I went shopping yesterday at ChefStore, which is a restaurant supply store and I can get some really great deals there.  Not everything, so I have to watch it, but most things.  You buy in bulk for most stuff, but they do have a few things that are in smaller quantities.  They are just more expensive.

Here is what I bought:

30 pounds of navel oranges $22.98

1 pound loaf of Muenster cheese $4.29

3 pounds of grated parmesan $20.97

15 pounds of Russet potatoes $5.39

1 loaf buttermilk bread $2.99

1 mega twin pack of tortillas $9.89

1 pack of 20 organic German sausages $24.99

1 pack of 10 3.39 toaster biscuits $3.39

1 30 pound case (6 5 pound bags) of diced frozen yellow potatoes $54.19

Total spent: $157.92

I saved $9.50 due to sales on items, that largest discount of which was $8.40 off the sausage.  Otherwise I would not have bought the sausage  It is one thing to buy 20 sausages at $24.99.  It's another to buy them for $33.39.  Even if they are organic.  We will be able to get three meals out of them, so $8.33 per meal for the meat.

We will be shredding the Muenster since we don't have a meat slicer.  Well, we do, but it is buried in our storage unit somewhere and we just haven't had time to find it.  I am hoping when the whether warms up, we can go in there and clean it out and get rid of a bunch of stuff.  We have a ton of children's toys in there that we don't need anymore and that the kids are willing to get rid of.  There are a lot of Barbie dolls and Polly Pockets and stuff like that that my great nieces would probably adore.

There are also a bunch of stuffed animals they could pick through and see if they wanted them.  Some can just be thrown away, too, because they are falling apart.  I do have a few I want to keep.  One that my grandmother made me and one that my mother made me and my first two stuffed animals.  I have a ton of stuffed penguins from when I was collecting penguins that I would like to keep one or two of and two collectible bears, and there is a set of Winnie the Pooh characters that we got at Disneyland back in the late 90's that might be worth something, so I'd like to see about that, before giving them to the kids.  Otherwise, I don't really care.  The kids have their most important stuffed animals from when they were babies at home.  Not many at all, just two each.

But hopefully when we start purging the unit we will also find the meat slicer.  Then we can also make our own roasted chicken breast and turkey breast and London broil and slice it for sandwiches instead of paying exorbitant prices for the cleanest deli meats they offer.  Which still has some stuff in them.  We would have completely clean meat with nothing in it.  Just our seasonings.

The oranges should last us 3 weeks.  We still had some left, but we had really been tucking into them when we were very sick.  We should be slowing down now that we feel better.  The 15 pound bag of Russet potatoes should go two full weeks.  And the diced potatoes should last several weeks.  The Muenster should last a month.  I will vacuum seal half of the cheese and shred half of it, so the sealed half stays protected longer.  The parmesan containers are sealed, but must stay in the fridge.  They will last 6 months and my kids go through powdered parmesan pretty fast.  They eat it on all their pasta and pizza and sometimes on their broccoli or fries.

The tortillas will be for breakfast burritos for the freezer for the guys' breakfasts and also taquitos for one dinner.  I do have a lot left of the pack of tortillas we bought at Costco, but we will definitely needs this one, too.  The toaster biscuits are like English muffins but softer.  They will be used to make breakfast sandwiches.  Egg, Canadian bacon, and cheese sandwiches.  So not all the shopping was just for this pay period even if it came out of this budget.  I will probably still have to buy a couple of things, so I won't save as much these two weeks, but that is okay.  I think the goal has to be that we are eating from home and improving our health than it does that we are saving all of the money.

And when the credit card bill came in for all of the December spending, I realized just how much we did spend eating out.  The money I did save went to pay on the credit card instead of the emergency fund like I wanted.  I will be able to pay off the credit card this month, but barely and only because it is a three payday month for us.  But hopefully next month will be better.  I had a talk with DH about his free spending and I won't be spending any money on my game for a few months, because I did spend a lot on it in December because they were having all kinds of sales on stuff that were ridiculous.

