Life Organizer

What’s the biggest money-waster in your budget – and the easiest to fix? For us, it’s eating out. What’s the worst part of your diet? For us again, it’s eating out. Even when we don’t try very hard to “diet”, we eat pretty healthily at home, but it’s easy to consume 1000+ calories in a single meal at a restaurant without even noticing.

I’m working on getting our records straight to do taxes, and noticed that we have 120 entries totalling $2900 listed under dining out in 2008. I’m not through yet, and that may well include vacation meals and business travel meals, but still… YIKES. How on earth did that happen? It certainly wasn’t PLANNED that way. The majority of that happened on days when I didn’t have a plan, or wasn’t watching the time, and so we ran out for fast food. If we had eaten expensive convenience or gourmet food from the grocery store instead of all that, we could have still saved $1500. If we had prepared a typical meal for our family (mostly scratch), we could have saved $1800. If we had prepared low cost meals at home, we could have saved more than $2000. And the calories! My typical McDonald’s meal (Big N Tasty Burger, Super size fries and a diet Coke) has 1250 calories. My husband’s (double QP with cheese, super fries, large Sprite) has 1490. IN ONE MEAL! What if we had saved 600 calories off of 120 meals through the year? That would be 72,000 calories – more than TWENTY pounds!

Eating out may be good for the economy, but I would rather support the economy through my local grocery store. Wouldn’t you? So here’s my challenge to you – how long can you go without any unplanned dining out? (Planned celebrations don’t count against you, unless you pay with a credit card that has a balance or you go over 1000 calories on the meal!)

Leave comments here to let me know how you’re doing! Today is day 1!

I’m feeling pretty good today! (Ignoring the drippy nose, pfft!) And I’m off to a good start – I remembered to program the coffee maker last night, which helped motivate me to get out of bed on time, and I made cheese muffins before getting the kids up, yum. Dishes are caught up, we’ve listened to the Bible, laundry has been started, kitchen is in acceptable shape, I’ve done 41 minutes on the Wii Fit already, and helped one customer on the phone. We also have stir fry leftovers for lunch, so I don’t even have to think about cooking until tonight.

Most of the inside Christmas decorations have been put up, and the yard stuff won’t take long. Mick rebelled this year and didn’t put lights on the house – I can’t say that I blame him, I didn’t want to fool with that, either. It was a busy month with a lot of illness, that that was just one thing that was a relief to let go. So I spent half an hour with help from the kids and put some lights on PVC over our other yard stuff. That won’t take long to put away, either.

We finally “scored” a great Christmas tree from Hobby Lobby! You know how they mark stuff down after the holidays, and it keeps getting lower and lower as time goes by? For YEARS, we have tried to get one of their trees at a good discount, and keep finding out that we waited too long and they ran out. Well, this year, we got one at 50% off. It’s gorgeous, pre-lit, with pine cones and berries. I *almost* can’t wait until next Christmas. (Just kidding!)

I’m also really happy today because I think I’m totally through feeling icky from chemo – and that was my LAST treatment! Radiation is next, and I have an appointment tomorrow to get the scanning and modeling stuff done.