I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘saving money’ Category

Today is Blog Action Day, when over 14,000 blogs across the blogosphere all write on a common topic: the environment. I usually write about money: finances, debt, saving money, frugality… and today is no different. But today I’ve given things a specifically environmental twist. And the other unusual thing today is in honor of Blog Action Day, this will be the only post here today. It may be the first day I’ve only posted one post!

I’m going to focus on the Reduce part of the environmental “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” mantra and give you 10 ways to reduce your carbon footprint. What is a carbon footprint, you ask? According to the Carbon Footprint website:

A Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of greenhouse gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide.

Limiting your own carbon footprint can help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide produced and slow down the negative effect excess carbon dioxide has on our climate. These 10 ways to reduce your carbon footprint are brought to you from StopGlobalWarming.Org and if you click on the link, you can explore how much your carbon footprint is reduced by taking different combinations of steps, as well as how much money you can save. I chose the 10 “Everyday Cheap and Easy” steps to highlight, but there are even more steps you can take on the website relating to transportation, housing, money, and smart choices. As I said, 9 of the 10 listed here will save you money (with limited to no initial outlay of funds), and the one that doesn’t - it won’t cost *that* much more. Depending on where you shop.

Without further ado: 10 Everyday Cheap and Easy Ways to Reduce your Carbon Footprint:

1. Replace 3 frequently used light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs. Save 300 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $60 per year.
2. Keep the tires on your car adequately inflated. Check them monthly. Save 250 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $840 per year. If everyone in the United States did it, gasoline use nationwide would come down by 2 percent. If every household in the United States did it, we would save a trillion pounds of greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere!
3. Check your car’s air filter monthly. Save 800 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $130 per year.
4. Run your dishwasher only with a full load. Save 200 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $40 per year. Use the energy-saving setting to dry dishes and don’t use heat when drying.
5. Make sure your printer paper is 100% post consumer recycled paper. Save 5 lbs. of carbon dioxide per ream of paper. The paper industry is the third greatest contributor to global warming emissions.
6. Move your heater thermostat down two degrees in winter and up two degrees in the summer. Save 2000 lbs of carbon dioxide and $98 per year.
7. Keep your water heater thermostat no higher than 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Save 500 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $30 per year.
8. Air conditioner check. Save 175 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $150 per year. Clean or replace dirty air conditioner filters as recommended.
9. Take shorter showers. Save 350 lbs. of Carbon Dioxide and $99 per year. Showers account for 2/3 of all water heating costs! Using less water in your shower means using less energy to heat the water which means less pollution.
10. Install a low-flow showerhead to use less hot water. Save 300 lbs. of carbon dioxide and $150.

So far, I do 1, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8, and 9, and I plan to add 3, 5, and 10 in the near future. We made a drastic 5-10 degree shift in our heating and cooling (from 70 in the summer to 79, and from 72 in the winter to 67, I am aiming for 65) and we have over 30 CFL bulbs in our house. Otherwise we are just making small changes and adding them up for a big savings (and a lower carbon footprint for our whole family). You can too!!

From the M-Network:

• Blog Action Day - Being Frugal and the Environment @ Being Frugal
• 10 Mutual Funds For A Greener Future @ Gather Little By Little
• Little Things You Can Do To save Money And Our Planet @ Moolanomy
• Blog Action Day - One Day To Discuss The Environment @ My Two Dollars
• Save money. Save your health. Save the planet. Walk @ Plonkee Money
• Blog Action Day @ Single Guy Money

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

So I’m convinced buying in bulk is a good and worthwhile thing. I have reservations about how effectively I’ll be able to manage it, but the risk is worth the rewards I think so I’ve decided to put more effort into it and really give it a try. Every journey begins with a single step. My single step is making a list of all the further steps I will take to start incorporating bulk buying into my shopping and take advantage of saving money. So…

Step One: Make this list. A step I’ll be done with by the end of the post. How’s that for motivation :).

Step Two: Construct a price book. I have been doing this informally but I need to start consistently entering all the prices from my receipts by date into my spreadsheet. To get the best prices, I need to know what the best prices are.

Step Three: Separate items bought in bulk each week into a separate category in my grocery tracking to determine the amount spent just on stocking up on items.

Step Four(a): Start getting the Sunday paper to get coupons. Not directly related to bulk buying but will help save even more money when items are at that lowest price determined by the price book.

