Tossing Out the Budget

I recently realized that we had hit a point where we were completely, utterly burnt out. I dragged into every weekend with a near-endless to-do list. I dreaded Mondays, and the long hours that came with the work week. I never felt like I was doing enough, or things well enough. I haven't been sleeping well.

And my husband is right there with me. We are tired.

The budget, and our goals, have been daunting and overwhelming. The house, while a labor of love, is starting to feel more like labor, and less like love. Work is demanding, and my husband just experienced an involuntary job change due to some restructuring in his office. And then there's the near-constant medical intervention due to our fertility treatments.

In other words, life isn't all that fun right now. It has it's moments, but mostly it is work.

So we've started talking about chucking the budget for a month and escaping for a long weekend. Unplanned. Unbudgeted. No dishes. No laundry. No paint or shovels or mulch. Just rest, relaxation, good food, and unplanned, unbooked, open time. Kind of like the time we had a couple years ago - before all our current chaos.

I'm a planner by nature, so blowing the plan doesn't come easy for me. Especially because I know that our goals will be easily derailed by the drip, drip, drip of unplanned spending. But...(you knew there was a but here, didn't you) at the same time, at what price comes our sanity?

There are other ways we could buy ourselves some serious relaxation. Spend that long weekend money on a housekeeping services for a year, for example. Except that I haven't quite bought into the idea of a housekeeper yet. I'm not all that wild about having someone in my home when I'm not there. I'm thinking about this.

I know that a time may come when I am willing to make the trade of a vacation for a housekeeper or another service, but right now, it also seems like my husband and I ought to take advantage of what times we can just pick up and go away - eventually our fertility treatments will be successful. Eventually we won't be able to just say 'we're tired, let's go'. It seems timely to take advantage now, while we can.

Another reason to up and go - because of those treatments, I am tied to the doctor 2 weeks of the month - we literally can't go anywhere. Also, some planned work trips are in limbo, so we can't make lengthy getaway plans. Work may even impact our vacation this fall. But a 4-day weekend in June we can swing.

Will this impact our goals? Yes. Without a doubt it will. How much remains to be seen.

Will it be worth it? I think so.

Stay tuned for an update on whether we decide to be 'good' or not.....

The Best of The Best: 8 Really Good Financial Sites

There's a lot of financial information out there on the web - some of it is very good, some of it less so.

But there are some sites, blogs and forums that in particular stand out, and I thought I would share them with you.

One of my all time favorite web sites on frugality and financial planning is The Dollar Stretcher. Gary Foreman, the founder is a former financial planner, and he runs a really great website with links to Bankrate.com articles as well as some of his own. If you are looking to cut costs and learn to live within your means, this site is a great place to start.
www.stretcher.com

The Frugal Living area at About.com is a really the place to learn about stretching your money until it begs for mercy. With great articles about how to DIY nearly everything, as well as an excellent forum - much improved in tone and focus by the recent change in guides to Erin Huffstetler, this site is a great resource for those who want to learn to live within their means. And for those of you who aren't familiar with About.com, check it out - there's an area devoted to almost every topic under the sun, from buying antiquest to DIY car repair. It's one of the better informational resources on the web.
http://frugalliving.about.com/

Two very similar-in-tone blogs, Trent over at The Simple Dollar, and J.D. at Get Rich Slowly both changed their lives via frugality. Both run excellent, informative blogs, and have acheived my goal of making a living at their writing. Trent recently acheived a lifelong goal of mine, and interviewed Amy Dacyczyn, founder of The Tightwad Gazette.
http://www.thesimpledollar.com/
http://www.getrichslowly.org/

Liz Pulliam Weston, Jim Jubak and MP Dunleavy are all brilliant writers, for very different reasons. They all write for MSN's money site, and they do it well. I especially enjoy MP's Women In Red articles, which follow the lives of real women trying to gain control of their finances.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/home.asp

Bankrate.com has some of the best financial calculators on the web, and even though I am not her intended audience, I really enjoy Barbara Mlotek Whelehan's Boomer Bucks. This site is serious about money, and a great resource.
http://www.bankrate.com/

On the less-known side, I highly recommend checking out Our Common Cents, a brilliant site hosted by my friend Carrie. Good advice, simple solutions, worth your time. I especially enjoyed her recent article on financial literacy.
http://www.ourcommoncents.com/

Last but not least, I have to offer kudos to CNN's personal finance area, as well as the consistently good articles put out by Money magazine on their money site. Money is one of the few mags I purchase, and their articles are typically excellent. I also enjoy their 'Millionaires in the Making' segments.
http://money.cnn.com/

Happy reading!

