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List, like life, subject to change!  I am grateful for:

1. Crisp, cool fall weather.
2. Crisp, rainy fall weather.
3. My two hound dogs, happy to see me when I come in the gate.
4. My home-sweet-rented-cottage-home.
5. Heating up something I made myself for dinner.
6. Great girlfriends.
7. My cushy bed.
8. Fresh sheets on my cushy bed.
9. Google reader for my blog-reading habit.
10. The way list-making can calm my anxiety.

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Are you plagued by guilt?  If not guilt, how about just a nagging feeling that you should be doing more?  (Heads up, folks, I think that’s guilt.)  I am.

Disclaimer:  I know I have a lot of great things going for me in my life, and perhaps I should start another post that’s just a list of things I’m grateful for.  I’ll add that to my to do list.  :-)  But I also feel like there are lots of things that I should be doing, that I’m not.  My questions:  Which are worth the time and effort needed to change my already-present patterns?  Where do you get the biggest bang for your behavioral modification buck, so to speak?

1. Menu planning. Check out I’m an Organizing Junkie for more on Menu Planning Mondays. Lots of folks are big advocates of menu planning.  I see a lot of bloggers advocating this who have kids and bigger households to manage than I have (and the dogs’ menu is planned in perpetuity, let’s be real), but they assure me that I too can reap value from this habit.  I believe them, but I’m lazy.  I’d rather read the Sunday New York Times Magazine online, or knit a dishcloth, or cuddle with the dogs.  On the other hand, when there is nothing in the house prepared, I’m just as likely to eat popcorn for dinner as I am to drop $20 on Indian takeout.  Neither frugal nor fit.  Plus, I’m a single girl.  As it is I have a hard time remembering I am only cooking for me; if I do a big bulk batch of something there is no one but me here to eat the leftovers into perpetuity!  Can menu planning work for a 1 person household?
2. Keep a Price Book. The idea is you write down the best price you see for the things you usually buy.  I guess every time you go shopping, you are supposed to update it in case you find better buys.  Seems to me like a lot of work, but I have to admit, I could use more consumer confidence when it came to capitalizing on a good deal.  I need to figure out what the best practices are for these things and get on board, I think. Update:  I found an article that is a good place to start on the price book journey.
3. Exercise. People, I’m fat.  I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but I’m fat.  Overweight.  Actually, obese.  And while my perspective on fat acceptance continues to evolve, I am having trouble ignoring the signals my body is giving me.  I get winded way more easily than I did 50 pounds ago.  Oh yes, 50 pounds ago.  My knees kill me after a few days of walking uphill.  Actually, walking uphill is enough to wind me and make my knees ache.  No matter how much I love my curves — and a lot of the time, I love them a lot — I cannot deny that the body that carries those curves needs some attention.  So.  Right now, doctor’s orders, I’m to take it easy for another weak.  But after that, I resolve to do . . . something?  Walking, for sure.  My old doctor advocated Curves and Weight Watchers.  Putting WW aside for the moment, I do not want to find $40 in my budget for Curves each month.  Nor do I want to go to meetings I have to pay for at Weight Watchers – it’s the money and it’s also giving up my time to go somewhere.  It’s either time from work or time from home, and I feel swamped at work as it is.  Time from home?  No thank you.  I think I need to find an option, exercise-wise, like walking with the dogs, that I can enjoy as part of my down time.  But I’m putting you all on notice, I don’t like this one bit.
4. Nutrition Counseling. OK, back to Weight Watchers.  I believe this is a great program, it helps lots of people, but I’m pretty sure it’s like anything else: it only works if you work it.  In other words, if you won’t use their little tools, and go to their meetings, then you probably won’t lose weight.  People, I ain’t going to their meetings.  Nothing against the great meetings leaders, or the people for whom that program has been such a great tool, but I’m just not going to take the time after (or in the middle of) a stressful day at work to schlep to your meeting.  Then join online, the masses say!  Um, no.  It’s about the money.  I’m trying to pay down my debt.  There has got to be a way to change my eating habits a little bit and reap some sort of reward without forking out a ton of cash.  I think that my health insurance might subsidize a few visits to a nutritionist for me, though, and if I can swing that, I will.
5. Make It Yourself! Many frugal divas and divos on the intertubes make everything from laundry detergent to clothes themselves.  I’m not much of a sewer, but I do like to cook and craft.  Is it cost-effective for me to make my own taco seasoning?  Salsa?  How about faux-Bisquick?  Bread?  I have a bread machine I got off of Craigslist for $25, but it needs a new paddle.  I need to look into replacing the paddle or cooking the bread in the oven rather than in the machine.  What about canning?  Freezing things?  Hmm.
6. Get enough sleep. Am I the only adult who struggles with this?  When I was in high school, ahem, in the late 90s, school’s first bell rang at 7:27 am, and it was awful.  I have no idea how I made it up.  Actually, yes I do know.  On the days I didn’t stay after school, I often came home and took a nap from 3:30 until 5.  That would pick me up and carry me until 1 or 2 or later, and then I’d crash.  I have really never fixed the bad sleeping habits I developed then.  I need to get my routine down, like the sleep experts advise, and go to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every day.  This will require daily vanquishing my inner night owl and reader, who conspire together to keep me up far, far past a reasonable bedtime.  I am way too old to have this problem!

