Kosmo, Author at Lazy Man and Money

How COVID-19 Has Changed My Shopping Experience

October 26, 2020 by Kosmo Leave a Comment

We’re more than a half year into the coronavirus pandemic. At this point, even if COVD-19 hasn’t transformed your life in a drastic way, it has likely caused a permanent shift in some of your daily practices. For my family, the entire retail shopping experience has been changed.

Online shopping

We were already doing a lot of online shopping. A considerable amount at Amazon, but also retailers such as Target and Kohls. This has accelerated in recent months, as we’ve made every attempt to shrink our bubble and limit outside exposure. We’re lucky enough to be able to work from home, and the kids are able to attend school remotely. The next step was to push more of our shopping online. It’s rare to have a couple days pass without having a delivery of some sort.

Stockpiling

I wouldn’t say that we’re hoarding, but we’re certainly making an effort to keep more inventory on hand. Even though we’re not facing rampant shortages, we do have stretches of a few weeks where it can be difficult to find items. In the past, we’d keep one spare Tide on hand. Now we have a couple extras. We buy Clorox wipes whenever we see them, of course. Spottings are as rare as Bigfoot sightings.

Grocery pickup

I have always hated grocery shopping. There are always items I struggle to find, and I end up backtracking. Canned fruit and fruit cups are in two completely different sections of the store. Why? Nobody knows.

The local grocery store offers free pickup for orders of more than $35. When we first started using this in March, it was a bit of a mess. Even if you showed up in your correct time window, you could end up waiting an hour or more, and items were often missing from the order. The process has gotten much more efficient. In the best situations, it takes less than five minutes. Even if things go a bit awry, it’s faster than a trip to the actual grocery store. Overall, it’s a great experience.

Although our first foray into pickups was for groceries, many other retailers off the same service. The aforementioned Target has a pretty slick process. They’ve actually improved it in the past couple of weeks. Previously, you entered your car information, and they’d confirm your identity verbally. With the recent changes, a numeric code pops up on your phone’s screen, and you simply hold your phone up to your window.

A number of smaller retailers at the local mall are currently offering drive-up service. For some small retailers, it’s a lifeline to keep afloat, and likely won’t remain in place after the pandemic passes. For other retailers, it will remain an important channel in the future.

Movie Theaters

At the age of 45, I may have attended my last movie. I had soured on the experience in recent years anyway. The local theater moving to a reservation system made things much worse. Previously, if you got stuck behind tall people, or loud people, or whatever, you could simply move. Now you need to go out and change your reserved seats. Additionally, the seats have a tendency to hurt my back. In general, attending a movie in person had become a much worse experience than streaming something online – and much more expensive as well. I’m content to just wait for the latest blockbuster to roll onto Netflix.

Dining

I’m going to sound like a grumpy old man, but I’ve never really cared about the ambience of a dining experience. My primary goal, especially with two kids, has always been to avoid having the experience swallow up an entire evening. That goal has been accomplished, at least in the short term. I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since March 6.

That doesn’t mean that we haven’t eaten food from a restaurant. About once or twice a week, we use a local service called Chomp that is a competitor to companies like Grubhub. Chomp has a cool logo (dinosaur) and the majority of the company is owned by local restaurant owners. The guy who started Chomp lives in an adjacent neighborhood, and has been an active volunteer in the community’s youth sports program. Being able to help this guy’s small (but growing) business while also getting access to restaurant food is killing two birds with one stone. Not every restaurant participates, of course, but we’ve gotten a wide variety of food delivered – everything from shrimp to pancakes. We’ve also had a few pizzas delivered, of course. There are occasional glitches – like the time Popeye’s only gave us three meals instead of four – but in general the order are accurate and are delivered hot.

At some point, I’m sure we’ll resume in-restaurant dining, but my guess is that this will be less frequent, and that we’ll continue to use the delivery service.

We’re probably going to steer clear of buffets for quite a while, though. The pandemic has heightened awareness of some unsanitary practices of some of the guests.

