Budget follow-up

I know this is all very tangentially related to our whole theme around here, but I just had to follow up on our budgeting discussion to say that I’ve started using mint.com and it is neat-o frito bandito, people. Thanks so much for the recommendations!

Being able to see credit card/bank transactions and categorize them as soon as they’re made is awesome (I think if I can commit to doing that, we might be able to be trusted to go back to using our credit/debit cards for everything!). It definitely caters to the all-electronic set. One downside is that not all banks are hooked up to it – some of our savings are at a rinky-dink local bank, and my retirement accounts are in a weird industry-specific fund, so I can’t hook up to either of those. It would be nice for the bigger picture but hardly critical for day-to-day budgeting. It took awhile to set up all our accounts and get the budget categories how I wanted them, but I think it was worth it.

I did also check out pear budget, after reading some reviews that it was easy-to-use and no-frills, and while it did seem to be both of those things, it was SO no-frills I’m not sure I’d pay $3 a month for it – you could accomplish the same thing with some very basic spreadsheet skillz yourself (mint.com is free, there is just some advertising on it – I haven’t found it annoying so far). Having to personally enter every receipt would be my downfall – the glory of mint.com is just logging in once a week or whatever and categorizing any transactions, many of which will automatically show up in the correct category anyway all by themselves! Oh, wonder of wonders!

OMG Daycare (Or, experiments in budgeting and cash)

While I was aware that daycare would be expensive, and having a baby would cost money and all, it really did not completely sink in until I started looking at daycare options a few months before the little mister man arrived. Realizing that there was going to be a new $700 line item in our (nonexistent in that we don’t really have a careful one) monthly budget is a major kick in the pants to get this mess under control to avoid disaster! (If your daycare costs way, way more than that, please don’t hate me. If it costs way, way less, please don’t tell me.)

As I was prattling on to Olivemom about this and what I was planning on doing, she suggested it might be a good blog topic…another tangentially related flavor of our “simple green clinical trials.” So here it is! Assuming I don’t completely crash and burn and declare it’s all hopeless, Olivemom might even come along for the ride in a few months!

Envelope System: I picked up on this from the thrifty-mommy-blog world, but apparently it is quite popular all around and a big part of this financial guru I’d never heard of before‘s plan (Handy detailed overviews here, here and here!). The idea is simple – identify your monthly budget, and use only cash (in categories where it is reasonable to do so, like groceries, gas, personal care, household items, entertainment). Put those amounts in an envelope at the beginning of the month, and that’s what you’ve got. This will be a big change for us, as for several years we have used credit cards like cash for basically everything (the points! the POINTS!!!). And while I do love my cashback bonus, I don’t love how easy this makes it to lose track of what you are spending.

Sinking Funds Strategy: The other thing I’m planning to do is start a separate account for quarterly and annual expenses.  I calculated out the monthly cost for them all and will move that set amount into a separate account every month instead of just being somewhat surprised when the bill arrives and assuming we just have enough sitting in our checking account to cover it. SimpleMom has a great description of her method for this!

General Budget Overhaul: A central part of both of the above items is just doing a general budget review and overhaul. What on earth are we spending all our money on? We have REALLY been digging into it – not just the typical big categories, but really fishing through the file cabinet to make sure we’re capturing ALL the quarterly, annual and periodic expenses and factoring those into our monthly budget. Along the way, we have even identified a couple to easily cut back on. Whee!

A warning, though – this can be a pain in the butt as you finally make yourself do things like get new quotes on car insurance for the first time in ten years and downgrade your AAA membership and call such-and-such company to claim the $3 a month discount you’ve been eligible for the past year but just never bothered to call about. I wouldn’t know anything about that, as obviously I would never procrastinate in such a fashion.

While this all seems a bit overwhelming (so far in a good, fired-up-to-dominate-this way), I am hopeful it will end up helping us commit to living more simply (nothing like having a finite amount of cash in an envelope to help us not buy crap we don’t need and think hard about purchases!) and hopefully help free up some money to even spend more on things we care about, give, and save.