Think I should pay attention to your site? I'd love to hear about it. Leave me a comment and let's talk!

How Does My Garden Grow Weeks 7 & 8

It's been cold on and off recently in my area, and I've paid the price in a few plants that didn't survive starting to harden off. This has been a tiny percentage, thankfully.

Thirteen asparagus plants survived the winter, of the 25 we put in the ground. Part of that was our fault - we were so deep in our home renovations last summer the roots sat for several weeks before being planted. So we feel lucky. I may get us back up to 25 roots over the next couple of years, but I'll see how the 13 work out. If there's enough to eat straight through the spring and then blanch and freeze some, we'll stick with what we have.

Next year will be our first asparagus harvest, and I'm really looking forward to it. It's not until the third year after planting that asparagus can be cut and eaten. Asparagus is a long-term investment in our food. The root stock should last us many years of good eating, but it comes slowly. It will be worth it though - fresh picked asparagus tastes nothing like what is in the store. It is much sweeter, and far more delicious, needing almost nothing added to it.

Over the last two weeks, our fruit trees, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries all went into the ground. It's hard to believe that the tiny little sticks that are the fruit trees will, in a few years, become large and abundant. But they are already growing and budding.

We're still waiting for our apricot tree, which is the last of the fruit-bearers to arrive this year. Next year we hope to add two more apple trees, as well as some peach trees.

This weekend, we're starting to clear out the plants that are in the space we plan to use for a vegetable garden, including relocating some perennials and a stand of mature raspberry cane. I'm hoping between the mature plants and ours, we never have to buy raspberries again in a year or two.

Today a few of the fingerling potato plants are going in the ground, with the rest to follow next weekend. I started them inside this year, having taken the advice of some local gardeners.

In addition, we'll be mulching and adding compost to the existing garden beds, and the new ones as we clear the ground. My goal is to only purchase mulch and compost every other year.

The garden is growing beautifully, and the weather is slowly warming. Birdsong often wakes us up in the morning. All of the tulips we put in, as well as the ones that were here already, have bloomed, and now we're waiting for the June flowers to come up. The magic of our well-planned perennial garden, a legacy from the previous owner, is that from April-September, something new comes up every week. It's amazing to watch the garden grow.

Date Night

Lisa posted in response to my Peace, Quiet and the American Way post about how she and her husband make Friday night 'date night'.

Interestingly, we do this too. Friday night for us, is sacred time. All too often, our dates are at home - we're gone enough during the week that home is very appealing by Friday evening - and usually involve nothing more dramatic than dinner, a movie, a fire in the woodstove and perhaps a bottle of inexpensive wine. It allows us to decompress and reconnect. Sometimes it's enough downtime. Weekends like our last one, it is not. But it is one of the wisest decisions we've ever made, booking that time together.

No projects are done, no house cleaning, no emails are checked, nothing. We sometimes even leave the dishes and kitchen cleanup until the next morning. This is sometimes hard for me to do, as I am a neat freak. But it's worth it to just sit and be together.

About once a month we go out and have a nice dinner together, but overall we really enjoy the peace and quiet of our family room on Fridays. I might try a new recipe from one of my cookbooks, or make a homemade pizza. In no way do we ever feel deprived by not going out. Quite the contrary, we look forward to our evenings.

My picture of what constitutes a date has changed over the years. I used to enjoy going out to great restaurants each weekend, or the movies, or both. I still enjoy both of those activities, but I tend to prefer to make them a treat. And I want a deal, if possible.

For example, this weekend, my husband and I plan to go see Iron Man. We've waited until the two week moratorium on discount tickets is over, because those tickets cost $6.50, not $10.50. We might see 4-5 movies a year in the theater, and when we do, we try to get a discounted price.

The same with our favorite restaurants. We save them up for a treat. One of our favorite spots, that we enjoy only on special occasions, is quite pricey, but the large portions provide us leftovers, and the have a 'BYOB' policy. Finding a place that will cork wine you have brought is far cheaper than purchasing it by the glass.

