“The Unwind,” a dance move created by my mom.

Though she can cut a rug when the occasion calls for it, Mother’s Day is  typically a low-key event for my family. We usually just hang out at my parents’ house; my dad cooks, my the rest of us watch movies and play sports outside. 

This year, instead, my dad left for a fishing trip Sunday morning, and we children decided to take my mom to the zoo to enjoy the weather and allow her to spend time with her one and only grandson. So on a blustery morning that felt more like early April in Chicago, nine of us trooped to Brookfield Zoo in the western suburbs to take in the monkeys, lions, and bears. We spent a few hours there until my brother, his wife, and their baby split, and then the remaining six of us went for coffee followed by dinner and drinks. My mom enjoyed herself (maybe not at the level of intensity in the above photo), so I’ll count the day as a success.

Here’s how the spending went:

1. Gifts. I bought her a yellow flower plant, mums, for $10, a box of cookies for $4, and a card for $4. I included a future dinner and a movie in the card, so let’s count that as an additional $100. Total: $118.
2. Zoo day. We are zoo members, so no fee for parking or entry. We lunched at one of the zoo cafeterias, and I put lunch for 6 on my charge card for ~$70. I got money back from most of my siblings, but I’m still collecting. My lunch alone was probably around $12 for a salad, juice, water, cookie, and chips. My eyes were too big for my stomach; I only ate the salad, 1/2 cookie, and drank the water. I gave the rest away.
3. Coffee. I’m not sure who paid for my coffee at Starbucks after the zoo. There was a lot of awkward throwing of money at each other. Hilariously, I think the $20 my mom tried to pay ended up back in her pocket, and there’s a good possibility the $8 I tried to spend ended up stuffed somewhere in the back seat of my car.
4. Dinner. We had a lovely three-course dinner for six at our local pub for ~$215 (including tip). $36 per person isn’t bad, when you factor in that we all had two drinks each and my mom got crab legs. I paid for most of this meal because I was treating my mom and I owed my brother and his g/f a meal. So I paid$135 of that total.  Again, there was a lot of awkward “YOU BETTER LET ME PAY FOR THIS” type of talk by everyone at the table. My brothers having full-time jobs is a new thing so none of us really are used to them having cash for outings like this. I will let them treat me next time, for sure.

Looking at the rundown above, Mother’s Day was pretty expensive. Especially when you consider that we took manfriend’s mom out for dinner the night before with his family.  Since we don’t do this every year, I’m OK with this spending level. After all, if you can’t give your mom a nice holiday when you work full-time, what’s the point?  There are days to be frugal and days to splurge a little, and Mother’s Day is definitely a splurge day.

I went grocery shopping later that night and spent around $150, so I will have to be very good with my cash flow this week. It won’t be difficult; we don’t have any events to attend (phew!) and our house is a mess so we’ll spend this week cleaning and hopefully relaxing a bit when I’m not training for upcoming races.

How did your Mother’s Day go?

The post Mother’s Day Spending Recap appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

I don’t know how people get through the holidays. I’m fairly certain I need to take a day off to accomplish all of the following: decorate my apartment, sign & send holiday cards, shop for gifts, bake cookies, and prep for parties. We have — wait for it — eight parties to attend in the month of December alone, plus one day devoted entirely to baking with my family, so nine if you count that. I’m starting to hyperventilate a little just thinking about it.

Baking day - a sampling of our products

Batches and batches of cookies will be baked!

ManFriend is encouraging me to slow down, because I’m basically the Tazmanian Devil of Christmas at the moment, especially since I lost the week after Thanksgiving due to my wallet being gone. I could always cast a few things off, such as decorating, but I’ve ditched decorating the last several years and I really want a tree this year. Maybe I’ll just get a little one?

How do the holidays always sneak up on me and why am I always so unprepared for them!?

The post Holidazed appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

I don’t always follow her preferences; I recently bought her flowers for her birthday from a chain grocery store for too high a price, because the colors caught my eye and the label said they were sustainably grown and I was in a hurry.

Today, I think a lot of folks will purchase their flowers similarly, paying marked-up prices for small bouquets while rushing home.

