Apr 8, 2016 03:56
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How did you even spent $200 on meat? At $2/lb for chicken/pork, that's 100lbs! If you really took home that much meat, where are you even storing it? Even going with beef/lamb/fish @ roughly $5/lb, that's still 40lbs of meat which is still a tall order for a fridge freezer. If you bought $10-20/lb meat, that's a great first place to look at trimming cost. Sales are generally sufficient to cut costs quite a bit. Couponing can mean getting stuff for ridiculously cheap (even free if you're dedicated), but merely buying the sale/store brand stuff will dramatically cut costs. Also, if you're cool with leftovers, one word: crockpot. Throw in meat of choice, onions, garlic, vegetables and broth, go to work. When you return, your abode will smell heavenly and you'll have enough food for one person for several days at an extremely low cost. This type of slow cooking will turn nearly any meat into tender loveliness. I usually pair with some sort of starch like potatoes (in the crockpot) or rice/couscous (prepared separately).
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Apr 8, 2016 04:01
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Faerunner posted:Pffft, our chili recipe lasts two of us a week eating it 2 meals a day, and we only spend like $30 on it. See, it's just me and I like a meaty chili. Oh, there are two huge cans of red kidney beans involved, but I want a thick, viscous, meat paste to spread on a piece of bread with butter. I'm sure I could lover my cost per pot, but, gently caress you I enjoy my meat and can afford it. No offense meant.
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Apr 8, 2016 04:07
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You are one dude, right? Why did you buy four loaves of bread? Even eating bread at an absurd rate that's like two weeks plus.
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Apr 8, 2016 11:56
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OP, I'm guessing you thinking along the lines of "If I get everything for the month in one big trip at the beginning, then I won't have to go grocery shopping as much." But why was that? Is it because you hate grocery shopping? Because because you have a habit of picking up poo poo you don't really need, and you figured that only going once/two times a month would help you curb that? Because the store isn't close to you or you feel like you don't have the time?
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Apr 8, 2016 12:49
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I guess I'll have to check the receipt when I get home lol I just figured the bread would be cheaper at costco and its like the same bread I buy at Safeway, plus it doesn't really go bad ever so why not buy a fair amount? It should last like well into next month maybe even thru it. I go grocery shopping maybe every week or two but I am super busy with work and stuff lately so making time to do anything can be a little tough. I did manage to get to the store yesterday to buy some produce at least! Sorry if it's like super bougie to not know the price of meat or a loaf of bread haha but I seriously never paid any attention to this stuff before so it'll take me a little bit of time before really considering the price of anything has an effect. Even so tho, I think I just need to make some minor adjustments to the way the system is currently working and I'll be good. Honestly I'm not looking to like maximize my whole life around eating red beans 15 meals a week for the low low cost of whatever. I was afraid I would need to take measures like that if I couldn't control my spending or getting out of debt looked hopeless but I think I have a handle on it now. If I try to cheapen things up too much I'm afraid I'll just end up getting tired of the whole exercise and relapsing. Basically what I'm saying is I'll probably push groceries to $350 next month, try to take advantage of sales for the first time in my life ever, stop going to Costco except maybe like twice yearly and try to hit the store more often. I may even try out this crockpot idea that has been raging like a storm over SA for years now haha I don't really want to end up making an enormous food that I then eat non-stop for a week though if it can be at all avoided. I've lined up another ~$6k in gun sales for this weekend which could probably cover the rest of my debt without issue but since that part of it is going to be sitting on a Chase 0% card I figure I'll put this stuff into a savings account to back me up in case I screw up the Chase plan somehow. That will basically zero out my "savings" in gun form but hopefully even with the pressure off I can stick to a budget and keep reinforcing good habits.
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Apr 8, 2016 16:05
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ZenMastaT posted:Anyway I'm feeling pretty good about all this. I didn't have super high hopes for myself but just packing a lunch every day is a big change that hasn't proven super hard and I'm now reasonably confident I can live within my means once the debt is paid off. Which should be sooner rather than later! Just have to keep on it and not get complacent or relax back into old habits. This is the most important thing. You are making the right moves and learning from the missteps. You may be over budget at first but moving in the right direction and feeling good about it is important. You are the one realizing where you messed up and that is really good to see. Keep learning, keep feeling good, and keep making progress.
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Apr 8, 2016 16:26
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What kind of mutant bread do you have in the US that doesn't go mouldy or stale?  I think you should look at your receipt and start paying some attention to what different things cost in general. Not so that you can become an obsessive bean counter but because you seem to have little idea what different things cost. I'd be curious about the meat/other goods breakdown because spending $150 on stuff like bread, onions, oranges and grapes seems unlikely. You've done a lot in the past month and seem to be sorting things out handily, so well done. Nice to see that kind of success
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Apr 8, 2016 16:32
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You put it in the freezer and it is fine. Do people never buy bread when it is on sale?
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Apr 8, 2016 16:47
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Enfys posted:What kind of mutant bread do you have in the US that doesn't go mouldy or stale? It doesn't. It's really scary! There's a ton of sugar in it, that's probably part of it.
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Apr 8, 2016 17:19
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BarbarianElephant posted:It doesn't. It's really scary! There's a ton of sugar in it, that's probably part of it. New Zealand has done a lot of research into delaying breach going off via the starches or growing mould. That said there are a lot of chemicals in the bread that probably shouldn't be in there and are not good for certain biological functions. It's been a while since I've bought any bread.
