As the weather continues to get colder and we move closer to Christmas season (yay!), I’m thinking a little more about what my plans for 2020. Over the last year, we fixed up and moved into our new house, plus our daughter transitioned from “baby” to “toddler”. Honestly, I really love the toddler stage. I worry a lot less and communicate with her a lot more. In a way, I have more freedom to do my own things, but in another way I have less. 

Why no frugal accomplishments this week? I was so naive when we moved into this house. I thought that once we moved in, the house would magically paint and decorate itself. That, or it would magically do all of the laundry, cooking, and cleaning without me. Oh, how wrong I was. It has been over two months since we moved in, and we still don’t have rugs or curtains anywhere. Hubs just got the dryer vented today. I had intended to finish the big upstairs bedroom by now. As of today, it still has an air mattress and puppy-dog spotted floor (painted that way… don’t worry, there’s nothing gross up there). I mean, I got the walls and trim painted. But… it’s a far cry from being done.

So... I don’t have a lot to report. I’ve been making yummy meals and painting the upstairs when I’m not taking our daughter to the potty, reading her books, cleaning or doing laundry. It’s been a boring week around here, frugally speaking, and I expect more of the same during the next few months. Sorry, guys.

So, yeah. And I have more bad news. Last week I was trying to free up space on my phone, and accidentally deleted five months’ worth of photos. Permanently. Thankfully my husband had taken pictures of our daughter and our house renovation, so we still have those. But all of my “before” room pictures? Gone. Which totally stinks. But maybe I can squeeze my in-laws for some. Sigh.

Okay. So.

I did a uploaded a short Youtube video on Saturday that had some clips from the past month. There would have been a lot more, but like I said… deleted. And it’s probably okay that the video is short, since it ended up taking four hours to upload to Youtube.

​Apart from that, I thought I would share a simple fall/winter meal idea with you.

We have been eating a lot of soup lately. The meal pictured at the top of this post is a hearty soup with homemade fruit cups. The soup is convenient because you can add whatever “in-season” vegetables and meat you want. I put turkey, kale, and carrots in this soup. The fruit cups are the same. In this version I put little mandarin slices and pomegranate arils. If you have a good Pyrex set like I do, you can make the fruit cups ahead of time and store them in the fridge.

Leftover soup is easy to freeze. Just ladle it into wide-mouth mason jars (leaving about a 2” headspace) and loosely screw on some lids. Be careful about where you put it in the freezer. I keep my freezing jars in a “jar box”. You can probably make your own jar box with a plastic box and cardboard to separate the jars.

In a week or two, pull out that soup again, thaw it out and heat it up! Then prepare whatever fruit you have on hand, put it in the tiny glass bowls, and you have another simple, easy winter meal!

Note: as I said at the beginning of this post, it has been (and will continue to be, as long as we’re still working on our house) difficult for me to come up with extra “frugal accomplishments” each week. It’s not that I don’t do frugal things, but I struggle with photographing and keeping track of them, then spending an hour or two every week writing down the details. Instead of doing a long post on here, I may switch to making vlogs for the time being. I think this will bring you better, more usable content each week. I say "more usable" for two reasons:

1. Instead of writing "I made soup this week", I'll be able to show you how I made it, what I put in it, etc. This is the kind of detail I don't have time to go into when I put together a blog post.

2. My ideas will be more accessible to people like myself, who don't make time to read blogs. If something isn't in a video or podcast, or on Instagram, I just don't read it. There are so many "hands on" things I have to do in a day. When I do get a chance to sit down and read, I'm reading a physical paperback, not anything on the internet. Sadly, blogs have fallen off the radar for me. Happily, there are many interesting Youtube channels I can listen to while doing dishes or folding laundry, and a handful of podcasts that I listen to while painting upstairs. The podcasts take more concentration to listen to, so Youtube seems to be my "go to" content source when it comes to all things homemaking.

3. Oh yeah- there's one more reason I plan on switching to video. I'll actually put out more content! Video is something I can do with my daughter tagging along, and it doesn't take much extra effort.

What are your thoughts? Yay or nay? Video or blog posts? I don't plan to quit writing forever, but during this busy season I'm struggling to do it all. 

I hope you all have a wonderful week!