Does anyone else use cash-only or the sinking funds method? Any tips’n'tricks, experiences, or inspiring tales out there? I am thinking it will probably take a few months of tinkering both on the amounts and the method.

Change is not simple.

The end of last week was a bit discouraging for me. I ran into simultaneous setbacks with THREE of my homemade endeavors. Combined with a particularly crazy week of trying to balance work and family (and a child who took all her naps at the sitter’s, giving Mommy no personal time whatsoever), I was feeling rather hopeless about everything. It reminded me that while a lot of this stuff seems and sounds like it should be so easy, it’s just really freaking hard, in the middle of everything else life requires, to change habits and replace systems that have been working for you just fine for years.

And I know, you’re all dying to hear what went wrong for me this time (and bask in the schadenfreude!). Here’s my list of complaints:

1. My dishwasher detergent is not nearly as effective as I’d like it to be–and it’s going to need to work really well if I want to stop my bad habit of pre-washing dishes.
2. I don’t know what happened, but after over a month of uneventful, generally successful use, my baking soda shampoo just started SUCKING. Seriously, we’re talking hair coated with I-don’t-know-what and just greasy and dirty-feeling immediately after every shower.
3. And to top it all off, under my baking soda toothpaste regime, my gums started bleeding. Awesome.

Now, I am pretty certain each of these things has a pretty easy fix–or at least a clear next step. For instance, I know I need to get washing soda for the dishwasher to replace the baking soda. As for the shampoo, I think I just need to tinker with my baking soda amounts and washing frequency–as well as add in some weekly deep conditioning treatments or alternative washes. And regarding my teeth, I KNOW my problem is that I was brushing way too hard–I’ve always struggled with that anyway, and somehow between my excitement at making my teeth feel REALLY clean and my desire to compensate for the lack of suds with more elbow grease, I totally stressed out my poor little gums.

But really, who can manage all this tinkering at once while also keeping the house running and showing up for work in a semi-timely fashion? My plan of attack is to go back and take them one by one again. I’ll start with the dishwasher, then the teeth, and save the shampoo for last since that’s clearly going to be the most difficult (and cause the most stress because if it’s 8:30 and you should have left the house 15 minutes ago and your husband is now also late to work and your hair is still a greasy mess, you’re basically screwed).

My point here is not to discourage you from trying these things yourself, but just to remind us that it’s not always completely forward progress and not every change works for everyone. But that doesn’t mean I should feel discouraged about the overall project. Some changes turn out to be as simple as they look! Other changes will have to wait until I have the time and energy to make them really work for me. But that’s okay! I’m still headed (slowly) in the right direction, and that’s really enough! (Really!)

Better Late than Never: Organic vs. Local Produce Edition

Yes, I’ve decided I need to make an actual name for posts that arrive a month (or two) behind schedule. Because I can’t promise that it won’t happen often. But once given an assignment, I ALWAYS deliver! As my most loyal readers will recall, back in February I set us off on a quest to find out “the truth” behind many pieces of environmental conventional wisdom. In March we discovered that conventional cotton sucks. In April I started to get overwhelmed and totally dropped the ball. So here is APRIL’s wonk-fix. (And just because I went MIA in May does NOT mean you won’t get a May topic. I’ll crank that out next week, and then we’ll be back on schedule for June. See tomorrow’s post for my first-ever reader-poll in which YOU get to decide May’s topic! (Who says you can’t rewrite history?))

So, produce. I’ll be straightforward. It’s complicated. It seems that when considering what kind of fresh food to buy from where, there are at least SIX major and often competing factors that matter:

1. Your family’s health (i.e. how pesticide-laden is this?)
2. The Earth’s health (i.e. how many ecosystems are pesticide-laden and how much carbon was burned so that I could eat this?)
3. The health of the people who did the work to bring this to you (i.e. how many migrant farm workers will get cancer in twenty years because of their cumulative direct-pesticide exposure and in any case can’t feed their own families right now because they aren’t being paid a living wage?)
4. Your community’s health (i.e. am I supporting the growth of my local economy?)
5. Our overall food system’s health (i.e. is this purchase enabling the worst of agribusiness–see numbers 1-4?)
6. The food’s taste (i.e. something picked this morning is bound to be more delicious than something picked last week, dipped in preservatives, and shipped across an ocean.)