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Apr 9, 2016 00:21
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We bake most of our bread now.  But really, store bread lasts forever. It's kinda weird. And yeah, you can freeze it for long-term storage and as long as you defrost it properly it's fine texture-wise afterward, or you can just use the frozen loaves for toast. 'cause toast is always good.
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Apr 9, 2016 05:29
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Ok since I got curious too and because it'll probably be kind of funny heres a breakdown of my astounding $340 Costco trip! $34 Beverages (Diet Snapple & San Pellegrino Fancy Water) $31.06 Produce (Oranges, Grapes, Onions, Mangos) $11.58 Bread (4 Loaves!!!!!) $16.98 Condiments (Peanut Butter & Mayonnaise) $21.58 Snacks (Jelly Beans and Crackers) $22.78 Pasta (Dried & Tortellini) $12 Haagen Daas bars mostly for entertaining (they're very amusing) $10 Yogurt $118 Meat (Organic Ground Beef & Chicken Breast, Carnitas and a Tri-tip thing that are super expensive cause they're already like prepared, bacon and sausages) $13 Lasagna $30.84 Sandwich Meat $17.89 Cheese equals $340!! The easy ones to cut out in future are the pre-prepped stuff and the chicken breasts which were $31 by themselves dang! There's like 5lbs of them but still. And whatever I can get most of that at Safeway for probably the same price - I don't actually know that yet since I have like 0 metric for what things should cost, but it seems true at least!
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Apr 9, 2016 17:32
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There's no reason to buy Organic. They're not more ethical and it doesn't mean it's better for you or the environment. Costco chicken is pretty stupid cheap. I wouldn't go with them for beef though, but I buy my beef in bulk from a local farm.
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Apr 9, 2016 20:34
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Seconding do not buy organic / free range products. https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/09/little-evidence-of-health-benefits-from-organic-foods-study-finds.html and #3 http://blogs.scientificamerican.com...al-agriculture/
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Apr 9, 2016 21:57
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ZenMastaT posted:Ok since I got curious too and because it'll probably be kind of funny heres a breakdown of my astounding $340 Costco trip! Chiming in to echo the concern that you spent a decent chunk on things that won't keep. Onions are good for a while if you store them properly, but the rest of the produce you got is going to start turning in a week to two weeks. Sandwich meat also definitely is not going to keep all month before it goes all slimy and gross. Cheese will possibly make it through but there's a non-zero chance it will go moldy after a couple weeks. You also didn't spend on things you need to go with what you bought. For instance, a few pounds of pasta is great but may not be very tasty without some sort of canned tomatoes (or jarred pasta sauce if you must). I don't see any support ingredients for the meats you bought, like rice or frozen vegetables or what have you. Do you eat peanut butter without jelly? Do you eat mayo exclusively and never mustard? Maybe you already had some of these extras on hand, but you don't give any impression you went in with a plan beyond "randomly grab what looks good". IMO you would eat cheaper and tastier food by shopping a week at a time using a menu plan and shopping list. Possibly this could be supplemented with some bulk bought frozen goods/non-perishables, but you have no idea because by your own admission you haven't even tried to find out about grocery prices. You only think Costco is cheaper because they told you so. If you believe grocery stores have your best interests in mind, you may want to read over http://theplate.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/15/surviving-the-sneaky-psychology-of-supermarkets/. Spoiler: they want your money and will play you like a chump to get it. Organics are the same thing. The so-called morality of buying organic is at least 99% a marketing ploy, because people see that sticker and just automatically go "of course I need to spend $5/lb on these vegetables, it's ~for the planet~". In reality, you can grow produce in the dead of winter in an energy-wasting hothouse, have some underpaid migrants pick it for you, and still slap an organic label on it at the end of the process. Since your reason for buying organic seems to be that a marketing campaign said it would make you a good person, I suggest you switch to cheaper options--and then also read that supermarket article a second time, because drat dude, don't trust marketing campaigns. I don't want to say this isn't a step forward because at least you have the intention to improve. But your post has a very "*shrug* lol" tone that comes off like you're annoyed just buying groceries didn't magically make you good at budgeting. You don't need to clip coupons hours every week or whatever, but you do need to be smarter about your shopping for it to really save you any money.
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Apr 9, 2016 21:58
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He can freeze the meat, cheese, and bread there shouldn't be much that goes to waste aside from produce.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:58
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Thanks for all the food advice guys! I'm not really worried about anything going off, I've bought all this stuff before and the only time I end up wasting food is when I eat out so much that it just sits in my fridge for a month unused. Good info about organics &c, my roommate is pretty pro organic for environmental reasons so I've mostly just been following his lead since he's the one who is teaching me how to do most cooking things, plus we share a fair amount of ingredients so I figured it would only be fair to him. As far as complimentary food stuffs like rice and mustard and whatever, I have all that already. I'm sure I seem pretty dumb to a lot of you haha but I promise I'm a real adult with a job and stuff and I have been living on my own for like 12 years lol - I do appreciate the advice though even when it seems condescending since I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I've been blind to due to apathy over the years! I ended up selling a few more guns than I expected in a shorter time than I expected so, combined with what I already had saved, it looks like I'm going to be depositing like ~$23k or so. I understand deposits over $10k cause some kind of auto-notification to the Feds but, if for some reason I came under investigation, all I'd have to do is show cause for possession of the money right? Which I think I could do with gun transfer paperwork and the like. Are there any tax implications that I should be aware of?
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Apr 10, 2016 06:41
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Yes there will be a report. No you don't need to worry about it. Like you said, the transfer paperwork is sufficient in the extremely unlikely event anyone follows up with you. No tax implications.
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Apr 11, 2016 12:32
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