One of the things that happens with me is that when I am in extreme pain, I buy things.  It makes me feel better.  It is an old bad habit.  But since I don't need anything, really, I spend it on my game.  And I need to not do this.  I thought I had shaken it, but apparently not.  It's like now that I am over my food addiction, my old spending addiction is rearing its ugly head.  I think I will talk to my therapist about that in my session on Tuesday.  I mean, I haven't used my credit card in 18 days, so I am doing pretty good for now, but I really have to think about why I am doing this again.  It hasn't gotten to the point where I will have interest to pay, but this one was going to be pretty darn close.

After being on antibiotics and steroids for 4 days now, I am feeling a lot better.  I'm still not well, but I am no longer coughing from my bronchials or choking on gross stuff in my throat when I lay down flat, so that is a huge improvement.  Plus the steroids are giving me energy.  My sprained wrists are feeling a lot better, too, though if I make certain moves with my left one it still stabs.  My sprained ankle is still sore, probably because I couldn't rest it like I mostly could my hands.  You still have to walk.  And it is wobbly, risking another turn at all times, so I am using my cane outside again just for balance.  Otherwise, things are pretty good.

The challenge is going well and we still haven't eaten out.  I didn't make the stew yet.  I did make the sausage, bell peppers, and onions and we had baked potatoes with it for dinner last night. 

The night before that I made crockpot spaghetti and meatballs with my special pour and dump spaghetti sauce.  It's kind of homemade.  Three to four cans of 15 oz tomato sauce depending on how saucey you want it to be, I did 3, a can of tomato paste, a cup of dehydrated onions but you can use a whole fresh onion, I was too tired, 2 pint jars of my home canned diced tomatoes with thejuice, two heaping spoonfuls of garlic from the jar or one whole head of diced garlic.  I didn't use my own meatballs.  I had a big bag of Kirkland Italian meatballs in the freezer from Costco so used about 40 of those.  They are the 1 inch size meatballs if you want to make them from scratch.

Just put a thin layer of sauce in the crockpot, layer the frozen meatballs on the bottom of the pot, then add in the rest of the sauce and let it cook on high for 3 hours.  Then break a pound of spaghetti in half and add to the crockpot and completely cover with the sauce.  Continue to cook on high for half an hour.  Stir the noodles, bringing sauce and meatballs to the top and mixing together.  Makd sure noodles are completely covered.  Cook for another half an hour on high.  Check noodles for doneness.  They should be perfect, but if not, cook another 15 minutes.  Stir everything one more time before serving.  So easy.

I don't often eat breakfast or lunch, but today I had sort of an in between meal.  We had two small potatoes leftover from a previous night that would have about equalled a regular potato, so I chopped those up and fried them in avocado oil with salt, pepper, and paprika.  Put a little ketchup on and called it good.  And it was good.  My husband finished off the leftover spaghetti and meatballs.  My son finished the sausage, onions, and bell peppers, and my daughter had a smoothie.  She doesn't do well with solid foods until around dinner time because of her meds.

We have been very good with managing leftover waste this week and only had to throw out a package of corn and a little rice.  It was a seasoned box rice that had been cooking around in the pantry and no one really liked it.  We have one more box of it and when I make it again, I am going to add onion powder, garlic powder, pepper, parsley, and oregano.  Maybe a bit of salt.  And cook it in chicken broth.  It was way too bland.  The corn I bought at our last Costco trip right at the end of December.  I got bronchitis then and it got pushed to the back of the fridge and was forgotten about.  When I was cleaning out the fridge I found it.  Still, it wasn't that bad.  Usually when I clean out the fridge we throw out a lot more.

Then we will be completely out of that brand of boxed rice.  I think we have one box of Zataran's dirty rice left.  After that I am going to learn how to make dirty rice and Mexican rice myself.  I won't worry about learning the type of rice that no one really liked.  I do  know how to make saffron rice and I have a recipe for turmeric rice that I've been wanting to try.  I don't often make saffron rice because of the cost of saffron, but I am seriously thinking about getting the type of crocus that makes saffron.

