Caveat emptor
One of the things I was wrong about under Life in General was Economics. Mike got his technical training, got a good job with a large company and good benefits. He was supposed to work a certain number of years, then we could retire and run around in an RV like our parent’s generation.
I’ve since learned is that right around a person’s 50th birthday, his company won’t like him anymore. That senior person has worked up the pay scale, has medical claims on the insurance and worst of all, will question a stupid rule. 28 yr olds who job hop, don’t have a house payment and don’t pay attention to benefits packages are better! I’ve heard variations on this idea, any number of times. Some good, some bad. Good is the person who gets an early retirement offer, a livable pension and opts out to go have some fun. Or like my husband, you could be riffed on two days notice and given 6 wks severance to show for 28 yrs. At lease he had the satisfaction of knowing he was replaced by TWO much younger people on temporary, no benefit contracts!
Well, after a few months unemployment and active job searching, Mike took a position offered to him. Enough money to get by, but about a 30% pay cut. It’s a small company with less than 20 employees. No benefits at all. Sheesh, when I made $2.50 an hour at K-Mart, I got life insurance! They have some info about medical insurance, but it’s the same type that self-employed people have to get with no company contribution. I looked it up and estimated that the premiums would be $270 a month + all the co-payments. So you’re over $3000 before you ever go to the doctor! (remember we just took the pay cut, but the house payment, utilities and everything else didn’t drop in price) So for more than a year now, we’ve been going “bare”. Just because we have to. No check-ups, no dentist. New shoes, new clothes and things like that wait for overtime. We have retirement- if we live that long- but over the past year, haven’t been able to save a dime!
We’re doing okay, but we have to be really careful with money. I stay home a lot, because going out always involves spending money, even if it’s just a $4 lunch at Arby’s. I try to make a tank of gas last 3 or 4 weeks. When I have budgeted $75 a week for groceries and my favorite cereal is $4 a box, I get discouraged. I buy very little fresh produce anymore; did you know that most people throw out more than a third of produce purchases because it goes bad? We have fresh stuff in the garden. But I can buy a can of green beans, and it will sit there happily until I use it.
I’ll probably post more another time. Not whining, but it sure is different! We went from comfortable middle-income people who could be frivolous and wasteful now and then, to blue collar, barely getting by. Lucky for both of us, that was how we grew up, deja vu time! So now I get the $1 a jar spaghetti sauce and we use the library a lot!
Yet, a true conservative would love this. We’re living in the Free Market- it’s exactly what they like…supply and demand and all that.
I may vote democratic in the next election!
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July 27th, 2007 at 11:27 am
How’s inept Democrat Martin O’Malley working out for you, anyway? Do you like your new 50% utility rate hike he promised to stop as the basis of his campaign? Don’t worry; it’s making me a fortune as a shareholder and that will eventually feed into your retirement home of choice. Just DON’T VOTE FOR CLINTON. K, thx. (At least it won’t be Kerry! *shudder*)
I’ve been keeping track of all our food money recently because we need to get out of debt! Last night I made a gallon of pigeon pea soup for $2 in supplies and a few weeks ago I bought a big pack of 2 dozen sub rolls and a big $10 pack of assorted lunch meats that we’d never go through in a week, cut all the rolls in half, assembled sandwiches and froze them. Now Kurt grabs a sandwich half or two on his way out of the door every day or, on special occasions, one of the frozen slices of lasagna also made for lunches. He can add an apple and a juice or portion of meal-replacement shake and it’s not so expensive (although we need to start keeping more apples around the house so he doesn’t have to buy them there).
You might enjoy the odds-and-ends method of shaving off a few bucks a week. If there’s a piece of fish or meat no one wants toss it in a storage bin in the freezer and keep a separate bin for veggie scraps (the half a baked potato no one wanted, an extra spoonful of corn at the bottom of the pan, etc). Cook a few cups of milk with cornstarch once a week (homemade cream-of-skim milk soup!), mix your meat scraps with some of the veggie scraps and cooked pasta, instant huge tasty casserole, not wasting a thing! Dogs probably won’t like that, though. I’m starting to keep vegetable chunks and peelings to strain into homemade veggie broth. (It’s only saving pennies, but it’s MUCH better than buying store-made broth or bouillon and getting all that salt!)
I also like the Miserly Moms tips archive (http://www.miserlymoms.com/MOMfrecipes2.htm) because people post recipes with estimated costs for ingredients. Makes it a little easier to keep food costs down near our magic $50/week value. My favorite on-the-cheap meal is currently just buying chicken quarters like crazy (often less than 75 cents/lb on sale), shredding the cooked meat and making chicken and dumplings (and, of course, I make my own biscuit mix now), chicken and rice and chicken pot pie using the huge bags of frozen mixed veggies. The problem, of course, being that I HATE HATE HATE chicken. I guess it’s pretty good with dumplings, though. Anyway, if we can just stop going out to eat entirely life will be great!