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When we talk about “Provident Living” in the church, what do we usually talk about?
- Food storage
- Water storage
- Staying out of debt
- Having a savings account
Those are all good things, but we’re not going to talk about
them today. Those things tend to fall
under the idea of “provident planning.”
What happens if you flip the words around, and instead of
“Provident Living,” we talk about “Living Providently.” What do you think of then?
- Saving money on a regular basis
- Paying off debts
- Being a wise and prudent steward
- Not being wasteful
- Couponing
- Recycling, reusing, upcycling
Provident Living can sometimes induce guilt, or feelings of
“not good enough” – not enough food storage, not a good couponer, etc. We’re going to talk today about being
provident on a daily basis – living the idea, instead of just preparing for it.
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I’ve been thinking about this class for about a month and a
half now, and the best title I could come up with that was the most all
encompassing was “Champagne Taste on a Beer Budget,” but I didn’t think that it
would be approved as an appropriate title for a church activity. Other working titles I came up with included:
- “Not Your Mother-in-Law’s Couponing Class”
- “Fabric Napkins: Not Just for Guests Anymore”
Here’s what this class isn’t:
- This isn’t a couponing class. I’ll talk about coupons, but it’s not a couponing class.
- This isn’t a budgeting class. I’m not a numbers girl.
- This isn’t a guilt-inducing class. We give ourselves enough grief already.
What I hope to accomplish is to give you some tools that can
help you stretch your budget, and to get you thinking about where and how you
spend your money. There’s a scientific
principle that says that the act of observing something changes the very nature
of the thing. And that’s how I came to
be teaching this class.
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How many of you use coupons on a regular basis? How many of you don’t, but wish that you
did? Why don’t you? For me, I never had a good system. I’d forget that I had clipped them, and
forgot to bring them with me. So I
bought a small accordion folder, and sorted them into categories. I stored the folder in a drawer in my
kitchen, and forgot to bring it with me.
Finally, I decided that coupons just weren’t worth it for me.
But I know that they can be.
My mother-in-law and sister-in-law are big couponers, for things that
they need and use. And I was raised by a
couponing mom. I’ve seen first-hand what
couponing, done right, can do for money saving.
I wanted to make them worth it for me.
For Christmas last year, my sister-in-law gave me a coupon
binder. It’s a copy of her system, and
I’m pleased to say that it’s worked for me.
It’s big enough that I can’t just tuck it out of sight and forget about
it. It goes on a shelf in my kitchen,
right next to my recipe binder, so I see it and reach it (or next to it) often. It’s a simple three-ring binder, with divided
sections for different categories, and page protectors to hold coupons. Mine has business card sized sleeves, but
baseball card ones would work, too. The
thing that really caught my interest, though, was at the front of the binder: a
price comparison sheet.
A brief tangent: I’ve lived in Shaker Heights for seven-and-a-half years
now. I’ve shopped primarily at Giant
Eagle, and either Sam’s Club or BJ’s the entire time I’ve been here. I’ve tried Aldi a few times, but I found it
unsatisfying. I know a lot of people who
shop there almost exclusively, though, and love it. I decided to try an experiment.
Over a month-long period toward the beginning of this year,
I visited five different stores, and recorded price information on about 40
grocery items at each one. I visited
Giant Eagle, Aldi, Heinens, GFS, and BJ’s.
I wrote down which brand I was recording, the price, the unit size, and
any other notes that I thought might be relevant. It was a lot of work, especially with a
toddler in tow. But I really felt like
it was something I needed to do, if
for no other reason than the scientific principle I mentioned earlier. Once I collected all the data, I put together
a spreadsheet to compare things. I
plugged in formulas, cross-referenced, and color-coded. I calculated the per-unit prices of each of
the 40ish items I evaluated, to find out where they were the least expensive. I found that Aldi and BJ’s had the lowest
prices in general, which really came as no surprise.