This is me thinking out loud.  All of these things, to one degree or another, I am already sold on doing.  The nutrition counseling thing, especially, if I can get that paid for by my health insurance, will start soon.  The rest?  I don’t know how, or when.  Just getting all of this out on the page feels good, but it’s also a little overwhelming, wondering how I can manage to make the big changes these goals would require.

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I’ve been doing some research about programmable thermostats.  Various articles claim they can save you a lot of money over the course of a year.  Every place I’ve looked online that sells these puppies makes similar energy claims, too — no surprise there.  This This Old House video makes it look like a doable do it yourself project.  I’ve hung a light fixture before, so I’ve seen the wires they’re king about.

Plus, I am particular about the way I sleep — I like it to be cold in the summer!  But I often forget to turn the AC up or off when I leave.  I’m not as bad about the heat in the winter, I really don’t mind keeping it cooler in the house.  My only defense is that I am *not* a morning person.  I’m lucky if I get out of the house fully clothed with my lunch packed every day.

I rent my home, and I have a fantastic landlord.  I am 99% sure that if I install and purchase a programmable thermostat, my landlord will let me deduct the cost from the rent.  I am also thinking that if for some reason he decides not to do that, it will still be a good deal for me.  I have no plans on leaving this rental until my credit card debts are all paid off and my student loans are at least 20% paid off.  I’m thinking that will take at least 5 more years of focused living, so thre will be plenty of time for me to enjoy the benefit of lower bills.  What say you?

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I tried to whip up a batch of Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies for the week yesterday, but it didn’t go well.  First, my oven and microwave do not have timers.  Madness!  I had a timer that was shaped like a tea pot, which was very adorable, but it isn’t an accurate timekeeper anymore.  Now, I am timerless.  This is a problem with baking!  My cookies were burned.

Next, either my baking powder or my baking soda have lost their effectiveness.  I’m not sure which it is, but I suspect it’s my soda.  I keep both in little Tupperware containers purchased years ago at a party.  I think they were just too old to keep on kicking.  I used to not keep an organized pantry, and I’d have more than one of things, and then I combined them into the Tupperware, and now I have flat cookies as a result of it.  Flat cookies!

One tray of them was given to the dogs, they were the flattest and most burned ones of all.  Don’t worry, I picked the chocolate chips out.  I don’t like a lot of chips in my cookies, so it wasn’t that bad.

Two things I did well with these cookies, if I do say so myself, deserve sharing.  First, I discovered in my pantry — it’s very frugal to go shopping in your pantry! — that I had a small container of Crisco Shortening.  Why on earth I bought this stuff, I’ll never know.  It’s high in saturated fats and is yucky looking.  But I wanted to use it, and use it quickly, since it is past its sell-by date.

Second, I discovered that The Joy of Cooking, that old stand by, has common substitutions in it!  Turns out you can switch out shortening for butter in a recipe cup for cup, no fancy math required.

The other thing I did with these cookies is I baked one tray on a sil-pat lined baking sheet and the other two were on parchment paper lined baking sheets.  I was raised using pam spray or the like on cookie sheets, but my pam’s sprayer up and broke.  It’s a real bummer, since there is a lot left in the can.  I turned to my parchment paper, and can I just tell you how much I love it?  Cookies don’t stick!  There is no cleaning!  You just toss the paper out!  Now that is less green than the sil-pat, which you can wipe down and reuse, but holy cow is it easy.

