The physical act of frugality

Tracking expenses has gone a long way towards giving me a picture of my money, my habits, and my priorities. According to the Financial Integrity plan, the first month usually goes really well. Just like dieting, people are very motivated and they scrimp and save and see huge results and get excited. BUT, making lasting change is difficult. The authors consistently stress that if you feel deprived, you aren't doing it right and you will not last in the program. The biggest step comes when you convert your income into what they call "life energy" units. You figure out your actual wage, taking into account commute, car expenses, clothing expenses, lunches out that you would not spend on if you weren't working. That TRUE wage can then be broken down into the life energy units. It's at this point that you start to see the value of certain things, as well as the value of your own time.

There is a lot of re-conditioning in the book to stop thinking of money as just numbers, and to start thinking of it as something physical that actually represents your time on this earth. It's pretty heavy stuff.

On to something else, cooking. I LOVE cooking, but as the book points out, a lot of us who work full time feel like we don't have the time or energy to actually cook once we get home from work. I'm luckier than most since my time is my own, but I also suffer from fatigue easier than a lot of people so I know exactly what they mean. The key to cooking now is preparing in advance, using ingredients on hand, and making enough for at least 2 meals, usually more. The other day, I bought lunch at work because there is this rotisserie chicken truck that comes by my work on Wednesdays and I'm addicted. It's $7 for a quarter chicken and some potatoes. Usually I eat the entire thing, or maybe toss some of the scraps that are left. This time I ate only until I wasn't hungry, then took the rest home. I was able to make a chicken salad sandwich for dinner and I cooked down the carcass into about half a cup of rich broth. No, that's not very much, but it's making better use of everything than I was doing before. It was also very easy since I just popped it in a pot with some water and cooked it down for about an hour. I froze the broth and I'm sure I'll use it soon.

The next cooking project was to use some beans I bought a month or so back. Everyone talks about how beans are so economical and healthy, but i've never cooked them. I found a cheap and easy bean soup recipe and made enough for a few meals. Finally, I made something called "garbage soup" which is basically taking all vegetable matter from the fridge and cooking it down for an hour. This included stems and leaves from some fresh beats, some wilted celery, half an onion, a handful of mushrooms that were way past their prime, and some carrots. It makes a veggie broth that isn't big on flavor without seasoning, but it's a great base for all kinds of other things. I poured it into muffin tins which I will then dislodge and freeze as discs of rich broth.

All in all, I enjoyed the frugal method of cleaning out the fridge. Except for dish clean up, it was all easy to do and I feel like I'm learning more about "waste not, want not" as well as making my food dollar stretch even more.