-Bethany

1. Groceries: I spent almost $90.00 on groceries this week. This is a lot more than we usually spend, but…. Those fantastic holiday sales have started!!! Some of the best deals I got were pasta for $0.50 per pound, cheese for $2.50 per pound, and cottage cheese for $1.10 (24 oz.), turkey breast for $1.00/lb. I also bought some cereal for $1.27 per box, which is inexpensive, but not the best deal I’ve ever found. I have a love/hate relationship with cereal. I really love to eat it. But it’s not very healthy. It’s very expensive when compared to other grains. But rather inexpensive when compared to chips, Little Debbies and other snack foods that we sometimes buy. 

Other things I bought were sour cream, grapes, a bell pepper and a pomegranate; all on sale. I used a coupon for the pomegranate, so that only cost $1.50 (cheap for our area). I found some marked-down lunch meat that I will use on a road trip we’re planning.

I harvested kale, swiss chard, endive and spinach from the garden. I also started some sprouts this week, since the garden pickin’s are getting more slim.  

2. Cooking: I cooked part of the pork butt that I bought last week, in the Instant Pot. It was AMAZING!!! If I ever see that cut of meat again, I will buy more. We ate some of it like a roast, and some with pasta. It would be perfect for pulled pork.

I also baked some biscotti to have with tea, coffee and cocoa this holiday season. I haven’t made biscotti in a long time, but they turned out so yummy. I froze half to eat later.

3. Kids’ stuff: my sister-in-law dropped off some clothes and a LOT of shoes for our little girl. The shoes spanned three sizes, so those will last for a while. There was also a beautiful dress in the box that will be perfect for next summer.

4. Book: I borrowed a book from the library’s interloan system. It’s a book related to my never-ending local history research; exactly what I was looking for! So I was super excited to find that.

5. OCC: We packed two shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child. I was able to fill each box (for 10-14 y/o boys... their most under-served demographic) for about $15.00, not counting the shipping fee. We found an AMAZING deal on pocketed T-shirts; one of the clearance packages at Walmart had been marked down from $15.00 to $3.00. We picked out a set of matchbox cars for the “wow” toy ($5.00) and filled the rest of the box with personal care items (combs, toothbrushes, washcloth, soap), school supplies (pens, pencils, highlighter, notebook, eraser, pencil sharpener, etc… purchased at back-to-school sales) and inexpensive toys from the Dollar Tree, which included marbles and a pack of miniature dominoes. Some non-toy items were work gloves and a multi-purpose screwdriver tool from Walmart. I made drawstring bags for the loose school items, personal care items, and marbles. A lot of the items I was able to purchase in packs, and then split up the pack between two boxes. Last year we only packed one box, and it was much more expensive.

That’s about it for this week. As usual I line-dried laundry, cooked from scratch, etc. We’re still working on potty training, so that takes up time. Sometimes I get to the end of a day and think, what did I actually do? As in, how did I move forward today? Usually by the end of the week I feel like I’ve got something done, but lately it seems like I've been chasing my tail a lot. :/

Til next time,
-Bethany

​Hi everyone! I don’t have a lot to report, as most of this week’s activities were just a continuation of last week’s. But here are some things:

1. Groceries: I went to Kroger this week and bought a lot of pantry fillers. You can see the haul below:

I spent under $20.00 on everything. The roast was $9.16, the butter was a little over $2.00, the pasta was something like $0.50 each, sour cream was $1.00 (I know it's the wrong brand... this was a stand-in for what I actually bought), cereal was $0.99/box, and I believe the onions were $1.50.

I also froze and canned the venison we harvested from a road-kill deer last week. I canned most of the chunk meat and froze the backstrap in steaks. We already have a lot of ground venison from a deer that my BIL gave us last month.

I'm so happy to have a basement for food storage. I have a shelf down there divided into 6 parts, where I can keep dry goods and canned goods for the next 6 months. Last week I brought October's remaining jars upstairs and dumped the ones I knew I wouldn't use. I still have some spiced plums from October that I don't have the heart to throw away, but I don't really like them, either. What would you do with spiced plums?

