Menu Plan Monday - Not!

I keep meaning to post for Menu Plan Monday (@OrgJunkie if you need ideas for the week) but the last few weeks I've been planning more on Monday afternoons than Sundays. Unfortunately, this week our refrigerator has decided to give up the ghost, so we'll be without fresh foods til Wednesday at the earliest. This puts a huge damper on my menu planning skills.

Yes, I know many people (especially people who like to stockpile and therefore, need to rotate food) would consider this a challenge, to create a few meals without fresh foods... Having the refrigerator die on us has really been a blow to me.

I have come to the realization that while the purchase of a new refrigerator did not hurt us financially, it could have. We scraped together the money using our sparse savings, including some money we had set aside to build a deck this year. We both agreed that increasing our credit load was unacceptable, and managed to get a fridge that we both were happy with, while not spending any excess money that we did not need to.

But it made the pit of my stomach ache. I realize we don't have a large enough emergency fund, we have too large of a credit load, and we aren't doing as much as we can to get out from under our debts and create a solid financial rock to stand on. If Murphy decided to visit us right now, we could find ourselves between a rock and a hard place too easily.

So I've been rethinking our goals for the year, rearranging some priorities, and will be reworking the budget to see where we can trim some fat. I'll be posting some of our numbers and goals here soon so you can follow along, and hopefully cheer us to victory! Wish us luck!!

Returning from AWOL

I've been missing in action for a while now, and lest you think I've given up blogging altogether, I'm popping in to ask for your input.

Due to allergies and general spring-ness, we've all been a little sick, sniffly, generally miserable. Not only that, but this is prime time to get the garden up and running, which contributes to our food budget lowering significantly in the summer months, so we've been busy.

Unfortunately, this has meant fast food breakfasts and take-out dinners for the most part, and even a few lunches out on days I didn't have time/energy to pack lunches for the crew. Meaning I definitely need a better plan for days like these.

Any suggestions? How do you handle it when time is tight and energy is fleeting? Any tips that could be shared so I can handle the next time without blowing the budget would be greatly appreciated!

Plugging the Leaks

This weekend I plugged a leak in our budget, literally. We had a toilet with a faulty flapper, so handle jiggling was necessary to get the flapper to close and let the tank fill back up. Eventually jiggling didn't work any more and removing the lid to tap the flapper down was required. Even then, the flapper didn't seal completely and there was a constant stream of water running down one side of the toilet bowl and the annoying sound of slightly running water constantly audible.

We'd been seeing our water bill creep up a little at a time, but told ourselves it was the watering of the garden or other things we were doing that was making it rise. A huge water bill came as a result of leaving the outside hose running for a day or two after forgetting to turn it off in the evening, and we suddenly became much more diligent about our water usage.

After plugging all the wasteful water habits except this annoying tiny (it seemed) fix, we expected the water bill to be down significantly - at least as low as it had been this time last year, when there was no garden watering being done. But while it was much lower than the forgotten hose month, it was still high for our average. So the hubster did a little sleuthing. No water was being used (except the leaking toilet) and he went to check the meter. It was spinning around out of control with the amount of water that was being used!

Needless to say, that fix was processed within the hour. After the new, improved, and functional flapper was in place, he checked the water meter again -- even with the dishwasher going, it was only moving at a trickle compared to before. YAY! Hopefully next month our water bill will be much, much lower and our checkbook will be much happier.

What tiny fixes have you been letting go because they seem too insignificant?