Las Vegas on the Cheap

I know, I know. The title of this post is already a misnomer. How can Las Vegas ever be cheap?

Read on, dear ones.

We traveled to Vegas over the long President’s Day weekend for The Daughter’s dance competition. It was the first comp of the season and in an effort to save money, we brought all our breakfasts, lunches, and snacks with us. We only bought dinner each night, which became a huge cost savings on food!

The day before we left, The Husband and I went grocery shopping at Winco. We had a vague idea of some things we wanted, but mostly we just wandered around the store and grabbed whatever we wanted.

We knew we needed things to eat for breakfast, things for lunch, fruit and snacks. With that in mind, we decided on apples and peanut butter and pop-tarts for breakfast. We bought pre-packaged individual peanut butters, (which we would never usually do) for convenience. They were great, and made clean-up so easy. We grabbed the biggest box of pop-tarts they had and our breakfasts were taken care of.

Again, trying to make life easy, we picked up Lunchabels and pre-made chicken and tuna salad and crackers. We got 10 of each; enough to have each lunch twice. We also bought bananas and cuties to have for fruit with our lunch. From home we brought Baby-bel cheeses and, voila, our lunches were set too!

We bought several different snacks for the trip: Chex Mix, honey roasted peanuts, pretzels, apple sauce, protein biscuits, and Cheeze-its. And, although I thought we were going to run out, there were enough snacks to last the whole trip and we brought some home.

All told, we spent $104 on food at Winco and, bonus, we got to bring the left overs home! $100 wouldn’t have covered even one day’s worth of food if we had bought every meal. Instead, we planned ahead, fed our family of 5 (my mom traveled with us), and saved a ton of money. 

In addition to bringing our food on the trip, The Husband also packed our individual Keurig machine so we would have tea and coffee without having to buy it at Starbucks. That was another huge savings.

While many families flew, we knew it would be much cheaper to drive, not to mention, because of my mom’s hip replacement, she can’t fly yet. I did not think to budget extra money into my gas envelope this month, which would have been the smart thing to do, but we were able to cover most of the gas. My mom did pay for one fill-up and we did have to charge one, but only one, fill-up. The rest were all covered with our gas envelope. Not too shabby.

For cheap… read, free, entertainment, The Husband got on the waiting list at our local library to borrow book one of the Harry Potter series on digital download. We listened to half of it on the way to Vegas and the other half on the way home. That kept The Kids from asking to download and buy a new movie for the ipad, which was awesome.

We also knew the hotel we were staying at had a Regal cinema. We have, literally, hundreds of dollars worth of gift cards to Regal, so we decided to bring them along. On Sunday, we did go as a family to see a movie and we were able to use our gift cards for the tickets. My mom treated for concessions. It was another frugal bit of entertainment for us.

For most of the weekend, The Daughter’s dance competition kept us busy. When we go to Vegas, we usually only gamble with $20 each and once it’s gone, it’s gone. This time was a little different. As a gift, my dad called us while we were driving and told us he would give us each $100 to gamble with! In all honesty, I told The Husband it was painful for me to spend that much money, but it wasn’t ours and we had fun. The Husband had a lot of luck on an “Uncle Sam” inspired slot machine and we played for a couple hours on my dad’s money. All told, we made about $80 and it wasn’t our money that we were gambling with to begin with! That money paid for dinner out on Sunday night with The Girl’s dance team. (So, if you are keeping track, we really only had to buy dinner Friday and Saturday Night as we were home in time for dinner on Monday night and my mom bought us pizza!)

All in all, it was a great trip; and pretty frugal, too. In the 23 years I’ve known my husband, and the15+ times we’ve gone to Vegas, this was definitely the least we’ve ever spent and it couldn’t have come at a better time!!!

When it Rains... It Really Pours

We have three working cars (and one project car).

One of our cars is 15 years old, but still runs pretty well, and more importantly is, paid off. We have not done any work on this cars since 2011 (what?!?) and so we brought it in to have several small, and a couple big, problems taken care of. The total came to $1900. Of that, we had $1700 in our car repair fund, so we only had to come up with an extra $200 to pay the bill.

Since then, it’s started pouring.

That was our “extra” car, and has been for about 3 years, ever since my husband got a new car.

Because we have really liked the flexibility that having an extra car has given us, we felt it was worth the money. In retrospect, I wish we would have waited.

Read on.

Last weekend, in preparation for our upcoming trip to Las Vegas for The Daughter’s dance competition, The Husband went to replace the brake pads on my daily driver car, where he discovered that in addition to the new brake pads, my car needed new rotors and new struts (whatever those are).