One restaurant that has completely dropped off the radar is McDonalds. I’m not sure if the kids (13 and 10) have just completely outgrown it at this point, or whether it simply loses out to delivery options, but the kids haven’t even asked for McD lately. I have used the Hardees drive through a few times. I love their monster biscuit and bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit.

Subway is another restaurant that has gotten completely neglected. My guess is that we’ll eventually return to Subway when we need to grab something quick before rushing off to a school event. But with the social calendar bare at the moment, there just hasn’t been the need to eat quickly.

In non-shopping news

My company hasn’t announced a plan to return to the office. They’re planning to work on the plan over the course of the next month. My guess is that we’ll return to the office sometime in late spring, that some areas will remain primarily work from home, and that the company will use “hotel” cubes in an attempt to reduce the real-estate footprint. If given the option, I would probably only come into the office about once per week. Occasionally, if we’re working on something like screen design, it can be helpful to be gathered in front of a big whiteboard. A lot of my recent work has involved abstract concepts where the need is more cut and dried. In those cases, remote working is a great solution. I’m in the process of moving to a new area. That area supports our tax area, and I’m guessing that even more of my work will deal with the abstract and less of it will deal with user interfaces.

When I worked in the office, I’d buy things from vending machines pretty frequently. I’m guessing this is another habit that I’ve shed. Considering the markup on items in the machines, this should save a fair amount of money over the course of the year.

In case you’re worried that I’ll eventually become a complete hermit, that probably won’t happen. We do look forward to making occasional forays in the outside world at some point. We have a trip to Door County (Wisconsin) that had to be delayed and is now scheduled for June of 2021. We enjoyed a previous trip a few years ago and are looking forward to the encore trip.

Was I Prepared for an Emergency?

August 21, 2020 by Kosmo 5 Comments

On August 10, my state of Iowa was hit by a derecho. This is a type of storm with destructive straight-line winds. In this particular case, winds topped out at 140 mph. The city of Cedar Rapids, a dozen miles north of me, was devastated. I’m writing this article ten days after the storm, and quite a few people still don’t have power, and even more don’t have internet access. The road to recovery is going to be a long one. The city has lost half its tree canopy, and already 22,000 tons of debris have been removed.

“A windstorm”

The early forecasts weren’t particularly concerning to me. There was going to be a storm with high windows in the afternoon, with the possibility of people losing power. That’s not particularly rare – it’s not unusual for storms to briefly knock out power. My neighborhood has buried power lines, so we’re generally less affected than other people.

My wife and I are both working from home, due to COVID-19. She works upstairs, and I have a desk downstairs, in the finished basement. As the storm approached, she and the kids came downstairs. I continued to work, updating documentation in Jira. I was working right up to the point where we lost power and internet access.

The aftermath

My wife and kids went back upstairs after the storm passed. I attempted to continue working. I tried using my cell phone as a hot spot. This didn’t work the best, but I was able to sporadically get connected. Eventually, I stopped trying, and just did some work offline.

I expected the power to be back within the hour (as it usually is), but a few hours had passed and still no electricity.

The FDA recommends discarding refrigerated food if you lose power for 4 hours and frozen food if you lose power for 48 hours. This assumes that you have left the doors closed to prevent warm air from getting inside. As the four-hour mark approached, we ate an early supper. Anything that didn’t get eaten was going to get thrown away.

Later, we went through the process of taking everything out of the fridge, cataloging it, and throwing it out. Luckily, the next day was trash day. Many homeowner’s policies have coverage for refrigerated contents. In our case, there was no deductible. We turned in a claim for $300, and it was promptly paid. $300 might sound high, but there’s a lot of stuff in your fridge. We had 75 unique items on our list.

Nightfall

We chatted outside with the neighbors. The main topic was the power outage – when would we have power back? Hopefully by morning. The local news stations had been knocked off the air, so nobody was really sure what was going on.

We had plenty of flashlights around the house, but not many spare batteries. I went onto Amazon and ordered a bunch of D batteries since we didn’t know how long this might last.

[Editor’s Note: We lost power the week before for about 4 hours. We have a ton of AA and AAA batteries for kids toys, which work well in some of our smaller flashlights. I didn’t plan it this way, but it worked out.]

