As I waited for the update to my McAfee to download I suddenly realized I was smiling, not a little half smile but a big full blown smile. It was one that reached from one side of my chubby face to another.
“What in the world am I smiling about?” I thought. I looked around the nearly empty library to see if my husband, who sat across from me, or anyone else had noticed me smiling like the proverbial ape. Nope, I was safe.
“Surely I’m not that happy to be sitting in the public library and using free wi-fi” I thought to myself. “Maybe it’s because Gary got a job yesterday” I continued, “No that’s not it, I’ll miss all the time we spend together and I’ll miss traveling. That’s not it. Although I am delighted to have a steady income again”
Yes you read right my husband was offered a job after nearly 18 months of unemployment/retirement. It’s not going to mean instant wealth for us, things are still going to be tight. But if we stick to our budget we will be able to pay the bills and finally truly snowball as described in Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover. Not just once in a while, but each month. Only a few dollars at first, but it will be steady.
Our plan, as some of you already know, is for us to keep mystery shopping around home, and selling stuff to add flakes to that snowball until we are totally debt free. It will take us more than a year or two that is for certain, but we didn’t get so deeply in debt super fast either, so slow and steady will win the race in being debt free. Of course there will be several gazelle intense spurts of paying off debt.
So why was I smiling. The download wasn’t finished so I decided to mull over this weird grin on my face and the happiness I was feeling as I tried to discover its source. Then it hit me what it was “No, it couldn’t be that! “ I admonished myself, “surely not”. But then I realized that was exactly it and I grinned even bigger.
I was smiling about a single purchase I had just made for $1.92. I had purchased a quart of buttermilk. Yes I said buttermilk. No I’m not a buttermilk junky, well maybe I do cook with it a lot. The smile was because I suddenly realized our life had done a 180. No not the job, well yes the job, but not so much about it as what it meant.
It meant I had control of my life back. As you already know I’m all about frugal food cooking and storage. Since that day in 2009 when we had our first talk about how we would survive being unemployed our life has not been totally in our control.
Oh we have had the final say on all we did, but our life was ruled by when and where the mystery shops could be found. This was not a bad thing, we have had a blast traveling and seeing all sorts of things. But when it comes to frugal food storage it is a hard thing to do when you aren’t certain where you will be when. Certain food items that will help to feed your family frugally require a bit of attention now and again. So starting such food items when you may be leaving town on a moment’s notice is not a good idea. You could lose your original ingredients. There are all sorts of foods like that. Some you can refrigerate or freeze to save, such as sourdough starter, but others like Perpetual Buttermilk needs “renewed” periodically.
I cook a lot with buttermilk in my scratch cooking. I use powdered buttermilk in my dry mix recipes a lot, but I also marinade with it. You can use reconstituted powdered buttermilk to do that as well, but I prefer using regular buttermilk because you pour out just what you need to do the marinade, no mess, no mixing up too much, no waste, and fast.
That’s where Perpetual Buttermilk comes in. The premise is simple you purchase “a single quart of buttermilk”. Cultured buttermilk is what you need, you could even go as small as pint because here’s how you make a quart of buttermilk from just ½ cup of that original purchase of cultured buttermilk.
PERPETUAL BUTTERMILK
3 ¾ C water
1 1/3 C powdered milk
½ C cultured buttermilk
Mix well 3 ¾ cup water with 1 1/3 cup powdered milk (NOT powdered buttermilk) . Once this is mixed well add ½ cup cultured buttermilk. Then leave the container sitting on the counter overnight. That’s all there is to it. New fresh buttermilk will be waiting on you in the morning. Refrigerate and use as normal. Start to get low, use another ½ cup and repeat the process.
You can do similar things with live culture yogurt, sour dough starter and much more, but you need to be home to tend to them. Refrigerator bread dough either needs used within a certain amount of time or mixed up into a loaf and frozen. So for the last 18 months I’ve not been able to make these staples to our family diet.
Now I can, I am back in control. I smiled big. We were going back to good frugal eating. Homemade Artisan breads in less than 5 minutes a day, sour dough biscuits, onion strings, chicken nuggets, yes these would all soon be back on the menu. In fact I decided at that moment there would be onion strings on the dinner menu with charcoaled hamburgers and butterfly potatoes to celebrate the new job. That will bring a smile to my husband’s face too.
The next time my darling husband retires it will be permanently and I will still be in control because then I’ll know when we might leave town and can prepare my food storage accordingly. So for the next long while be prepared to see a lot more recipes and be told many a story about the adventures on and off the Rock ‘n Tree Ranch.