(By the end of this project, I decided that I had put so
much work into it that I couldn’t just keep it to myself. I knew that others could and would benefit
from it, so I sent the spreadsheet to my ward, along with a long explanatory
email. That email is what brought me to
the attention of the stake Relief Society presidency, and why I was asked to
teach this class today.)
I mentioned before that I found Aldi unsatisfying. There were too many things that they didn’t
carry, so I still ended up going somewhere else to buy them anyway. And without having an Aldi already
conveniently located along my route, plus having to return the cart to get my
quarter back while I’ve got a toddler with me in the snow, well, it just wasn’t
worth regular visits.
However, I’d now observed how much money I could actually be
saving if I shopped at Aldi instead of at Giant Eagle, or somewhere else. Having seen those numbers, I did change my
shopping plans somewhat. I still do most
of my regular weekly (or bi-weekly) shopping at Giant Eagle. Every couple of months, though, I visit Aldi
for a stock-up trip.
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At this point, I want to stop talking about numbers, and
talk about finding balance in saving money.
Sometimes in life, we find ourselves in the unfortunate situation of
having to pinch ever available penny, stick rigidly within a budget, and
struggle to make ends meet from one paycheck to another. I will talk a little later about that. Other times, we either want or need to save
money in order to put it toward a vacation, a car, a gadget, a nest egg, or
something else. Or we just want to live
prudently. In those cases, we sometimes
have the luxury of choosing our savings battles.
How many of you are parents?
As a parent, have you ever found yourself on one side of a fight with
your child, only to realize that the struggle isn’t worth it? As parents, we find ourselves constantly
choosing our battles – what’s worth arguing over, and what isn’t. Each family will evaluate these situations
differently for them, and often even differently for each child within a
family. Saving money also requires
choosing battles.
Will you drive all over kingdom-come just to save two dollars
on three boxes of cereal? Or is that not
worth it to you? How much are you
spending in gas, in order to visit four different stores? How much time? Do you have children in tow, that make
errands longer and more stressful?
We each need to evaluate our own situations, and find a good
balance between saving money and saving sanity.
For example, I use a lot of ground turkey in my
cooking. Giant Eagle only carries it
fresh, not frozen. It costs $8.99 for 3
pounds, or $3 per pound. Aldi carries frozen
ground turkey, for $1.69 per pound.
That’s barely over half the cost as Giant Eagle. That’s a huge difference, and for me, it’s
worth making the out of the way trip, and stocking up. Fortunately, I have a deep freezer, so I’m
able to buy a lot of it at once.
By doing a stock-up trip for ground turkey and other things,
I only visit Aldi about once every 2-3 months, instead of weekly. That’s a good balance for me.
Another savings battle to think about is brands. Do you only buy brand name, or do you buy
generic products? Generic is almost
always less expensive, but sometimes it’s also significantly cheaper. The difference is that you get what you pay
for, sometimes. And sometimes, those
savings aren’t worth it. I, for example,
will never again buy a generic brand of plastic wrap. The last time I did, I probably got to use
less than half the roll, because it stuck to itself so badly that I kept
throwing it in the trash and getting more.
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How many of you create meal plans on a regular basis? Do you do it based on what you already have
in the house, or do you do it before you do your grocery shopping?
Going to the store with a plan in hand will help you save
money. You’ll be less likely to make
impulse and/or unnecessary purchases when you have a specific list. I plan out my family’s dinner meals about a
week-and-a-half at a time, and then build a grocery list based on what ingredients
I need for those meals, and then round out the list with other household
staples (bread for lunch sandwiches, eggs and milk for breakfast, chips for
snacks, fruit, etc.).
This is also where you can use coupons more
effectively. Some people clip coupons
for anything and everything that catches their eye. Sometimes I do this. I don’t actually use all of them though. The way to do coupons right is to use them
for things you’re already buying anyway.
Things you know you’ll use.