For those who can spare a few minutes to think through their purchase, the folks at personal finance blog FrugalDad have developed a handy infographic to make sure you buy the right bouquet for all the flower-lovers in your life.  As they put it, sometimes “putting more thought than money can really make the gift more special.”  I’ve posted the  lovely graphic below. 

If you read the infographic and you’re still confused about which bouquet to pick, just stay with something simple that you know the receiver likes. A lot of folks go with red roses, the traditional choice, but I’m personally a fan of tightly bunched, bright colored flowers of the same variety like pink tulips, red peonies, or blue hydrangeas. And my mom? I’m sure my dad will be getting her a dozen yellow roses tomorrow, her favorite flower, the same kind she receives for every special day.

Source: http://frugaldad.com

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Of course, there’s a flip side to this ignore-the-holidays approach. Usually, the week before Christmas, I discover I have nothing done, make a frantic to-do list, freak out about my procrastinating ways, and hit the stores hard in a last-ditch effort that leaves me in need of a drink – stat!

This year, I have the added challenge of needing gifts for my man-friend’s graduation from law school, which unofficially will happen the same week as Christmas. I also need to buy for a child I “adopted” through a charity giving program, and I need to make a few end-of-year donations to my designated non-profits. Needless to say, I need a holiday plan.

My strategy this year is to determine what gifts I’ll buy in advance for each person and how much I’ll spend, create a list, shop online to compare prices, and buy the best value I find. I usually put everything on my credit card to get points and pay it off once the bill comes. I need to start earlier this year than before, so I’ve been doing some online investigating already.

There are a few traps I need to avoid as I shop this year:

• I usually buy a little something for myself at almost every store I visit. I rationalize that those are part of my holiday “gifts” too. That’s pretty ridiculous and must stop.
• Sometimes I ignore my own spending rules. For instance, if my list says spend $20 on a grab bag gift, I’ll spend $30 or $40 and just pretend it was $20.  Or, if my limit for a brother is $50, sometimes I’ll get caught up in the moment and spend $75. I guess you could call this spending creep. Twenty or 25 dollars here and there can really add up.
• Shopping brings its own expenses with it. Gas money, meals out, drinks after… I need to remember that shopping is not a party and focus on getting in and getting out. I do not need to swing by the local brewpub for drinks and dinner after. I can make meals at home and save myself $50.

If I can stick to these rules, follow my strategy, and not wait until the last minute, I have a fighting chance of surviving this holiday season with my sanity and budget intact, and making it to every holiday party from here til January with gifts in hand. Now if I could only manage to come out of it with my waistline intact, too…

The post And so it begins… Black Friday and other holiday shopping thoughts appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

So we decided to give each other just Christmas cards, no gift certificates, and save the trouble of shopping for each other. This will be hard, but I think I’m going to draw him a card or create it with photography somehow to make it special and meaningful. And I’m OK with that.

The truth is, for in the last few years, I’ve been tired of filling my Christmas list with little stuff that I don’t need that will just take up space in my apartment. In the past, I’ve tried the “Make a donation to this charity in my name,” request, but I always get the “Oh, that’s not fun” response. It sounds selfish, but I think people naturally want to indulge in the gift-giving process — it says something about the giver and serves as a relationship builder to let the recipient know you’re thinking about them by picking out just the right gift.

But if you’re self-sufficient, it’s a little awkward to create a Christmas list at the request of your family. You see, I’m able to spend money on myself to get the experiences and things I really want during the year. When it comes to the holidays, I always feel strange asking for gifts I don’t need, when, for instance, I know that my younger brothers and some of my cousins in school or with kids really need a lot.

So this year, I’m going to create an extremely small wish list… gift certificates to Best Buy to supplement the computer and camera. That’s it. And I’m going to give the charity request another go around…

The charities I will probably request donations be made to this Christmas are:

Children’s Memorial Hospital (Chicago)
The Chicago Food Depository

And to start the trend, I am gonna go out on a limb this year and make donations in my co-workers’ and families’ names to those charities, and to It’s Hip To Have Heart, my cousin’s wife’s foundation.

(As some of you know, during the year, I also donate to the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation, still a fantastic and worthwhile organization.)

Gifts are great, but this year, I’m lucky enough to have everything I need.

