Category: Finances & Money

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Daily Life Finances & Money

Items We Still Buy at Costco & Our Costco Connection Magazine Cover

People seem surprised that we have kept our Costco membership even while living in such a tiny space. Either we are crazy, or there is more to Costco items than large, bulk purchases. I prefer the latter explanation.

Truth is, we are probably addicted to some of the items they carry, and even though the packages may be larger than a regular grocery store, its worth squeezing them in for the cost savings in the long run. In addition, sometimes it really just is convenient. If you follow me on Instagram, you’ll notice my occasional rant about loathing grocery shopping. I really do. Its very difficult to price shop, build up a pantry, coupon or any other cost saving techniques. When I buy in bulk from Costco, I feel that I’m getting at least a marginally better deal than the grocery store.

Costco is also predictable. While we sometimes can’t find an item (e.g. Dave’s Killer Bread), its usually not difficult to stock up on our regular items. The layouts of the stores are all the same and we know right where to find everything.

We also have a Visa card through Costco. We get 3% back on gas, 2% back on restaurants, and 2% back on travel expenses. We make enough back between the Executive Membership and the Visa to more than pay for the Costco Membership (hello? Have you SEEN our gas bill every month?). Plus, we usually have quite a bit leftover that lends itself to a spending spree sometime in April. I’m sure they planned it that way.

The food court. Seriously one of the cheapest meals for a family of 5 (even if its not exactly healthy).

In celebration of our recent appearance on the cover of Costco Connection magazine, I thought I’d revise and republish our 2014 list of items we typically purchase. Its actually changed quite a bit in that we’ve added a few things we simply can’t live without. Somehow we always find room.

Items We Buy A Lot

Frozen Strawberries (for smoothies, pancakes, and muffins)
Multigrain Tortilla Chips
Cherry Tomatoes
Grapefruit
Cara Cara Oranges
English Cucumbers
Bananas
Organic Spinach
Rotisserie Chicken
Frozen Chicken Breasts
Chicken Apple Sausages
Cheddar Cheese
Greek Yogurt
Kodiak Cakes Flapjacks
Real Maple Syrup
Love Crunch Chocolate Granola
Cereal (Oatmeal Squares, Frosted Mini-Wheats, Cinnamon Toast Crust)
Mixed Nuts
Dave’s Killer Bread when I can find it, Sprouted Honey Wheat Bread when I can’t

Items That Last Us Quite Awhile
Quaker Old Fashioned Oats
Natural Turkey Lunch Meat
Ground Flaxseed
Chia Seeds
Organic Chicken Bullion Base
Butter Quarters (freeze most of these as well)
Honey (the 3 bears one)
Gummy Vitamins
Dove Body Soap
Kirkland Shampoo & Conditioner
Vegan Protein Powder (for everyone but me, I use Shakeology)
Johnny’s Garlic Seasoning Spread
Quinoa and Brown Rice Packets
Fig Bars
Cliff Z Bars
Stretch Island Fruit Strips
Triscuits
Almond Butter
Nutella
Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ Sauce
Kirkland Signature Salsa
Coconut Milk
Paper Towels
Single Serving Hummus (I usually freeze more than half of them)
Laughing Cow Cheese Wedges

When We Have Room or Just Occasionally For Fun:
Potstickers
Orange Chicken
Canned Chicken Breast Chunks
Papa Pita’s Greek Pita Flat Bread (found in *almost* every Costco we’ve been to. Except Nevada.)
Cheese Tortellini
Pesto Sauce
Bagels
Coastal Aged Cheddar Cheese (this stuff is seriously AMAZING)
Broccoli Florets (if I plan a whole week’s worth of dinners with broccoli in them)
Skinny Cow Ice Cream Sandwiches
GoGurt (then we freeze a lot of them)

