The high road

So K and I have been using our bikes to commute one way to/from work. We don't do it all the time, but we have managed to make it happen several times. We work relatively close together so K drops the kids off at daycare and takes his bike with him. After dropping off the little bundles of joy, he drives to work. I ride my bike in to work, and pick up the car. He rides his bike home, and I load my bike in the car and pick up the kids on my way home. It's complicated, and the logistics sometimes trip us up, but we both agree it is a great way to wedge some exercise into our busy schedules. We've also been touting our reduction in gas usage. But even with the high prices recently, I was saddened to see we're not really saving that much money. I guess the environmental and exercise benefits will have to suffice:

Scenario 1:
Average MPG between our 2 cars: 16.5
Total miles commuted via car per week: 118.8
Total gallons of gas used: 7.20

Price of gallon of gas: $4.05
Total cost of commuting per week $29.16

Scenario 2:
L and K each ride one way, 3 days:
New total miles in car per week: 94.8
Total gallons used: 5.75

Price of gallon of gas: $4.05
Total NEW cost of commuting per week: $23.27

Savings per week: $5.89
Savings per month: $24.74
Savings per 4 months: $98.97

Dog Food Continued

This is how I arrived at a price for the homemade food. It occurs to me that I could probabaly find some less expensive meat and mess with the proportions a bit to bring the price down.

Homade Raw Diet Costs

Ingredients	Pounds	Price per pound	Total cost for 8 pounds of food
70% Beef	5.6	$2.99	$16.74
10% potatoes	0.8	$0.60	$0.48
10% squash	0.8	$1.50	$1.20
10%broccoli	0.8	$1.50	$1.20
Totals	8	$6.59	$19.62

Playing with html

We have two lovable dogs. One of them has terribly itchy skin and in the past month has started to lose some fur on her back. We have had some luck with prednisone to control the itching, but the various (and expensive) shampoos and creams suggested/prescribed by our vet have not seemed to help. Raw pet food is all over the internet as a possible cure for itchy/allergic dogs and a means for improving overall pet health. If you think people can get persnickety about ingredients in their food, you should see the ingredients some people will apparently pay to feed their dogs. Food for dogs. Little animals. Animals who can't tell the difference between a terrorist and Mike the mild-mannered mailman. I love my dogs, don't get me wrong, but holy mother of god! Organic kale? Antibiotic and hormone free duck liver? My children--who are pretty well fed-- do not eat food this good. My frugal (and yes, perhaps provincial) New England sensibilities are getting quickly offended. Sorry for the rant. I am now going to attempt to figure out 1) how much this fancy-pants pre-made stuff costs and 2) if I can make it at home for substantially less, including costs for my labor because I am a busy gal these days. Any way you cut it, this is a pricey endeavor:

Raw Diet Comparison

Type of Food	Food Price (for 8 Lbs)	Shipping/labor	Effective price per pound	Pounds needed per day	Total cost per month (30.5 days)
Primal Pet Food (Beef Patties)	$37.29	$31.29	$8.57	1	$261.46
Darwin's Natural (Beef and Veggie)	$30.00	$8.00	$4.75	1	$144.88
Beef, potato, veggie home made	$19.62	$7.50	$3.39	1	$103.40

Building a playhouse - Part Two

Here's my basic plan: build a 10' x 10' base. Walls on all four sides. Front wall will have a door and maybe (depending on space) a window. Each side wall and the back wall will have a window. Build another 10' x 10' platform on top for the roof. Put 4x4s through that deck at all four corners and at edges of openings to support railing.

Issues still to resolve:

What kind of siding? Paint?
Window edging - simple flat 1x4s?
Floor - plain plywood? Something more gentle on feet?
Snow on roof - a potential issue up here in the frigid north.
Make the roof solid or let it drain through? (If it drains, the floor needs to drain too.)
If solid roof, should I put a slight angle on it for drainage?

Building a playhouse - Part One

We have two little ones: W, a boy, is coming up on three and C, a girl, is coming up on one. I want to build a playhouse! I've browsed the plans (both free and for purchase) on the web and am unimpressed. Here are the attributes I'm looking for:

It's not going to be a treehouse, so there needs to be some element of climbability. So why not make it a flat roof? With a ladder up from the inside through a trap door! Terrific. Need to make sure the trap door won't slam shut on small fingers. Need a railing around the roof/deck. Let's add a slide off the roof - create an opening in the railing. I'm also thinking a rope net would be fun for climbing up. How about some rock climbing grips up one wall? This is going to be fun!