Summary: I burned 6 cookies, fed two dogs, used up 1 cup of shortening, got 24 edible cookies, enjoyed using parchment paper, and relied on my old standby cookbook.  All in all, not too bad.  Using what you have is frugal, but doing without things you need — like a working kitchen timer! — isn’t frugal at all, as it makes you waste food.  Well, it’s an arguable waste.  The hounds thought that was a great use of cookies.  I disagree, though.

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I read a couple of blogposts this week — I am a big fan of blogs, unlike some friends I have who work in journalism, but I digress — that were great kicks in the butt for me.

• Adam Baker at Get Rich Slowly wrote about 11 Ways to Spice Up Your Emergency Fund. I liked the selling your crap point — I think it’s time for me to admit I’m not going to learn to play that acoustic guitar in the corner of my bedroom anytime soon.
• Trent at The Simple Dollar has as one of his basic posts an explanation of how you figure out how much you need in your emergency fund.  Since I rely on just my income, I fall into the six-month category under Trent’s guidelines.
• Wisebread, a blog that seriously kicks ass and whose tag is “living large on a small budget,” just posted 9 Things That are Worth Buying at Costco.

I totally agree with author Myscha Theriault about the ECOS detergent, I love that stuff and my hyper-sensitive skin tolerates it well.  My skin breaks out all over if I don’t use fragrance-free products, and I like the eco-friendliness of ECOS, too.  I can’t get behind the seafood recommendation, as I don’t buy or eat much of it, but I am excited to try the organic low-sugar strawberry jam.  I just bought a jar of Smuckers with Splenda in an effort to cut down on the sugar, but the Splenda tastes funny, and rumor has it it’s bad to eat.  I’m also going to look into her recommendation on glass storage dishes.  My plastic throwaways are disappearing left and right, and I like to be able to put a hot dish right into a glass container after I’m done cooking.  I just need to make sure ye olde budget can bear the cost.  If not, it will be easy enough to save up for.  Myscha and my friend Sarah also say that their cheese are a good deal (it’s in the comments, scroll down).  I need to buy some freezer bags so I can take advantage of that!

• Finally, a real renegade for you!  Emily at Under $1,000 Per Month writes about how she feeds her family of four (soon to be five!) on, you guessed it, under $1,000 per month.  Her posts bring lots of controversy.  Folks disagree with everything from the size her slow cooker-baked pizzas come out to her choice to live in a cozy, 489 square foot apartment.  You read that right!  But she and her husband have made really tough choices in order to accomplish their goals, and I really respect that.  She also refuses to compare her standard of living to that of other Americans, she recognizes that she lives better than 95% of the world already.  Thought provoking and encouraging!  Check her out!

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In a perfect world, I’d have single servings of homemade food stashed in my fridge and freezer with time to spare every Sunday evening.  Well, guess what?  The world ain’t perfect.

Around 5 on Sunday evening, I realized I have nothing ready to go for this week.  So I grabbed the third of four containers of frozen ground turkey I got at CostCo for $1.99 a pound a week ago and threw it in the Crockpot.  Well, it’s not actually a CrockPot, it’s a knock-off, but it’s mine, and I love it.

Stephanie from A Year of Slow Cooking said somewhere in that genius blog of hers that when in doubt, you can take a meat, toss it in the crock pot, and add some sauce.  Stephanie, if you read that and say, heck no, I never said that, then I’ll take the blame for it.  Hey, imaginary readers, did you know that Stephanie has a cookbook coming out?  Awesome.

Anyway, something I read on Stephanie’s blog spurred my mind and I reached into the back of the cupboard for a can of sloppy joe mix.  I’m pretty sure this is just tomato puree, but it smelled like it might have had spices in it, too.  I added a half of a cup of water and then covered the cooker.  It ran on high for about 5 hours, and now, voila!  Lunches or dinners are set.  Just add veggies and serve.

Color me proud of myself.  This is part of my attempt to knock down my debt faster (well, first to build up my emergency account) by living frugally.  If I didn’t have quick heat and eat type options ready at home, I’d be very tempted to run out and grab fast food.  Yuck.

