Congratulations! You made it to Day 6 of the 60-day financial fitness challenge. How are you doing so far? If I’m doing my math right, that means we’ve made it 10% of the way through the challenge. Woohoo!
Today’s Task:
Cook a meal and share it with others
Today I made plans to have brunch with a friend at her house – honeyberry pancakes (gluten-free, of course), bacon, eggs, and orange juice. One of the best parts about moving is having to take stock of what I’ve got in my pantry and my freezer and use everything up.
My goal for the next few weeks is to drink a lot of smoothies with all of my frozen fruit and find creative uses for frozen tomatoes. 😀
For this weeks’ menu, I’ll be using up a lot of things in the freezer. This includes:
- Sopa Azteca (one of my favorite dishes from Soda Kathia in Herradura, Costa Rica)
- Uses up all of my tortillas
- Uses up a good chunk of my tomatoes
- Uses frozen chicken thighs
- Chilaquiles
- Uses leftover fried tortilla strips from the soup
- Uses enchilada sauce in the pantry
- Uses the queso fresco that I just bought 😀
- Grilled Cheese Paninis with tomato soup
- Uses gluten-free bread from the freezer
- Uses provolone cheese in the fridge
- Uses tomato soup in the pantry
Something I’m struggling with is condiments. I’m thinking I might just gift them to a friend.
I also forgot about a ton of hard liquor I have in the cabinet, so I made myself a fancy cocktail yesterday that helped me use up the rind of an orange I had in the fridge. Needless to say, despite feeling very poor right now, I am eating incredibly well.
There is something very powerful about sharing a meal with someone else. I love sharing my love for food with others, and love it even more when I have the chance to cook a scrumptious dish and serve it up to others.
I put this one on my 60-day challenge because I knew that it would help me cultivate a sense of gratitude for what I have, and remind me that living a ‘rich life’ doesn’t mean that you have to spend a ton. Some of my best memories have been around a dining room table. In fact, one of the most standout moments from this summer was visiting with the owners of several wineries in Napa Valley, and passing around I don’t even know how many bottles of wine to sample. We had grilled chicken and steak, and the son who I think was maybe 17 was responsible for cooking the meat. I’ll never forget when he told his mom “Don’t cut it yet! Leave it in the foil. It needs to rest for 10 minutes.” She threw her hands up and said “If you say so!” We all agreed that the meat was cooked perfectly. And all I could think was “You are going to go to college with so many life skills it’s not even funny.”
Aside from sharing a meal today, I took a few additional steps in what I feel is the right direction. This included:
- Sending emails to my internet service provider and my electricity provider to end my service at the end of the month, ensuring that I don’t get charged while I’m abroad
- Making the switch to the new To Be Magnetic Platform. This was a very conscious investment in my personal growth that is worth every penny.
- Purchasing some storage bins and cardboard boxes to pack up my belongings. A necessary but sucky expenditure. $125
- Staying well within my budget grocery shopping ($20!)
I categorized my expenses yesterday, so I’m caught up on that. For those of you who don’t already have a system in place for keeping track of your expenses, I highly recommend finding something that works for you. Everyone’s system is different.
A few apps that you can check out include:
- Mint
- GoodBudget
- Personal Capital
- HoneyDue
- Fudget
These are a few listed in an article I found from Nerdwallet. You could also go old-school and do something like me, which is just a spreadsheet I open up once a week. I’m sure QuickBooks also has something related to budgeting. The most important thing is to find something that works for you and stick with it. Consistency is everything.
I’ve got my spreadsheet split up into several categories. And I just use a free template available online that I liked, tailoring my categories over time:
- Cash Flow (this is my ‘master’ that summarizes all of the categories and my savings
- Personal Expenses
- Food budget
- Transportation
- Travel
- Fixed expenses
- School expenses (this one has pretty much been dormant since I graduated from grad school, but I leave it there because I’m always interested in continuing my education and would like to work towards putting between 5 and 10% of my income towards education annually)
- Health and wellness
- Business budget (this is where I keep track of the cash flow for all things Mezclada)
- Accounts receivable (this is where I keep track of incoming cash, esp. If it’s something I consider ‘overdue’)
My system for categorizing my expenses every week is basically just pulling up my bank account and writing in every item that I spent money on in its respective category. I can’t tell you how helpful it is for me to do this because it makes me more conscious of my spending. Doing it on a weekly basis is the other piece that’s critical for me, as I have found that when I go two or three weeks without it (when my cash flow was more stable), I would spend way more than I thought I was, and not stick within my budget. Doing it that often also means that I only spend about 10-15 minutes doing it. So time really isn’t an excuse. The longer I wait, the longer it takes, the more I put it off…you get the cycle.
Something I continue to struggle with is sticking within my food budget. It’s not changed much since I was in grad school ($200/mo.), so I decided in October of this year to increase it to $300. Since increasing that number, my spending has been very different from one month to the next. But sometimes my food expenses get disguised as ‘travel’. For example, in October I spent $284 on food, and I also spent a little less than a week in New York (another $40). In November, I spent $144 on groceries and eating out, not including about $35 on food for the week that I was in Kansas.
Let’s be clear. My $300 a month includes eating out. And because I don’t eat gluten, and live pretty much in the middle of nowhere, I don’t have many options at the restaurants around here. There’s a lot of burgers and fries, fried everything, and the food that I would like to eat on a regular basis I have a hard time spending that much money on. For example, Spanky’s sells amazing food, but at $32 a plate, I have a hard time justifying it in my head.
One of the things I know I would like to improve by the end of this challenge is increasing my income so that I can eat out more than I do currently (usually about 1-2 times a month) and treat myself to food that truly nourishes my soul. This means farm-to-table all the way, baby! And being unapologetic about doing so.
That’s all for today. Keep chugging along! I’m right there with ya.