Hair today, botox tomorrow

The hair coloring discount might be of some use to you? Is there something I don't know?

Dead in the water

So I read up on coupon strategy (as shared in my previous post), and despite my remaining skepticism, was committed and excited to clip the applicable deals from the Sunday paper. We visited my parents this weekend and, lo and behold, not only did they have the local paper (my views on which I will spare you right now) but the NY Times and the Boston Globe. I thought it was going to be veritable jackpot of money saving bliss. Instead, not only was it basically the same book of coupons in each paper, the only really good coupon I found was for Dunkin' Donuts. And there was only one copy of that one. My dad (also a big Dunkin' Donuts fan) started circling like a vulture when I pulled that one out. Since he is a pretty generous guy to begin with AND it was his paper after all, I felt guilted in to giving him that one. So then I was stuck with $1 off any three boxes of General Mills Cereal, some toothbrush deal that wasn't particularly exciting, and a hair color discount that may or may not be of use to me. Insult to injury, I then forgot those when we left for home. So, I have pretty much failed in my endeavor this week.

The path already taken

When I began to look into "coupon strategies" this week, I realized quickly that this is a well trodden topic on the intertubes. When I sifted through a great number of "how to coupon" sites, one strategy jumped out at me as a good way to start: a blog called The Simple Dollar originally posted the idea that you should find coupons in the Sunday paper and then wait a month to use them. This is because manufacturers use coupons first in their product marketing cycle as a way to boost sales, and then move on to discounting. So, if you wait to use the coupon you increase your savings because you are using a coupon for a product already on sale. The popular blog Boing Boing picked up the story and it drummed up a lot of comments. Some common themes were:

1) It's not worth the time to clip coupons unless you view at as a hobby in addition to a way to save money.

2) Coupons are usually for "bad" food-- that is processed, non-fresh, unhealthy products.

3) Related to the above--when couponing, you have to be careful not to get derailed into buying things you wouldn't normally buy because "it was such a great deal."

4) Many Sunday-paper coupons expire before the promoted items go on sale.

These ideas are fueling my belief that big companies with giant marketing budgets aren't dumb and coupons are an effective tool to get consumers to spend MORE on high-margin products like processed/prepared foods. But, I'm not giving up hope yet. Next I think I'll look into coupons for healthy items/organic brands and try not to use this California Pizza Kitchen coupon I found on my Hannaford receipt.

In the beginning...

The title for this post has nothing to do with what I plan on writing, it just seemed like an auspicious way to begin a new blog and hopefully ensure healthy readership numbers over the years. :-)

But seriously folks, the idea behind this blog is to chronicle my adventure into the land of coupons. Whenever my husband and I sit down to figure out where all our money goes, inevitably we find that grocery shopping makes up a huge chunk of our expenditures. So, after hearing a story on NPR yesterday about the resurgence of couponing I decided that it would be beneficial to educate myself about this age-old technique.

A few thoughts as I venture into this are as follows:

1) I have an MBA and am fascinated by the workings of businesses and how they make money. As a result, I am fundamentally skeptical of how much money a consumer can actually save via a system that is run by companies themselves.

2) I am in the extremely fortunate position that while my family doesn't have barrels of cash lying around to spend on weekly pedicures and designer clothes, we don't actually need to clip coupons in order to survive so I can be kind of philosophical about this whole process.

3) Admittedly, we are kind of food snobs in our family-- we like (and cook with) things like foie gras, truffle oil, and stinky blue cheese. (Well my husband is the brave soul who has actually ordered foie gras and both grilled and made torchon with it)

4) I buy many organic foods, and am interested in buying local food when I can which might make the couponing thing a bit more difficult-- but we'll see.

5) We have a busy family life with two kids, two jobs, two dogs and a house so I'm not going to be able to spend like 12 hours a day surfing the web for coupons-- it will probably be more like 15 minutes a day so I'm interested to see if that pays off.

So with that, here I go off into this new land of coupons. Ideas and thoughts welcome...