HisHersMoney

Well as of last Friday I no longer commute to work via car. Previously I have about a 15 minute commute to my office where my employer paid my $60/month parking fee. It really didn’t eat up THAT much gas but still resulting in a $75/month petrol bill. With the recent increase in gas prices I will be glad to leave the car at home.

As I have eluded to in previous postings, we recently moved to a new apartment. I wish I could say that the new apartment will be saving us money on rent and utilities but in reality it won’t. We didn’t make the move based on financial considerations but really just on general sanity (more on that later). Luckily the new place is exactly one mile from my office so as long as it’s not pouring down rain or over 100 degrees there’s really no reason for me not to walk.

I turned my parking garage opener in to my boss in exchange for a nice new shiny Smarttrip card. For those of you not in the Washington DC area, Smarttrip cards are like a little credit card which has preloaded funds on it to ride the public transportation. My company gives their emplyees two options for transportation, paid parking or paid public transportation. Even though I will be walking I took the public transportation option since I do ride it occasionally and I might as well ride free.

So Friday was my first day walking, it was an absolutely beautiful day weather wise and the walk was quite enjoyable. I recently had loaded my iPod with the audio version of Steven Covey’s 7 Habits book (from the local library) so I have plenty of listening material since it’s something like 14 discs long!

I even decided to cancel my local gym membership wince I will now be enjoying two miles of walking a day which has got to beat 2 hours of aerobics a week at something like $65/month. This brings my savings to about $115/month as I will still need to put some gas in my car for some errands and such.

Before you go thinking of where I could put those $115/month I will tell you where it’s going – a housekeeper. I am done spending my evenings and weekends trying to keep up with the cleaning. I would gladly walk to work in trade for house cleaning!

This week we made a huge runs to the warehouse club, Costco is our favorite but we went to BJs this time (free guest pass), and stocked up on a household items and food items that we needed. BJs is great becuase you can combine the club discounts, club coupons and manufacturers coupons.

When I say we made a huge run I wasn’t kidding. Our bill was $175 and that was after $50 in coupons! So what did we get for all o four hard earned dough? Toilet paper, crystal light, chicken, BBQ sauce, mayo, goldfish snacks, italian sausage, wine, breakfast smoothies, laundry soap, fabric softener, cat food… all sorts of things.

We have been preparing to move into our new apartment (more to come later on this) so we have really been careful to just buy the minimum and use up everything we have. When it comes to things like toilet paper and laundry soap I don’t like having to wonder if I have enough or do I need to buy more this week so I generally buy it in bulk and get it over with. Most of the warehouse clubs send out coupons every so often so I usually stock up then.

There has been a lot of debate as to whether the membership fees that the warehouse clubs charge are worth it. For us it really wasn’t even a matter of it being worth while or not, it was a matter of convenience. We live in a high rise that is literally right next door to a Costco. We will walk over there for just one item some times. I think over an entire year we could possibly claim that by being able to walk next door to shop instead of driving a few miles away to the grocery store and spending money on gas that we mitigate the cost of the membership even without taking any actual discounts into account.

What is your opinion of the warehouse clubs and the membership fees that they charge?

After reading a couple articles about Crissy Thompson, the Coupon Queen I can honestly saw that I am in awe. This woman spends like $10 on a week’s worth of groceries for her family of five, not one but five. It seems that I can’t even get by with $10 a day for the two of us let alone for a week.

Basically Crissy spends about an hour each week combing through the grocery store fliers and clipping coupons from four Sunday papers. She only cuts the coupons for items that she uses and combines them with the current sales items. After reading the article about Crissy and her extreme couponing I did learn a few great tips and facts that I didn’t know about.

My favorite tip is that you can use one coupon for each item you purchase. If there is a buy 1 get 1 free sale you can use a coupon on both of the items. I think the key here is to get multiple papers and/or have a good stash of coupons so that you do end up with multiple coupons for the items.

I don’t buy multiple papers each week but every once in awhile I do end up with two sets of coupons. I live in a high rise and one of my neighbors puts their Sunday paper in a pile outside the trash room on my floor to be recycled and if I see it I’ll grab the coupons books out of it.

I do try to keep an eye on the sales and what coupons I have. We actually got about $30 worth of groceries for $16 this weekend when we combined the sales and coupons. This isn’t nearly as good as Crissy does but it’s not too shabby.

Do you use coupons? Are you embarrassed using them or too embarrassed to use them?

I really enjoy cooking, but sometimes after a long and/or hard day at work I’m really not in the mood to cook so I suggest we eat out. It’s really the idea of sitting down, relaxing and visiting with Him and not having to do any of the prep, cooking of cleanup. We used to go out for wings on Monday night. There was a group of us that all gathered, had a couple of $2 brewery beers and ate our super cheap wings. For the two of us our bill was usually about $15 before tip. Well, the group has some what disbanded due to the disappearance of the wing deal and it seems that the wings just really weren’t worth almost 4 times as much as they were charging before. It was nice to eat out and never have to worry about the bill since it was so cheap.

After reading through our local DC paper I noticed that there were a ton of places that offered discounted food on certain nights during the week. If you live in the DC area here’s a few good options that we like. (Always check ahead of time as deals can change)

Crystal City Sport Pub: We like Friday happy hour half price appetizers and beer specials as well as Monday night half price burgers.

