My dad, fishing on Sunday at a lake near his house

We did have one problem though, and I wondered what you would have done about it. Some of us kids took my dad to a Brazilian steakhouse  in Downer’s Grove for dinner on Saturday to enjoy copious amounts of meat. To give you an idea of the costs, the food was $42 per plate. That gives you unlimited access to a big salad bar, 15 types of meats, and some side items. This was an “expensive” restaurant for our family, but we were all pretty excited to splurge on my dad. Drinks were not included with the price. 

As we ordered drinks from the waiter, we were considering getting a bottle of wine. While the waiter was standing there, I asked about three different bottles, all priced under $30. My dad wasn’t sure about the choices I picked (a pinot noir, a malbec, and a French red). He explained to the waiter that he wanted something sweet, and explained that he really loves sangria (which they had on the menu). The waiter said something along the lines of, “I have a sweet red wine that I think you will enjoy. It’s (insert name here).”  He was sort of difficult to understand through a thick accent.

I asked, “Is it your house wine?”

He said it was not, the house wine wasn’t sweet.

He never pointed it out his recommendation on the menu, but since he had seen the prices of the bottles I was considering and I asked about the house wine, I just assumed that his suggestion was on the same price point.

The wine came out and I thought it was good. We all had some. We actually left a little on the table because not everyone loved it.

Then the bill came: it was a $126 bottle of wine.

I was shocked.

But I didn’t ask about it because I thought it was my fault for not asking the price. After all, we drank the wine. It was nearly done by the time we got the bill. My family wanted me to ask about the price, but I was insistent that we didn’t because I didn’t want to cause a stink on a special occasion, and also because we consumed the wine, so there didn’t appear to be much the restaurant could do. So we just paid it and left.

Now, after a nice, relaxing weekend, I’m sitting here kicking myself. I should have made sure the waiter charged us for the right bottle. I shouldn’t have been embarrassed to question the bill. Had it been a special craft beer, we would have been very savvy consumers and known the price right away. Unfortunately, we’re not wine connoisseurs.  We had no idea whether that bottle retails for $20 or $200 (since it wasn’t one of the wines I normally buy). I should have made the waiter explain why he recommended such a higher-priced wine than a house wine with no warning. I feel totally fleeced by that guy.

In the future I will always ask for the price of a bottle of wine before I buy.  I’m thinking of calling the restaurant and asking them what the bottle was so I can make sure they charged us correctly.

So, readers, what would you have done differently in my situation?

The post Burned by the price of wine. What would you have done? appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

Well, I got hungry. And I opened — and finished — this, all 500 and some odd calories of it:



It was supposed to be my “extra munchies” for the week. It lasted one day. Oops.

Let’s discuss how much I ate today.

Breakfast
Instant g-f oatmeal plus banana
Coffee with almond milk

Snack
Half a bag of Pirate’s Booty

Lunch
Tuna sandwich on g-f bread, with a slice of cheddar cheese
Apple
Fage 2% blueberry yogurt
The other half of the bag of Pirate’s Booty
HonestTea honey green tea bottle

3:00 Snack
Kind bar (fruit and nut)

It’s 5:00 and I’m hungry snack
The rest of the tuna salad that was supposed to be a side with lunch later this week (about 2 Tbsp. full)
2 dried dates
LaCroix

Somewhere in there I chugged a bunch of water too.

The good news is that I brought all this food with me today so at least there was no spontaneous spending today. Yay! The bad news is that some of it was supposed to last a little longer.

I think I need to start eating a breakfast with more protein to get me through the day so I don’t wolf down a bunch of air-puffed carbs. Unfortunately I already shopped for the whole week, and oatmeal was the breakfast I chose. Maybe I’ll just hard boil some eggs and add one of those, or toss some almonds in my bag for the morning to tide me over a little better. I really want to avoid unnecessary trips to the cafe down here. Everything is so much more expensive! But the calories in/calories out equation is difficult to figure out when you’re upping your training time every week.

I’ll figure it out, eventually.

All that said, I am still STARVING. I’m going to go home and eat an avocado for a snack before dinner. And then snarf down a lot of dinner before I swim tonight. And maybe some sea salt caramels. And anything else edible in my line of sight….

The post The Hungries are Messing with My Budget! appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

I cook pretty much everything at higher temperatures than that. Now I’m stuck with a jar of coconut oil I’m not sure how to use.

