Many
people that know me do not know that I have a weird attention span. I do not
think my husband even really knows, although he does frequently see my eyes
begin to glaze over when he talks about the military. :p I tend to have some
ADD and OCD tendencies-throw in some (ok-A LOT) of anxiety issues, and you have
a fun party mix of issues. When I am at work and receive a new assignment, I usually
want to start working on the new one right away instead of finishing my current
one. Fortunately, I always make lists (OCD) and go off my lists to get things
completed. A friend that has adult ADD told me that during a conversation the
person with ADD will often want to cut people off inadvertently to tell them
what is immediately on their mind. I do that and I have the horrible habit of
not paying full attention because I am thinking up a response or certain words
or phrases trigger my mind and I go off into complete tangents in my head.
Bad-I know. Long story short, I have a tendency to get obsessed with a subject
and then once I have had my fill of it-I go onto the next thing. However, I
will eventually return to a subject once I have a renewed interest in it. For
instance-reading debt blogs. I may lose interest in reading them once in a
while (Sorry everyone!) but that doesn't mean that I am not still obsessed with
debt reduction. Believe me...90% of my monthly pay goes to debt repayment. I am
lucky to be in the position where my husband can pay for our monthly bills and
daily needs. This allows me to focus solely on paying down my credit card and
personal loans. If I wasn't serious
about getting out of debt I would just pay the minimums on all of my loans and
my credit card. Eek! I shudder at the thought.
Anyway,
I have a tendency to stick to things for a while and then give up. However,
recently my husband has started to get a little more involved in wanting to
save money so I have been more determined. If someone were to look at our bank
account right now, they would scoff a little since we do have a LOT in savings.
However, 95% of that has already been earmarked for our wedding that is on June
1. For anyone new here-my husband and I did a courthouse wedding before he
deployed. We are doing our church wedding and reception now that he is home. We
have been very lucky and due to careful saving during his deployment, we will
be able to fund our entire wedding on cash-which I am very grateful for. I am
lucky in that my husband has always been frugal. God can I get back onto topic
here? What was my title again? Waste Not Want Not? Oh yeah. Ok-back on
track. Anyway, we noticed that we have been wasting a lot of food the past 5-6
months. A LOT. Some of it was out of our control-my mom passed away in November
and we were out of town for over 3 weeks and we had just gone grocery shopping.
The rest is just our failure to finish what we have before we buy more. Well no
more. I have made it my goal (starting last week) to eat what we have and not
waste any more food. A couple weeks ago, we threw out a garbage bag worth of
food and we had not done a major grocery shopping trip in over 2 months. How
awful is that?
We have really been making the effort to
finish off leftovers-anything we have before buying more food. I have also
started taking my lunch to work every day (No-I wasn’t eating out every day-I
just wasn’t eating lunch.) For the past week, I have been taking bagels and
cream cheese for lunch or I bring dinner leftovers with me. I would really like
to not only see our food budget go down but to also finish this week up and not
have anything to throw away because we didn’t eat it in time. One of our plans
after the wedding is to buy a stand up freezer and put it in our garage. This
will allow us to 1. Buy more in bulk and get some more use out of our free Sam’s
Club Membership (hubby’s father has a small business and we use a business
membership or something like that) 2. Save money. I literally imagine $$$$
being thrown into the trash when we get rid of expired food. I think we buy too
much food at once thinking that it will last us a month and then we don’t get
around to eating it. When my husband was deployed, I actually did a kind of fun
thing for myself. I kept the receipt from the grocery store in my kitchen.
Every time I finished off a food product I highlighted it. It allowed me to see
exactly what I used and I could see that the money had not been wasted. Maybe I
should try that again? In any case-I’m going to start checking the fridge on a
weekly basis and see what needs to be used up and sadly what hasn’t been used
up before it went bad. I will also make
a list of the food we had to throw out and my goal will be to get that down to
almost nothing! Here’s hoping this will work!
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