Items We’ve Given Up on Buying
Avocados (I just can’t nail the ripeness and they usually go to waste)
Toilet Paper
Cheese Sticks (my kids won’t eat them all)
Eggs (as much as we eat them, I can’t fit it in my fridge!)
Milk (only room in the fridge for 1 gallon)
Fruit Snacks (I just don’t like my kids eating them)
Carrots (once again not enough room for such a large bag)
Oatmeal Packets (much to the dismay of my children)

Wow. That is quite the list. I’m sure I forgot a few, but I’ll add more in as I think of them. What are your favorite items to buy at Costco? Anything you can’t live without? Personally, I still jump for joy anytime we can leave the building with a purchase under $100. Tell me I’m not alone?

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Finances & Money

How Much Does It Cost to Live in an Airstream? May – July 2015 Summary

Airstream Living Cost July 2015

Wow. Its been awhile since I’ve done one of these posts. About time I guess.

Standard disclaimer that this is not ALL the money we spent for these months. Not even all our discretionary shopping – just the categories I feel that people would find most interesting. To learn how I work my budget see this post.

A couple of notes about May 2015 –

Camping Fees -We stayed for free at my brother-in-law’s house in Idaho for the majority of that time. We helped out with some purchases (he was also helping us weld a new battery box) and we just didn’t have him pay us back and allocated that money spent as “camping fees”. It was about $200.

We also reserved spots in the Florida Keys (Dec) and in Minnesota (June) for a total of another $480 – which we count when we spend it, not when we actually stay there. So, realistically our 17 days of free camping helped us spend a whopping $272 in May. I just didn’t want anyone to freak out and wonder where on earth we stayed for the 14 days we did pay for.

In June we spent quite a bit of time at my brother’s house in Minneapolis. To balance that out, the state and regional parks are not cheap and there’s very little free boondocking anywhere in Minnesota. We barely went over our $700 budget in July and I think that’s pretty accurate for the Midwest. We are currently trending to go over budget by quite a bit in August.

Laundry – I get a lot of people wondering how we keep laundry so low. Granted, I think I’m terrible at tracking it as I usually pay in cash. BUT, I think the biggest factor is that our kids literally wear the same clothes at least 3x a week. Its just not that much laundry. I figure if the clothes don’t smell bad and aren’t visibly dirty, why on earth would I wash it? Wear it again. My kids get in trouble if they are lazy and put their clothes away in the dirty clothes instead of their closet.

Same goes with adult clothes. I will often wear the same shirt/pants at least two days in a row.

We only wash our sheets 1 maybe 2 times a month (depends on how bad they get). We also wash our towels (5 bath towels, 2 bathroom hand towels, 4 dish/kitchen towels, and 4 wash cloths) about every other time, or half of them every time. When you shower every 2-3 days, washing bath towels every week seems overkill.

Its pretty regular that at least once a month we’ll end up at someone’s house and they’ll offer their washer and dryer for our use. Don’t mind if I do.

Groceries–  I bought two months worth of Shakeology in May (which adds up quick). We also stocked up in Pocatello/Idaho Falls at Costco and Winco before heading to said brother-in-law’s house in Driggs, ID for 10 days. Groceries are expensive out in Driggs.

I am wondering if NOT shopping at Costco would actually save me money since I probably overspend there every time anyway.
July spreadsheet

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Finances & Money

Budgeting 201 – Using Toshl To Keep Track of Spending

Budgeting 201 – Using Toshl To Keep Track of Spending

A few weeks ago I posted about how we set up our budget. This week I’m going to share how I keep track of everything once it has been budgeted!

Software like Quicken & Mint are GREAT  if your brain can handle a whole month of lots of categories at a time. Turns out I can’t. I can’t say I have $150 to spend on dining per month, and maybe $50 on clothes for the whole month. It never worked. I was NEVER in my budget and it was completely frustrating. Some months I spent $200 on dining, and $0 on clothes and I felt that these software choices didn’t account for that. Plus, I just had WAY to many categories and it drove me crazy.