Jan who is not about to give up traveling for fun in OK
Showing posts with label Surviving unemployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Surviving unemployment. Show all posts
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Thursday, December 31, 2009
THE PRINCESS PLAN BASICS
Changing all aspects of our lives from living like paupers to becoming royalty.
December 31, 2009
Occasionally I have mentioned that I am working on the Princess Plan. Some of you are very familiar with my Princess Plan, but others have never heard of it. Since it is the beginning of a new year everyone is making plans for what they want to accomplish in the New Year. Myself included. I’ve drug out the Princess Plan and dusted it off. I had started it this time last year and was doing so very well on it until we got the BIG HIT from Murphy in late February, I think it’s still a good plan. So here are the basics of it.
The premise of the Princess Plan came from my realizing that clutter in all avenues of our lives was making us live like paupers. Think about it. If your home is in a mess you can’t find things, so you purchase another item to replace the one you can’t find because it’s easier. You can’t find a bill, you clutter your finances with late fees. How often has clutter caused an item to be ruined?
No menu plan, you tend to eat out and clutter your finances more.
Financial clutter aka: debt causes you to have cluttered emotions, which will clutter your relationships with friends and family it’s all connected and as a result you live like a pauper in at least one area of your life. I’m tired of being a pauper, I want to be the princess my Papa always called me. So I developed this plan and as long as I stick to it I find that we are slowly working our way toward living like royalty in all aspects of our lives.
When I set it up I used the Royal theme to help title and give substances to each aspect. You can use different titles or whatever. This is my personal plan and how I set it up.
I tend to work in twelves when making lists so I started with twelve basic goals. As always in my life this is NOT a to do list, but a goal list. I am not a person who works well with demands, a list that is titled “TO DO” sounds like a demand to my brain, so I set goals. The world will not end if I don’t get a goal done, but I will be very proud if I do.
I am a list person, meaning I work better if I have a list to follow. Some people hate lists, so they would just forget setting up the outline as I have it. And just work in general, but for those of us who need a list Here’s how it goes.
Twelve works well for the Princess Plan because then I can work some on each of the 12 main goals a month.
So I took those original twelve goals and broke it down to a certain amount to do each month for 12 months. In my example I will take the goal I have to “totally clean and organize the whole house.” That is an overall goal and looking at it in that HUGE lump is pretty daunting. But when I break the house down to twelve areas to work on solid one area a month it becomes a little more manageable. So the CASTLE segment was born.
Once you have determined the 12 segments for your house then break those 12 segments into four parts per segment—one for each week of the month.
Those four parts get broken into seven goals, one for each day. With details on EXACTLY how I want to do that day’s jobs. It sounds hard but if you set it all down to paper in an outline format you’ll see it’s “just a little” each day. Like I said I’m a list person, so I include EVERYTHING in my overall master goal list, right down to how I will dispose of the clutter I find as I go DAILY. As each of the sections is completed then it’s just a matter of keeping it picked up daily after that segment is completed to get to my goal. Being the S.H.E. (Sidetracked Home Executive) that I am I know that I will tend to put up just a few things in other areas daily too so by the time I get to the last area it will be fairly simple to do.
Just as Dave Ramsey suggests starting with the smallest debt and snowballing up to the largest to keep giving yourself a reward of seeing accomplishment to encourage you to move on to the next one I suggest starting with the easiest area to fix first, say your cleanest or smallest room and then trying to take care of removing 5-10 items daily from the remaining areas of the original 12 so by the time you get to the room from HELL there will be so little left in it you will find it a snap (after all you will have removed permanently 240-480 minimum items from that room already).
Here’s the outline I mentioned I use.
THE ROYAL CASTLE: goal to totally clean and organize it by year’s end.
I. Kitchen by the week
A.-D Break the kitchen into four segments to do one segment a week
1-7 Break the week segments into 7 parts (One part for each day)
a. Break it down into EXACT steps of how you will do that day’s goals, remember to include taking 10 items PERMANENTLY out of each of the remaining areas.
II. Master bedroom by the week
III. Repeat with the other segments for the year in this category. So you will complete one area a month.
Now go down your original list and do a similar outline for each of the other eleven areas. So you will actually be doing 12 different small type segments a day. The 12 items might be finances, exercise, cleaning various buildings, preparing for Christmas/birthdays whatever the “clutter is in your life.