The bulbs are expensive, but after a couple of years they make baby bulbs and I can separate them and have more flowers, so I can harvest more saffron threads, so I think it will be worth the investment.  Unlike regular crocus, they bloom in the fall, so that will be interesting.  I'll have to put them in their own bin with other bulbs that bloom throughot the year, like tulips, daffodils, snowdrops, other types of crocus, iris, and gladiolus, so something is blooming all year.  The autumn crocus can go in front so they don't get lost in the shuffle.  I won't get a ton in the beginning.  You can usually only get 2 to 3 threads per flower, but if I have enough flowers, I can make the rice a few times a year without buying the saffron from the store at the high, high cost.

I think I will make stew tomorrow.  I'm just not in the mood for it.  I'm in the mood for cheeseburgers with lettuce and carmelized onions.  I chopped an extra onion up last night, so I don't even have to bother with that.  I'll make some cole slaw first so it can sit in the fridge and meld flavors and then can finish off the bag of French fries and if that is not enough for everyone there are tater tots.  I will probably skip the potatoes since I already had some today and have an orange instead.

I only spent $109.23 over the course of two weeks, saving $290.77 from my grocery budget.

I did buy some groceries yesterday, but I will put that in separate post.  It was payday.

My daughter and I went to the doctor's today and the cold I've been fighting since before Christmas turned into bronchitis so he prescribed some antibiotics, a steroid burst, and refilled my ashtma inhalers.  My asthma has been really good for a long while, so I haven't had to use them on the daily up until I caught this cold and I was almost out of doses.  My other boxes were expired.  Insurance only covers one of my inhalers and the other one is $50, but it will cover everything else with a $15 co-pay.  Ah, the beginning of the year when we have to pay for everything again.  It was nice having the deductible and out of pocket max met while it lasted.

I went to the pain clinic yesterday as a follow up to my second nerve test to see if radioablation was something indicated for me to try.  And it is based on my second set of results, but...  I'm still kind of wary of the possible risks.  So we decided to try a steroid injection into the hip joint instead and hold off on the radioablation for now.  The one they put into the L4 space really helped a good deal and it has been long enough that I can get another injection at a different site.  So maybe this will be enough to give me relief.

I have also lost 8 pounds since the beginning of the year and weight loss is helpful to lowering my back and hip pain.  I haven't been trying.  I've been too sick to try.  But we haven't eaten out at all or had processed food more than once and that was some unbaked cheese pizzas from the store deli that we then doctored up with our own toppings at home so they weren't full of sodium.  I make my own sausage and it doesn't have salt in it and then we use one slice of prosciutto for an entire 15 inch pizza and some uncured pepperoni which I used sparingly.  Then I put on sweet yellow onions and purple onions, all the colors of bell peppers, zucchini, and then five minutes before it is done baking we throw on some basil leaves.  I can load it up with veggies and strictly control the amount of salt in the toppings and then the sodium on the pizza is on the label and it is much lower altogether than just getting one of their loaded pizzas.

Yesterday I managed to make a huge pot of loaded baked potato soup.  I tried a new recipe that uses cream cheese instead of sour cream, but in the end it still needed sour cream, but not as much.  So I think I will go with how I made it last night in the future, but with a different cheese than I had on hand.  I used Beecher's Flagship because I didn't have any shredded Romano or shredded sharp cheddar and I didn't feel like getting out the food processor because it is such a mess to clean and I haven't taken the new salad shooter out of the package to wash yet.  But the Beecher's is just not strong enough.  It was still really good, though, but I just like that kick.  Or it might have been my taste buds were off.

There were plenty of leftovers so my daughter had some of that tonight and my husband made tacos for dinner.  My daughter is having trouble with spicy foods right now so we take advantage of days we have leftovers for her to eat to make spicy foods.  I might do sausage and peppers tomorrow, just because I can throw them in the oven on a sheet pan instead of stir-frying them.  Just make it easy on myself while I am this sick.  And probably some Instant Pot baked potatoes.  Dinner doesn't have to be super complicated when I am sick.

I bought some Souper Cubes with some of my Christmas money and they finally came today.  I am happy to have them, because now I can freeze soup and broth in them and pop them out and vacuum seal them and have nice stackable blocks in the freezer.  I do try to can my broth, but if I am too sick to do that, this is a nice option.  As for soup, you can't can soup with noodles in it and you have to have 3/4 of broth to 1/4 amount of stuff in the soup in order to safely can it, and I like my soup to be about half and half, which means freezing it.