2. Thrifting: Volunteers of America had their 50% off sale this week. I got quite a few things:

-A book for me.
-Three books for our daughter. We have a good selection of books at home, but I’m just tired of reading them. Seriously, I can quote those books better than my favorite movies. These new books were just $0.30 each, and have a good storyline, morals and illustrations. I’m okay with buying a book and donating it again if it doesn’t fit that criteria. Little Golden Books are usually a good choice, but I’ve even passed on some of those; especially the ones with trademarked “characters”: Sesame Street, Disney movies, etc. I don’t have a beef with characters, but I do prefer a clean, vintage aesthetic over a cartoon-y one.

​-Ark toy for our daughter. I’ve been wanting to buy her an ark for her animals and little people. This was $2.50. Not exactly cheap for a thrift store toy, but I believe it was a good value for the money. As cute as they are, eventually I want to replace the wooden animals with plastic ones that match her others, and the wooden Noah with a peg person Noah. 

​-Several square baskets. I only buy square baskets for storage, because they fit together much more easily than circular ones.

-Boots for our daughter in a size up. I think they were $1.50. I’ve been surprised at how “expensive” used kids clothes are, but thrift store shoes are less than 10% the price of new kid shoes. So I’ll take it.

​-A lamp…post. It still needs a shade, so it’s just the metal post. It cost $4.00, but it works. I really liked the bronze finish. After I bought it, we went to Walmart and I was disappointed to see whole lamps for just $10.00. We bought one. Then we got it out of the box, and I realized why it was only $10.00. Hubs threw me one of the shades. “Try breaking this!” he said. It bounced off the floor. Dumb globe wasn’t glass, it was cheap plastic! In fact, the whole thing was cheap plastic, but I guess it won’t hurt anybody if it falls over. LOL.

3. House projects: we moved the washer upstairs, and Hubs hooked up the dryer. YAY!!! Now I have a functional (if not completed) laundry room! Our cabinet guy also put the stained glass insert into our corner cupboard, and the last of the cabinet hardware was purchased and installed. I know I promised before-and-after pics last week, BUT…

I forgot about this thing. More decisions. While we are definitely past the hardest part of moving and renovating, there is still so much more I want to do. Decorating seems to compete with getting the house functional. I think if we make a little bit of functional progress and a little bit of decorating progress each week, I’ll have this thing done by the time I die. HA!

I hope you all had a wonderful week!
Til next time,
-Bethany

In my last Frugal Accomplishments post, I mentioned the book, Stop Acting Rich by Thomas Stanley. It was such an interesting and thought-provoking read (or, in my case, “listen”). I'm just going to jump in with some thoughts.
 
In this book, he put “rich people” into several categories:

1. Aspirationals: typically people who earn a lot of money, and spend it on status symbols and lifestyle purchases. They might look rich, but they’re not actually millionaires. You and I probably know a LOT more aspirationals than those who are truly wealthy.

2. Next-Door Millionaires: people who don’t seem particularly rich, but they have more than a million dollars in non-house assets. I know the term “millionaire” has come to mean less and less because of inflation, and also since many people include home value in their net worth. On Dave Ramsey’s “millionaire theme hour” he often interviews millionaires who have just one or two million in assets, half a million of that is in their house, and many of them are in their 60s and 70’s. I don’t think that is the kind of millionaire that Mr. Stanley is talking about. He mentions a lot of decamillionaires (people with 10 million or more) in his next-door stories. About 2.5% of the U.S. population are millionaires (not including home value in their net worth). 

3. The Glittering Rich: people who look like millionaires and ARE actually millionaires, because they earn vastly more than they can spend. This group of people earn in excess of 2 million per year, and have a net worth of over 20 million dollars.

Somewhere between the next-door millionaires and the glittering rich are people who ARE millionaires, but also buy status symbols because they feel a need to be recognized as special. Mr. Stanley said that salespeople in particular fall into this category (because they don’t have accomplishments to point back to, as would a business owner, author, etc.) as well as those who grew up poor and don’t want anything to do with “frugality”. These people are still rich (typically they work very hard), but not as efficient at producing wealth as the more frugal types. For example, the “Porsche millionaire” might earn $250k per year while the “Toyota millionaire” earns just $200k, but they both have the same net worth in dollars.