I used my work laptop to top off my phone’s battery. Then I remembered that the battery charging packs for the car had a 12V port. The battery packs didn’t have much battery left, as it has been about a month since I had last charged them. Still, they had plenty of juice to charge a couple of phones. We also had quite a few portage power packs for the phones. We’d be able to keep our phones charged for a while.

My wife ordered a couple of battery-powered fans. Days later, I realized that we actually had a couple of them. I’d ordered some a couple years ago when my daughter’s Girl Scout camp occurred during a heatwave. Unfortunately, they got put with the camping stuff and forgotten.

I was able to take a hot, albeit dark, shower. Unless you have a well, you don’t need electricity to have water. We have a gas water heater, meaning that we also don’t need electricity to have hot water.

Power!

Around 1:30 AM, we got power back. Hooray! The joy lasted about 90 seconds before the power cut out again. Finally, around 4 AM, the power returned for good.

The next day, we saw the extent of the damage. Our town had been hit with winds of about 80 MPH, meaning that we were spared the brunt of the storm. Almost all of my coworkers were without power, and most of them would be without power for days.

In Cedar Rapids, it looked like a war zone. Power lines were down all over down, and trees had been uprooted and had landed everywhere, including on houses. Each batch of pictures looked worse than the last. It was – and still is – sickening.

Near Des Moines, one of the grocery stores disposed of 800 gallons of spoiled milk by dumping it down a storm drain. That causes a fish kill and they had to pay for the Department of Natural Resources to prevent the water from reaching a river. If it’s not rainwater, it doesn’t belong in a storm drain.

How did we do?

Although my family had fairly minimal impact, it seemed like a good time to see how we fared in terms of disaster preparedness.

Electricity

We don’t have a generator. We almost never lose power for more than a trivial amount of time. Also, I know quite a few people with generators, and in most cases could probably borrow from them. Unfortunately, in this case, the destruction was so widespread that all generators were in use.

Honestly, I doubt that we’ll get a generator. I’m not sure that the risk of this happening again is enough to justify the cost. But I’m definitely giving it more consideration than I had in the past.

In terms of batteries, we were in OK shape. Our cell phones would have lasted for several days on the power we had. I did go ahead and buy some solar-powered battery packs so that we can produce our own power next time. My kids don’t know it, but if we were still without power the next day, I’d have confiscated their chrome books and bled the batteries dry to charge phones.

Food

We wouldn’t have starved. We had peanut butter, cereal, summer sausage, crackers, fruit cups, and some canned goods. Our propane grill could have generated some heat for cooking.

Communications

We do have a landline phone and a low-tech non-electric phone. This worked fine. Our cell phone service was spotty, but we were able to stay in contact.

Housing

We weren’t forced from our home like some people. We do have a six-person tent. At this point, we’ve only used it for cub scout camping events. It wouldn’t be the most comfortable place to sleep, but it would work in a pinch.

How did we do?

Overall, I think we were reasonably well prepared. We should have had more options for power, but we’d have been OK for several days. We may want to look into the best ways to cook various shelf-stable foods on a grill, and maybe buy some extra grill accessories to make it easier.

Have you been through a natural disaster? How did you fare?

What’s Worth Collecting?

July 22, 2020 by Kosmo 1 Comment

Here’s another article from regular contributor Kosmo. Once again he’s saving my bacon as I’ve been struggling with a lot of things. (Aren’t we all?) I’m hoping to get a fresh article of my own tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have recently begun collecting stamps, primarily those of New Zealand. One of the more interesting aspects of collections is deciding what to collect. Some stamp collectors have a very broad collection – collecting any stamp from any country. Others are much more narrow – perhaps collecting almost unnoticeable variations of just a few stamp designs.

The “Lake Wakitipu” stamp

One recent purchase made me think more about exactly what is worth collecting and what is not. The stamp was a 2 1/2 pence stamp issued by New Zealand in 1898 (the stamps on the left). It features Lake Wakatipu. Unfortunately, in the lower right corner, the stamp says “Lake Wakitipu”. The error was caught and corrected quickly (with the stamp on the right). Normally, that would cause the error to be quite scarce.