All of these factors are important and the questions related to them worthy. Every person will probably choose a slightly different ranking based on what is most important to them. (By the way, I listed them in no particular order–but then went back and tried to re-rank them in order of importance to me and found it was REALLY difficult, so just left them in their no particular order for now.)

I’m going to start with the obvious: The BEST choice is locally and sustainably-grown organic (maybe from your own backyard or maybe from a small, worker-owned/co-operative farm–oh, if only!!).

But of course we’re having this discussion because that is not realistic for most people (especially here on the east coast–where apparently the humidity makes it extra hard to grow organically and keep off bacteria and fungi).

So what’s the next best choice?

Well, it all depends on what is important to you…and that decision can be maddeningly complex–so much so that I can’t even begin to lay it all out in clear step-by-step terms that would apply to everyone equally. Let’s walk through my own train of thought on all this and see where I end up.

1) Local AND sustainable is better than organic BUT from 3,000 miles away and/or a giant factory farm.

I belong to a CSA (that pic up top is the bounty of last week’s harvest). Every other week for the spring/summer/fall and once a month through the winter I get to go pick up extremely fresh, locally-grown produce and dairy products. In this instance, it’s nice to let other responsible, like-minded people make the where-to-buy decision for me. Their farm is not technically organic and neither is the food they source from local farms, but I believe them when they say they seek out sustainable, responsible partners. I guess it’s kind of a “semi-organic-in-spirit” if not “in-certified-USDA” kinda thing. Which frankly, gives me a lot more reassurance than, say, this kind of certification. In the end, I know that I’m supporting the types of businesses we need more of in this world, and lending momentum to a movement that is of vital importance to the health of my community and the local environment.

When it’s not my week to pick up the CSA share, I can always hit up one of many farmers’ markets around the city to the same effect.

2) Local (from a responsible farm) AND (by definition) in season is better than organic BUT shipped from down south so that you can have your tomatoes year-round.

This is one I’d like to get better at. But because we have come to expect (nay, demand!) that we can get ANYTHING at the grocery at ANY time of year, it is going to require a lifestyle shift on my part that will slowly evolve over the next ten years or so. In some ways I actually look forward to the journey, because I do think it will add to that feeling we all love in temperate climates that “every season is unique and special” (and hey, in 20 years when winter here amounts to like, a month of semi-chilly drizzle, we can probably use all the added ambiance we can get–oh, but wait, when that’s the case I’ll be able to get my tomatoes year-round here, too. SNAP!). In any case, right now you can pry Li’l Miss’s bananas out of her cold, dead hands–thus, it will be a work-in-progress for all of us.

3) If it’s on the dirty-dozen list, organic might very well be better than local, especially if you eat it a lot.

When I think about how many strawberries and blueberries my child eats per day, and how many apples I eat in a week, it just seems to make sense to go with organic when it comes to these guys. Especially when I see that glaring “80% reduction in exposure to pesticides” statistic–feels like a no-brainer when presented in terms that stark. And maybe for the items on the dirty dozen list where organic is hard to find or too expensive or only grown in New Zealand, I need to think about simply skipping them most of the time.

And hmm…I might have just sort of covered most of my bases there! My main rules of thumb then would be:

• Go local (and ideally sustainable) whenever possible (and think about skipping it if it’s not in season near you). Support the small farms/farmers’ markets in your neighborhood over the big chains.

• Go organic when you’re dealing frequently with a member of the dirty dozen.

• If it’s something you’re not willing to give up, but will never be available locally (for us that would include bananas and avocados at the moment), might as well go organic when price allows.

After all that is it really so simple? C’mon guys, time to add your ifs, ands, or buts to the mix!