I don't like all my containers in the freezer, though.  So this will be nice.  Plus, vacuum seal bags are also safe for boil in a bag use, so I can toss one in a pot of boiling water to cook and then put in a bowl instead of thawing and pouring out into a pan and then cooking and then transferring to a bowl.  I just have a pot full of water to dump and a bag to throw away, instead of a pot to wash, which when you are sick is extra helpful.

We have had to buy a few things at the grocery store, but haven't spent more than $50 this week.  Our grocery budget is $200 a week so we are doing really well.  My husband did get lunch one day off the food truck that will be coming to his work every two weeks, but he used his own spending money for that and it was from a local pizza restaurant that went out of business 15 years ago that we used to go to.  They had the absolute best pizza and now they've started up a food truck.  He said it is just as good as it ever was.

They also sell take and bake pies, so after the challenge is over I will have him pick up one to bring home.  He doesn't work far from home, it is 3 minutes on the freeway and 2 minutes off of it in one directions, so he could run it home on his lunch break.  They will let him take a long lunch as long as he has his hours in at the end of the week.  Most people work either four days or four and a half days anyway.  DH tends to do four and a half, so adding a half hour on Fridays is no big deal for him.

I don't have to go anywhere until Thursday when I have a chiropractor appointment.  I'd stay home, but I really need to go to it.  I'll wear my mask.  If she was going to catch it, she would have caught it from the last two weeks of me going, but I'll still wear it.  I have a lot of credit on my account there from before the out of pocket max caught up with the payments I was making, so I will have a while before I have to make any payments to her.

I think for Thursday I will plan crockpot beef stew, so it will be another easy meal.  I can used my canned meat, potatoes, and carrots and just mix up some packet gravy to dump on top and let it heat for a few hours and not have to worry about anything.  Or maybe I will do that tomorrow and save the sausage and peppers for after I've been on antibiotics for 24 hours.  Yeah, that might be best.  I'll figure out the rest of the week Thursday night.  Probably spaghetti for Friday night since I have a bag of meatballs in the freezer.  Oh, I could do crockpot spaghetti and meatballs.  Now that sounds good.  I'd have to carmelize onions, but other than that, no real work involved.

Okay, well, I better get to bed.  It is almost midnight.

Nearly every January for the past 8 years or so, I have participated in a January Eat from the Pantry Challenge to save money to save up for a bulk purchase of a steer or a hog and a couple of lambs on alternating years.  We would either raise our own meat birds or buy off farms when we could, grocery store when we couldn't, but in bulk if possible, as well.  Of course, we would be saving up through the rest of the year, too, as a line item in the budget and any leftover grocery money we had each payday, but the biggest chunk came from the challenge and we bought almost nothing.

This year is different in both the challenge and the goal.  The goal is to save any money from the grocery budget we can to put in the Emergency Fund because it is non-existent right now and that really scares me.

The challenge is not to eat everything just from the pantry and freezers this year.  It's not to spend almost nothing.  It is just to be quite frugal.  We will plan our meals as much around what we already have with hopefully only the need to buy one, maybe two items for a meal.  None if we can do without is preferable.  For the last two night's dinners I only needed to buy leeks, celery, and carrots for the first meal, but there were enough carrots and celery for more than one meal. 

I made a soup after making broth with the ham bone leftover from Christmas that I'd thrown in the freezer, then I threw in all the veggie scraps I'd saved in the freezer, the last of my old carrots and old celery that had been hanging out in the veggie drawer, and onion that was starting to get soft, and some parsley from the garden as well as other herbs and seasonings.  We cooked that, then strained it, cooled it overnight, skimmed off the fat, and made the soup by putting in some broth, leeks and onions, cooked until soft and pureed, then cooked some carrots, more onions, potatoes, and some new celery in the soup with more broth and once that was done, we added the last of the ham diced up and just let it simmer until the ham was warm.  It was very good.

We had some leftover rolls from Christmas to go with it and bananas that were getting speckled.  So pretty economical, we spent under $10 for the vegetables and we ended up with 3 servings of soup to go in the freezer leftover as well as 6 servings to eat as the men had two servings each.  All servings are 3 cup servings because this was a full on meal, except mine, which was a 2 cup serving because that is all I can eat.