My annual list? It’s below. If we do #7 like we want then my outline will need to be adjusted accordingly because it’s a little hard to clean at home when you are three states away. #12 is going to be the hardest to do with our current state of employment, but remember this is a goal list. The world will not end if it doesn’t happen. It would simply be a wonderful reward to work toward, we all LOVE Walt Disney World and haven’t been in four years, we miss it deeply.
It will of course not happen if our finances do not improve, it is a reward goal. The apple hanging from the string so to speak. We all need a reward to work toward. It will get the exact same type of monthly, weekly, daily breakdown the other areas will get, but they will be appropriate for it. Money will only be put back for the trip AFTER we are actually doing great on our finances again. The only money in the beginning that will be put back will be the change from our pockets once a week. If we see we are not going to be able to make the December 2010 trip we all desire all the put back money will make a great snowball payment. (which is what will most likely happen).
Annual goals:
1. Totally clean and organized the house—THE ROYALS CASTLE
2. Sell off all excess items, vehicles, critters, etc. THE ROYAL TREASURERY
3. Garden year round successfully HER MAJESTY’S GARDEN
4. Preserve all excess foods, get to the point that we only grocery shop for the very basics we cannot produce ourselves.THE ROYAL PANTRY
5. Clean, organize, repair, and paint the garage THE OUTER KINGDOM BUILDINGS
6. Clean, organize, repair, and paint all out buildings, pens, and porches THE OUTER KINGDOM POULTRY
7. Mystery shop five days a week, traveling whenever we can. THE ROYAL TREASURERY
8. Take all excess weight off of all three of us THE ROYALS
9. Lay in two years worth of firewood HEAT FOR THE QUEEN/DRAGON’S BREATH
10. Reduce our debt by at least one half THE ROYAL TREASURERY PART II
11. Go to entirely scratch cooking THE PANTRY OF THE ROYALS
12. Go to Walt Disney World on a cash basis PARTY TIME!—THE ROYAL BALL!
So that’s the basics of the Princess Plan, will we accomplish it all? Not if Murphy has anything to say about it, but then Murphy can be defeated it just takes an “I can” attitude. I am realistic about this, finances being our biggest problem right now, but as I tell myself and the guys “this too shall pass”. After all we are so much better off than others we have blessings galore and most important, we have each other.
So, now I challenge you to make your own Princess/Prince plan. What are your goals, what will you achieve in 2010.
Jan whose family is so much closer after the BIG Murphy visit and who wishes you a Happy New Year in OK
December 31, 2009
Occasionally I have mentioned that I am working on the Princess Plan. Some of you are very familiar with my Princess Plan, but others have never heard of it. Since it is the beginning of a new year everyone is making plans for what they want to accomplish in the New Year. Myself included. I’ve drug out the Princess Plan and dusted it off. I had started it this time last year and was doing so very well on it until we got the BIG HIT from Murphy in late February, I think it’s still a good plan. So here are the basics of it.
The premise of the Princess Plan came from my realizing that clutter in all avenues of our lives was making us live like paupers. Think about it. If your home is in a mess you can’t find things, so you purchase another item to replace the one you can’t find because it’s easier. You can’t find a bill, you clutter your finances with late fees. How often has clutter caused an item to be ruined?
No menu plan, you tend to eat out and clutter your finances more.
Financial clutter aka: debt causes you to have cluttered emotions, which will clutter your relationships with friends and family it’s all connected and as a result you live like a pauper in at least one area of your life. I’m tired of being a pauper, I want to be the princess my Papa always called me. So I developed this plan and as long as I stick to it I find that we are slowly working our way toward living like royalty in all aspects of our lives.
When I set it up I used the Royal theme to help title and give substances to each aspect. You can use different titles or whatever. This is my personal plan and how I set it up.
I tend to work in twelves when making lists so I started with twelve basic goals. As always in my life this is NOT a to do list, but a goal list. I am not a person who works well with demands, a list that is titled “TO DO” sounds like a demand to my brain, so I set goals. The world will not end if I don’t get a goal done, but I will be very proud if I do.
I am a list person, meaning I work better if I have a list to follow. Some people hate lists, so they would just forget setting up the outline as I have it. And just work in general, but for those of us who need a list Here’s how it goes.
Twelve works well for the Princess Plan because then I can work some on each of the 12 main goals a month.
So I took those original twelve goals and broke it down to a certain amount to do each month for 12 months. In my example I will take the goal I have to “totally clean and organize the whole house.” That is an overall goal and looking at it in that HUGE lump is pretty daunting. But when I break the house down to twelve areas to work on solid one area a month it becomes a little more manageable. So the CASTLE segment was born.
