Month: September 2019

Grocery Delivery- Does it Save Money?

Hello Lovely Savers! This week I wanted to talk about a potentially (key word here) great way to save money… having your groceries delivered!

Growing up, in our neighborhood, we had the Schwan’s Man. A beige boxy truck with a swan for a logo, that would stop at certain houses and deliver groceries. I was convinced that it was ACTUALLY an ice cream truck and that my mother was lying to me so that I was not able to have those awesome little ice cream cups with the pull off lid. I knew those came from Schwan’s but had little to no understanding of why you couldn’t go up to the truck to buy some, you had to order them. And I had little to no understanding of why my mother did not order some then! Was she TRYING to deprive me?

Then when I was old enough to figure out it really was a grocery deliver service (and that you can buy those ice cream cups at regular grocery stores too, she was just choosing to NOT for some reason) I did not understand why anyone needed their groceries delivered. Didn’t they know Cub was down the street? Did they really pay someone to bring them their food? Were they just really lazy? It was baffling to me.

Then even later when I had to do my own grocery shopping, and I was already more frugal than is probably good for me, I could never imagine spending money on a delivery service. Surely, it was crazy expensive right?

One day I heard an ad on the radio (see? Sometimes those things are good to listen to!). It was for this generation’s Schwan’s Man- Coborn’s Delivers. If you signed up for Coborn’s with a code from the radio station, your first 3 month’s of delivery were free and you got like $10 off your first order or something. Well, for the sake of this blog of course, I was willing to try this mysterious delivery if I didn’t have to pay delivery fees AND I saved $10.

So I logged in and signed up and had groceries delivered for the first time. I wouldn’t say that it saved me any time- as I had to learn to navigate the site and find the foods that I liked, but it definitely didn’t take me more time that it would have taken to actually go to the store. Then on the day I selected, I had big green plastic bins delivered to my door. They were packed with cooler ice packs and after I unpacked my food I just logged on again to schedule a bin pick up for free.

It was pretty slick and, at least with Coborn’s, it really wasn’t any more expensive than a regular trip would be. Even if I had paid delivery fees, which were only $5 usually, I could see the benefit of having this done every now and then. And I did use it again when I was on rest after surgery in July!

Now- why did I say “potentially” a great way to save money then? If everything was so comparable?

Because I am a pro grocery shopper. I am so particular that I know what food costs and what I am willing to pay for certain items. I’ve been doing this blog a long time, I’ve been a stickler for saving money for even longer. I go to the grocery store with a list every single time, but even I know the dangers of grocery shopping while hungry! Impulse buys? Candy aisles? Seasonal decor (why is this in a grocery store?!)?

Everything in that store is designed to be tempting. So maybe, if you are particularly susceptible to impulse shopping, having to search for specific items on your list without those other aisles could save you a chunk of change.

And what about the time? Once you get good at using the website, it does go a lot faster. AND you don’t have to drive to the store, find a parking space, walk through every aisle because they renovated AGAIN and moved all of your favorite stuff, and wait in the check out line. Someone has to tell the stores that they don’t need 27 check out lines if they are only ever going to open 4 of them at a time. THEN going back home, unloading the car, and putting it all away. I only TYPED this and I feel like I need a nap.

You know yourself better than anyone. Would spending $5 on delivery be worth saving the time and skipping the tempting impulse buying? For me it was. And sure, there are other pros and cons to a grocery delivery service, but I write a personal finance blog- not a grocery deliver critique forum. It was worth the $5 delivery to me (and if you keep your ears tuned in during commercials- possibly free delivery!) and it might be worth it to you as well.

A word of caution- I have only used one delivery service. I have HEARD that some services may charge more for their food to offset their costs. 1. That makes sense. 2. Be conscious of what items usually cost and whether or paying a little more on them would be worth it. Again, you know yourself better than anyone. If you fall victim to impulse shopping and spend around $10 extra on those impulse items, and the delivery service fees are $5 and they charge $2 more on a particular item, maybe it would still be worth it for you.

As always, thank you so much for all of your support, Lovely Savers! I love sharing my tips and tricks for money and how to deal with everything in between. Please join the Facebook Group: Sugar and Savings- Budgets and Saving Money to be a part of our community of other lovely savers. We share our thoughts, and plans with money, and we celebrate each other’s wins! And each month I go live to answer YOUR questions about personal finance!

Until next time, wishing you all Sugar and Savings,

This entry was posted in Savings.

An Income Issue

Hello Lovely Savers! Today I wanted to talk about an issue that pulls on my heartstrings… income issues.

“Taylor, why does income pull on your heartstrings?” you might be asking. Because I am a personal finance nerd, obvs. Also, because sometimes, no matter how hard you try to save and budget- the spending isn’t the problem.

