Penny Pinching in the Food Dept.

Dave's favorite method of payment is cash and along with that he teaches us to use the ancient Envelope System where you have an envelope for everything. We have an envelope for Haircuts, groceries, gas, clothing, entertainment, toiletries, cosmetics (for me), restaurants, car repair/tires, and BLOW MONEY (there is always going to be something that you didn't plan for). Most people put cash in each envelope and once the money is gone, then it is gone! 

Of course when you first set the $ amount for each envelope it's going to change the first couple of months depending on which envelope needed more money and which one could be cut back. Since we have these awesome new high-tech HTC Evo android phones we found an app that is an electronic envelope system. Using this app we record the expenses and assign it to the envelope it belongs to and it will subtract our total. This way we don't have to carry around hard cash in my purse when we go out for the day and plan on buying gas, eating out, or shopping for clothes all we need is our simple piece of plastic, our debit card. As our first month using the app it's been a little tight on the grocery allowance so we might have to add more money for the next month.
Click HERE for the envelope application app 

This week we were really low stocked on food and I cleaned out the pantry inventing weird dinners. I had some nasty old pot of beans with scrambled egg in a corn tortilla and I was gagging. Why didn't you go grocery shopping you might ask?? Well I'll tell you why... It's because the envelope app on our phone has this really cool tool. As you can see in the picture a bar with some green coloring, and there is a white vertical line that indicates where we are in the month. If the green is to the right of the line it means you're ahead of the month with money. If the green is to the left it means you're behind and the icon will say stop spending for # of days.

With the groceries I was behind anonymous # money it said "Stop spending for 4 days?" And I really tried to hold on for another 4 days with what we had in the pantry. The last breaking point was Tuesday night when we really had nothing so I made white rice, and got the last cans of soup and picked out the meat so that I could mix it in with the rice. I chopped up and cooked a sweet potato, and we cooked two ears of corn one for each of us. It was a strange mix starch and starch and starch. I couldn't take it and we went to the store that night. Now our envelope is behind 14 days according to where we are in the month. I'm thinking the groceries we got this week will last us until next week and we might have to pull out from another envelope like Entertainment if we need another grocery run.
I also made bread from scratch, but i still haven't calculated if it's cheaper than buying it. 

One Day Two years after we received this toaster oven as a wedding gift it just decided not to heat up. I was like "WHY??? Are you kidding me? I need you Mr. Toaster Oven, how are we going to toast bread, broil corn, or heat up food? You were so nice to bake cookies with because you saved me from having to turn on the energy-consumer-hunking oven which saved us on bills and kept our apartment cooler."

When Shane got home I told him what happened and I thought that we were going to target then and there to replace our close friend because he is so essential to our everyday lives, but apparently Shane didn't think so. Looking back I guess his logic was rational that we don't have the money to get a new toaster oven right now and we found out that we could substitute our griddle (which is what I'm toasting bread with down below) meanwhile we save up for our toaster oven. And now I don't even feel the importance of the Toaster Oven anymore.