I just had a great idea, and I wish K and I had done this for our moving-in process (I guess there's still time, actually...maybe I'll discuss it with him). We've bought a ton of little, under-$20 kinds of things: drawer organizer, doorstop, shelf extender, skillet, curtains, etc., not to mention the big Ikea run we did, and it's really been difficult to keep track of the money side of it--who owes whom what. Next time around, what I'd do is this: at the outset, go halfsies on a gift card to the store where you do the bulk of your shopping (Bed Bath & Beyond, Target, Home Depot, wherever). That way, when someone needs to pick something up, they just take the gift card and go, and no accounting is necessary.
But our new place is starting to look really beautiful! I'm almost ready to invite people over for a housewarming party (not that more than 15 people will be able to fit at the same time...), and I do think that spending some money to get moved in comfortably and in an aesthetically pleasing way has been worth it. (Remind me I said that when I have to dip into savings to pay my credit card bill.)
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
Couples, Money, and Moving: Just a Thought
Monday, February 04, 2008
Frugal Food: The Virtues of Batch Cooking
So, I know that I've told you guys about batch cooking on more than one occasion. But seriously, seriously, batch cooking is awesome. Why? Here's why.
Over the course of two grocery trips (Trader Joe's and our neighborhood Associated), K and I spent just over $50 on groceries. Most, but not all of that went to our batch-cooking frenzy tonight (we also bought some seltzer, baking soda, flour and hand soap, for about $8, and two bags of turkey meatballs for about $5, which are already gone, because they are God's gift to lazy people). So let's say $40 worth of relevant groceries here. For that, we bought:
TJ's
Two pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs
A pound and a quarter of ground turkey
A bag of baby greens
A loaf of rye bread
A box of instant cranberry oatmeal
A bag of frozen spinach
Four granny smith apples
Organic ketchup (I'm somewhat phobic about high-fructose corn syrup)
Associated
A bunch of parsley
Two bags of super-cheap but annoyingly tiny yellow onions
Four heads of garlic
Breadcrumbs
A pack of 2% string cheeses (Trader Joe's has them cheaper, but...I like Polly-O. They string in that satisfactory way. So sue me.)
Two packages of cremini mushrooms
A bunch of carrots
A little cup of fat-free Greek yogurt
And we already had...
Whole wheat English muffins (I use them for sandwiches, K uses the rye--but notably, we certainly could get through the whole week on one loaf for the two of us)
Eggs
Slivered almonds (they're optional in the chickpea dish, really, but we had them)
Milk, the dregs of a quart
Two 28-oz. cans of chickpeas
One 28-oz. can of crushed tomatoes
Two extra boneless, skinless chicken thighs
Olive oil
Dijon mustard
Half a block of smoked jack cheese
We put in about three hours of cooking tonight, and the fruits of our labor are:
Eight deliciously tender grilled chicken thighs for chicken sandwiches
One big double batch of a variation on this amazing Catalan chickpea recipe (we added spinach), to serve as a side dish with lunches and dinners
Four miniature turkey meatloaves, in my wonderful miniature loaf pans (Christmas present from K's parents), waiting to be cooked and split between the two of us.
So essentially, we've made lunch and dinner for the whole work week. In three hours. Three fun hours, during which we listened to podcasts of "This American Life" and hung out and liked each other.
Breakfasts will be the oatmeal and perhaps a hard-cooked egg, and for snacks there are string cheeses, leftover carrots, more hardboiled eggs, and apples. Further effort required is basically just assembly and packaging (the turkey meatloaves have the extra complication of "stick in oven for awhile").
There are two of us. For $40 and 3 hours we fed ourselves for nearly a work week. And, just as importantly, we removed a lot of the obstacles between us and cheap, healthy, delicious meals—I think that's a big problem for a lot of people, and certainly for me, the whole "Yes, but Pret a Manger is right next to my office and I don't have to wake up early to get a sandwich there" thing, but the "oh, actually, I can make a really yummy sandwich myself in five minutes and it doesn't cost me a dime" response is a very, very effective one.
Plus, I'm pretty stressed lately, and I always find knowing what I'm going to eat for the week takes a big load off my mind. What I'm really saying is, give batch-cooking a shot! It saves money, time, and stress. What's not to like?
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Joint Life, Separate Taxes
I live with my boyfriend. We live our lives together in a lot of ways, and a lot of our choices affect each other. Our lives are merged financially to some extent: we have to coordinate to write the rent checks. He pays the bills for electricity and internet service; I pay the Netflix bill; we have to check in regularly and make sure everyone (including our third roommate) is paying his or her fair share. We go grocery shopping together, but also seperately; we take taxis together; we go to the movies together; all these things have financial ramifications and require us to work out a sort of policy on our financial interactions.
But this is one I don't think I'd anticipated: taxes. We file separately, of course, but while my taxes are easy-peasy (one W-2, a couple of 1099s, free e-file, done), K's taxes are a huge pain in the ass. He's a freelancer, and so he's got way more paperwork than I do, an entirely different vocabulary in which to discuss his finances (technically, he's a "sole proprietorship"), the self-employment tax, quarterly estimates, and the absence of witholding to deal with. Complicated. Also—let us be frank—he is just less organized than I am about these sorts of things.
So, while I'd filed my taxes and received my return by the beginning of February, K has yet to begin working on his. For probably a month and a half, I have been bugging him about this, making myself a nuisance with my anxiety.
I'm fully aware that I've been being intrusive, and I hate bugging him, but his inaction on stuff like this just brings up this tremendous, inchaote fear in me. I'm afraid that he will miss the filing deadline, and afraid that he will end up owing the government $10,000 that he doesn't have. It's some big, instinctive, disorder thing. It wigs me out.
Well, thanks to the kind help of another New York freelancer, I found an accountant who could help, and she and K have an appointment tomorrow, and I get to sigh a big sigh of relief. After I sigh the big sigh of relief, though, I have to consider whether I'd be so freaked out about the filing thing if we didn't live together—how much more intertwined does it make our lives feel? I'm thinking kind of a lot.
And I guess it's real that money is a big part of a relationship when you start living your lives together. You have to be able to set and pusue goals together, and make joint decisions without killing each other, and that kind of thing. But because we're not married, or planning to get married, it's a different deal—there's a sense that we're separate in our finances because we're separate in our lives, regardless of the fact that we buy groceries and housewares together and cook together and share chores and all the rest of it. I don't feel like it's okay for me to ask him to change the way he conducts his financial life unless it actively affects me (i.e., the fact that he hadn't done his taxes was going to give me a heart attack)—and because our futures are so up in the air, I can't really say that his future affects me.
It's an odd position to be in. I really don't have any conclusions about it—I'm just thinking out loud—but it's interesting that it manifests itself in money, that you can see it there.