I think date nights are a good investment in our marriage, in our life, and even for our finances. When I am happy and relaxed, I don't feel like buying something as a stress alleviator. It gives us time to talk about the things going on in our lives, and make good decisions.

In short, a date night, even one spent 'out' is, in my opinion, a good spend.

Peace, Quiet and the American Way

This weekend started much as many other weekends.  First, there were some invitations to do some things over the weekend with friends.  Then there was the list of things we needed to do.  Then, of course, a list of things we wanted to do.  Add those things up and we would have needed 3 weekends just to fit it all in - and then a weekend to recover from it all.

The problem was that because of all of this, we started out tense.  First, it was the tension on Friday night - we decided to get some takeout, and I called my husband when I was on the way home from the train station so that he could call the order in.  Feeling like he had to decide what he wanted right then now made him tense.  In retrospect, it would have been worth it to just have me come home and decide what we wanted together - and we probably would have spent less too.

Then Saturday, we had to run out to the doctor, followed by a series of errands, which turned into another stressful occasion.  For some reason, we just couldn't get on the same page, into synch.  

So about halfway through our errands, we stopped.  We came home, curled up on the couch together, and just stopped.  For about 30 minutes, we did nothing.  And almost as if by magic, all our tension dissolved.  

Why?  We gave ourselves margin.  What is margin?  It's space, breathing room.  It's permission to put down the to-do list and curl up on the couch.  And do nothing.  

In the book Affluenza, authors John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor quote lecturer Dr. Richard Swenson of Menomenie, Wisconsin.   He found, in the words of the Affluenza authors that "too many of his patients were stretched to their limits and beyond with no margin, no room in their lives for rest, relaxation, and reflection.  They showed symptoms of acute stress."   In Swenson's words: " I recognized that people didn't have any space in their lives, didn't have any reserves.  The space between their load and their limit had just disappeared". 

Everyone I talk to these days is busy.  Busy trying to keep the house clean, the errands run, make sure our bosses know that we're working hard, busy with kids and spouses and family and friends.  Just..busy.  With an endless to-do list.   And we're all trying to find balance,  whatever that is - to me, balance sometimes feels more like a description of trying to stay up on a high wire and not fall off rather than something appealing.

Modern life is a juggling act.  How do you maintain friendships while carving out enough time for yourselves?  How do you keep the house clean but not spend the weekend cleaning? How do you balance your Mom's needs on Mother's Day with your own desire for your husband to take the kids and just give you some quiet time for a few hours?  And what on earth will we have for dinner?

The answer is you give yourself margin.  You give yourself permission to have margin in your life.  You shut off the cell phone and don't answer the house phone during dinner.  You go for a walk rather than dusting the living room.  You say no to an invitation.  You stop answering email at 11 pm.  

You have to create it though - no one is going to give it to you.   And sometimes you can't - you just have to step up and meet that deadline, or show up when you would rather be doing something else.  But whenever you can, stop and ask yourself "Is the world going to come to an end because I didn't rake the yard or clean the toilet today?"  If the answer is no, then maybe you could do it tomorrow.  Sure, it needs to get done.  But starting to see your own downtime as a need - just as say, seeing savings as just another bill to pay - allows you to feel like it's okay.

The funny thing is, the sky doesn't fall when you do build in margin.  We still got most of our to-do list done this weekend, and what we didn't, we'll do tomorrow, or the next day.  

Creating this margin, of course, is easier said than done.  Much easier.  I know, because I struggle with it all the time - I am a compulsive doer.  I have difficulty relaxing.  But I am slowly learning that I must relax, I must do nothing in order to be a happy, healthy person.   The minute that an invitation to dinner raises my blood pressure rather than giving me something to look forward to, I say no.  I still juggle, because I cannot, and don't want to say no all the time.  But I am trying to no longer punish myself by getting everything done.  Because even if my to-do list is complete, there's another one, and living like that is miserable.

We are, as Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin say in Your Money or Your Life, human beings, not human doings.  We need to just be.   Margin is a requirement, not an add-on.  

Which is why I'm writing this in my pajamas, sitting in bed with a cup of coffee.  I'll get up soon and finish all the things I need to finish, but for now, I'm content.  

So if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to doing nothing. 

I'd love to hear how you create margin, and manage all the competing demands of modern life.  What have you learned about how to create space and time for yourself?

Thursday Money Tips: Green Eating Edition

Each Thursday, Ms. Moneypenny publishes 5 tips for living well on the cheap. If you have tips, please post them in the comments for use in a future edition of Thursday's Money Tips.