But people wanted the error stamp. Demand was strong enough that the postal authorities kept printing the stamp and had to limit how many could be purchased. People bought the stamps and tucked them safely away. No doubt the postal authorities were pleased – when a post office sells a stamp that doesn’t get used, it’s almost pure profit for the post office. Those stamps are probably worth a fortune, right?

Well, no. The fact that people were immediately purchasing them and collecting them means that there is sufficient supply on the market. The postally used stamp is actually the more valuable stamp, because few people “wasted” them by using them to mail a letter. This is the opposite of normal stamp pricing, where the mint copy is worth more.

I know what you’re thinking. Can’t you just pop the stamp on an envelope, have it get canceled, and make an immediate profit? Unfortunately no. The premium for the postally used stamp is only for stamps that were postally used during the relevant time – what is known as a contemporary postmark. In the case of my stamp, it was postmarked in Wellington on May 12, 1898 (if you’re a postmark nerd, it’s a G class cancellation). That’s shortly after release, and clearly qualifies as a contemporary cancellation. If the postmark was in 1908, it would not command the same premium.

Postmarks

Aside from stamps, you can collect envelopes (known in the hobby as “covers”) or even postmarks. I recently nabbed a lot on eBay. None of the stamps were particularly interesting. In fact, half of them were the exact same stamp (one penny 1882 Queen Victoria sideface). That doesn’t mean they were identical, though. Not only were there a few different configurations (strips of two of three stamps), and imperfect perforations, but there were also a variety of postmarks, including some partials of the 1900 Wellington Flag cancellation – a very wide postmark that doesn’t fit on a single stamp. Those partial flag cancellations were the main reason I bought the lot.

Freebies

Another choice some collectors make is to collect the stamps on their inbound mail. I’ve been fortunate enough to buy stamps from sellers in about a dozen different countries. Some (awesome) sellers make a bit of a game of it, plastering their envelopes with older, lower-denomination stamps. The main reason they do this is because you can typically buy modern unused postage at a discount – sometimes as much as 35-40%. Once again, this is because some collectors hoarded unused stamps in hopes that they would increase in value. Unfortunately, so many people did this that there’s a glut of these available. If you have a relatively small number, you can just use them on your own postage. But if you have thousands, you’ll have to sell – and there just isn’t much demand.

How do you save the stamps? Put them in warm water for about ten minutes, pushing the stamp below the surface. I use an old sour cream container for this purpose. After about ten minutes, the stamp will slide right off the paper. Rinse off the back to remove any remaining gum residue. To get them really dry – and to prevent curling – put them between two paper towels, put a bunch of books on top of them, and wait 24 hours.

The scourge of the hobby are the self-adhesive stamps that became popular in the 90s. You really can’t soak them to remove the gum. To make it worse, some countries add anti-soaking aspects that basically ruin the stamp if you try to soak it. They’re not trying to be mean to collectors – they’re just trying to prevent people from reusing stamps. Luckily, I don’t collect many post-1970 stamps, so this isn’t a headache I worry about very much.

A general rule

A general rule when it comes to collecting: if something is marketed as collectible, it probably won’t be. The collectibles that tend to appreciate the most are the ones that were never intended to be collected. When postage stamps were introduced in the 1840s, few people actively collected them – they simply wanted a mail letter. Postmarks are even less intentional. Many postmarks have value because it’s from a post office that only existed for a short period of time. It’s scenarios like that – an organic limit on the supply – that tend to make something more valuable.

But the final rule is this: collect what you want to collect. You may be able to squeeze a few bucks out of it in the end, but the true value is in the hours of entertainment the collection brings you.

I’m Being “Furloughed!”

June 18, 2020 by Kosmo 9 Comments

This is from regular writer Kosmo. I put furloughed in quotes because when he first told me about it he said he was getting a mandatory week off of work without pay.

We got news that we will be furloughed for a week – either in July or September. This was a bit of a kick in the wallet, as it’s basically a 2% reduction in pay for the year. On the flip side, we won’t be working that week, so it’ll be time to recharge the batteries a bit. In normal circumstances, that wouldn’t be bad. Right now, honestly, my batteries are pretty well charged. I’m no longer spending 60-90 minutes per day commuting, not taking the kids to their activities, and not going out to restaurants and stores. We’re even getting to kids to (reluctantly) do some household tasks. That has free up a lot of time.