I consulted Pinterest and it seems like a lot of people use it for baking, or for non-food uses such as natural lotions. This blogger has helpfully compiled 101 uses for coconut oil; though I’m not sure all the uses are applicable to me (several for babies), some appear time-consuming (homemade deodorant bars), and a lot of them seem like a stretch (how can something serve as a tanning oil and a sunscreen at the same time?). I think I can probably try some of the simple beauty uses, like lip balm, overnight moisturizer, hair product, hand creme, but I really intended to use it for cooking since it sounded so delicious.

Are any of you cooking with coconut oil? Help me figure out the best, most convenient, and easy ways to use up my coconut oil!

The post How to use coconut oil? appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

So, I meal planned, shopped, and baked this weekend,  and ate a fair amount of gluten-filled meals (because they will be my last for a while). While shopping, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of my sauces and dips from Trader Joe’s were already gluten free. (The folks at Trader Joe’s were just awesome on my first GF shopping trip!) And I baked a loaf of banana bread last night that smelled AMAZING while I was cooking it. I’m realizing that my diet really won’t be that drastically different than what I normally eat; I’ll just have to make some substitutions for breads and pastas, and I won’t be eating out as much. 

The budget implication.
I kept hearing about how expensive GF foods are, and I can see that they are certainly pricier than items generally found on sale at, say Aldi or Jewel. But I was already shopping at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, so the price difference per item isn’t really that great — just a few cents here and there per item. I will have to look at receipts for the month, but I’m pretty sure that any price increase on the GF foods will be offset by less dollars spent eating out and visiting local bars.

Finding support
There’s good news here, I already have a great built-in support network since so many of my family members are starting to go gluten-free. I’ve already put some of their shopping tips to good use and plan to use more of their lifestyle, cooking, and budgeting tips during this experiment. I’ve been thrilled to see how many resources are available online, too. There are tons of recipes out there!

I hope I come out of this experiment feeling better. At the very least, the next few weeks will be interesting. I’ll keep you all posted on how it goes.

The post Gluten Free, Day 1 appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

Breakfast

• Home brewed coffee made from a local roaster (Blue Max in Forest Park). I would estimate this at about 40 cents per 16 oz. cup but I could be overpricing it.  Includes a shot of soy milk from my home stash.
• Whole Foods 365 Brand Instant Oatmeal packet (1): 42 cents
• 1 handful of fresh blueberries: $1 (the most expensive item in my breakfast;  you could get them cheaper frozen if you wanted)
• 1 tablespoon of raw slivered almonds: I’m estimating this at 20 cents for no particular reason. I have a bag of slivered almonds that I bought probably 3 months ago that is good until July. It’s expensive when you first buy the huge bag but they last forever and are a good protein source to put in oatmeal. If you want them even cheaper, buy whole almonds from the bulk bin and toss them in a food processor for equally awesome benefits.
• Total cost for a totally healthy breakfast (Coffee with soy, oatmeal, blueberries, and almonds): ~$2.
  

Lunch

• 1 can Amy’s Tuscan Bean and Rice soup – $3.19
• 1 apple (organic, pink lady) – 96 cents
• 1 can LaCroix – 50 cents
• 5 peanut M&M’s from my boss’ desk – free! (Ok, these are not healthy. But they are delicious.)
• Total cost for a fiber-filled lunch: $4.65

Snacks

• 2 Wasa light rye cripsbreads with 2 tablespoon of Whole Foods 365 Brand crunchy peanut butter – 50 cents??
• Hot water – free! (It’s cold here. Needed to warm up.)

Dinner

• I ate 2 girl scout cookies when I got home. Again with the not healthy, but everything in moderation is OK, right? – 60 cents?
• 1 chicken breast – locally grown, without antibiotics or steroids – $1.49
• Brown rice (paying extra for the convenience of pre-cooked) – $1.50
• Sauteed okra and peppers – $1.00
• Glass of water – free!
• Garden of Eatin’ blue corn tortilla chips and Whole Foods 365 brand salsa (hard to estimate because we buy this stuff in bulk) – 60 cents?
• Total for dinner – $5.19 (ish)

And there you have it. A healthy, mostly organic day of meals for one $12.34. There are a lot of things I could have done cheaper to get this under $10, but for my budget, I don’t need to at the moment. What’s crazy is, eating at restaurants, I can easily spend three times this amount on one meal!

One small point to make when looking at this total, I think it’s probably cheaper per person when you can buy in bulk, but when you’re cooking for one or two, so much food goes to waste. For instance, I could probably make a vat of brown rice for much cheaper but roughly half would end up in the garbage. And the same goes for soup. I am a huge fan of cooking crock pot meals, but when you make big-batch foods it seems like it ends up being just as expensive as buying canned soups only you’re eating the same thing for a week.