He called around and the lowest quote he found for having the work done was $1000.

He decided to do the work himself. We were able to order the parts for about $375 and then we had to pay $180 to have it aligned afterward because the new struts pulled it so far out of alignment. That still worked out to a savings of $450.

Then we had even more rain.

The alignment shop let him know that our power steering fluid is leaking and that the repair will be $1500.

As our car repair is literally tapped out right now, we decided to forgo that repair for now and instead stocked up on power steering fluid so we can fill the reservoir as needed.

I’m bummed, but The Husband is really bummed about it.

It’s really messing with our (meager as it is) debt repayment!

Currently, we have $0 in our car repair fund. We will continue to fund it at $100 a month and any left over gas money each budgeting period will go towards car repair too. Hopefully before too long we can get some money in there so we will have a little cushion.

It’s very disheartening to go from $1700 to negative thousands of dollars in just a short couple weeks. I understand The Husband’s “depression”. I guess for me the hardest part is that we elected to have the work done on our old car when if we had just waited awhile, we would have had enough money to pay for the needed repairs on my car.

Having said that, the reality is that I’m glad we have 3 functional, relatively reliable, cars between the two of us. Hopefully we will be done with car repairs for a little while and we can build our envelope back up!

*Since writing this, we have driven my car to and from Vegas without any issues, so that makes me happy. I was afraid we would have some problems on the road that would cost even more!

Tax Cuts

The new tax cuts enacted by Congress are already having an impact on our finances. For each of my paychecks, we will get an extra $100 per month and for each of The Husband’s we are going to get about $50 more. Over the course of the year, we are going to be able to keep $2400 more of our money! Unfortunately, we won’t be able to have fun with that money, but we will be able to use it to our advantage!

In our budget, I have already adjusted the payments we will be making to our credit card to reflect this extra. This extra each month should help us to meet our goal of being under $10000 of credit card debt by the end of the year. It will certainly help us to meet our goal of paying a minimum of $605. What this extra money will not help us with is to stop charging on our credit cards. That one is all on me!

People can say what they want about Trump and about the tax cuts, but these cuts are making a big difference in my daily life. I am able to keep more of my money in my pocket. The tax cuts are directly affecting me in my daily life. I appreciate them. I will be completely honest, I don’t understand them. Tax codes are way above my pay grade, but I do understand the deposits being made into my account. I do understand that because of the tax cuts, my paychecks are bigger.

Going forward, I plan to send all the extra monies towards debt. Hopefully it works out well for us.

Unusual Spending for February

Hello and welcome back to my “unusual spending” series…

No excuses, life got busy and budgeting and careful spending went by the wayside; but I am trying to get back on track. To that end, I want to start looking at our unusual spending each month so that I can plan better for it.

In February, The Girl has a dance dress rehearsal and a competition in Las Vegas. The Boy will be starting baseball. We bought The Kids tickets to a Warriors game for Christmas and so that happens in February too. Other than that, our month will be pretty normal: haircuts, family birthdays, and life.

The Girl has a dress rehearsal for her dance season that is beginning. We will need to figure out dinner for that night for her and me. I might throw something in the crock-pot that day and then The Husband can bring it down to us (the rehearsal is just across town) and we wouldn’t have to buy dinner that night. That’s a good idea, but it takes planning ahead! Maybe now that I’ve thought about it, I’ll be able to execute it!

We paid for the first day of our Vegas stay but will still have to pay for the remaining two nights. I have not talked to The Husband about this yet, but I want to bring a lot of food with us to Vegas. I want to bring our breakfasts, lunches and snacks; that way, we will only have to buy dinner. That will not only decrease our costs, but it will be more convenient too because we don’t know The Girl’s schedule yet and sometimes at competitions we don’t have enough time to go and get something to eat. Better still; any food we bring will come out of our grocery budget so we will have the cash for that on hand. I’m hoping to keep costs for this trip down to a minimum.

For Christmas, we bought The Kids (and us too) tickets to a Warriors game. They are uber excited, and mama is too! With their ticket, each kid got a shirt to wear to the game. I don’t plan to buy them a souvenir there, but we will need to get dinner on that night. I’m hoping we can grab something quick and inexpensive to take with us.

Our extra spending for the month will make it difficult to meet our goal of paying off a minimum of $605 in principal towards our debt. Most of what we will pay for the month will actually go towards those charges, but I’m not going to stop trying!

$27

It’s found money… that went straight to my debt. I know it’s not much, in fact, it’s only .002% of my total debt, but IT IS .002% of my total debt that is gone.