Recovery from Slow Death by Rubber Duck

I’ve finally gotten around to reading this book recommended by Olivemom awhile back (indeed, the book that kind of kicked off our chemical-reducing adventures!) and it was a good, if scary, read. The big schtick of the book is that the authors attempted to reduce/control and subsequently increase the levels of many chemicals in their own bodies through planned exposure. In most cases, the results were pretty striking, showing that everyday exposure to particular chemicals was quickly and significantly reflected in their blood and urine tests. Early on I was seized by the intense desire to sell our house, buy a few acres of land as far away from civilization as possible, and live as subsistence-farming off-the-grid hermits. That said, there is overall an optimistic tone to the book – that it is entirely possible to reduce our exposure to these things, pervasive as they are (on a pessimistic day, I can still find it all sort of fruitless, but hey, I’m being glass-half-full here).

Anyhoo, in thinking about that, and thinking through the list of things I’ve slowly been replacing and eliminating from our household over the last few months, I was kind of inspired too. It really isn’t THAT hard to do without or find substitutes for many chemical-y personal care and household products, especially if you just sort of hack away at it slowly. And conveniently, eliminating some things entirely or replacing others with cheap products like witch hazel, peroxide, baking soda, Borax, vinegar, and plain ol’ basic soap has helped me feel less stingy about occasionally forking over more for the better versions of the products that don’t have simple alternatives or that I just can’t part with.

While it’s easy to still get caught up in being petrified that even my organic beans are probably packaged in a BPA-lined can (so are all canned sodas too, BTW. Apparently pretty much everything in a can is. Awesome! Canned beans are such a staple of our diet I’m considering starting to buy organic dried beans, cooking them in bulk and freezing them. I will feel seriously hardcore if I manage to do that!), and all the new-ish furniture and carpeting in our house has been emitting toxic fumes that surely made their way down the new little one’s umbilical cord (ugh, I find all the statistics about how even newborns have all these chemicals in their bodies already the most depressing), it’s still not hopeless! As we work on big changes to end the use of some of these chemicals – the removal of BPA from baby bottles and items is a great example – we can work in smaller ways in our own households.

So, that’s just a little “chin up, tiger!” to us all! It’s not totally impossible to eliminate a lot of products from our lives, and it doesn’t always have to cost an arm and a leg to do it. In fact, it may well save some money.

Ask me again tomorrow and I’ll probably be incredibly depressed and pessimistic, but for today – yay baby steps!

Thou Shalt Have a Giant Baby Car

Does adding one infant to our lives REALLY require that we upgrade from a midsize sedan to a Chevy Tahoe?

I’m curious about this phenomenon. My normal car is a compact, so I get that a really small car would feel cramped for the typical car-dependent suburban-ish lifestyle. But does it really require a ginormous SUV? I’ve noticed this trend among family and friends: one baby = omg we need a family car. Family car = giant SUV. Typical SUV mileage for models like Explorers, Suburbans, etc is in the 14-16 city/19-21 highway range.

From a simple-green perspective, this just seems very, very unnecessary to me (and I’m not even all that crunchy!). What has me brewing on this is that Mr. Larms wants a truck something FIERCE. No, he is not a farmer or contractor. His response to my concern that it would be a serious pain in the butt to have one vehicle that couldn’t hold the carseat was to half-seriously suggest that he get a BIGGER truck with second row seating.  Well, gee. Why didn’t I think of that?!?

The thought that we could end up one of these giant-car families with a unnecessary-truck-drivin’-dad and SUV-drivin’-mom – because I’d been thinking my next vehicle (since both are coming up on needing replacement in the not-too-distant future) might be like a small SUV crossover type deal, to be our family car – strikes terror into my heart. I’d be so guilt-ridden I’m sure my next car would end up being a moped. Okay, probably more like a Prius.

I’m sad to say that my first gut reaction to the thought of me having another small-ish car was “Wah! I need something BIGGER. I’m a MOM. Gots a BABY to tote!”