It was also difficult and complicated even with the mobile app. It just never happened in the moment that I spent my money.

After a frustrating few years of tracking all of our expenses in Quicken, and then Mint and not being able to stay under in any of my budget categories, I discovered Toshl. For some reason, this way of budgeting just clicked with my brain and I’ve been doing pretty good at staying withing our set budgets ever since.

Toshl is flexible enough that I can have my “discretionary” category, and its hard to let items just slip through the cracks. You can also track cash really easily (all our laundry is paid with quarters) something Quicken & Mint were never good at.

To set up more than one budget, you do need the Premium Version. It’s totally worth the $19.99 annual fee to be able to set up multiple budgets.

If you’ve read my previous financial post on determine our budget amounts, you’ll notice that my variable spending categories are also my budgets in Toshl: Discretionary, gas, camping fees, groceries & propane.

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Here’s a view of an individual budget. My favorite part is that black dotted line. It helps me know where I am in relation to the rest of the month. Have I totally overspent? Do I have a lot of money left over? For my discretionary budget in this case I’m pretty close – gas we are a little bit over so far in the month. This helps me know that I need to cut back, or if we have a little extra money to splurge going out to ice cream!

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It’s super easy to add expenses as they occur, especially those pesky cash expenses that I can never remember later. I have a widget on my home screen that I just tap, enter in the information, tap the check mark and its done!

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You can view expenses in a list either by date or by category which is super helpful when I sit down with Mint twice a month and double check that everything has made it in to Toshl (yes, I still use Mint.com for overall tracking as its super helpful come tax season!).

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I’ve also set our amount for variable spending (paycheck – fixed expenses) under “income” so I can keep track if we are under or over across the board. Sometimes we go way over on groceries (like last month!) but we are way under on gas and groceries. I figure as long as my balance is positive I’m doing pretty good for the month!

Screenshot_2014-12-13-09-38-03Excited yet? I seriously love this app, and no, we weren’t paid to write this article. 🙂 I hope this helped give you a brief overview of how I work and keep track of our budget. If you want to just give it a try, sign up for free and test out tracking one budget category and see how it goes!

Having control over our finances and really understand where our money was going has helped increase our confidence that we can make this lifestyle work for us!

What about you? Any financial tools you’ve found to be super useful?

Image Credit: 401kcalculator.org

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Finances & Money

Budgeting 101 – How I Determine Our Budget

6355836713_7ea15f733f_bI’ve put off this post for months. I think every time I post a “How Much Does It Cost to Live in an Airstream” I mention that the numbers don’t include EVERYTHING, just what is unique to our particular lifestyle. There really is another side to that coin, however, that includes long term planning like college funds, retirement, insurance and other life necessities that are more personal. To give you a better idea of how we make our travels work financially, I thought I’d break down the rest of our numbers and give you an idea of how we budget our money. Sound good? Okay, hold on because my brain thinks in complicated ways.

Two Types of Spending

For me, there are two different categories of spending: fixed and variable. Fixed spending is anything that is the same dollar amount every month, while variable spending varies from month to month. Simple enough.

Examples of fixed spending include: life/ health/car/dental insurance, HSA contributions, cell phone bill, church contributions, truck & Airstream loans.

Examples of variable spending: camping fees, groceries, dining out, clothing, propane,  gas, entertainment, and laundry.

The reason these are “variable” is that they are not a fixed number. Some months we spend more on groceries, some less. Anything I don’t know an exact amount for falls into this category.

Do the Math

Once I figured out what fell into the two categories I did a little math. I took our paycheck and subtracted the total fixed spending amount, which provided me with how much we had “leftover” after the bills were paid for our variable categories.

Paycheck – Fixed Spending = Variable Spending

The best part of thinking like this, was that I no longer had to worry about the fixed spending amounts. They never changed. The only numbers I have to think about on a monthly basis are the smaller variable spending amounts.