I see this with clients every once in a while, they cut EVERYTHING from their budgets and they stick to those budgets like it is their purpose in life, but even with all their sacrifices they can’t get ahead. They feel stuck, and like all the sacrificing wasn’t even worth it, and they feel hopeless. I would know, I’ve been there.

And it’s at this point that I ask them to look outside of the budget, I don’t ask them to try to cut more than they already have. I ask them to look at where the money comes from. There are so many people who work at their jobs for years and they don’t even consider any other options because they are comfortable and it “pays the bills”. But what about when it isn’t paying the bills?

In one of my really old blog posts I talked about leaving the non-profit world because it couldn’t pay the bills (and several other reasons). I felt SO GUILTY leaving the job I had worked so hard to get, and I was made to feel like I was being GREEDY to ask for more hours and thus more money. I left in June that year, and when I did my taxes the following year do you know how much they had paid me in 6 months? $5,000. They wanted me to work there for $10,000 a year. And it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I was right to leave, I am worth more than $10,000 a year.

Sometimes it isn’t even the salary. Occasionally I have had a client, and when we are going over their budget I naturally ask how much they bring home each month, and they explain that it is a little lower than they’d like because they only work 30 hours a week.

“Well”, then I ask, “why do you only work 30 hours a week?”

“Because they only want me to work 30 hours a week.”

Like, I’m sorry, what? Then they can find someone else to work 30 hours per week! And I understand that some people have limitations and that inhibits them from being able to work 40 hours, I am obviously not talking about that in this scenario. If you WANT to work 40 hours per week, then find a job that will pay you to work 40 hours a week!

It’s also my experience that if a job is only willing to pay for a half-time employee or a part-time employee (less than 40 hours per week), then they are NOT giving competitive compensation. And they are probably not providing benefits either.

Even if you are an Administrative Assistant, and they pay you $18/hour which is the going rate for Administrative Assistants in your area, if you are only scheduled for 30 hours per week you are making less than $600 per week. If you worked 40 hours you’d be making a little over $700. And sure, that $100 doesn’t seem like a ton in the grand scheme of things, but if your financial goals could really use that $100, it isn’t anything to sneeze at. AND if you don’t receive benefits from work, and you have to supply them yourself, you might be out another couple hundred per month to pay for things like health insurance and dental and vision, etc.

I am not suggesting that anyone working less than 40 hours should go get a second job to compensate for the missing income, if you want to, go for it. If you find somewhere willing to hire you for 10 hours a week, they probably are not paying higher than minimum wage, and it might not be worth the stress.

What I am really suggesting is that you determine what your goals need, and if they need more income to make them a reality, don’t be afraid to ask for it or find it somewhere else.

YOU ARE NOT OWNED BY YOUR EMPLOYER. You may feel loyalty toward them, toward the job and your coworkers, but no one can hold you back from reaching YOUR goals. As disheartening as it is, if you leave, they will replace you.

So there you have it Lovely Savers. If you have worked your butt off to stick to a budget, and cut the cable and all the fun stuff, and you STILL can’t make it past Baby Step One ($1,000 Emergency Savings)- time to look outside of spending. Is there enough coming in? If not, what are you willing to do about that?

Sorry that today’s blog might be a little bit of a downer, but thank you so much for all of your support, Lovely Savers! I love sharing my tips and tricks for money and how to deal with everything in between. Please join the Facebook Group: Sugar and Savings- Budgets and Saving Money to be a part of our community of other lovely savers. We share our thoughts, and plans with money, and we celebrate each other’s wins! And each month I go live to answer YOUR questions about personal finance!

Until next time, wishing you all Sugar and Savings,

How to Paint your Front Door

Hello Lovely Savers! Welcome to my fun DIY door painting project!

Handsome Man and I had been planning on painting our front and back doors for quite a while and I finally talked him into letting me do it! (We only bought the paint 3 months ago…)

I think part of his hesitation came from the color I was requesting, a bright teal, and part of his hesitation came from thinking it would be a bigger project than it is. Also maybe his hesitation came from the fact that I was the one who was going to do it and there was a very real possibility of me spilling paint everywhere. Whatever, I didn’t. So there.

  1. To start this project we picked out the color and bought a gallon of porch and floor paint. We didn’t mean to buy the whole gallon, there was some miscommunication between us and the paint lady, but it’s fine for the two doors. We will have extra for touch ups down the road.

2. To get the doors ready for repainting (ours were already painted, if your doors are not, I suggest sanding down the finish and priming it) I wiped down the doors and then sanded them. I made sure to sand extra where there were drips from the last paint job and where some of the paint was peeling. If your paint is peeling, try to get as much of it off as possible so the new coat doesn’t peel later. After sanding I wiped the doors down again.

