Port Potager

Now that our long autumn nightmare is over and we have heat again, we were curious about the financial upshot of sticking with oil. Not that we had a choice .  The new furnace works much better and is much  more efficient than the old one, thanks in no small part to fully insulated ductwork that is now installed properly – that is, the heat registers are under the windows instead of in the center of the house, where they did little good to anyone.  The only thing that’s not entirely up to snuff is the ductwork to the second floor. These are quite small, and there are only two ducts to the whole upstairs: One in our room, and one that’s split between the kids’ rooms. It’s a good 5 degrees colder upstairs at any given time of day – and that’s actually an improvement. But could we do better if we hung on to some of those electric space heaters we were using all through the fall? My thinking was that if programmed the thermostat to dial the nighttime t...

Though our Trim the Fat Tuesday challenge is officially history, we're still reaping the benefits of all those savings. Though we're longer actively seeking budget cuts, we've taken our total savings from the project and added it to our monthly mortgage payment. This has very quickly brought our equity in the house up to about 25%, which is well over the amount needed to ditch our PMI (that extra amount you have to pay for on a Fannie Mae loan if you have less than a 20% down payment). Our PMI was $400 per month (!!!!), so we were totally psyched to get rid of it. Too bad Wells Fargo (henceforth known as the Evil Empire) wasn't as eager. They can make us pay it for five years, even if we have built up our equity. Since that's a ridiculous waste of money, we hightailed it to our friendly local lender , a place not unlike the Bailey Building and Loan: This photo is from a great article about the Institution for Savings on boston.com We were able to re...

2014 and the year of the Trim the Fat Tuesday Challenge is in the books . So how'd we do? After 52 weeks of cutting back just one budget item each week, our total savings for 2014 came to $11,065.50. What?!? If you'd have asked me a year ago, I never would have believed that we would be able to save that much. Sure, some of our cuts saved us over a hundred dollars a month, but most were much smaller than that — just $10 or $20 at a time. Still, it's the cumulative effect that counts. This was made especially clear when we were able to pay off my car a couple years early with all of our Trim the Fat savings. That, in turn, led to our biggest monthly cut of all, as we no longer have a $350 car payment to worry about. We took those savings and added them to the pot as well, and we are now shoveling all that extra money toward the mortgage to pay the house off early. As of this January, our total monthly savings comes to $1,728.50 each month. Over the course of the ...

This is it: the final Trim the Fat Tuesday budget cut! In looking over our budget this month, I realized that we could easily Cut a little more out of our hobby budget for the coming year. As I mentioned before , our hobbies include things like Kirk's entry fees for races and triathlons, some theatrical production fees, rink admission for skating, and other stuff like that. It also includes materials for costume building on Halloween: The hobby budget does not  include the garden. That's filed under groceries, since it's kind of more like a family farm than a hobby at this point. Anyway, looking back over our budget and comparing it to our actual spending in 2014 revealed that our hobby barters and previous cuts have been so successful that we still have a surplus in this line item. To start banking that savings instead of letting it get frittered away, I'm going to officially cut $5 more from the hobby budget each month, since we're not missing i...

As the year draws to a close, we've decided to challenge ourselves to take one last bite out of our entertainment budget by (once again) Cutting an additional $10 per week out of our entertainment budget. Kirk and I debated about this one for a while. We've managed to get used to our past entertainment cuts without too much trouble, but this last one seems like it could be more challenging. But that's kind of the point, isn't it? I think this last cut will force us to decide whether eating out is how we really want to spend the money. We tend to get lazy about cooking sometimes and just order pizza or go out for a burger. With a tighter rein on the entertainment budget, we'll have to examine those choices a little more carefully. Do we really  want to spend the money on so-so Chinese food just because someone brings it to our door? Sometimes the answer will be yes, but I think it might often be no, if the trade-off is skipping a movie or round of mini...

This is a little bit of a cheat because I'm not technically making a cut in spending. After much haggling in our latest round of contract negotiations, though, we did end up getting a raise this year. I will therefore Move all the extra income from my raise immediately into savings. Photo courtesy of 401kcalculator.org It's actually easier for me to consider this extra money since it wasn't in my check from the beginning of the school year. We usually use that amount for our annual budget, but now my suddenly higher checks will feel more like a bonus since our budget is already accounted for. The trick here is to earmark that cash for savings right away, before we get used to having it lying around, and before it just sort of disappears into the checking account where it could be frittered away on goodies from the local bakery or a pellet gun or something. My raise comes to $902.29 for the year, which is $676.72 after taxes. Prorated out to 12 months, that...

I've been watching gas prices lately (when you drive almost 100 miles a day, you start to take in the scenery). There's a pretty wide variety, but I think I can make an easy cut by planning ahead to  Make the weekly fill-up at the cheapest possible gas station. I typically hate stopping to put gas in the car, but I'll admit that it's been borderline-enjoyable for the past month or so. Each time I pull into the gas station, the gas is just a little cheaper than the last time: This gas station is my preferred spot; the cheapest places I've found on the North Shore are in Peabody, which I drive through every day. Gas here along Route 1 is way cheaper than in Boston or Newburyport. I usually fill up during the commute. But … sometimes I don't. And then sometimes we run out of gas on the weekend, which forces us to fill up at the expensive gas stations at home. With a little advanced planning, I should be able to cut out those pricey Newbury...