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By the numbers:

• I make about $40K annually
• I have about $9,400 in credit card debt.
• I have about $90K in student loan debt.

Yeah, that’s right, I owe about a hundred large, and I ain’t even 30 yet.  Around here, that’s the sale price on a fixer-upper bungalow, something I’d love to have.  Gulp.

While I was in graduate school, acquiring those student loans was easy as pie.  It was simple to justify them – I wanted to live like all of my classmates were living, I couldn’t stand to have more roommates, or go out less, or manage my spending spree habits better.  It rarely required more than filling out a fillable pdf and sending an email to borrow tens of thousands of dollars.  It was so simple, really, it wasn’t right.

The credit card debt, how to explain that?  I wanted instant gratification, plain and simple.  I wish I could tell you now what things I got that were so important they were worth paying for over the next few years, but I confess, I can’t remember.  The really sad part is that, at some point, I rolled my credit card debt into a student loan, so I wiped them out and started at zero, and then I messed up and did it again.

The main thing I didn’t understand then was that personal finance isn’t necessarily about willpower alone, but about behavioral changes and understanding psychology as well.  Ramit Sethi’s blog and book by the same name, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, are fantastic sources to learn more about these phenomena.

The other thing I didn’t understand was that I am not a special little snowflake.  In other words, even though, yes my DNA is unique, and I’m an individual, and that’s bloody wonderful, my personal finance situation isn’t an anomaly.  Not only have other people been where I am, other people have been worse off and still ended up better off than I am now!  I have to thank my loving and nagging mother, who I shall refer to only as Mamacita que Bonita, for her encouragement on this front.  She gave me Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover, and although neither Mamacita que Bonita nor I are down with his religious views, we are both down with his financial views.  Mamacita que Bonita first heard about Dave on the radio, which is also where both of us first heard about Clark Howard.  We are both Clark Howard fans, and even went to hear him speak when the credit union we belong to brought him to town last summer.

So now I have a plan.  I’ve followed Ramit’s advice and negotiated better rates on my credit cards by using the scripts in his book — those scripts and negotiation tactics paid for the book 10 times over in the first phone call.  I can’t recommend those highly enough.  I also took Ramit’s advice in automating my finances.  Every bill that can be set to be paid automatically is now paid that way.  That includes my minimum payments on my credit cards so I will not have another late or missed payment ever again.  Victory!

Then I followed Dave’s advice and set up a zero-based budget.  It was painful to do.  I avoided it like the plague.  But then I decided that the googler probably had the answer, and, sure enough, it did.  I found some spreadsheets that others had already used to set up their budgets, and was able to tweak one for my needs with little trouble.  Once that was done, I actually felt really relieved!  Who would have thunk it?  I am actually enjoying updating the spreadsheet, I am getting a little thrill out of watching the numbers adjust.

Next step is saving up a $1,000 emergency fund.  Eventually, my goal will be to have an emergency fund equal to 6 months of living expenses, but for now, I just need to have a cushion between me and Murphy’s law.  This is Dave’s idea, but one I’m totally down with.  In fact, I was trying to do this before I got my budget in place, but my money never seemed to end up there.  Now, my minimum payment to my savings autodrafts two days after I receive my paycheck (the two days is Ramit’s idea to build in room for error on the payor’s part) and it doesn’t have a chance to get distracted and spent on beer or appetizers out.

So far the online savings account I keep the emergency cash in is 57% funded.  I will keep y’all updated.  After this I’ll use Dave Ramsey’s Debt Snowball technique to knock out those cards one by one.

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Unless you edit, I suppose, so really, let’s just consider this a temporary first post.  I’m starting this as a journal of sorts.  I can type so much faster than I can write, and paper is so last century, after all!  And maybe eventually other people will want to chime in on what I’ve got going on, who knows?

Some things I’d like to tell you about:

• My personal finance journey from indebted to in control
• My budding homemaking skills – making this rental a home
• My desire to lose some weight, not so that I look like a Gap model goddess, but so that I can trust my body to do the things I’d like for it to do.

Reading that list I sound like a million other bloggers.  I guess a few things that will distinguish me from the likes of mommy-bloggers a-plenty and lifehackers at every turn are the facts that I ain’t nobody’s momma, this ain’t my full-time gig, and I’m no expert at anything.  I’m just living and learning.  Welcome to my journey.

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