The post All I Want For Christmas…My Charity List and Christmas List appeared first on The Budgeting Babe.

And then it hit me: I didn’t have a costume or plans!

When I got back to Chicago, I quickly found a hotspot to hit up (the Yelp party) and chose a costume (rhythmic gymnast, as part of a team). And since then, I’ve been spending my nights shopping for and making my costume – freehanding glitter designs with fabric paint and firing up the glue gun to bedazzle my leotard and velour track pants.

Why spend money on something as frivilous as a Halloween costume this year? Why go to the effort to create and decorate a costume? Because for one night, one weekend, you have the chance to leave behind your worries, step into a character and create memories that last a lifetime.

I was reading in the Tribune today a story about the guys who play ghouls in local haunted houses and a Halloween memory came rushing back. When I was in college, a close friend and I volunteered to be ghouls at the Jaycee’s haunted house. We spent the day together, scaring young teens and laughing hysterically. I think I was a girl who shouted “I see dead people” (it was when the Sixth Sense came out) and then he’d come up behind them and scare the pants off them. My friend has since passed away, but I will always have that powerful and happy memory every Halloween. It’s so out of the ordinary that it’s crystal clear in my mind.

As is the time when I visited my first haunted house in grade school with my mom, where I had to reach in a box and touch something spooky. It was cold cooked spaghetti noodles, lumped together, but I thought it was a brain. I was pretty freaked out, but once my mom (and a volunteer) convinced me that it was spaghetti noodles, this former scaredy cat and perrenial “glenda the good witch” I got over it and eventually made visiting haunted houses an annual tradition that would last through college.

More recently, in my adult life, my friends and I have used the evening as a way to bond. While we love to gather and tell stories about the crazy times we had, the opportunity to wear a group costume (whether a basketball team or a table tennis team) is a great way to make new memories. After all, how many nights with your girlfriends can you really say something like, “There I was, singing Bon Jovi karioke dressed as a ninja next to an NFL Ref, when this huge banana walked into the bar …” now THAT’S a story.

So take my advice to heart: grab a friend, make a cheap costume and dress up tonight. Put all your economic fears aside and live on the edge for one night. Burn that costume and everything you embody in it, into your memories. Make it a night that counts, make it a night that lasts and most of all, enjoy yourself!

Tips for making a last minute Halloween costume:

1) Avoid costume stores. Last-minute shopping is no time to waste at a costume store. Go for something easy – grab a plaid shirt at Marshall’s and some snug pants or floor length skirt, pick up some “reading glasses” at Walgreens, affix some tape to the bridge, throw in a pocket-protector and voila! Nerd costume! Or, pick up some short shorts and a head band at Target, grab a running shirt, use magic markers to make number on a white piece of paper and Poof!, you’re a marathoner. How about a poncho from CVS, and some hair gel to mess up your locks? Now you’re a weather forecaster in a hurricane.

2) Don’t spend a lot. The trick is to be creative, but not to spend a lot. I once went to a family party dressed as my uncle (who happens to look like a superfan). It was awesome and all I bought was a Bears t-shirt and a flat-brimmed baseball cap. The rest (including mustache) was made from materials at home. I think I spent about $10 on that costume.

3) Don’t forget the make-up. Make up can increase a costume’s awesomeness in a second. It’s easy, cheap and if you mess up, who cares? It’s washable. My rhythmic gymnast costume, for instance, wouldn’t be nearly as believeable or funny without glitter, bronzer, red lipstick and heavy eyeshadow. Committ to it!

4) Don’t go trashy. I once saw a bartender who was wearing a bra and some body paint. Eww. Don’t stoop that low. Even on halloween, it’s not OK. I don’t even know what her costume was supposed to be, I think she was trying to be a vampire victim. They need shirts, too, you know.

5) Don’t go creepy. We once saw a group of grown men wearing diapers, pacifiers and baby bonnets. Were they hoping to meet women? I hope not. Nothing screams “stay away” like a guy who can’t grow up. Plus it’s just creepy to see grown men in diapers.

6) Use those old bridesmaid dresses! 80′s prom queen! Miss America! Carrie! Drag queen! The possibilities are really endless. Trust me on this one.

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