Many companies have been hit hard by COVID-19. If a one week furlough ends up being the only impact I feel, I’ll be pretty happy. More realistically, my bonus will take a hit, because it’s tied to company performance. I assume we’ll still get raises next year, but that’s not certain. Hopefully, this is the only furlough week we’ll have, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we have another.

My wife’s employer is the major hospital in the area. Since basically all non-emergency care was banned for a couple of months, they had a huge drop in revenue. They’re going to be doing something to cut expenses, but it’s not clear what. Hopefully, it’s just a furlough of a week or two.

Overall, my employer has been handling the situation very well and has been very transparent about the whole process.

What is the financial impact?

My wife and I are pretty secure in our jobs. Nobody is ever perfectly safe, but we’re both positioned pretty well. The impact on us will be mostly short term. We’re going to lose thousands of dollars in income. Hopefully, this is in the low single digits. Bonuses and future raises could also be impacted.

Unlike many people, we’re not living paycheck to paycheck. We’re both mid-career, and we don’t have particularly expensive tastes. While we don’t save quite as much as we’d like (largely because we have kids) we put a pretty healthy chunk into retirement savings every month, have a great start on 529 plans for the kids, 50%+ equity in our house, and have enough in liquid assets to weather a short-term storm.

We also qualified for a partial stimulus payment, which we put into savings. Our expenses have also dropped quite a bit in the past few months. Our driving has dropped to almost nothing, which should delay the purchase of a commuter car to replace my 2007 Elantra. Additionally, I’m pretty sure I’ll qualify for unemployment during the furlough(s). Put this all together, and it’s likely that our financial picture won’t be impacted too much – with the lower expenses offsetting the decreased pay.

How will I spend my time?

I’m going to have several days where I don’t have to think about work at all. How will I spend my time?

First of all, I’m going to take some naps. Why not? [Editor’s Note: I highly recommend naps.]

The garage could use a cleaning. Mostly, I just need to get rid of random crap that I no longer need and organized all the containers of screws, bolts, and nails I have. I have no idea what the school situation will be like, but if the kids are home, they can pitch in.

We have a ton of stuff to drop off at Goodwill. There’s a decent-sized mountain in our storage room, and it would be nice if we could reclaim that space. Again, the kids will be able to help with this – sorting things into piles so that we can get everything properly categorized and logged for tax purposes.

I’ll probably spend a bit of time writing. I’ll probably write a couple of articles for this site, and maybe dust off my novel.

Time for stamps?

Will I have time for stamps? Of course.

One activity that has taken up quite a bit of time lately is my jump into philately. I’ve been scouring auction sites for good deals and spending quite a bit of time and money getting my collection off the ground. What do I have to show for it? A lot of half-empty album pages. Many of the early pages have only a few stamps.

There are 665 New Zealand stamps issued between 1855 and 1970 if you ignore specialist variations (which I do). At this point, I have specimens of 298 of those stamps in my album (in some cases, multiples of the same stamp) and another 30 are currently in transit. COVID-19 has been brutal on international mail – I’ve been waiting 40 days for some of the albums, and 25+ for several. So I have purchased about 330 of the stamps I’ll need.

When I get those stamps in my album, I’ll be halfway done – in just two months. That means I should have the whole collection wrapped up by about Labor Day, right? Not quite. Although I’ve picked up a few higher-end stamps, most of the stamps in my album are the cheaper ones. I’ll probably be able to fill another 200 spots in my album without spending too much on any particular stamp. But as I get close to the finish line, it’ll start to get a lot more expensive.

Also, I’ve picked up an interest in covers (envelopes). Each cover is somewhat unique. A different addressee, postmark, or even physical placement of the stamps. I actually have my eye on several that I’ll be purchasing soon. Now I just need to figure out how to store them.

An interesting note: I’ve become irrationally drawn to postage due stamps.

