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Go Betty!

Betty Beguiles is now offering an online personal shopper service!

  I We will begin with an hour-long phone consultation (or online chat) during which we will discuss your needs, budget, body type, and stylistic preferences.

 II I will then spend the next week creating several outfit suggestions (all of which will be available for purchase online) that meet your requirements.

III Once I've identified pieces that meet your needs, I will present you with one or more “inspiration boards” (see below) that illustrate the outfits I’ve created for you. Accompanying the illustration boards will be direct links to the pieces I’ve suggested so that you can purchase the ones that most appeal to you.

I could really have used this help during my Year of Three Wardrobes (the size 6 wardrobe, the size 2 wardrobe, and the XS maternity wardrobe.)   I didn't do a bad job on my own, but I bet I could have saved more than what BB is charging if I really knew what I was looking for.

Education assumptions.

Instapundit pointed to this think-tank piece today that, I think, is worth reading:

Americans borrow roughly $126 billion a year to pay for college...This heavy debt load is causing much suffering...there is plenty of blame to spread around.

The piece discusses the government's portion (encouraging people to go into debt to start degrees they likely won't finish), the financial institutions' portion (structuring the loan system poorly) and the universities' portion (spending enormously, mostly with student debt), as well as the part that's the fault of students and their parents:

While earlier generations that paid only a few hundred dollars a semester can perhaps be forgiven for continuing to believe that college is a nearly risk-free decision financially, today's students do not have that luxury. Exploding tuition and the related horror stories about crushing debt loads appear regularly in the media. Yet students and parents largely ignore these warnings. The views that more (formal) education is almost always a good thing and that the loans needed to finance it are "good debt" since it is an investment are both widespread and contribute to the problem. While true to an extent, these views can be and are being carried too far by some, blinding some individuals to the dangers of debt.

I have been following the student-debt story with some interest, I suppose because I can feel it changing my mind.

I was graduated from high school in 1992.   When I was in high school and college -- public high school, state university -- I believed that college was a risk-free decision, with a few caveats.  I understood that if circumstances forced you to drop out, your money and time might be wasted; and, in my mind, you had to major in something "useful," otherwise it was your own darn fault if you couldn't get a job afterward.  I also found it really hard to understand why anyone would spend so much money going to a private school when there was such a thing as a state university, but I chalked that one up to taste.  So I had some pragmatism, but really, I completely bought the "thou must attend college or be a loser" line.

Hardly anyone in my peer group chose not to enroll in college the same year we graduated.  A few ran into hardships that prevented their enrolling, but I would have been rather scandalized if any of my friends were to say "Sure, I could go to college, but for me and what I plan to do, it's just not worth the cost."  I would have been thinking, I thought you were a contender, but I guess you're just a bum.  

And hey, it wasn't too long ago that I wrote this semi-famous post (the Anchoress linked to it, and it's still one of my highest-traffic posts ever).  I am not repudiating what I wrote there about whether education is "wasted" on a stay-at-home mother -- and you'll note that it contains a caveat about not going into debt -- but it is pretty clear that I come at the subject with an underlying assumption that more education is generally better.

I had the luxury of attending college and graduate school on scholarship, which undoubtedly affected my opinion.  Hey, if someone offers you free money, it changes the calculation.  But I find myself with different thoughts these days.  We expect our kids to go on to some kind of additional training after high school, but I try to talk about it in a more open-ended way.  Four years at a four-year college doesn't automatically make sense for every  bright and motivated high school graduate anymore.  Especially not if you would have to go into debt for it.  There are other ways to be.

Maybe it's the homeschooling habit.  You see all the opportunities for real self-education that are out there.  You get used to thinking that a lot of the time, credentials are not much more than pieces of paper.  You understand the value of your family's time, and you get used to saying "no" to some admittedly cool-sounding enrichment opportunities because they make it hard for everyone to sit down to dinner together, or because you'd have to drive across town in rush hour traffic.  You want the best for your kids, and it turns out that your idea of "the best" is different from what you expected it would be.

Update:  Don't take on debt to go to culinary school.

Added:  I seem to be getting some feedback that assumes I'm saying that all degrees are meaningless paper, or that private college is a waste of money, or that liberal arts degrees aren't worth it, or  that loans are always a bad thing.  Not at all.  But there seem to be a heck of a lot of people taking out loans and shelling out cash who don't understand the concept of return on investment.  I think some of them don't understand the concept of "loan."

