Welcome to 2009, hang on to your seatbelt!

2009 is the Year of Frugality and Belt Tightening.   The economy is so bad that for most people, it is really starting to cramp their style.  We are cramped to be sure.   Above is homemade dog food.  I have 4 dogs and go through 56 cans of canned dog food a month.  That doesn’t include the 50 lbs of dry dog food.  Lets do the math.  Pedigree can food comes in a 12 pack and costs $7.99.    I would need 4 packs and 7 extra cans.  Extra cans are roughly .89 cents each.   So, I spend $38.19 for canned food.  I could buy cheaper food, but that gives my dogs gas and the runs.  Also, the cheaper stuff is not as good, ingrediant wise.  I am not saying the Pedigree is all that great either, just slightly better.   ANYWAY,  the point I was getting at…. The Year of Frugality has led me to cook my own canned dog food.  Surely it must be cheaper, right?  IT IS!!!    I purchased a roll of ground turkey for $1.50.   I fried it up.  In my freezer I found leftover pieces of frozen celery and carrots, the parts no one will eat, but will flavor soup and stew just fine.  I added that and a half bag of frozen corn.   I shuffled through the pantry for rice and found two boxes of garlic Rice A Roni that we would never get to eating and I tossed that in there.  4 cups of water flavored with chicken bouillon later, and the concoction simmered down nicely.  My husband came to the stove and wondered what smelled so good.  LOL  “Dog food”     In the end, I spent $1.50 for 6 days of dog food.   Pretty good!  Today, I must make more.  It won’t be so cheap, but it will be cheaper than $7.99 and it will be real, lean food.  Good stuff for the dogs to eat.    Hey, if times get really tough.. we could eat it too.   ROFLMAO

I am also clearing junk out of the house.   This is known as the Great Purge of 2009.  I am drowning under all this clutter.   As I find good stuff, I am putting it up for sale on the Garage Sale Loop and Craigslist.  Normally, I would just give it all away, but we need the money.  It is all good.  I purge the house and earn a few dollars.

We are still gardening, but the fruit of our labor is slow coming and I didn’t plant enough produce to make much of a difference.  We will have to expand the garden.  There comes lots of hard work.  The garden bed I want to use is full of weeds and is overgrown.  I am not convinced that is the right place for it either.  The south side of the house is the best new site.  However, I am afraid the plants will be damaged when we replace the roof before May.  Of course, the crops should be done by May.  The heat will have done them in.  Now, the soil on the south side of the house is strickly sand.  I will have to ammend the soil HEAVILY.   How do you do that frugaly?   Why by taking the citie’s free composted mulch!   More back breaking work, but I do have boys to do the work. LOL  I am sure they would love to earn a few bucks.  Frugality.  Grow a garden and supplement your food bill.

On occasion, I have made my own laundry soap.  It is very simple and it works just fine.  I am lazy though.  2009 does not allow for lazy though.  Today, I will make a new batch.   Here is a link to one of many recipes-http://www.thefamilyhomestead.com/laundrysoap.htm      You can make your own fabric softner as well.  If you like sheets, then soak washcloths in your favorite liquid softner and let dry.  Throw that in your dryer.  If you want liquid softner you can use vinegar, that works nicely.   A good friend of mine used cheap Suave hair conditioner and diluted it with equal parts of water and vinegar and the conditioner.   She used an electric mixer to make the conditioner dissolve.   I think I will give that a go.  I have some bottles of conditioner hanging around. 

The biggest frugal change we made this week was turning off the cable tv, the house phone and moving out of the storage unit.  We slashed $300 off our bottom line by doing that.    We miss the tv and their are so many homeless boxes in the house and in the driveway, that we look like we just moved in.  I don’t know where it is all going, but it will get handled.    The decision was hard to make, but we are grown ups and we had to make grown up decisions based on needs, not wants.   It sucks, but it is not the end of the world.   If those changes are not enough, we have other more drastic budget cuts that can be done.   We will do whatever we have to, in order to have enough money to pay the bills and save for the projects that must be done this year.    We need a new roof, which we can install ourselves.  My one son needs braces and the other one needs cataract surgery.  We also have incurred more debt, that we would like to shrink.  Grown up stuff.  I hate being a grown up sometimes.

No matter what, 2009 will be a good year.  It is a growing year.  We will grow and change.  There is hope for 2009.  I look forward to it, not matter what it brings.