Working from home until next year

Other big news from my employer is that we’ll be working from home until next spring. Some employees might start coming back to the office in September, but it’ll be a slow trickle for a long time. I’m in IT, and since we should know how to be productive with remote tools, we’ll probably be last.

I’ve been getting by with a single 22″ monitor for the last few months. When I was last in the office (March 12), we weren’t allowed to take equipment with us. They relaxed the restriction a few days later, but at that point, I had no desire to go back into the office.

We bought a spare monitor and dock for my wife so that she has two LCD monitors in her workspace upstairs. I really didn’t want to repeat that expense downstairs. Most of my recent work has been analysis and planning. Lately, it’s been shifting into testing work. Testing is a lot easier with two monitors, and if we’re going to be working from home for nine more months, I needed another monitor.

So I got my manager’s approval to go back into the office to grab stuff. I grabbed a monitor (24″), a dock, and my Lazarus Android tablet, which had died for several weeks, been replaced, and then suddenly came back to life. I had Lazarus stashed at work since I had a better tablet at home. I also grabbed my stash of cables, and my Cyclones hoodie and jacket. Then I went to work cleaning. I always have a lot of food stashed in desk drawers. Everything was sealed and had not yet attracted rodents. Pretty much everything was expired. The whole lot went into the trash.

How are you being impacted

How are you being impacted by COVID-19? What changes have you had to make in your daily routines?

Pandemic Finances

June 2, 2020 by Kosmo 1 Comment

The following article is from regular contributor Kosmo. It was submitted earlier last week, before most of the conversation in the United States has rightfully focused on race and police brutality. I’m busy homeschooling a 6 and 7 year old through finals week (who knew there were kindergarten “finals”?). There’s great unrest in the personal finance blogger community as well. Everything around me seems to be an onion of fighting – just layers upon layers of fighting – home with kids, professional, politically, human rights, science (COVID-19) – did I miss anything?

We’re now about 2.5 months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Some businesses are starting to open, while others will still be closed for a while.

My wife and I have both been working from home since mid-March. It’s likely that she’ll be returning to the office in the next month. My employer has announced that we will be working from home at least through Labor Day. Even then, offices will only be at 25% capacity for a while.

It’s been a roller coaster ride of good and bad financial news:

Bad news: Investments

The pandemic has cost most people money, and we’re no exception. The biggest hit was investment accounts. We’re tracking slightly ahead of the Dow, but are still down for the year. We’re mid-career, and although we haven’t saved quite as much as we’d have like (thanks, kids), we still have more in investment accounts than most people our age. That means that we’ve taken a decent hit.

Some of our retirement assets are in pensions from my previous and current employer. The pension from my previous employer is defined benefit, so there has been no impact. The pension from my current employer is defined contribution, but can’t lose money. It basically pays a dividend within a fairly tight range, based on bond rates.

Bad news: Compensation

Unfortunately, my bonus for next year will likely take a hit. Last year, my bonus was around 10%. The company will likely struggle to meet some of the ROI-related goals for the year, which will impact bonuses.

My wife’s employer is a hospital, and they have seen significantly decreased revenue. They are looking at more drastic action, which will likely include some sort of temporary pay cut. We’re just hoping it’s a small cut.

Bad new: home office costs

We didn’t go crazy setting up home offices, but my wife did need a few things. She’s a CPA, so a second monitor (and the dock to make it possible) was a must, and she quickly got tired of the chair, so an office chair was a must. Overall, the costs were about $350.

I didn’t have any costs for my own setup. Currently, most of my job is involving analysis. If I was doing a lot of heads-down testing, a second monitor might be a necessity. For now, I’m happy hunkered down in the corner of the ~~dungeon~~ basement. (It’s actually a finished basement, so it’s not a bad setup at all.)

Not all bad

I don’t want to dwell too much on the negative. We’re better off than most people. My wife’s pay cut will only be temporary, and I’m confident that the market will eventually rebound. We did qualify for most of the stimulus check, which should offset some of negatives.

Good news: no day care

My kids are 12 and 10. We’ve been paying people to watch them since they were born. Day care, BASP (B and After School Program), and summer care. For the last 2.5 months, they’ve been at home. We’re still paying a holding fee (because if you lose your spot, you’re screwed), but the cost is much lower.