Step Four(b): Start using a service like CouponMom to help match the lowest prices at the Kroger across the street from me with my coupons. I don’t want to have to go to Kroger myself every week to see if anything there is on sale if I can get CouponMom to do it for me for free.

Step Five: Track the actual money saved over the long term by buying in bulk every time bulk items are bought. Apply that savings directly to debt as a snowflake. Example: I buy 10 bottles of Diet Mountain Dew for $1 each (regular price $1.38). We (meaning my spouse) use 2 1/2 bottles of this a week. That means I saved $3.80 for the 10 bottles total buying at this price over the regular price. So now I have $3.80 available to snowflake at the end of a month’s time (10 bottles divided by 2 1/2 bottles a week is 4 weeks to use all 10). This will probably be a pain to track but I like a challenge, and I can’t snowflake it all when I buy it initially because that would put too much strain on the budget.

The ultimate goal here is to turn those savings I get from bulk buying into debt reduction, which is the goal of all my savings right now. When I see that happening, I’ll feel like I’ve turned bulk buying into a successful venture.

And now I am done with Step One! On to Step Two….

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

As I said yesterday when sharing all of the reader suggestions on how to incorporate bulk buying into my shopping, I have struggled with this concept in the past. One of my struggles, how to find the money to take advantage of bulk-buying deals, was what prompted the original post that I received all the great suggestions from. My other struggle is a little more nebulous and harder to exactly define, and something I am still considering: keeping bulk buying from leading to lifestyle inflation.

Lifestyle inflation, to me, is when you have more money and increase your spending to match that. It is why even with a raise, sometimes, you just don’t feel like you’re making any more progress or getting any closer to being ahead. I used to do this a lot, especially on a month to month type basis. I’d have a month where I made more money contracting than I expected, and I’d go to Target and buy a bunch of stuff I had been waiting to buy until I had some money, and also a bunch of little extra things in the process. Or we’d have a little extra money in our bank account, and I would let us go out to eat a few times because we were doing so “well”. That extra money we had never got converted into anything that was making a positive difference in our financial health - it just got frittered away.

How does bulk buying lead to lifestyle inflation for me? It is kind of the same concept. The vast majority of my bulk buying is in the realm of groceries. When I buy something in bulk, it should reduce the amount of money I need to spend in the future because I am no longer buying that item as part of my normal grocery shopping. Somehow though, that never happens for me. It never seems like my grocery bill goes down. Even though I don’t do it consciously, it seems that I must be using the money saved with bulk buying to buy other things I might not have normally bought and my budget is never reduced, so I never actually see the savings tangibly. So, in effect, bulk buying seems to cost me more over the long run than buying in small amounts would have - I get more stuff for less money, but I also buy other stuff I can’t generally afford, leading to more money spent overall.

I am taking big steps to rectify this phenomenon though. First, all the tracking of my groceries I have been doing. I haven’t gotten to the point where I am dissecting my list here, but I do keep track of anything I buy that isn’t on my list and own up to it in my weekly grocery post, and I am not adding new things to the list before I go to the store that I wouldn’t generally have bought before. So the temptation to add more and more frivolous items to my cart is greatly reduced.

The other big step I am taking (that is still a work in progress) is figuring out what a reasonable grocery budget for me is. Once I know what is actually reasonable and that I can generally stick to, I can start building in bulk buying and then track if I am reducing my future budget by at least what I am saving by buying ahead. This process seems rather endless and frustrating to me right now, but I do know I am making progress (even if it doesn’t always feel like it!). If I have an unreasonable number as my budget, then I will never hit it, and I don’t want to blame buying in bulk for that when it isn’t the issue.

Once I can combine a reasonable grocery budget with a good consistent tracking system, I feel like I have the tools necessary to battle the lifestyle inflation I seem to slip into every time I free up money I would have used for groceries, and I can start saving even more money to apply directly to debt. At least - that is the hope. The real tangible and true goal of all this is to turn that bulk buying savings into snowflakes for debt elimination.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

A few weeks ago I wrote a post asking for help from my readers to figure out how to plan ahead to buy in bulk. Buying in bulk in the right way can save significant money in the long run, and apparently is actually an investment with a great rate of return, but I really struggle how to fit this bulk buying into my budget. I’ll have much more to say about that as time goes on. And the readers responded with all sorts of ideas and tips and strategies! I have formulated phase one of my bulk buying plan, which I’ll share over the upcoming few days, but I wanted to first highlight the super-helpful suggestions I got from many of the PaidTwice readers that made this possible.