Some people may be carrying assumptions that were valid a generation ago but aren't anymore.  Once, *any* college degree was a ticket to a good paying job.  Guess what.  Now so many people have college degrees that the value of a college degree has been diluted.   Once, college was less expensive.  It's more expensive now.  Ergo, some prices are too high to pay for some degrees.  

A lot of it depends on what you expect to get out of it.  And if you are seeking higher education not because you expect it to help you earn more money (or to earn acceptable money but at a job that you might enjoy more), but just to make yourself a more well-rounded person, well, let's just say I'm not really happy about my taxes funding your defaulted loan...

Pounds of vegetables, because you asked.

I have my receipt in front of me, and I can report that I bought about 37 pounds of fresh produce today at the store.  Plus three pounds of frozen vegetables, a can of pineapple tidbits, and a can of basil-garlic tomato paste.

I just picked up my quarter-beef, which will last me a while, so it's not too surprising that the only meat I bought was in a package of hot dogs and four cans of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee (don't look at me like that, we start school next week and I need lunch to be reeeeeeeealllly easy).  The other processed foods I bought were Cheerios (baby now on solids -- must have Cheerios), hot dog buns (natch), and some frozen cheese pizzas and frozen french fries (see above re: lunch).  Then there was some milk, eggs, cheese, and yogurt, peanut butter, coffee, and baking powder.  That's it.  Total bill $122.66, enhanced a bit because I bought a few organic items.

But understand that I have a nice big pantry that we stocked up with canned-good and dry-good staples some weeks ago.  I never buy things like dish powder or toiletries at the grocery store, either.

Michael Pollan: "Pay more, eat less."

This interview really resonates with me.

We've been conditioned by artificially cheap food to be shocked when a box of strawberries costs $3.

But it's important to know that farmers aren't getting wealthy. When you see strawberries being sold for $1 a box, picture the kind of labor it takes to pick those strawberries and the kind of chemicals it takes to produce those kinds of strawberries without hand weeding.

Eight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that's $1.50. It's really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that buying local is better for the environment in terms of shipping costs,  because it usually involves some seriously-inefficient distribution schemes.   And living as I do in Minnesota, I'm not sure I'm on board with the idea of eating seasonally, as I like green vegetables and fresh fruit more than 5 months out of the year.  But I'm pretty well on board with "pay more, eat less."

ADDED:  His point about the eggs is well taken.  We expect eggs to be pretty cheap, but considering the high-quality protein they provide, maybe we should be doing the math on a per-meal basis, and comparing them to the meat they replace.   Four ounces of meat easily costs more than $1.50 for two eggs. 

Sustainable, healthy, and cheap menu plans.

Check out the Cook for Good website.  It's not the most attractive-to-navigate website around, but the author has obviously put a lot of thought into some well-designed menus. 

There are instructional videos, a month of menus (breakfast, lunch, and dinner) for spring -- and I should add, there is plenty of repetition among the breakfasts and lunches, which makes the menu plan realistic if you ask me -- a little monotony is a good thing) -- and a bunch of good, basic recipes for vegetarian/thrifty living.  Oh, and an e-book.

If you've been looking for some ideas (especially ideas to eat less meat and spend less money) you may like this one.

via Lifehacker

How we did.

Stuff on my list:  $32.53

Fruit for the week (a nice variety, about 23 pounds of it):  $25.71 

Stuff Mark decided to add (treats for the kids, chocolate, fresh mint, green beans, red chard, honey roasted cashews, pine nuts, ice cream):  $19.60

Tax:  $0.41

--------------

Total:  $77.84.

About that $80 grocery list.

One thing Mark and I have never seen eye to eye on is the family budget.

It's not that we have different priorities, or that one of us wants to spend more and the other wants us to save more, or that we have different assessments of our savings needs.  I think we're pretty well aligned on basic budgetary values.  It's just that we have never really agreed on how to keep track of everything.  

Every time we talked about it we wound up arguing about what goes in which category, what kind of a spreadsheet to set up, how to track how much each person is spending, whether to track spending with the credit card data or whether to use cash for some categories, whether we should be allowed to borrow from one category to make up for an excess in another, whether to set priorities and buy things immediately or whether to defer buying things, whether just one of us should be in charge of the budget or whether to divide categories between ourselves... and we always ended extremely frustrated with each other because we seemed, um, unable to explain ourselves to each other.  At least, it was pretty obvious that my ideas didn't make any sense to him, and his didn't make any sense to me.