My daughter won’t be going back. She’ll be in 7th grade next year and will be taking the bus to school. It would have been nice (and cheaper) to have that as an option in previous years, but we’re 1.9 miles from the elementary school, and kids must be 2.0 miles from the school in order to qualify for a bus.

My son (going into 5th grade) will be going back at some point. But by the time I go back to work, we will have saved more than $2000.

Note: the IRS is allowing people to change their flex spending for dependent care, but only if their employer allows it. If you won’t need your entire flex spending amount, check with HR to see if you can decrease your election.

Good news: long hair

I’m the only member of the household who has had a haircut since March. No, I’m not a jerk who sneaks out to the barbershop in the dead of night. For the past twenty years, I’ve used a home haircutting kit to cut my own hair.

My son’s hair is getting a bit shaggy, and we’re currently planning a trip to the cuttery next week, with all possible precautions.

Haircuts are expensive.

Good news: lower discretionary spending

We’re spending a lot less money on discretionary things. We’re not dining out (although we’re doing delivery a couple of times per week), not buying random stuff at the mall, not buying gas, not incurring wear and tear on the cars. No date nights, no movies, no sports gambling (because there are no sports).

Instead of buying snacks at the vending machine at work, I’ve been getting 2 liter bottles of generic cola (99 cents) and bags of candy bars. That’s saving a few dollars per day. I could save even more if I snacked on water and carrots, but who are we kidding?

[Editor’s Note: Our investment in a custom SodaStream kit has kept us with plenty of fizz. Flavorings, such as diet coke, or calorie-free fruit is very cheap.]

We run a lot of household expenses through our Fidelity Visa, since it automatically puts the 2% cashback into 529 accounts for the kids. The monthly costs has been about half what it is in a normal month.

What are we spending money on?

We’re still spending some money, of course. The grocery bill has skyrocketed, since those groceries are now providing nearly every meal. In a typical week, the kids would eat at school (2 kids X 5 meals per week = 10), and we would eat several meals out. So the cost of the typical meal is lower, but almost all of that cost is on the grocery bill now. (Speaking of food, it’s lunch time for me – time to microwave a Banquet Salisbury steak TV dinner.)

[Editor’s Note: I’ve been occasionally splitting Hungry Man dinners for lunch with 7 year old. It’s hard because he doesn’t eat a lot of different foods.]

As mentioned in my last article, I have begun collecting stamps. I’ve spend too much and money on stamps in the past month. It’s a drop in the bucket compare to what we’ve been saving, but it has definitely become a bit of a money pit. The good news is that I should be done buying supplies for a while. I have my tongs, magnifying glass, stock pages, and storage boxes. So I’ll just be buying stamps now.

I also spent a few bucks buying digital codes for the Jurassic Park and Hunger Games movies. For a total cost of about $30, I was able to get nine movies. In a normal situation, I don’t have much time to watch movies. Lately, I’ve had quite a bit of free time.

We also decided to upgrade tech for the kids. They currently have Fire 6 tablets. We actually got a great deal of them at the time. By taking advantage of a Prime Day deal and signing up for an Amazon credit card, our total cost was $47 – or $23.50 per unit. The downside is that they kinda suck, and that they’re now five years old. Battery life has always been an issue, and it’s getting worse. Surprisingly, the kids haven’t complained yet, because Minecraft still works.

I found a deal on the 8″ Lenovo Tab 3 and bought two of them. I have a Lenovo Tab 10 for myself, and it has been a very good user experience. The Tab 3 doesn’t have the same specs, but it should be good for their needs – Minecraft and streaming video. We ended up paying $59 each.

Non-financial news

We were planning a vacation to Door County, Wisconsin in a few weeks. Our AirBNB was very nice and was within walking distance from Lake Michigan in 2017. We planned a return trip last year, but had to cancel due to a family medical situation. So we made the same plans for this year. Unfortunately, with all the uncertainly, we decided to push this back to next year. Finger crossed that everything works out next year.

What about you?

How have your finances changed?