Eleventh St Lounge: Wed night half price prime rib (I heard this may be changing to Thursday night so verify first)

Mr. Days: $2 beers and $2 appetizers and burgers on Wednesday.

For more upscale options you can’t beat the deals at McCormick & Schmicks and The Front Page.

I’m personally not a fan of eating at 5pm so if we want to take advantage of any of these deals we try to head over there with just enough time to get our order in before the time expires (usually 7pm) that way we get our food a little after 7 which is more in line with my eating time.

Whether you take advantage of happy hour or weekly specials we have found it’s usually cheaper to eat out during the week. We tend to order less food and drinks. We went out for sushi tonight, while there wasn’t any deal going on out bill was only $20 because it was more just a quick meal out rather than an evening affair.

Last night, Hers and I took in a baseball game at the new home of the Washington Nationals, appropriately named Nationals Park. Luckily she gets free tickets as her place of employment has 8 seats reserved for employees throughout the season. This is good because the seats themselves (in the club level) would end up being pretty darned pricey judging from the carpeted interior where the food vendors and beer is located.

It’s never cheap when you go to a professional sporting event these days. Quite frankly they end up being about as bad as the movie theater, holding their guests captive. Just like any good consumers, we bought a program, a foam finger, and had dinner at the park. The damage just for my dinner alone was $20 for one beer (domestic), a chili-cheese hotdog, and chili-cheese fries. Now I’ll grant you that the food was GREAT, but it was from Ben’s Chili Bowl which is a D.C. institution and I could have gotten the same food I’m betting for half that price at another location.

So here are some tips for your next trip to the ballpark:

• Eat BEFORE you head to the game. Enjoy just a snack at the game
• Take public transportation to the game. This of course is so that you can also drink cheaply before the game if you must have a few brewskis.
• If you want to support your team, fine. Just purchase team apparel AWAY from the ballpark
• If there is a ‘cool’ hangout at the game where you don’t need special tickets to get to, purchase the cheapest tickets available and go there! At Nationals Park, it’s got to be the Red Loft bar in center field. It’s a great view, they’ve got other sports on TV while the game is on, and it’s just a great atmosphere.

I came across an excellent article by Paul Michael at Wisebread this morning. It asks the question “What will you do when gas hits $4 a gallon?” and responds with “I’ll pay it just like everyone else.”

And you know what? He’s exactly right. For probably 90% of this country, we’ll just suck it up, drink a latte or two less a week, and live our lives as we had been. Let’s face it, most people are not willing to fundamentally change their lives unless gas say doubles or triples from even where it’s at right now. People these days can’t live without gas, electricity, and the internet. They are staples of our everyday life.

Paul also linked a YouTube video that I found fascinating and left me wondering how long if ever that we’ll see something good come from this man’s invention?

We received a fantastic wedding gift in the mail today. It was from my Grandma and Grandpa and we received a Food Saver. I was so excited as I have wanted one of these for awhile now but could part with the close to $100 to buy one. Everyone has seen the ads where they claim you can save hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of food that other wise would have gone bad but with just the two of us I just wasn’t seeing the value in it.

Receiving one as a gift is perfect. No guilt over spending the money on it and I get my cool kitchen gadget. So, tonight we used it for the first time while preparing dinner. After opening a bag of salad and only using half of it I stuck the lettuce bag in the Food Saver and sealed away. It seemed to work just fine. Then there was the bag of croutons. After we took out what we were going to use on this evening’s salad I stuck the bag right into the Food Saver and again it worked like a charm.

So, will it save us money? I’m sure it will in the long run. We don’t have a ton of different foods in the house to have too much of a food going bad problem but there’s always a few items that I end up having to toss. The key seems to be in whether you use the “FoodSaver” bags. From what I understand they can be costly but you can use the plastic packaging that the food already comes in. I will be using it on a daily basis and will report back in about a month or so on it.

As I have previously posted, I am a foodie at heart. Everyone knows that dining out on a daily basis will have a shrinking effect on your wallet and an expanding effect on your waist line. Our goal is to avoid both of these side effects as much as possible while still enjoying non-ramen meals. His takes his breakfast and lunch with him to work each day and I (hers) take my coffee and lunch with me to work each day which really helps.

Weekly grocery bills: 3/15/08 $47.74 Grocery Store & 3/15/08 $13.64 Costco

Breakfast for the week is bagels and cream cheese, cereal & apples.

Lunch is left over lasagna, left over chili or tuna sandwich.

Dinner Menu:

Sun: Loaded Baked potatoes with bacon, sour cream, cheese & broccoli

Mon: BBQ Chicken

Tues: Lamb Chops

Wed: Tacos with ground beef

Thurs: Penne Pasta with pesto

Fri: sushi (eating out)

Sat: Salmon Burgers

Each night we always add vegetables or a salad and a small side starch. So, you can see how two people can eat pretty well on a reasonable amount of money. We usually get sushi on Friday nights and a couple glasses of wine out at a local restaurant. Our bill this week was about $60 so combined with out grocery bills we usually stay within our $125 budget.

Stayed tuned next week when I try out a new idea I saw over on Dimples’ Divine Domain to cook an entire chicken in the crock pot! I never would have thought of it but I’m looking forward to trying it.