BillJ shares two ideas:

This is where your emergency fund should kick in. I think most people want to leave that money in savings unless something truly awful happens (major car problem, huge medical expense, job loss). In fact, the best bet is to build up the emergency fund so it could cover 3-4 months worth of basic expenses, just in case.

But I think the emergency fund should also be your cushion that keeps you from living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, I’m going to call it the cushion fund from now on, just to keep us on track.

…..

The other alternative is to try to budget an amount for bulk items that is separate from your regular grocery budget. For instance, we go to Smart & Final (a local warehouse store like Sam’s Club or Costco, except without an annual fee) about once every month or so. When there, we buy large amounts of staples such as toilet paper, olive oil, and spices. (What an image!). If we’re good about regularly going to the warehouse store, we’ll see our regular grocery shopping expenses go down.

But I think it has to be a separate budget item. If I were being realistic, I’d say that we spend at one trip to the bulk warehouse store about half of what we normally spend on a regular trip to the grocery store.

Lynnae shares her past strategy:

I don’t buy in bulk much anymore, be cause we have a serious lack of storage space. In the past, I’ve cut the grocery budget to the bare bones and created a little surplus for myself. Then I’d use the surplus to buy stuff on sale.

It’s a hard thing to get started when you’re broke, but once you have a system going, it gets easier, because you’ll find you pretty much only buy things on sale.

Alison feels my pain too:

I have a lot of trouble with this too. Stocking up when something is on sale is one of the main reasons that I have trouble staying within my grocery budget. So I pretty much stopped buying in bulk, which for some reasons irks my husband. LOL In a perfect world, I’d tack on a food storage budget to each month and any time I’d really stock up on something it’d go into that category. But when I recently re-worked my budget, there was no money for that. Someday that’s what I’ll try though.

crazypumpkin has another idea:

In the beginning, I’d just suck it up and deal without something else in my food budget to buy the bulk items. But much of what I eat can’t be found in bulk (gluten free pasta), or I just can’t store it in bulk (fresh produce). I do buy my meat in bulk and now that I’ve been doing it for a while I’ll find that the closer I get to needing an item, the more extra money I have in my food envelope. And with buying bulk, I of course spend less overall, so I may even be able to lower my food budget and put a bit more into paying off the credit card.

Layla goes with the separate budget idea:

I have a special amount each month for things I buy in bulk at BJ’s. It’s not part of my normal grocery budget. I found I could then lower my grocery budget because I wasn’t buying those things at the regular grocery store anymore. Also, I try to only buy things on sale. So if it isn’t on sale, we aren’t eating it for dinner. This doesn’t always work but it does keep costs down. I find sometimes I spend over my weekly budget and under but in the end it usually works out for the monthly budget.

Rete does bulk buying as a budget “shift”:

I’m starting to buy in bulk as well, and what I did was added $20 to my monthly grocery budget (removed from our eating out budget since we’re trying not to do that as much to save money and lose weight), and each week I try to keep our necessities down to the bare minimum and any great deals I find up to that limit. As time goes on, our necessities should go down since I have a stockpile at home and free up more money for great deals I find in the future, so we’re always eating our meals at the absolute lowest price possible.

Heather built in bulk buying little by little:

I was in a similar situation when I started Sam’s club shopping. I had a membership card from my employer at the time (and although now I have moved on and have to pay for my own membership, after looking at the costs, it still saves me money yearly to have the card.) But, I digress.. This is how I started and stayed within my $150/two weeks grocery budget.

On the first shopping trip, I bought 1 thing (chicken breasts in my case), spending only about $20, but which lasted for almost 9 meals. And then did the rest of my shopping at the grocery store.

On the second shopping trip, I bought 4 things (beef, mac & cheese, green beans, corn) spending $40 (the same $20 out of my budget as the last time plus the $20 i would have been spending on chicken if I had to buy it at the grocery store again this week), all of which was enough to last about 2 months.

And I just kept going from there. Now every time I go grocery shopping, I spend approximately $75-100 at the warehouse store and $75-50 at the grocery store.

This are the two things to remember, DON’T buy it if you are not going to use it, and make sure that is is worth buying in bulk. Compare the per unit price to that of the regular grocery store. On a rare occasion, I have found one or two things where there is no benefit in buying in bulk (usually milk is similarly priced).