Sometimes these things are on your list, and sometimes they’re not. I mentioned that I shop at BJ’s, which is
similar to Costco – it’s just closer to my house. BJ’s sends coupon books to its members, and
one thing I frequently find coupons for in their books is large bags of
Craisins. My daughters and husband love
to snack on Craisins. So even if I don’t
necessarily need more right then, I’ll buy them while I have the coupon,
because I know that we do and will eat them.
One trick to using coupons effectively is to not marry
yourself to one particular brand of anything.
If you only ever buy Ragu pasta sauce for example, you’ll miss out on
savings from coupons for Presto and Bertolli.
Another trick is to make sure that you’re actually saving
money. If Ragu is $1.99 for a 24 oz.
jar, and Bertolli is $2.49 for a 24 oz. jar, and you have a coupon f or $0.25
off a jar of Bertolli, it’s still cheaper to buy the Ragu. It may even be less expensive still to buy
generic.
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I’d like to talk a little bit about what to do when we’re in
that situation where we absolutely, positively, have no other choice but to
pinch those pennies.
When I was a young teenager, my family found ourselves in
dire financial straits. I won’t go into
the details, but I will share a little background. My dad was making about $103k per year at his
job. Due to a number of reasons, my
family moved out of state, and my dad took a new job, making only about $52k
per year. We were a family of five, and
he had just taken a 50% pay cut. This is
why I was raised by a couponing mother.
I remember driving around to the three big grocery stores in town,
buying the best deals, and maximizing our coupons. We stacked and doubled them. (Stores don’t double coupons nearly as much
as they used to, and it’s not always easy to find stackable coupons either,
which are when you use a store coupon and
a manufacturer’s coupon for the same item.)
We had a big food storage. We
had, a few years earlier, come out of a period of unemployment, and weren’t
sure we weren’t going to be finding ourselves there again.
My mom went to great lengths to stretch our money as far as
she could. Like I said, there were other
circumstances that I won’t go into, which made things a bigger deal that they may
sound like on the surface. We didn’t
just use the coupons that came in our Sunday paper or our weekly circular. My mom contacted the local newspapers, and
spoke with the person in charge of whatever department dealt with the coupons,
circulars, etc. She learned that
whatever newspapers (and coupons) were printed and not distributed, were just
discarded. All those coupons that could
be used, that manufacturers authorized, went to waste. She made arrangements to come once a week and
collect the unused store ads and manufacturer coupons.
A lot of times, store coupons will “limit one per customer
per visit.” There are ways around that,
which we did use, but my mom preferred to stay above-board. I do remember times when she would go through
one line, I’d go through another, and my sister would go through a third,
maximizing our use of coupons. One thing
I didn’t know then, but that she told me while I prepared for this class, was
that she also spoke with the store managers.
When we first started this (perhaps) extreme couponing journey, and each
time a store got a new manager, she would approach them, explain our family’s
situation, and how she legitimately obtained additional coupons. In each case, the managers thanked her for
being upfront with them, and didn’t object to our methods. The mantra she lived by at this time was
“never take ‘no’ from someone who doesn’t have the authority to say ‘yes.’”
Even within couponing and driving around, she found other
ways to save. One simple way was that
instead of buying individual lunch-sized bags of chips, she bought a big bag of
Cheetos (or whatever was on sale), and divided them up individually. That saved so much money in packaging. At the time, my brother, sister, and I were
all in school. We each packed a
lunch. That’s 15 lunches per week, not
to mention my dad packing a lunch to work.
If you assume that we each packed a sandwich, a bag of chips, and some
grapes (for example), that’s 45 individual baggies per week. A 100-count box of Ziploc sandwich-sized bags
would be gone in two weeks. So much for
saving on packaging.
This was an area that ended up coming as an embarrassment to
us as kids, but that (apparently) saved the family a respectable about of
money.
We didn’t not have resealable bags in our home. We just didn’t use them as often. My mom saved bags of every stripe, and reused
them. The bag from one loaf of bread,
now empty, could be knotted in half, cut just below the knot, and used for two
sandwiches.