But then I got to thinking, well, why not? Would it really kill me to be a baby-hauling suburban-ish mom with a small-ish/midsize sedan? Do we really take so many lengthy car trips that a smaller family car would just be the end of the world? Nope. It would be just fine, and since we are already used to driving smaller cars and not gigantic tanks, would not be much of a change.

Maybe this is just a general complaint about how slowly even my own attitudes are to change, how slowly we adjust to new norms even when I’m putting effort into thinking more about things like this. All the progress we have seen in the last few years, the reduction in the popularity of monster SUVs (although mostly replaced with still-not-hugely-efficient smaller ones), expansion of hybrid vehicles, etc. isn’t even beginning to REALLY challenge the actual core issue that a huge swath of the country is completely and utterly car-dependent. Notice that my conundrum wasn’t about going down to one car, or no cars, it is just a question of how grossly fuel-inefficient the two cars we have will be.

I think part of the whole “simple green” thing for me is trying to think through wants vs. needs, especially perceived needs vs. real needs. Maybe maybe we’d feel less pressure to scrimp on other things if we didn’t “need” a huge family vehicle – both more expensive to buy AND operate. Shopping encourages us to focus on the little deal – 2-liters of Coke on sale for 99 cents! Such-and-such unnecessary cleaning product is 50 cents off this week! – but I think all too often we (myself definitely included) ignore many of the much bigger things draining our family budgets.

Talk about rambling! I’m still torn about the car plans. Any rants or raves about recent models or thoughts about how much a new family really needs a substantially bigger vehicle from more experienced parents would be much appreciated!

Why the urban life…

I figured it’s about time that I go into a bit of detail about why the urban life goes hand in hand with my “simple” and “green” themes. I will preface this by saying that I KNOW that not everyone will see the benefits I list in the same light I do and also that I AM NOT deliberately trying to cast aspersions on suburban living (though it may seem like it since the point of this post is to point out the advantages of the city–next I’ll do a post of the disadvantages, k?). There are many great things about both, and a person can be simple and green and happy in either place. I grew up in the suburbs and would say I pretty much had the perfect childhood. I just happen to love the city now–and love it so much that I have to share why!

1. I have nearly no outdoor maintenance. This is simple because, obviously, my husband and I just have to sweep a 10×8 ft. patio from time to time and try to remember to water the flower boxes out front. This is green because we do not have to use any water to keep a big lawn alive!

2. It costs almost nothing to heat/air condition our house. We live in a row home–which means the two long sides of our house are attached to the homes next to us–which means only the front, back, and flat roof are true outside walls. We get away with turning our heat and air on much later in the seasons than you’d expect, and even once they’re on, the bills just don’t skyrocket.

3. We only have one car. I was so happy the day we downsized to one! No more second insurance payment, no more buying gas, and no more taking it to the shop. Now I walk or take the bus/subway/train everywhere. Is it a little annoying from time to time that I can’t always get to a place as fast as I want or escape the elements when they catch me unawares? Yes, but I think the trade-off is worth it in saved money, saved carbon, and a whole lot of automatically built-in exercise for me to boot.

4. On the car note, I love the fact that I am forced to do virtually no baby-schlepping in and out of hot cars to run errands. I pop her in the stroller or Ergo and away we go by foot–no trying to keep her happy behind me while we’re sitting at endless stoplights, no finding parking and loading her in/out/in/out of different carts and strollers and carriers. And again, bonus that we’re not dumping lots of extra pollution in the air being in the car all afternoon. (And maybe a bonus to our general safety that we are in a car so infrequently–if you follow the news AT ALL it’s hard not to be convinced that you’re about to be mowed down at every moment by a crazed text-addicted 20-something! You doubt me?–See this vid at minute 2:15!)

