Month: January 2019

A Year of Good Food: What I’ve Learned

A year ago, I made a decision to try again: I’d been working to decrease our grocery bill for 10 years. I’d never been consistently successful at it, and as our family grew and our boys ate more, the grocery bill steadily ticked upward. In 2017, we spent almost $1000 per month on groceries alone. So I set a modest goal for 2018–to shave about 20% off our grocery bill each and every month. I set a budget of $772 per month, or $9264 in total yearly spending.

Did we do it? Well, despite going over budget in 4 of the last 12 months, we had an average monthly spend of $746.55 and a total yearly spend of $8958.60! We did it!!!

The Three Year Experiment's 2018 Food Spending

We did not halve our grocery bill. We did not keep it under $500. Or $400. Or $350. But we did hit and surpass our goal, keeping grocery spending to under $750 on average for the entire year.

I am proud. I am pleased. I have $1600 in the bank that I wouldn’t have had if I’d spent it on groceries, many of which we might have thrown away. I would have had $2400 if I’d saved $200 for each and every month of the year like I planned, but for four months in there, the months when we were getting our house ready to sell, I didn’t save the $200.

So what lessons can I extrapolate from this year-long experiment so that I can continue to spend less on our groceries?

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On Staying Married

Little ThreeYear and I spent a little time counting our blessings yesterday as we talked about his New Year’s Resolution, to work on his anger issues. Sweet thing, he hardly has any anger issues. He has major anxiety and sometimes that causes him to freak out a little. But he’s gotten so much better this year! So we talked about that and about all he’s good at, and all we’ve got to be thankful for. And I spent time counting my blessings after reading Mr. Money Mustache’s really honest and thoughtful post on his divorce.

Mr. ThreeYear and I have a best friend who’s a divorced, single-parent dad. For years, we watched many things happen with his former spouse and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly that came from his divorce.

It takes such strength of character to be able to write about such a wrenching and difficult subject, with all its associated social baggage and judgment, in a way that’s designed to help others get better with money and life, and I admire MMM for writing about such a hard topic. I’ve read plenty of posts lately about people getting divorced, but not as many about staying married, and so here I humbly offer my own situation and lessons for better or for worse (no pun intended, of course).

The most helpful part of Pete’s post for me was where he gave tips on how to stay married. Staying married is really important to me. I remember in middle school, telling a classmate that I was never getting a divorce. She, with much more maturity and insight than I had at the time, reminded me that it wasn’t always within your control. I told her I’d do everything I could not to get divorced. I feel the same way twenty-eight years later.

My dad’s parents, my grandparents, got divorced after 34 years of marriage, and it kind of wrecked the family. It really messed up my aunt and uncle, who were born much younger than my dad. They were little kids at the time and got shuffled between two homes, one of which contained their mother who was losing her mind to grief and booze, and the other of which had their self-absorbed father who was more involved with his new wife than worried about his kids.

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2018 Net Worth Update

A year passes quickly, no? Especially when you move almost 1000 miles South during that year and upend your quiet life drastically. I’ve been fairly faithfully sharing our net worth and spending progress in 2018, so this final post of the year probably won’t be much of a surprise. Still, it’s fun to have a reminder of the good, bad, and ugly of this past year, and our final stopping place, net-worth wise.

Our Progress

Mr. ThreeYear receives his annual bonus in December. This year’s was a good one, which was helpful in offsetting some of the losses we experienced in the stock market. He used part of it to buy a new car, which you can read more about here, and is saving the rest. The deal this year was that he got to use the entire bonus however he wanted. As much as I’d love to take what’s left and throw it into our taxable account, I also love the fact that we’re at a place financially where the bonus truly is a bonus. For nine years, Mr. ThreeYear has dutifully turned over the bonus to me to put towards our financial goals. We’ve used it to save up for a downpayment on a house, increase our emergency fund, finance our trip to Chile, pay off our cars and Chile apartment, and many other things.

This year, he gets to enjoy the money and think up ways to spend it (he hates spending money, so I know him–he won’t actually spend it, he’ll just imagine dozens of ways to spend it.

So how much did we increase our net worth this year? Well…

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