3. How do you paint a door?! Well for the front door, handsome man removed the handle but you can also just tape like I did with the back door. Then I googled. Because I don’t instinctively know how to paint a door and now that Ted is finally trusting me with this I cannot afford to mess it up! I found several tutorials on Pinterest where they even marked out the parts of the door and the order you need to paint them in. Awesome. Color by numbers? I can do that.

4. So according to my handy dandy google directions, I used a brush to first paint the tricky bits in the groovy areas (so official, I clearly know what I am talking about.). Then following the pattern on the guide I painted the rest with a brush. Handsome Man has an unnatural hatred for brush strokes so I only did that for the first coat.

My very unimpressed supervisors…

5. For the second coat I repeated the instructions, using the brush on the tricky bits and then a small roller to complete the rest of it. We only needed two coats but you may want to do a third. 

Ta Da! A beautifully painted door!!!

It completely transforms the front area, and brightens up the front of the house. To see all of the projects we tackled on the front of our house (and under $100!) read the full blog here.

Thank you so much for all of your support, lovely savers, I love sharing my tips and tricks for money and how to deal with everything in between. Please join the Facebook Group: Sugar and Savings- Budgets and Saving Money to be a part of our community of other lovely savers. We share our thoughts, and plans with money, and we celebrate each other’s wins! And each month I go live to answer YOUR questions about personal finance!

Until next time, wishing you all Sugar and Savings,

This entry was posted in Savings.

Update your Curb Appeal- On a Budget!

Three things you can do on the cheap to make your house shine!

Hello Lovely Savers! The air is starting to get a little brisk in the evenings and the leaves have an EVER SO SLIGHT tinge of orange mixed in among the green… which means fall is almost here!

If you are anything like Handsome Man and I, you are scrambling to get your outside projects done before the season is upon us. Or maybe you live in a state where Summer actually lasts as long as it’s supposed to, we are not so lucky.

Today I wanted to share a few things that we did to SUPER update the curb appeal of our house, all on tight budget restrictions.

1. The Front Door. The front door is the focal point of the home. It is literally the first thing people see and it is a blank space for creativity. Our front door was painted this burgundy red before we moved in (and not super well). 

It was fine for a while but I wanted to dress this home up. I wanted something light and welcoming and bright against the dull grey of the house. 1 gallon of porch and floor paint later, and voila!

You can see the steps I took to paint the door here.

Total Budget for Update: $100
Front Door Project: $35
Total Left: $65

2. The Windows. Now OBVIOUSLY if you are on a budget you are not about to spring for brand new windows. And luckily, with our home, we don’t need em. We LOVE our big window right in front, it lets in a ton of light into the living room and was a big selling point for us. But, if your trim is peeling or looking dingy, maybe its time for a clean up job. Our windows were in pretty good shape, but they had these (same color as the door) burgundy shutters. 

I didn’t mind the shutters, I think they frame the window nicely! However, they needed an upgrade too. We kept the same shutters and spray painted them a dark blue to contrast against the grey and teal on the door. The spray paint was really cheap, but as a disclaimer I did need more than I thought I would, and Handsome Man made some extra trips to Menards for me.

Total Budget: $65
Window Project: $25
Total Left: $40

3. The Yard. So… I’m sure I’ve complained before about our yard. We saw the house during an open house in May- Before anything in MN grows back from the winter. We BOUGHT the house in June. When EVERYTHING WAS GROWING LIKE CRAZY. See, the lovely woman who lived here before us, didn’t like to mow. So instead, she decided to just plant hastas and ferns and day lilies…. EVERYWHERE. I still can’t talk about the number of ferns we had to dig up… traumatizing. That being said, that was last year’s project, this year we just wanted to stay in control of the plants. We cut the front yard “prairie” way back and dug out a ton of the pants in front of the window. Other than a new shovel, we only spent money on some grass seed which we plan to put down this fall to over seed what is already there. With some manual labor, and DIY attitudes, we saved a ton of money and the house looks way better already. And not like it sits in the middle of a jungle. We still have a ways to go, but neighbors have already stopped by to compliment how much better it looks! I wish the pictures below actually did the transformation its due justice.

Total Budget: $40
Yard Work: $20
Total Left: $20

So whether you are a home owner, renter, getting ready to sell a home, or looking at buying a home, these are just a few ways you can spruce up the front without breaking the budget. They are also really easy projects even for brand new homeowners and DIYers. We sure aren’t done with everything we want to do to the house, but for under $100, we have done pretty good so far!

Thank you so much for all of your support, lovely savers, I love sharing my tips and tricks for money and how to deal with everything in between. Please join the Facebook Group: Sugar and Savings- Budgets and Saving Money to be a part of our community of other lovely savers. We share our thoughts, and plans with money, and we celebrate each other’s wins! And each month I go live to answer YOUR questions about personal finance!

Until next time, wishing you all Sugar and Savings,