The other point to make is that I could probably knock a few dollars off this tab by using more Trader Joe’s products, but we were on vacation this weekend so we only had time to shop at one store this week and it happened to be Whole Foods. As you can see, we mostly get the store brand when we shop there.

Which brings me to why I created this post: most people think it costs an arm and a leg to eat healthy. But look at the lunch I ate for just $4.65 — the same price for which a lot of people eat a much less filling and less nutritious Lean Cuisine or some other artificial rubbery microwave meal. The reality is, there are a lot of brands out there that are not mainstream that are reasonably priced and don’t use artificial ingredients. I say: your food should be made of food. And looking at the menu above, I think you can see that you can get actual food for reasonable costs without breaking your bank.

As for feeding a family, I’m not sure what the comparison costs would be. If you have any insight into this, I’d love to hear it!

The post A Healthy and Cheap Day of Eating appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

Here’s my entry, mid-way through cooking.

The meat was delicious, unfortunately the tortillas I served it with weren’t heated and so the dish lost something in the translation.

The next day I made leftovers with the meat and those were fantastic!

I’m already thinking about what I can do next year.

The post What a Crock (pot) appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

In the budgeting world, organics are a hot topic. I’m lucky enough to be able to afford them, despite being a one-income household. I shop almost exclusively at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, and it shows in my monthly budget. I spend more on groceries and restaurants each month than any other one expense (aside from rent). It’s a conscious decision that I feel good about. I like knowing that no added hormones or antibiotics are in my food. I appreciate that my meat isn’t washed with ammonias and bleaches, and that my vegetables aren’t sprayed with harmful chemicals. I’m skeptical that animals are treated better by organic farmers, but I hope it’s true. I also hope that the farmers are using sustainable methods that are better for the planet. Of course, it’s impossible to know without actually visiting or seeing the farm where the food comes from, which I would like to do someday.

Given that background, then, I wasn’t surprised to see the conditions of “big food” farms featured on the movie I watched last night, “Food, Inc.” (2008). I posted on Facebook that I was watching the movie, and one of my cousins – also in a single-income household, but with four kids and a wife in school – replied, saying in his area the difference between a dozen regular eggs and cage-free eggs is more than $2.00. Multiply this cost difference to an entire shopping trip for a family of six, and you can see why organics are such a hot topic.  One of my co-workers calls Whole Foods “Whole Paycheck.” Most average, working families would have to significantly increase their food budgets to afford organics.  For a lot of folks, that’s simply not an option due to income. For others, it would require a complete change in priorities. Would you be willing to give up car payment number two in order to afford organic groceries every month?

Admittedly I’ve not done the math to figure out the cost difference between buying organic vs. buying regular. But others have. One woman estimated buying organics resulted in a 37 percent increase in her grocery bill. Another study claims that people who consistently buy organics and other healthy foods spend 20 percent more than those who buy less nutritious foods. So as a concerned budgeter, how can I be such a big fan of foods that cost more? Even with all that I like about organics, isn’t a 20 to 37 percent decrease in my biggest monthly expense an easy way to grow my net worth and increase my savings for a home?  Shouldn’t I be solely focused on the bottom line?

For me, the answer is easy. It’s a matter of priorities. Yes, I want to grow my net worth and save for a home. But not at the expense of my health. If that means I have to have less home, car, or “things” to support my food choices, I’m OK with that. I know that my genetics aren’t great; preventable food-related diseases run deep on both sides of my family – heart disease, high cholesterol, stroke, diabetes, cancer – so the choices I make today could potentially save me health care costs in the long run. It’s an intensely personal choice. But it’s one that is worthwhile to think about if you’re in your 20′s – and before you start having kids – because the farther along you go buying cheaper calories, the more difficult it will be to make the switch in the long run.

I don’t know if I’ll always be able to afford organic groceries. If I were to lose my job, this is unfortunately one of the first choices I’d have to reconsider after all the easy decisions like cable and DVR. I feel pretty strongly that when I have kids, they’ll be eating organic foods, but it’s impossible to know whether my budget will be able to afford feeding extra mouths organically on a budget.

The benefit of budgeting, and constantly re-budgeting and evaluating your expenses, is that it gives you the freedom to make such lifestyle choices. If you want to buy organics, you have the option to build it in and ask yourself: what’s more important – cable TV or nutrition? If you’re looking solely at the bottom line, though, with no other context or consideration for long-term costs, I’d encourage you to read up on the subject and make an informed decision.

The post My Biggest Monthly Expense appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.