Showing some Mint love

I’ve been using Mint to track my expenses for almost a year and a half now. I’ve been appreciating the regular upgrades to their interface.

I’ve been using it mainly as a budgeting tool. The “Trends” feature is particularly helpful to compare your own budget on things like gas, food, etc. with Mint users in other parts of the country (I typically look @DC and Virginia, I’m nosy). I also like how you can now split transactions, because often when I go to the grocery store I get cash back and it used to count the cash back in the grocery total.

The only drawback for budgeting is that you can’t track cash purchases. I’ve been using a lot more cash lately as we’ve been regular visitors of the year-round Farmers’ Market in Falls Church. Overall though Mint has helped me be more in control of my budget, especially of the everyday things I’d buy without thinking (this phenomenon happened to me most often during work lunch breaks).

Cheap lunches – not just for kids.

Just when I was getting tired of my regular PB&J’s I found this article in the SF Chronicle’s Food section that challenged cooks to pack 5 kid’s lunches for under 20$. I tried a veggie version of their lunch wrap recipe – I replaced the hummus w/a tofu carrot curry dip I made. Making it the night before like they suggest proved to be the key. I was concerned that the tortilla would end up soggy but that turned out not to be the case. 

A couple of the recipes are a little too Bay Area Foodie to be duplicated anywhere else, but it’s easy enough to substitute things. Orange muscat Champagne vinegar? I think white wine vinegar would do in that case.

The intersection of healthy & frugal

Before I made a commitment to bring my own food into work, no matter how nasty the work fridge is, I’d get 2, sometimes 3, meals a day @the office. I know it was a terrible habit, but I felt @the time that I just didn’t have the time to cook anything for myself. I found a good article on Mint’s money education blogs that has good responses for all the usual excuses for not bringing in your own food to work. Read the comments, too – they’re very helpful, not the usual “you’re a douchebag” type of comments.

One day a couple of years ago I just woke up and did that math. Meals out in DC are expensive and limited to just a few froo-froo, overpriced, lousy-service chains. Yes, I’m talking about you Panera and ChickenOut – why so much dressing on your damn salads anyway? Gross!

For meals out my old way, I estimated 5$ for breakfast and 10$ for lunch -  15$/day x 5 days = $75 x 48 weeks (to account for vacation/sick time) = $3600/year. That was about as much spent on meals out as I was spending on my car payment @the time. I’m not even including snacks.

Now I budget 2$/day for breakfast and 3$/day for lunch. I’m guessing that I’m saving around $50/week x 48 weeks = $2400 saved every year. It’s going into an account I have set up to pay cash for a new car eventually. I’m putting $4.20/gallon diesel in my VW lately so it may take a good while to save up enough.

Does this mean we’re hippies?

As a way to be frugal, we’ve been doing things that could certainly be considered hippie:

• I just made a batch of homemade granola for the week, complete w/nuts and berries bought in bulk @Costco. I’ve been going to Costco to stock up on things we use all the time, plus milk, bread, and eggs are super-cheap there. Of course super-cheap means what was the full price @a grocery store a year ago.
• I’m learning how to bake bread, which is certainly a challenge because our oven sucks. I started this week by making carrot cake muffins, which I’ve been keeping in the freezer and bringing in to work for breakfast.
• I’m also learning to make my own vinegar from leftover wine.
• We wash and reuse plastic bags, though they get tossed if we marinate meat in them.
• We have hard water @home, so I’ve made my own dishwasher soap from a mix of Borax and baking soda, with a few drops of tea tree oil thrown in.
• I’ve also been shunning expensive cleaners in favor of white vinegar.
• We’re the only ones on our block who recycle, much less compost (which is almost ready for planting). I even bring home things from work like cardboard boxes and recycle them @home. Our neighbors? They regularly leave 1/2 full cans of Coke and bottled water in the parking lot and let their Volvos, motorcycles, and SUV’s run idle for insane periods of time (as in an hour or even more).

I’m reluctant to call myself a hippie, though. Trust me, I’m well-versed in hippie. I went to Hampshire College, briefly. I lived in Santa Cruz, not-so-briefly. I’ve always thought that most hippies, while well-meaning, come off as self-righteous and dogmatic. If you want evidence of self-righteous hippiedom, just stop by the Whole Foods near American University and observe.

But as long as there are things like this in the neighborhood grocery store:

(Yup, oatmeal’s in the freezer section.)

I guess I’m a hippie. Granted, this is steel-cut oatmeal which takes longer to cook, but give me a break! Frozen oatmeal? Oatmeal is the easiest thing to make as well as dirt cheap. I go through a can of rolled oats every 2-3 weeks, depending on how much granola I make. The whole can is $1.25, or 9.6 cents a serving! A handful of nuts, raisins, honey, and cinnamon will add a few cents. Making oatmeal from scratch probably takes less time than re-heating a bowl of the frozen stuff.

Compared to a culture fed by instameals, we’ve been practicing conspicuous alt-consumption. I don’t see this stopping once we finally have a decent down payment for a house, which was the catalyst for the frugality. But neither my fianceé nor I will ever grow dreadlocks.