5. The people-watching is amazing. This has nothing to do with the environment (unless you want to make an argument that too much homogeneity crushes the soul), but man, can you “simply” entertain a baby by parking her stroller at a good vantage point in a city square and just letting her watch the ridiculous variety of people passing by. The perfect “zone out” activity for that 6-7 pm hour before bed! (Which does remind me of another related advantage–that you can take about 10 quick walks per day in the city and have them all be to completely different genres of destinations even though you’re staying in the same 5 square block radius–really helps when you’re at that “I’m completely bored with my infant who can’t really do stuff yet but I don’t want to admit it to anyone lest they judge me” phase.) Of course, you can’t choose which types of people walk by, which can really be a burn sometimes.

All right, I know there are more, but that’s a good start for one night. And I will post a rant at some point about all the things that piss me off about the city. Because there are plenty of those, too. But actually I think I already covered the biggest one a minute ago.

Keep it simple, stupid!

I am a simple lady. Although in recent years I have given in and started paying more than $10 for my haircuts, and I have tried to invest more time in accessorizing according to the Friday night admonishments I receive from Stacy and Clinton (my kicky Kate Spade purse has pink lining, people!), I still can be found without makeup many days of the week and I can’t ever seem to keep more than one pair of jeans in the house that I actually feel comfortable wearing in public.

I tell you this so that you have some context when I try to explain how woefully unprepared I was three years ago when I passed from the uncomplicated, carefree bliss of single womanhood into the mystical, surprisingly intractable social construct that is WEDDING PLANNING. When I had bothered to envision this momentous step of my life at all, I assumed it would go like most things in my world. My husband-to-be and I would keep it simple, map out some general plans, make a few phone calls, and make it happen. Little did I know that weddings are this living, breathing entity with a mind of their own, and that if you are ill-prepared or not paying attention (or are an overwhelmed and exhausted inner-city teacher), your low-key celebration can turn into a recipe for bridezilla mania!

This is not to say that I don’t now appreciate having a Kitchen-Aid handy and all, it’s just that if I could have a do-over, I would have invested more time and vigilance into ensuring that the festivities bucked more of the typical “wedding” stereotypes and reflected more clearly a few of my own core values. But you can’t have a do-over (well, not if you’re really into your current husband, which I am). What I realized I DID have, however, was another chance with the next BIG event in the average woman’s life—the arrival of the first baby.

This time I would be prepared! I would take charge and preemptively simplify at every step possible. I started by trading my high-stress 60-hour-per-week teaching job for some low-stress part-time desk-work (like, is this even WORK?). Then I decided the next step would be avoiding at all costs having a baby shower that would drown me and my growing belly in the tell-tale piles of boxes, bows and ribbons that to me scream, “AMERICAN BABIES MUST HAVE ONE OF EVERYTHING IN THE BABIES-R-US STORE IF THEY ARE TO SURVIVE IN A WORLD OF UNCERTAINTY! WE WILL SHIELD THEM FROM THE CHAOS BY MAKING SURE THEY ARE SURROUNDED BY AS MANY TOP-OF-THE-LINE PLASTIC PRODUCTS AS POSSIBLE!”

Thus it was that when I became pregnant, I began announcing EARLY and OFTEN to anyone who was listening or just had the unfortunate luck to be within earshot that I would only be accepting reused and recycled items as baby gifts. To ensure that my wishes were actually followed and that my friends and family didn’t think I was just making idle threats, I made a website explaining as much that could also double as a bootleg “registry” for said used items.

Nearly ten months later, and with everything ready for the new baby, I can proudly say the sum total of “brand new” supplies in my house would probably fit inside two grocery bags. Absolutely everything else has been handed-down, re-gifted, bought at a thrift or consignment store, or lent to us by friends who jumped at the chance to free up storage in their house until their next newborn comes along.

But gathering supplies was just the beginning! Now I’ve got a living, breathing, pooping-machine whose sole purpose on this earth right now seems to be generating dirty clothes and diapers faster than I can even get them off her little body. (Question: how can something so tiny emit so many fluids simultaneously out of so many orifices?!)

So, welcome to my blog, a chronicle of a first-time mom’s part-time pursuit to find cheap, simple ways to lighten her adorable offspring’s imprint on the world.