This one is short and sweet, and super-easy because it affects the children. Several months ago we decided to Cut the granola bars out of the grocery budget. Back in the spring, the kids were eating these glorified candy bars like they were going out of style. We were buying two boxes a week, and they would often be gone by Wednesday. They gobbled down a lot at baseball games, and after the season was over we put a stop to granola bars entirely. At the height of granola insanity, we were even buying name-brand Chewy bars. These are two boxes for $5, so that was $5 per week, or $20 per month. But … it's not like we stopped feeding the children. Though we're not buying these any more, they have been replaced by other snacks (fruit, whole grain crackers, homemade bread ). To be more realistic, we probably only save half the money, because we still spend half on other, healthier foods for their lunch boxes.  Still, $10 a month isn't too bad. Especially no...

This is something we've been meaning to do for years — ever since we moved here, in fact. We have a gigantic, ancient water heater in the basement, and I'm quite certain that it is responsible for most of our electric bill. So we finally got off our asses to Turn down the water heater to 120 degrees. Our tank is a beast: 80 gallons, which is way more than we need. It's electric, which is the least efficient thing ever. It's also 15 years old, so we're on borrowed time. We need to replace it soon, but in the meantime, this little change should save us some cash. There's going to be a lot of rough math here, because the thermostat on the water heater looks like a child's toy: As near as we can tell, this decal is fake, as there is no knob to turn. Instead, Kirk had to take a screwdriver and move a tiny screw inside that hole to change the temperature. The choices were 150, 125, and 90. It had been set at 125 according to the (surely inacc...

It's that time of year again: the sniffles are upon us. Wintertime colds and (fingers crossed, not this year) flu mean an investment in several boxes of tissues, and that go us thinking about trying to skim a little off the price of those. From here on out, we plan to Replace name-brand Kleenex with store brand tissues. This isn't one of the biggest money-savers in the world, but it is a really easy one. It turns out the Market Basket tissues aren't too bad — a little thinner, but not terribly scratchy or rough. And since our typically wasteful children appear to use just a tiny corner of a tissue tissue before throwing it away, they probably won't notice at all. The boxes are uglier, but whatever. The math on this involves some estimating, as I can't honestly claim to know exactly how many tissues we go through in a month. Let's say we average two boxes per month for the family (less in the summer, more in the winter). The box of 160 Kleenex tissues...

Now that it's cold and the furnace is on for the season, we've decided to take another look at the thermostat settings. It turns out that we can comfortably Turn down the thermostat by another 2 degrees while we're at home. As you may recall, turning down the thermostat to save some money on our heating bills was our very first Trim the Fat Tuesday exercise. Since then, though, we've insulated the house , and that has made an enormous difference in our comfort level. This house used to be a drafty wreck , but now it's consistently comfortable. No longer are the upstairs bedrooms a full 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the house, and our November heating oil top-off was under 25 gallons, which is far less than what it's been in the past. All this plus an oil price of just $2.89 per gallon (for now, anyway) bodes well for this winter. I should note that the insulation did right by us in the summer, too. We never even bothered to put in the window A/...

With the holidays coming up, now is the perfect time to take a look at our budget for gift-giving. Luckily for us, this past summer our children (at the time, ages 10 and almost 12) finally admitted that they no longer believe in Santa Claus. Woohoo! That frees us up to Cut Santa presents out of the gift budget. During our conversation, it became clear that these slightly greedy little children haven't believed in Santa Claus for some time now, but were afraid to come clean about it. Not because they were worried about hurting our feelings or ruining Christmas for the other sibling, though. Nope. The motivation here was straight-up fear that the gravy train of an extra present was over. And they were right. Being Santa for the last decade was fun, but also increasingly challenging. Check out a fairly recent letter to Santa from the oldest: As you can see, requests are either incredibly hard to find (thanks for the weird flute, eBay guy!), or on the expensive si...

For the last entry in this month's grocery series, the kids are going to take another one for the team. They might not notice, though, since all we're planning to do is Swap out expensive cereals for their generic counterparts.  This, then, is our last box of Cheerios for awhile. They will be replaced by Market Basket Tasteeos, which taste pretty much exactly the same and have all the same nutritional stats. Speaking of nutrition, the part of the cereal maneuver that the kids are likely to notice is the part where we stop buying them sugary cereals. We usually provide them things like Frosted Mini-Wheats and Special K Red Berries, and that shit is expensive . And they go through it like it's nothing, scarfing it down for every breakfast as well as an after school snack. Well, no more. We're thinking that if they only have (fake) Cheerios, they'll be bored enough to eat something else for their snacks. Like, um, vegetables from the garden, maybe. Or a...