Long story short, we have a history of “finder’s keepers, losers weepers” in our family. I drove my mom’s car the other day, as she is still staying with us from her hip replacement, and I found $27. (Another long story short, we know the money was my dad’s.) I did ask my mom first and she did allow for the “finder’s keepers” rule to be played!

The day after I found the money, I was going to the bank to deposit some money and withdrawal our bi-weekly budget allotments, and that money was deposited and then immediately sent to our credit card.

We are still in massive debt, but that is one small step closer to our goal of getting out of debt.

I don’t know that we will make our goal of under $16500 or not, it’s too soon to tell. It’s also too soon to tell if we will make our goal of paying off a minimum of $605. (We will pay that much (and then some) towards debt, but we have also charged things this month.)

I need to stop charging… or at least really work on decreasing the amount of things I charge!

Still using the credit card is certainly not helping us to get out of debt!!!

$27 doesn’t sound like much, but I am happy with the decision I made to send it straight to debt!

I have some more money coming in from a couple places (hopefully in the next few weeks) and all that money, about $300, will go straight to our debt!

Debt right now

Well, what a mighty hole we’ve dug ourselves.

Now, it’s time to grab shovels (or rolled pennies) and start digging our way out.

The debt we owe our children has continued to (ever so slowly) decrease. We borrowed $1500 from each child and have paid back $650 to each of them. Our car loan has continued to decrease as well. We have a 0% loan so it’s nice to see the payment actually affect the bottom line.

Our credit card is a whole ‘nother story! We charged and we charged and we charged and now we have to face the music.

For 2018, my only resolution, or goal, is to have our credit card balance below $10000 by the end of the year. That gives me 12 months.

Here are our current debt totals:

            $17248.36         Credit Card at 15.74%

            $850                 The Boy

            $850                 The Girl

            $8925.00           Car loan at 0% - payment is $345

Our total debt stands at: $27,873.36. YIKES!

There’s really not much I can say. I have no excuse. I just need to stop buying on credit card and start digging out of debt!

I just redeemed a statement credit on our credit card to the tune of $280. That should at least cover the interest for the month. I also have $500 in payments scheduled to go towards our credit card debt. Any extra money will be funneled that way as well. I’m hoping my next statement will have a balance of $16,500 or lower. It’s going to be really close, and obviously dependent upon whether or not we charge anything this month. (*We did pay cash for our groceries last night, small win!)

In order to meet my goal of under $10000 for the year, we need to pay back a minimum of $604.03 per month, not including interest. It is a doable amount if we are diligent with our money. And in all honesty, we usually aren’t. Including interest, we need to pay back closer to $800 per month and I am a little nervous about reaching that amount. I will shoot for $604 per month first, and then go from there.

I would love to say “debt-free” by the end of the year, but I think that has been my biggest problem in the past: I haven’t been realistic about what we can do. $600 ($800 with interest) towards credit card debt is realistic.

I will try to keep track of my progress each month and find out if I am meeting my goal of paying off over $600 of debt per month and therefore on track to meet my goal of credit card debt below $10000.

I know I say this every time, but, wish us luck.

Meal Planning

In an effort to support my “decrease debt” goal, I am working very hard to manage our grocery budget. Just like most everyone else, our good budget has a tendency to get out of control. And just like everyone else, I realize that the more diligent I am with meal planning, meal preparing, and creating grocery lists, the more likely I am to stay within budget.

Going forward, I want to try to stay within our $500 (plus $70 for a produce box delivered to our house every other week) grocery budget.

This past weekend we traveled to Mariposa for a relaxing weekend with friends. I brought along about 5-7 cookbooks, a calendar, and some paper. I got down to work and meal planned for the rest of January and February.  When I got home, I went grocery shopping for all that we needed for the rest of January (minus our weekly perishables) and a lot of the meat needed for February’s meal planning.

When I meal plan, my life is so much easier. Every day, dinner time rolls around, and every day, I wonder we are going to have. When I meal plan, that isn’t the case. I just have to look at my calendar and see what to take out of the freezer or what to prepare: easy-peasy.

Our grocery trips, since meal planning, have stayed within budget, so far.

                Winco: $100.87

                Costco: $105.45

                Safeway: $14.48 (specifically for my mom)

                Savemart: $10.97 (specifically for my mom)

Our total so far is $231.77.

We received a produce box this week so we shouldn’t need too much more before our next budgeting period.

I’m hoping to meal plan for every month this year in an effort to keep our grocery budget, and my stress level, down.