This week, I thought I'd work towards dispelling some of the myths around the costs of 'going green' for dinner (and breakfast, and lunch). Here's 5 simple things you can do to lower your food costs, while eating locally and organically.

1. Get to know your faucet
Water is cheap and healthy. Contrary to popular myth, bottled water is not safer. Tap water is actually subject to stricter guidelines. In addition, about 30% of bottled water (Dasani, anyone?) is actually tap water that's been sold to you when it could have been free. Buy yourself a Sigg bottle http://www.sigg.ch/ to drink it in, and you will be hip and healthy.

Don't believe me on the tap water? Check out:http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=87558&page=1

Also, there may be some of you who think your drinks have to have flavor. At least do yourself the favor of cutting out drinks with High Fructose Corn Syrup, which has been well documented to contribute to a variety of health issues, including obesity.

2. Seek out local farms
While local food may never be as cheap as discount grocery stores, it represents the true cost of growing and raising it. The most economical way to obtain this food is perhaps through a CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture farm share, which is literally that - a share in the production of the farm for the season. You share the bounty - and the risk. Our CSA farm share costs about $28 a week for the two of us. Learn more and find resources in the links below.

http://www.eatwild.com/products/index.html
http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

3. Pot some herbs
Dried herbs in the little grocery store jars are pricey, especially the organic ones. Fresh ones are even more expensive. Consider planting a container herb garden this spring, and eat fresh basil and other culinary herbs all summer long. Even buying the little plants at the grocery store ends up being cheaper than buying those small jars.

If that doesn't work for you, consider buying quantities from Penzey's, a great herb and spice resource http://www.penzeys.com/.

4. Eat in season
This is a tough thing to do, in the winter, but it's easy and pleasurable in the summer. Incorporate a locally grown salad (even plant some lettuce, a few tomato plants and some cukes in patio planters) into your diet a couple times a week. Or pick your own strawberries this June and have lots of strawberry-related dishes. It tastes good, the environmental impact is lower, and it can be fun to grow or shop for local food. The local farm links above should help get you started.

5. Buy less packaging
If you have a choice between the head of lettuce on display and the bagged salad, pick the head of lettuce. Chopping it and rinsing it takes only a moment. And carry that forward. Explore the bulk bins. Buy larger packages of items and store them. The less packaging you use, the less trash and waste you encourage companies to use. And it's usually cheaper to buy the 'less prepared' item.


Saving the world isn't all about spending. Much of it is about not consuming, which is something all of us could do more of. M.P. Dunleavy recently wrote a great article on msn.com that speaks more to the 'less spending, more saving' approach to green living.

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/RaiseKids/TheCheapestWayToSaveTheEarth.aspx

How Does My Garden Grow Week 6

This weekend was all about food and friends. We had a good friend over for dinner on Saturday, and the again some friends to Brunch on Sunday. Which worked out well, because the weather was cold, rainy, and in no way conducive to digging up garden beds to prepare them for planting.

I did, however, put a lot of seedlings out for a couple hours to start hardening them off. I'll slowly increase their outdoor time over the next couple of weeks so that by Memorial Day they are ready to go in the ground. I'd hoped to do it earlier, but we're still getting frost warnings here, so I've decided to just go with the flow.


Sometimes you just have to let Mother Nature drive the agenda. We worked inside this weekend, which included more transplanting, and starting some more herbs. I want to make pickles and dilly beans this summer, so I need a big batch of dill.


The downside of the cool, wet weekend was that our fruit trees, seedling sweet potatoes, blackberry bushes and strawberry plants arrived, so we'll be out in the yard some evening this week getting everything in the ground. They say they are wrapped to last 3 weeks, but last year we lost our strawberry plants by waiting, so I don't want to risk it. I'm nervous about frost, but more nervous they won't survive if we wait.


The next 4 weekends will be driven entirely by Nature's schedule. We need to prep our garden beds by moving any plants that we want to keep, clearing weeds, turning the soil, and adding compost. Then we plant - and everything we've currently got growing needs to be in the ground by the first week of June. This time of year, Nature is in a hurry, and so we are too. In June and early July, we'll be able to rest a bit and work on other things, occasionally adding a vegetable or herb to the mix, before we will again hurry through August and September to preserve the harvest.