This should be a no-brainer, but up to this point we haven't displayed the willpower to Eliminate the sugary drinks from our grocery budget (and our diet). I'll admit, this idea came about purely from a fit of jealousy on my part. You see, I like a glass of delicious chocolate milk every now and then. Once in a while, it can serve as a quick dessert when there's nothing else around, and I eagerly open the fridge … … only to find that, once again, my children have used up the entire bottle of Hershey's syrup in just five days. I never get any . Well, joke's on you, greedy ones. If I can't have it, no one can. Mwah hah hah. Though I never seem to get any chocolate milk, I do always get more the my fair share of Mexican Coke. It is our only fizzy vice, and it is such a delicious one. It's so good with homemade pizza or nachos or tacos. And it definitely tastes better that regular Coke what with its real cane sugar and glass bottle. But, ...

To continue this month's look at the grocery list , we decided to make a small adjustment to one of our common snacks. From now on we will Replace individual yogurt cups with a quart of plain yogurt. With four people eating lunches away from home, we tend to pack a lot of yogurt to take along with us. After all, it's a healthy snack that can cure a craving for something sweet, and it's super-convenient to toss into a lunch box. Sounds great, but there's a but. All those little cups are more expensive than buying a big tub of yogurt, and of course there's more plastic involved in individual containers. We recycle them (or use them in the garden to keep cutworms at bay ), but it still strikes me as more wasteful than is strictly necessary. Getting a big container of plain yogurt is more versatile, because we can use it in cooking (think marinades and raita, for starters). And while it's nice to pick out fun flavors of yogurt, the pre-made kind use...

One aspect of the budget that I have been reluctant to deal with during our experiment in frugality is the  grocery budget. Our grocery budget is kind of complicated. Sure, we have a basic amount we spend weekly, like anyone else, but we also consider many other items to be groceries as well: vegetable seeds, chicken feed, and row cover fabric, for example. After all, these materials are required to make the garden grow, and that's where about half of our groceries come from. It all makes sense, but those garden expenses don't occur as regularly as the weekly trip to Market Basket, and that makes trimming the grocery budget more difficult than just deciding to cut a certain amount each week. It might be easier to make a lifestyle change instead of just picking a dollar amount to cut. The big change? Bake the week's loaf of bread at home instead of buying it. This is yet another change courtesy of Kirk's new job: His new schedule is only four work days instea...

One of the other perks of Kirk's new job is that it forced us to go back to the drawing board and re-research our health insurance options. Not gonna lie, that's a ginormous pain in the ass. Despite how irritating it is to try to compare plans and change insurers, we were able to Comparison shop our employer-sponsored health insurance plans for the best deal. This all seems like a no-brainer, but the (admittedly extreme) hassle factor meant that, whenever possible, we ignored open enrollment and stuck with our current insurance plan, without really checking out the competition. It also didn't help that open enrollment at my job is in May, while Kirk's is in November or December — that made it hard to remember to do an apples-to-apple comparison of all our options. And, I know, we are very lucky to have so many choices. We were prompted to shop around when we found out that the health insurance at Kirk's new job was nearly twice as expensive as his old plan....

We are always looking for ways to use less gasoline in the cars. As far as I can tell, there are only two ways to accomplish that. You can  drive more slowly , or you can drive less often . We've dabbled in each of those areas during the Trim the Fat Tuesday project, but now we're going all in on the driving-less-often concept. Starting this month, Kirk is going to Walk to work instead of driving. This has been made possible by his new job in town, which is just a five-minute walk around the corner. The hospital is just behind our back fence: It turns out that you can now see our garden from space, so if you're looking carefully, you can see just how close we are to the hospital. So close, in fact, that it's not even worth taking the bike out of the garage to get there. His old commute, on the other hand, was 22 miles each way, five days a week. In dollars and cents, that added up to about $160 per month in gas. Occasionally he would ride his bike as par...

What's the worst part about owning a car? The maintenance. It's expensive. It's unpredictable. It's un-fun. So for me, the very best part of getting rid of our second vehicle is Adjusting the car maintenance budget to reflect actual spending in this area. Because actual spending is gonna be a whole lot less. I should note that this is the time of year I go through every line item on our budget (because of course we have a budget, and you definitely should, too) and use data from the previous year to inform our projected spending for the coming year. In our house, the fiscal year aligns with the new school year, because that's when we get our raises (you know, if our contracts have actually been negotiated on time and raises are a thing that year). So in September we use our new paycheck numbers to tally actual income, and we go through our previous year's actual spending to make the most educated guess on each budget line item for the coming year...

This is another post about how we get to save a lot of money by getting rid of a car. There are going to be a bunch of posts like this, because cars are expensive . I hope you can find a way to get rid of one too, because it's life-changing. For example, you can Stop paying for car insurance. Yup. When you don't have a car, you don't pay insurance. And they don't make you get bike insurance, so Kirk is pretty much golden on this. As you may recall, we recently changed our auto insurance coverage  because of the insanely good rates GEICO was offering us. Well, that's getting even cheaper by the end of the month when we get rid of the Focus for good. GEICO's website is also easy to use, and gave me a great snapshot of exactly what portion of the insurance costs go to Kirk's car: So with about 15 seconds of research, we can see that our yearly insurance savings comes to $218.70, or just about $18 per month. That's not nearly as much as it wou...