In other words, we have always had different ideas about how to engineer the budget apparatus.

(Look, couples are supposed to fight about money, right?  OK, well, this is how we do it.)

So we have avoided problems by not budgeting at all.  Believe it or not, this has mostly worked okay so far, but as our family grows it gets harder to meet yearly savings goals by the "save what's left at the end of the year" method.  

So.  Budgeting.

Somehow, I can only assume because Mark decided to be nice and do it close to my way, we have finally come up with a method that may work.  I say "may" because we haven't actually saved any money with it yet.  But it (a) makes sense to me and (b) is not odious to Mark, which is better than most of the plans either of us ever came up with before.

Here is what we are doing (I think).

First, we agree to pay for absolutely everything we can with credit cards.  (We pay them off in full each month.)  That makes data that's easy to download, as do personal checks, the next choice.   Cash is a last resort, and we will each try to limit our cash withdrawals to $50/month. 

Mark keeps the "official" record of the budget, including dividing things up into categories.  But we decided to design the categories for easy categorization of expenditures based on the information in the credit card statement.  So we have a "clothing" category and a "groceries" category.  But we also have a "Target" category and a "Walgreens or Walmart" category.  Why?  Because I buy household goods AND groceries AND clothes AND other stuff at places like Target, and if I do this all in one trip it shows up on the credit card statement as "Target."  Why should Mark worry about dividing up a single trip to Target into all the categories?  Let's just set a spending limit at Target and be done with it.   We can move money from one category to another if we happen to have the information, but we also can just leave it at that and not worry about it.  The point is to try to cap our overall spending, the categories are only guidelines.

I am in charge of deciding how to spend some of the categories, and Mark is in charge of deciding how to spend others.  I am in charge of clothes, but Mark is in charge of "outdoor gear" (skis, winter coats).  I am in charge of household goods, but Mark is in charge of hardware.  And I am in charge of the grocery budget, because I make the lists, even though Mark does the shopping.  

So anyway, I hadn't been tracking grocery expenditures this month, and just today I sat down and looked at the credit card statements and realized that if we are really going to stay within the month's budget, we only have $80 to spend for groceries this week, which is about half what we usually spend and two-thirds what we figure we ought to spend.    Okay then!

Fortunately, the freezer and pantry are really well stocked right now, so I decided to plan only four dinners and one lunch.  We'll have leftovers or make do with what we've got (e.g., scrambled eggs and toast) the rest of the time.   I also deferred non-essential restocking until the following week -- even though we ate the last of the wild rice this week, we don't need to buy more just yet.

Meal 1:   chicken lasagna (I already have everything except ricotta cheese, and I could use cottage cheese if I had to), green salad, stir-fried vegetables.

Meal 2:  taco soup (I only have to buy one can of beans, one can of hominy, one can of Ro-Tel tomatoes, and the seasoning packets), fried tortilla strips, green salad again.

Meal 3:  black beans and rice with cooked greens (I only have to buy parsley and rice).

Meal 4:  salmon patties, tri-color succotash (I only have to buy lima beans) and okra.

One lunch:  a big batch of tabouli (OK, I have to buy lemons, tomatoes, parsley, and cucumbers, but hey, I have some mint left over from this past week...)

 

So my list looks like this:

1 green pepper

1 cucumber

2 parsley bunches

1 head lettuce 

2 tomatoes

2 lemons

1 bag frozen lima beans

1 envelope ranch dressing mix

1 envelope taco seasoning mix

1 can hominy

1 can pinto beans

1 bag brown rice

5 lbs whole wheat flour

1 canister iodized salt

Enough fruit for a week (Mark's choice -- he can decide when he sees the produce section)

and, if there's still room left in the budget,

15 oz ricotta cheese

1 bottle red wine vinegar

1 can Ro-Tel diced tomatoes with chilies

I showed the list to Mark and he thought about it and added to the bottom of the list "Chocolate if in budget."  

"OK, but you're not allowed to buy chocolate and not buy my ricotta cheese."

"D'oh!"

I will let you know tomorrow whether we managed to bring it in under $80.  (We go through a LOT of fruit.)

Thought while trying to construct an $80 grocery list for this week.

The more real food and less processed food you eat, the less point there is in trying to clip coupons.