We washed and reused the resealable bags that we did have,
within reason. If they’d been home to
raw meat and marinade, they usually just ended up in the trash. Same thing with aluminum foil. As a teenager, I hated all this. It was embarrassing, it was a hassle, and I
just didn’t understand the whole picture enough to know why we needed this.
I was old enough during that time in my family’s life that I
remember clearly the way things were.
The sacrifices that we made in the grocery arena allowed us to still
maintain a reasonable quality of life in other areas. We still went out to dinner as a family about
once a month. We still had ice cream and
treats. The scrimping and saving that my
mom did, and the hours that she spent obtaining, clipping, and organizing our
coupons, she did so that us kids wouldn’t notice a huge change from before.
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My mom is a strong woman, and she loves her family
fiercely. She didn’t do all this
alone. I mentioned before that my siblings
and I went with her on these grocery errands.
But more than that, she involved us in the process. Remember that math from a few minutes ago? Three bags per lunch, 3 lunches a day, 5 days
a week = 45 bags? We talked about that
in Family Home Evening once. We talked
about working together to save money, with the bread bag technique, bagging our
own chips, and more.
I think my mom involved us kids partly so that she and my
dad weren’t alone in the journey, and partly for the same reason I made myself
do the grocery price comparison I talked about earlier. She wanted us to be mindful. When we knew more, we understood better why
we did certain things. This, I think, is
an eternal principle. The scriptures
tell us that “…unto whomever much is given, of him shall be much required.” We are encouraged to seek knowledge, and
greater spiritual understanding. With
those things comes greater accountability to the Lord. As my mom involved us in the process, we came
to better realize the consequences – good or bad – of choices that we made.
While I again admit that I really did not like some of the reusing methods my mom employed at the time, I
am forever grateful for the lessons I learned from her and my dad in my youth:
lessons of prudence, frugality, stewardship, and hard work.
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Alright, to finish up the class, I’d like to talk about some
practical real examples of things you can do to save money, and things I do.
Did you know you can make your own dishwasher
detergent? Laundry soap? Lots of other home cleaners as well. Not only does this have the benefit of saving
money, you also cut down on chemicals in your home.
How about cereal? I
have a homemade granola recipe that it to die for.
How well do you know your over-the-counter medications? What is the generic name for Tylenol? Advil?
Aleve? When you know the generic
names (acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen, respectively), you can get them
much cheaper by buying generic brands. I
have occasional allergies, not bad enough or frequent enough to need a
prescription. I usually get by just fine
with Alavert, which is loratadine, 10 mg.
Alavert, however, is expensive.
The last time I bought some, I ended up getting the generic Walgreen’s
brand for about a third of the price. I
don’t know why I’d never looked for the store brand on it before, because I do
all the time for pain-type medications.
Do you thrift shop? I
don’t very much. The size clothing I
wear tends to be pretty hideous from thrift stores, if I can find it at
all. I have a lot of friends who are
much smaller than I am that find great stuff at thrift stores all the
time. I should still shop there more
frequently for my kids, though. My
husband suggested I share his most recent thrift shopping experience. He wears dressy slacks to work every
day. So he needs several pairs to rotate
through. All his pants seem to wear out
at the same time, too, which is frustrating.
A new pair of dress pants for him could cost anywhere from $40-$90,
assuming he needed them now, instead
of being able to wait for a sale. With
the amount of wear he gets from them, they might last two years. Instead, my husband spent about 30 minutes at
Salvation Army, and came home with three pairs of dress pants. Total damage: $15. That’s $5 per pair. Even if he has to replace them each year,
it’s still a savings of $15-$40 per year, per pair of pants.
Group deal sites for entertainment can be great. Groupon, LivingSocial, Zulily, and Amazon
Local/Amazon Daily are popular ones.
