Life in a temporarily frozen land
A big winter storm raced through the area last night. I went to bed around 11:00 and it was raining a little bit. By 5:30am we had received about 5 inches of snow!
Last year it snowed a little bit, but it wasn’t enough (or maybe not cold enough) for any of it to stick. Last night it straight up dumped on us. Really cool site to wake up to this morning, considering I’m a west coaster and haven’t spent a lot of time around this white fluffy goodness.
I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, so I got outside and built a quick snowman. My skills aren’t too great, and it took a little longer than I’d hoped to build something pretty basic. I’m sure my neighbors were confused why a 33 year old grown ass man was up at 6am building a snow man.
I was mostly interested in getting a photo op with my kid out by it. She was born in February of 2017, and when she was a month old she got her first light snowfall. There was no way for her to know what the hell was going on at the time so I didn’t want to miss this opportunity to let her see some snow.
She still wasn’t too interested in it, and it was pretty cold. So my efforts were mostly wasted.
In preparation for the storm, I built some basic hoop houses for our garden and covered the plants with some old bed sheets. It’s not the best way to insulate, but on short notice it was the best I could do to keep the frozen rain and snow off of the plants. Our sugar snap and snow peas have just about had it, I think. I think maybe we planted too many and didn’t give them enough space. They grew like weeds and had just started to make some peas before we had to leave on vacation for the holidays.
After a week without water the peas were not looking great. Our bok choy also bolted. It was really bad timing to not water for more than a week and have a dramatic temperature drop here. Most of our plants are pretty cold hardy, but I think it was just too much of a shock at once.
Anyway, the hoop houses worked very well. The sheets were frozen solid this morning, but ice is very insulating, which means when the sheets froze in place, they actually did an awesome job of protecting the plants underneath.
We have some plants in the holes of the cinder blocks that border the garden. Some of those weren’t covered as well, and I think they probably didn’t make it. Thankfully they aren’t the bulk of our plantings; mostly some extra attempts at radishes, turnips and beets, which for some reason didn’t do so well in the main garden.
Taking the sheets off this morning was quite a challenge and it’s going to be difficult to get them back on for tonight’s overnight freeze again.
I think I’ve learned a valuable lesson about winter gardening. I hadn’t prepare well enough for the cold, and my makeshift ways of protecting and watering the plants are pretty time consuming.
Grocery Budget
Before the storm hit we decide to get our grocery shopping out of the way. Our small town doesn’t respond well to cold storms. Roads don’t get salted usually, and it becomes very dangerous to get out there and drive around after a cold storm like this.
While we were shopping, I usually make a mental estimate of what our expenses for that trip are going to be. We get some basics fruits and vegetables, restock on larger items and try to stay on the outside aisles of the store in order to avoid some of the less healthy choices.
With my wife, daughter and I to feed, we usually try to keep our weekly food expenses around $150. If it’s a major restocking, then usually we aim for $200. This sounds like a lot (and it is), but of the few things worth splurging on, I think nutrition is one of the most important. $400-$500 per month in groceries isn’t grotesque but it could be better.
When we were still going hard on our loan debt, we were doing some intense couponing. I used various apps including Receipt Hog, iBotta, Raise, Samsung Pay and the respective discount apps for whatever store we happened to be shopping it — usually WalMart, since it’s what’s available here.
Over a year of couponing, I’d say we saved probably $700 or $800. We tracked it for a while, but the time involved with keeping account of every penny seemed like it was not a value added process to our day-to-day.
Our shopping process looked like this:
Pre-Game
- Make a list of needs and wants. We already would have our mental $150 budget in mind.
- Scope out the weekly ads of whatever place we were going to
- Make sure our credit card(s) were loaded into that store’s payment app if they had one, or with Samsung Pay to get double rewards on our card.
- Look on Raise or Gift Card Granny to see if there are any discounted gift cards we can use. Even 1 or 2% is helpful and usually available. Usually we will buy the gift card with Samsung Pay to earn rewards on our credit or debit card, and then use the card on the store’s app and potentially earn extra rewards that way. We’ve gotten lucky at times and score 50% discounts or more.
- Head to the store
Game Time
- At the store we stick to our plan as much as possible. Stores are designed to make people impulsive. Companies put hundreds of thousands of dollars into store design and layout which is supposed to make it easy to buy things you didn’t necessarily want or need.
- We stay to the outside aisles. This makes sure we’re buying vegetables, fruits and meets rather than boxed junk. We try to avoid anything with a printed nutrition label as a general rule, but obviously that can’t be 100% of the time. By buying perishable items, it also encourages us to eat in moderation and also to eat everything we buy so as not to be wasteful.
- We go down our list as quickly as possible, we buy from clearance when it’s appropriate, and we clip coupons as we go and as they become available.
- At the register we pay with a gift card if we managed to get one. After the gift card, we pay the remaining balance through Samsung Pay or the store’s app, which often offers some kind of reward for using it. Apple pay/Android pay/etc. are also useful, but I’ve had the most success at the register using Samsung.
- Ignore the line that forms behind you while you penny pinch. If you offered any of the frustrated people behind you the $700 you saved annually up front, they wouldn’t complain.
- Get out as fast as you can before you get tempted to buy something you didn’t need. The WalMart here has a Subway very strategically placed right by the exit. We’ve been seduced by it multiple times when we weren’t even hungry, and after just spending $150 on food!! Fight it.
Post-Game
- Once we get home, we scan the receipt’s QR code into the WalMart Savings Catch app. It checks local stores for better deals and credits you with the difference. It’s usually not a lot, but I’d say at least $30-$50 of our savings each year come from that.
- The most tedious part of this process is using IBotta. You go line-by-line down the receipt, searching for each item we bought in the IBotta app. IBotta has lots of coupons and discounts built in. We’ve saved $100+ using it. Let’s say they have a discount on Bell Peppers. You find bell peppers on your receipt, scan the receipt using the app, and redeem the reward. You can cash out at $10.
- Lastly, we scan our receipts into Receipt Hog. It’s a goofy app that gives you points for each receipt scanned… whether it’s from shopping, dining out, groceries, etc. After enough points, you can redeem them for cash or sweepstakes, etc. Probably $50 of our savings come from Receipt Hog, which is a decent return on investment considering the time spent.
So in total we probably get about $200 in savings from apps on our phones. Probably another $300 on coupons and clippings from weekly sales and well-timed purchases. And probably another $100 to $200 in Raise discounts.
As savings trickle in, it’s easy to get discouraged because most of the money earned is actually money not spent. If you think of it this way, you’ll get discouraged too. Think of every penny saved as a penny earned. If you have time to track your savings, then at the end of the year you’ll be amazed!
Our savings and credits pay for at least a whole month’s worth of food for our entire family. That’s pretty awesome.
What kind of couponing and shopping tricks have you used, and what successes have you had with them?