Once you have determined the 12 segments for your house then break those 12 segments into four parts per segment—one for each week of the month.
Those four parts get broken into seven goals, one for each day. With details on EXACTLY how I want to do that day’s jobs. It sounds hard but if you set it all down to paper in an outline format you’ll see it’s “just a little” each day. Like I said I’m a list person, so I include EVERYTHING in my overall master goal list, right down to how I will dispose of the clutter I find as I go DAILY. As each of the sections is completed then it’s just a matter of keeping it picked up daily after that segment is completed to get to my goal. Being the S.H.E. (Sidetracked Home Executive) that I am I know that I will tend to put up just a few things in other areas daily too so by the time I get to the last area it will be fairly simple to do.
Just as Dave Ramsey suggests starting with the smallest debt and snowballing up to the largest to keep giving yourself a reward of seeing accomplishment to encourage you to move on to the next one I suggest starting with the easiest area to fix first, say your cleanest or smallest room and then trying to take care of removing 5-10 items daily from the remaining areas of the original 12 so by the time you get to the room from HELL there will be so little left in it you will find it a snap (after all you will have removed permanently 240-480 minimum items from that room already).
Here’s the outline I mentioned I use.
THE ROYAL CASTLE: goal to totally clean and organize it by year’s end.
I. Kitchen by the week
A.-D Break the kitchen into four segments to do one segment a week
1-7 Break the week segments into 7 parts (One part for each day)
a. Break it down into EXACT steps of how you will do that day’s goals, remember to include taking 10 items PERMANENTLY out of each of the remaining areas.
II. Master bedroom by the week
III. Repeat with the other segments for the year in this category. So you will complete one area a month.
Now go down your original list and do a similar outline for each of the other eleven areas. So you will actually be doing 12 different small type segments a day. The 12 items might be finances, exercise, cleaning various buildings, preparing for Christmas/birthdays whatever the “clutter is in your life.
My annual list? It’s below. If we do #7 like we want then my outline will need to be adjusted accordingly because it’s a little hard to clean at home when you are three states away. #12 is going to be the hardest to do with our current state of employment, but remember this is a goal list. The world will not end if it doesn’t happen. It would simply be a wonderful reward to work toward, we all LOVE Walt Disney World and haven’t been in four years, we miss it deeply.
It will of course not happen if our finances do not improve, it is a reward goal. The apple hanging from the string so to speak. We all need a reward to work toward. It will get the exact same type of monthly, weekly, daily breakdown the other areas will get, but they will be appropriate for it. Money will only be put back for the trip AFTER we are actually doing great on our finances again. The only money in the beginning that will be put back will be the change from our pockets once a week. If we see we are not going to be able to make the December 2010 trip we all desire all the put back money will make a great snowball payment. (which is what will most likely happen).
Annual goals:
1. Totally clean and organized the house—THE ROYALS CASTLE
2. Sell off all excess items, vehicles, critters, etc. THE ROYAL TREASURERY
3. Garden year round successfully HER MAJESTY’S GARDEN
4. Preserve all excess foods, get to the point that we only grocery shop for the very basics we cannot produce ourselves.THE ROYAL PANTRY
5. Clean, organize, repair, and paint the garage THE OUTER KINGDOM BUILDINGS
6. Clean, organize, repair, and paint all out buildings, pens, and porches THE OUTER KINGDOM POULTRY
7. Mystery shop five days a week, traveling whenever we can. THE ROYAL TREASURERY
8. Take all excess weight off of all three of us THE ROYALS
9. Lay in two years worth of firewood HEAT FOR THE QUEEN/DRAGON’S BREATH
10. Reduce our debt by at least one half THE ROYAL TREASURERY PART II
11. Go to entirely scratch cooking THE PANTRY OF THE ROYALS
12. Go to Walt Disney World on a cash basis PARTY TIME!—THE ROYAL BALL!
So that’s the basics of the Princess Plan, will we accomplish it all? Not if Murphy has anything to say about it, but then Murphy can be defeated it just takes an “I can” attitude. I am realistic about this, finances being our biggest problem right now, but as I tell myself and the guys “this too shall pass”. After all we are so much better off than others we have blessings galore and most important, we have each other.
So, now I challenge you to make your own Princess/Prince plan. What are your goals, what will you achieve in 2010.
Jan whose family is so much closer after the BIG Murphy visit and who wishes you a Happy New Year in OK
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