Last night I did not need to buy anything.  I had one last jar of Classico pasta sauce and one last jar of Prego pasta sauce.  I don't really like the type of Prego that we had, which was why it was the last jar on the shelf, but decided to make the best of it.  I mixed the two jars together after sauteeing an onion and 2 small zucchinis in a pan, then quickly adding garlic for thirty seconds, then adding the sauce in.  I added in fresh parsley, and oregano, basil, and thyme I'd dried from my garden, onion powder, garlic powder, and pepper.  It altered the taste enough that I didn't taste the Prego at all, just the fire roasted tomatoes of the Classico sauce and what I had added.

I cooked gluten free penné pasta that I have a ton of on the shelf in homemade chicken broth and a couple of pounds of meat seasoned with onion powder, garlic powder, pepper, a little salt, dried parsley, thyme, basil, and oregano (all from my garden).  This was all mixed together and then I added some Romano cheese and mixed it in as well.  We had a Caesar salad kit in the fridge so we opened that and at least my husband and I had some.  So no money spent on that meal.  We ended up with 1 serving leftover to put in the freezer.  However, I did have to throw out 2 zucchini that had gone bad.  I still have to clean out the kitchen fridge to see if anything else has.

My breakfasts have been 2 2 oz sausage patties.  I do intend to buy some cucumbers so I can have some slices to go with them.  I don't eat lunch and some days I don't eat breakfast, usually the day after I take my shot and the day after.  My son and husband are eating breakfast burritos from a big batch of freezer burritos we made.  My daughter doesn't eat breakfast and had smoothies for lunch.  We have lots of frozen fruit in the fridge right now and still have greens growing in the garden.  We have not had a freeze yet.  The closest it has gotten is 35 and kale and Swiss chard can handle that fine.  My son has some rice and chicken dishes we made up in a big batch and froze the day we made the breakfast burritos.  My husband has been eating chicken salad sandwiches using my home canned chicken, some red onion we had on hand, avocado mayonnaise, celery (see, that came into play again) and some potato bread.

Tonight DH did stop for hamburger buns and pickles.  And I went to a warehouse store and picked up 20 pounds of navel oranges.  The oranges should last us all month.  The hamburger buns are for dinner tonight.  We are using burger patties from our steer, cheese from a 2 pound multi-pack we got from Costco in December, an onion that we have on hand, air fried tater tots, salad, and oranges.  The guys usually only have one bun each, but double up on patties.

There will be almost a full jar of pickles left to carry on for months.  We will have four hamburger buns left, which may carry forward into a dinner meal, or my husband may just have over the weekend as sandwiches or more burgers.  I'll figure it out.  I need to make up a meal plan for the next nine days so I can buy what I need to fill in the gaps around what I have and stay out of the stores until the end of that time.  I don't want to be spending a little every day and being tempted by stuff we don't need, which usually happens if my husband picks up stuff after work.  It's really hard to save money that way.

I plan to shop at Winco, because it is the cheapest store in town.  It doesn't have as many options, but that is okay.  Other options are more expensive.

Goal #1:  To save $10,000 for the bathroom fund.  We had to completely gut the bathroom to the studs due to black mold in February.  At the time we had no idea how much it would cost to fix it.  Spoiler alert: $45,000 including materials.

Did we meet this goal?  Yes, and we exceeded it.  We saved $15,200 in ten months.

Goal #2:  Save enough money for a snowblower and purchase it.

Did we meet this goal?  Sort of.  We saved enough money for it, but we haven't had the chance to go and buy it yet.  The winter has been very mild so far, but we really need to go and do it soon, because February is always brutal.

Goal #3:  Save up for and purchase a large propane grill.

Did we meet this goal?  Nope.  DH worked overtime all summer and it was too hot for most of it to go outside at lunch or dinner time.  Wasn't even tempted.  Even gardening had to be done before 10 a.m. or after 8 p.m. because of the heat.  We weren't grilling that early or late, even with our small charcoal grill.

Goal #4:  Refund the Emergency Fund

Did we meet this goal?  Sort of, but then stuff kept going wrong.  The last of which was our furnace irrevocably dying and having to be replaced and leaving us with just under $100 in our EF.  So I guess for the year, no.