Mrs. Micah takes some of the above advice and distills it into a nice outline:

Quick idea outline:

1. Use money from your emergency fund to buy in bulk for a certain period, say 6 months.

2. Figure out how much that comes out to per month’s supply.

3. Add an item to your monthly budget “Pay back emergency fund for medicine” or somesuch equal to that month’s worth of medicine, from step 2.

After all the medicine is in your budget anyway, so you can afford to pay back LESS than it normally costs. Even frees up a little money.

That’s what I would do, but it might not work for you. Hope it’s helpful anyway.

Moms Finance has a bulk agreement with friends!

I buy in bulk quite a lot but I don’t rely on spare money all the time. I buy in bulk with my girlfriends. We’ll chat about specials we’ve seen and if possible organise our buying at the same time, getting the benefit of bulk buying but spreading the purchasing across several families.

And a reader emailed me her way of bulk buying:

I read a while back (I think it was Humberto Cruz’s syndicated column in the business section of my Sunday newspaper) that you should pad your grocery budget by 30%, and only use that 30% for items that are on sale, so you can buy extras without sacrificing the other items on your grocery list.

A budget category just for surplus is a good idea, too, if your system works better that way.

I usually pad the grocery budget and that works fine for me. I look at the grocery flyer as soon as it arrives and add the sale items I will use to my grocery list and put a “PC” (for purchase card) by those items. Once my grocery list is done, I decide the quantity of the PC items I can buy without breaking the budget. I am extremely disciplined when I shop, and I do not buy anything that is not on the list.

Thanks for all the ideas and suggestions! I’ve read and pondered and considered and thought and I’ve come up with a few ideas to implement myself. I’ll be writing more on that throughout the week. I hope if you’ve been thinking about how to buy in bulk you pick up some ideas from these fabulous comments and suggestions!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I went to Babies R Us this weekend to buy diapers for my kids because they were having a sale on their store brand, which is what I generally use. As I was walking in, I saw a sign on the door advertising a “Buy 1 get 1 50% off” special on Carter’s clothing. It was the fine print that caught my attention though - “Including clearance items“. My big failing when going into that store is their clearance racks - I love the clothes there and I generally cannot resist looking through the clearance racks and end up buying things that the kids don’t really need.

I went in, went to the back of the store and got the diapers, and then headed to the checkout, but was, of course, sidetracked by the clearance racks. But I had a plan in mind. My daughter does not need any clothes right now, but my son actually does need one or two more pairs of pants and some fall PJs since he has outgrown most of last spring’s PJs. So my plan was to just look at the boy’s rack and if they had anything at a really good price I could consider it.

I did have to walk past the girl’s rack to get to the boy’s one, and I was almost derailed by a very cute fall shirt. But I was strong! I picked it up and looked at it for a few minutes, but ultimately I walked on, leaving it behind. When I got to the boy’s rack, I found three potential items. One was a pair of pants that were only $3 but they were kind of ugly (to me). My son does need more pants and these were a good price but you can’t buy something just because it is cheap if it is ugly. There’s a reason that made it to the clearance rack, after all. But the other two options…. two pairs of adorable Carter’s fall PJs. So not only was I getting PJs at clearance prices but one would be 50% off!

But there’s more, and where the assertive part comes in. One of the two pairs of PJs, the rack itself had been rolled over onto the leg of the pants. I had to physically move the rack to rescue the pants. The wheel of the rack left scuff marks on the leg and a little bit of the fabric was disturbed - not ripped, but definitely damaged. It was hardly noticeable, and they were PJs after all, but I thought to myself, I can at least ask someone about a discount. So I brought the PJs up to the customer service counter, took a deep breath, and explained how the PJs had been caught under the rack and asked if they were willing to discount the PJs any further. The salesperson took the PJs to her manager and I waited, pretending to be busy with something in my cart because I’m not really good at this asking thing yet and I didn’t want to make eye contact, and the salesperson came back and said they would discount it 20%. Yay!

So, just for speaking up a little bit, I saved even more on two totally cute pairs of PJs for my son, which I actually needed. The money off the price was good, but even better, I’m starting to speak up and ask for things. That’s a mindset that will serve me well in the future. I am generally an assertive person in other aspects of my life, but not when it comes to money. But I’m learning. And saving some money in the process. Every discount matters.

~J

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!