Wednesday, May 17, 2006

Off I Go, Into The (Unknown) Wild Blue Yonder...

I made a decision yesterday. I decided that in addition to blogging and working at the day job, I am going to make a serious run at trying to do freelance writing. I have enough going on in my life, and in my frugal journey, that I know I have things to share! And, I love to write. So, the combo works for me. We shall see if it works for others and I land some (paid?) writing gigs! :)

May is turning out to be a very LONG month. Our expenses this month have risen and we just haven't done well on the budget. It seems with the price of gas (locally now $3.49 a gallon for 87) and the rising costs of food and other items we shop for, we just plain didn't budget enough cash for the month. I am working on revamping the budget for next month, and looking at where we can save, cut-back and modify.

One of the ways we save is to do a monthly stock-up on groceries and other items. Generally this includes a trip to Costco, a lower price food warehouse type store, WalMart, and maybe the Grocery Outlet to fill in. (While I don't agree with many of the business practices of the WalHell, it's pretty much the only game in town for many items - and my only place to shop within about 80 miles of home...)

For the rest of this month, my plan is to work on using up all the "pre-dialysis diet" foods in the house and to really see what I need to buy and stock-up on next month. Our diet has changed so much that it was really hard to shop this month and know what to buy.

Hubby and I are contemplating getting a Costco membership for him (I use a free one from a relative's account) so that while he is in Redding getting treatment he could hit the Costco for fresh fruits and veggies. That would save us a lot of money and I believe easily cover the cost of the membership.

I started selling our eggs at work. Right now we get about 6 free-range eggs a day. We eat some, but still have a few dozen left over. At $2 a dozen they are easily paying for our feed and eventually my hope is to take the extra "egg money" and do something like make an extra house payment with it. Right now as I sell the eggs I am transferring the cash into an ING account. This way I have a good track of what we actually made on the eggs. And, I can ear-mark the cash rather than it getting lost in the day to day household spending.

I ordered 15 blue egg laying chicks a couple weeks ago. So far they are all doing well and starting to get feathers. Looks like the egg business will be picking up nicely and I will be able to sell as many eggs as they can produce. :)

1 Comments:

Blogger Jenn @ Frugal Upstate said...

Cool! What a neat way to make some extra money. When I was a kid my mom had those chickens that laid the blue green eggs.

3:57 PM  

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