Here is the book’s main point: if you earn an average—or even higher than average—income, you can either ACT rich (by society's definition) or BE rich, but probably not both. Separating truth from myth makes me feel a whole lot better about being frugal, even “extreme” frugal. As we are continually saving and building wealth, sometimes I feel like we should be “acting our wage” as Dave Ramsey would put it. The question that Hubs and I face more often now is: when we should make an upgrade? Is it wise to buy a nicer car—something with no rust and a few less miles? Should I start shopping at Kohls instead of wearing thrift store picks and hand-me-downs? Should I start buying more organic food? Many people don’t have to ask these things because they just buy whatever they can afford, and that’s the end. But if you save more than you spend… then you have to decide what to do with the extra.

Stop Acting Rich has given me permission to just be myself, regardless of what I *could* be spending. And I really like being frugal. I would much rather grow organic kale and spinach and lettuce than buy it. I like putting together outfits with free hand-me-down clothes. I like our rusty car. It's comfy and warm in the winter. I like drinking water at restaurants. Chain restaurants. Of course I like nice things as well, but oftentimes the expensive stuff doesn’t make me any happier than the inexpensive (or free) stuff, and why not use extra dollars for a noble cause? Our church just put up an announcement last week about the popular Christmas “shoebox” gifts that go to poor kids around the world. I would far rather spend $20.00 or $30.00 on a shoebox than a new shirt from Kohls. OR, dump that money in a fund, forget about it, and in 10 years fill two shoeboxes!

I think what I love about this book most is, again, that it separates the truth from lies. Thomas Stanley uses statistics to build his argument, and statistics have a way of revealing the truth that fake news, or even personal experience, does not. Fake news would tell you that rich people aren’t paying their fair share of taxes. Fake news would tell you that rich people are stingy and greedy and mean. And while the affluent skew toward frugal, statistics say that a majority of wealthy people donate a much higher percentage of their wealth (10% or more) to charity than people who earn high incomes but wear, drive around, and live in their wealth (who give just 1% or less). Another interesting statistic is that most “next-door” millionaires live in Bible belt territory, not the more liberal east and west coast regions. The vast majority are married, and have been married to the same person for 30+ years. 50% of millionaire wives do not work outside the home, and of the half that do, most do not work full time. All of this information tells me that next-door millionaires are politically conservative, as a whole, and hold traditional values.

WARNING: Political thoughts ahead!

I think these statistics are interesting when compared with the current FIRE (Financial Independence, Early Retirement) movement that has popped up in the last ten years or so. This movement closely mimics what it takes to become a next-door millionaire: you earn way more than the general population, and spend far less. For many people, this means working for about ten years and saving at least a million dollars, thereby becoming a millionaire by age 30 or so. What’s interesting? The FIRE demographic is pretty much opposite of the next-door millionaires’. There are a lot of childless, liberal millenials stashing cash in order to become rich and travel the world. But the movement seems to be losing a lot of steam. I don’t think it’s the numbers that are causing the problem. I think statistics alone will tell you that being liberal and being rich are often mutually exclusive. 

Why? Statistically, Democrats have a higher yearly income, but don’t give as much or keep as much as Republicans. The author makes a point here that higher education could somehow correlate to why liberals aren’t as wealthy. In my opinion, divorce and broken family relationships could play a role. Republicans are more likely to stay married—and happily married—than Democrats. One could argue that Republicans report more happiness and give more money because they HAVE more money. But why do they have more? Thomas Stanley gives us the truth, via statistics. While I’m not saying that ALL Democrats are this and ALL Republicans are that, I’m saying that you can pull objective truth from statistics and come to your own conclusion. Kudos to Mr. Stanley for blowing the top off of fake news.

Well, that’s the end of my brief book review! I hope you feel inspired to read a good book, yourself. These colder months are a great time to cuddle up with a book, blanket and cup of tea. Recently I listened to a great podcast about how to read a book. I gleaned a lot from it, and I hope you can too.

If you want to read or listen to a lot of books for just a little money, use my referral link to get yourself a Scribd subscription. It’s something like $9.00 per month. You can read or listen to all of the books you want, and share the subscription with your spouse (so, just over $1.00 per week per person, for multiple ebooks and audiobooks!). If you want a free way to read Stop Acting Rich and almost any other book, use your library’s interloan system. It will take a while and you won’t have access to thousands of books at a time, but… FREE. There’s a lot of stuff you can do with $9.00 if you’re not a voracious reader.