Goal #5  Purchase more garden bed kits and soil to put in them from my own personal money that I'd been saving (spending money, birthday money, Christmas money) as well as some infrastructure items and tools.  Put up the kits, fill them with dirt and start growing.

Did we meet this goal?  Partially.  We put up six 2 x 4 x 1 foot raised bed kits with t-posts and trellises for our blackberries to grow up and then planted various types of summer squash in the front of the beds as well.  Several more garden bed kits were not assembled.  I bought two new shovels, garden gloves, and a rototiller with a Briggs & Stratton motor so it should last forever.

Goal #6  Buy a new bed and frame for me that raises and lowers.  I want a full size to replace the King.  It is too big and I want space in my room for an armchair that will help you sit up.  I don't need it quite yet, but it would still be helpful.  But the armchair is more of a goal for 2026.  We have an old regular armchair that can come in and be a placeholder for it, too.  That will keep people from sitting on my new bed when they come in and talk to me and ruining it like they did with the current one.

Did we meet this goal?  Nope.  Hopefully, we will this year, sooner rather than later.

Goal #7 Start saving for 2 generators.

Did we meet this goal?  No.  We did have 2 power failures this year where it would have been nice to have them, also.  One was overnight, which meant we couldn't use our C-pap and Bi-pap machines all night, just only as long as our little power stations would last, which was 6 hours each.  The nighttime power failure lasted 10 hours.  The other power failure only lasted 90 minutes.

Usually we don't have power failures like this.  The long one was a planned outage to replace traffic light poles in the neighborhood, but they didn't tell us until the day before when they were supposed to give us a week's notice.  They did two different intersections and then they took out lights altogether in one intersection where they had put in a teardrop roundabout.

Goal #8 Lose 50 Pounds

Did I meet this goal?  Yes, I did.  I lost 63 pounds this year.

So we/I met 3.5 out of 7 goals in 2024, but considering it was a rough year and that we did a huge thing in saving $15,200, $5,200 over one goal, and losing 63 pounds, 13 pounds over another goal, I will still call it a massive win.  Now I just need to think about what my goals for 2025 will be.  Some will roll over, but not all.  Some will be new.  I will do a separate entry for that.

The last time I updated my sidebar my retirement sat at $174,400.86 for the combined 401K and IRA.  The total is now at $199,429.57.  It was almost at $200K, but there was a downturn in the IRA last two weeks.  I am seriously thinking about moving it over to the same company that manages the 401K and putting it in the same fund that doesn't seem so sensitive.  Anyway that is an increase of:

$199,429.57 New total

-174,400.86 Old total

---------------

$25,028.71 Rise since June 30th

That brings total retirement funds to $266,268.31.  So we have passed the 1/4 of a millioniare mark.  Wasn't sure we'd ever see it.  Next big goal is half a million.

Unfortunately our emergency fund is non-existant, as we had to put in a new furnace.  It went in yesterday.  We were without one for 3 weeks and just using space heaters, which was not fun.  Fortunately, the temperature at night never got below 40 outside.  Today it has dropped into the 30's so just in time, I'd say.  And we had to get tires, so the EF is down to $84.37.  Not the best number and I am far from happy about it.  But at least we could pay cash, which is far better than incurring debt.  And to be frank, I would have taken it out of the money we have been saving to fix the gutted bathroom before we would have taken on debt.  But this is what an emergency fund is for.  Now to rebuild it.

New net worth amount is now $299,243.58.  So not the $300,000 I could have ended on with just $1000 more, but oh, well.  I mean, I do have $15K in the bathroom fund and $1K in the anniversary fund, but those are sinking funds, so don't really count.  Net worth at the end of 2023 was $238,973.61.

$299,243.58

-238,973.61

-------------------

$_60,269.97 Increase in Net Worth

The total in my 401K and IRA at the end of 2023 was $143,668.67.

$199,429.57 New Total

-143,668.67 Old Total

-----------------------

$_55,760.67 Amount of Increase

We contribute 16% and work contributes 5% match up to a $6000 max contribution for the 401K.  So that's pretty much it.