There are a lot of “money back” rewards sites out there as
well. Swagbucks, Ebates, and a new app
by Groupon called Snap.
If you shop at Target a lot, and you aren’t using Cartwheel
yet, you’re missing out in a big way. It
lets you add discounts to things you’re buying, often on top of already reduced
sale or clearance prices, and you get to do it without coupons. If you use a Target RedCard on top of that,
you’ve got even more savings.
You can use Fuelperks from Giant Eagle to create additional
savings for yourself. Do you have a big
home improvement project coming up soon?
Instead of just going to Home Depot or Lowes and buying your supplies,
stop at Giant Eagle first, buy gift cards for those stores, and then go spend
the gift cards. The money spent at Giant
Eagle will go toward your fuel perks discounts, and you still get to buy what
you need at the other stores. The only
caveat is that you usually can’t use the gifts cards until the next day, so you
need to plan a little in advance. And
Fuelperks do expire. But you can do this
for home improvement, dining out, or buying gift cards as gifts.
When you have errands and shopping to do, and you’re gone
for several hours, do you usually eat out?
When you know you’ll be gone that long, pack a lunch to take with you.
Do you take long road trips?
Even if it’s only once a year, fast food tabs can add up quickly,
especially when you’ve got several children to buy for as well. This summer, my family drove to California and
back. We took our time driving, taking
shorter days so that our girls could have time out of the car each day, instead
of all of us going crazy together. The
nights that we were staying with friends or family members, we camped. Our car was packed with two large buckets
containing clothing, shoes, and toiletries; camping equipment including an ice
chest, a tent, sleeping bags, pillows, a cot, cooking supplies, a stove, and
more; entertainment; and I honestly can’t even remember what else. We planned meals out in advance for our
drive, and tried to eat fast food only once a day. For lunch each day, we took breaks at rest
stops, where we used the bathrooms free of charge, and made our own
sandwiches. We shopped along the way,
and restocked our ice daily. I can’t
tell you how much we saved. Plus, we
didn’t have the constant gassy bloated feeling that comes with days on end of
fast food and sitting in a car.
Make cookies for your kids’ lunches, instead of buying
pre-packaged ones. One friend of mine
baked about ten different varieties in August, before school starts, and
freezes them. She can pull them out of
the freezer in the morning, put them in her kids’ lunches, and they’re thawed
by noon. Most cookies freeze well, and
you can even freeze the dough, too, if you want a fresher taste for each batch.
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Being economical doesn’t mean you have to be stingy. Figure out why you’re saving money, and work from there. You may find that you have a little more
leeway than you think.
Being mindful of needs versus wants, and having a better
understanding of the whole picture can help you make decisions as well. Involve your spouse, teach your children, and
focus on living providently and prudently, instead of just “saving money.”
Remember that sometimes you have to spend money in order to
save money. Growing a garden and canning
can be great money savers. But buying
seedlings in the spring can feel like a big expense. If you’ve never canned before, building up
your stock of canning jars is an expensive startup, not to mention the canner
itself. But if you look at the long
game, these things can save money.
One other thing I would like to mention is tithing. I hadn’t initially thought to include tithing
in my class, but as I listened to a Sacrament meeting talk on it last week, I
realized that it’s vitally important to a topic such as this. The Lord has promised us that if we pay our
tithing, He will “…open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing,
that there shall not be room enough to receive it.” Not all blessings that come from tithing are
financial. In fact, most probably
aren’t. But tithing is one commandment
we have been given in which we can be
completely perfect in our obedience. If
we are faithful in paying our tithes and fast offerings, the Lord will bless us
and see to it that our needs are met, one way or another.
Finally, at this time of year, I’d also be remiss to not tie
gratitude into my lesson. Being grateful
– and expressing gratitude – for the things we have can go a long way to being
happy and satisfied in life. Being
grateful, in and of itself, won’t improve our temporal conditions. But it will
improve our attitudes, our families, and increase our happiness.
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