Ballpark Your Spending for Larger Variable Categories

Once I had a number for my variable budget, it was time to divide it up. Just because our spending changed every month, didn’t mean that I shouldn’t have a specific number to shoot for in my various categories. I can’t just take a budget of $3,000 and choose randomly where to spend it, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to eat because I’d spend it all on clothes (not really, but you get the idea).

I picked the 4 most regular categories and gave those a number:

Camping Fees: $970.00/month
Gas: $700.00/month
Groceries & Household Items for Family of 5: $700/month
Propane: $50/month

Since I didn’t know exactly where to start with these numbers (Camping Fees started out at $1200 when we first started out), I picked something I felt was in the ballpark and have adjusted the amount as I’ve received more data over the months.

Find Out What is Leftover

Since those aren’t the only things we spend money on every month (you might have noticed our rather large dining out category every month) I still needed to figure out what we had left to spend on everything else.

To figure out what I had left, I did a little more math:

Variable Spending Amount (from previous equation) – Camping Fees – Gas – Groceries – Propane = Discretionary Budget.

This is where I finally felt like a genius. Why does it matter WHAT I spend my money on as long as I don’t go over my allotted amount? Right? Maybe one month we are in Portland and want to stuff our faces, and the next month we need to buy everyone new clothes and eat at home every night?

So my “Discretionary Budget” includes everything else: clothes, dining out, hair cuts, entertainment, laundry, small home improvement projects, etc.

I originally broke this budget down even farther so I had a weekly allotted amount, but once again I had trouble sticking to it. Some weeks we don’t spend anything because we are out in the middle of nowhere, and others we just spend a lot. Once I switched to a general monthly amount things went a lot smoother.

Save What You Don’t Spend

Since our variable costs, well, vary there can be months where we spend a lot, or months where we spend very little. The winter months in the southwestern US (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada) are usually very low on camping fees. We dry camp a lot, or stay in low cost state & national park campgrounds. In contrast, December 2015 we are planning on staying in the Florida Keys. Turns out that’s REALLY expensive. Any month we have leftover in our budget during the slower months, I transfer from our checking account into our savings account and pull out again when needed to make up the difference.

It’s not a perfect system, but my brain can wrap itself around the numbers and generally keep us on track month after month. Later this month I’ll post about the budgeting app I found (and LOVE) that helps me stay in the green so stay tuned for that!

Image Credit: 401kcalculator.org

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Finances & Money

How Much Does It Cost to Live in an Airstream? October 2014 Summary

Airstream Living Cost template copy

You guys. I did it! I stayed in my budget. Hallelujah. Okay, okay. We went a little over on groceries, but *overall* we were $37.56 in the black. Whew. Just made that.

I’ll detail a post later on about how I budget in general (because that’s not really Airstream life specific) but just know that these are not ALL of our expenses. Not even close. These are just the ones that are fairly Airstream specific. We still have health insurance, life insurance, entertainment expenses, loans on the Airstream and truck, HSA contributions, children’s savings… You get the idea.

But aside from all that, most people want to know what it’ll cost in the Airstream. The biggest differences for us are the camping fees, higher gas spending, higher groceries, laundry, and the higher eating out (only because we never really ate out before).

Okay, here are the numbers for October. We really didn’t go very far did we? We started in Vancouver, BC went down through Whidbey Island, across on the ferry to the Olympic Peninsula, and ended on the Oregon Coast in Lincoln City, OR. One of the biggest differences this last month was zero days courtesy parking. There really are not many free campsites in Oregon. Lots of beautiful state parks, but not a lot of BLM free places to stay. I’m looking forward to Arizona and New Mexico this winter where boondocking will be plentiful.

Consequently, I think we had the highest laundry budget ever. No friends to stay with and use their washer & dryer. 🙁 Maybe I even washed our sheets more than once every two weeks? Who knows. I don’t keep careful track of that. TMI?

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