Monday, January 7, 2019

Clothes Repairs

Blessing Darlings!

As I mentioned in the last blog post - while our income is finally up and stabilized, we still need to be frugal/cheap.  One way we're doing this is to keep our clothes wearable as long as possible.  This means, amongst other things, that we .... okay, *I* need to do clothes repairs.

Therefore one of the purchases I've already made this year was material to use to patch clothes with.  The least expensive way I've found to be sure that I have a variety of colors of material for this is to buy pre-packaged 1/2 yard swatches of material at Walmart.  The brand is Waverly.  Solid colors are 97 cents before tax.  Since most repairs don't take a lot of material, one package per color lasts me at least a year, except for the black one.  I use a LOT of that to repair my work clothes.

So for $2 of material, and maybe $1 of thread, and I can save at least $10 that I'd have spent on new work clothes every year.  I probably save even more than that - repair one pair of pants and I save $15.  The shirts are 'only' $3 each, but if I only have to replace two instead of 5 a year, I save another $9.  By repairing 3 shirts the other night at work, I more than paid back the investment I made in material.

Yes, I repaired my work shirts at work.  It very was a slow night.  It was, arguably, work related.  My boss and the supervisor on duty were aware of what I was doing.  They may or may not be as hands-off if I repair other clothes at work.

By doing these repairs, I also reduce the amount of garbage I create, and, since most of my clothes are cheap cotton - reducing buying more of them reduces the amount of pesticides used and saves a lot of water use (growing cotton uses a HUGE amount of pesticides and a large amount of water.)

Oh - I don't buy the material in either white or tan.  THOSE colors of cotton I have plenty of, from saving salvageable parts of my husbands tan/khaki pants, and use them to repair his NEWER pants that need patches.  And those pants are way more $$$ than my cheap pants.

Reduce, repair, re-use, recycle!

Frondly, Fern

Friday, January 4, 2019

It's a New Year!

Blessings Darlings!

Yup, a new year.  New chances.  Mostly the same old bills.

Here there has been a change - after months of complications, the Chubby Hubby is now getting Social Security benefits.  He's in his 70's - so since starting it after turning 70 he's getting a monthly deposit that looks HUGE in our eyes.  Between that and my job all of our 'normal' monthly bills will be able to be paid without panic ... for the first time since 1991 (when he left his job with regular paychecks to start his own business.) 

How do I know that we'll be able to pay all regular bills?  Because I made a budget, of course.  We all know that we should know what our monthly regular bills are, but making budgets out of those figures can be scary.  It can show what we're doing wrong (we, for example, are spending WAY too much of our income on rent so CH has space for his business.) 

So, yeah, go forth and see what you spend on stuff last year, so you know at least what minimums you'll be spending this year.

I'm sure that we'll be tweaking this budget.  It doesn't have 'correct' amounts for things like health insurance/meds in it since Bob will be switching to Medicare and paying for that and some of the additional plans for that, and our higher income has me no longer eligible for Medicaid so I'll be paying health insurance and higher medicine and doctor visit copays.

Still, it's a start.

The current budget doesn't have room for savings, tho', and we need to get that in order.  At one point last month our savings account had only $38 in it!  Remember - that's the account that would also be  bail money for some of you who read this regularly, so some of y'all have a vested interest in us having cash in that account!

So our cheapness .... uh ... frugality is going to continue, along with refining what we really spend. 

And, seriously - why is propane still so expensive now that oil prices have dropped?  We finally we able to get the propane tank filled today, and it's going to cost around $950!  What's up with that?

At any rate, this is what we're starting our year with.

Frondly, Fern.