How To Have A Cheap (AND Fun) Vacation

John and I just got back from our mini-vacation to Chicago, which is a good 4-hour drive away (0r 45 minute plane ride, if you have $350 lying around). And while we didn’t have a strict budget, we didn’t have a great deal to spend since we had nothing saved for it and didn’t want to tap our emergency fund. We got back and counted up the numbers, and we spent $400 total, including the gas to drive there, the hotel, food everything. Which I think is pretty good, but we could definitely do better next time. So I’ve compiled a post full of tips that we already used, and things we learned to do for next time.

1. Make food to take with you. Whether it’s as simple as lugging along some leftovers from the night before, or pre-preparing a pasta salad or potato salad, or making sandwiches, it’s good to have food with you. Do you really need to be sitting opposite each other at an expensive restaurant to be having a good time together? Or could you save the money and calories and eat at the hotel, then head out for your drinks/evening plans? We all have coolers & ice packs, and most hotels have refrigerators & microwaves. So use them! – We did this to a certain extent, but we could have saved an additional $45 if we’d brought more food (plus food for the way home, which we didn’t even think about).

2. Bring water. Lots of water. I’m one of those people who cannot drink tapwater (it’s so chlorinated that I just want to gag). But we neglected to bring water, so we ended up buying expensive drinks while out and about, like sodas and flavoured drinks. A 24-pack cost us $2.49 at Aldi, or to be even more frugal, I could have filtered it at home and reused all our bottles and brought them along. – This could have saved us at least $5.

3. Look up coupons and groupons that match up with your plans before you leave the house. We did this, and it got us free popcorn at the theatre (at least a $5 saving), and a free dessert at the cinema’s restaurant (that we didn’t end up using in the end). Looking at groupons was fun, but we had to be careful. Some of the things we wanted to buy just to get the savings, even though we didn’t necessarily want to do the activity. Example, bowling. Yes, bowling is fun, but paying $10 to save $20 on 2 games with 4 people? I don’t think we’d have saved anything for just the two of us. And we’re no good at bowling. It’s clever advertising on their part though. – This strategy saved us another $5 or so, but could have saved us $10 if we had gotten the dessert.

4. BYOB. It’s always fun to have a couple of pre-drinks at the hotel before your night starts. It gets you in the mood for fun, and you don’t spend as much on alcohol while you’re out.

5. If you’re bringing a car, try not to use it. We didn’t do so well with this, and ended up paying approximately $16.50 to park AND $20 to use public transportation. Honestly, we should have gotten a hotel nearer to downtown, or at least nearer to the subway/buses. But I think we saved $20 per night by being a little further away, so it might balance out, who knows. We could have saved $16.50 if we figured out a way to leave the car at the hotel, theoretically.

6. Just walk around. See the city. You don’t have to spend a lot on a weekend away, especially if you’ve already seen the city/plan to go again in the future. You can take your time and explore all the different parts of the city, and you might end up finding an awesome place to hang out, a free museum to pop into, or have a funny story about someplace awful. Seeing the sights is nice, but you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg to be a tourist.

So, those are my tips from personal experience, and I calculated we could have saved $71.50 with a little pre-planning. This would have made our trip around $330, all inclusive. I’d love to hear your money-saving vacation tips too!

Husband’s Birthday

My adoring, wonderful, ravenous husband just turned 31. He’s not a big ‘birthday’ person, but I like to make him feel special now and again. Last year I made him a sickly-sweet peanut butter cake, but I don’t remember what I got him present-wise (this blog is really good for helping me remember things, I don’t realise how much I forget sometimes).

This year I got him a download of Borderlands 2 for his PC, which I e-mailed to him on the morning of his birthday (right before I made him a hearty birthday breakfast). I think he’d have liked a physical copy of the game on principle, but it would have taken almost 3 weeks to arrive and he does like the fact that he doesn’t have to fiddle with discs to play.

This year, I decided to go all out and make him a cake in the shape of his truck at work. He loves his job, and he’s very good at what he does, and I’m proud of him. It’s not a very complicated design or recipe, and Cake Boss does stuff like this all the time, so I nipped to Wal-Mart to get shortening, a brick of fondant, pens that write on food, and marshmallows.

I made some rice krispy treats to form the base of the truck, and that was a big enough pain to start with. That stuff is like CEMENT. And it’s incredibly sticky. Clumps stuck to my hands, the pan, the spoon, everywhere. But I got a vague rectangle and left it at that. I piled slabs of cake on top, gluing them together with frosting. When I had a rough shape of a truck, I started rolling out fondant.

Rolling fondant is something I’ll never do again. After 30 minutes of pushing and rolling and flipping and re-rolling and running out of space, it was still far too thick for my liking, but my phone was vibrating with husband-texts, saying he’d be home soon. So I laid it on top of the truck.

And it promptly tore in several places. And I couldn’t get it wrapped neatly around the truck without a seam. So I left it folded and flapping and crumpled in places, and honestly it looked like a truck under a ripped bedsheet more than a truck. But I pressed onwards. The decorative pens were for drawing in his workplace’s logo and the patterns on the truck, which also went hideously. I’m used to drawing/designing on the computer, but there’s no ‘undo’ button on cake.

Then all I had to do was the wheels. I was hoping to just use food-colouring on the fondant and stick them to the sides of the truck. But I didn’t have any black, and despite what you might think, mixing red/green/blue in large enough quantities won’t ever make black. It makes a gross purply colour that gets all over your hands.

So I was wrestling with coloured fondant when my husband stepped in. He had to pretend to really like my cake, which was leaning slightly to the right and looked like it had been in quite a few road traffic accidents. I hastily stuck on the purple-ish wheels, washed my hands, and called it a day. It ended up tasting pretty nice, aside from that wretched fondant, which it turns out neither of us even like.

The good news is, I made so much mess and got myself so flustered with the cake that he took me to KFC for our dinner, so it was win-win really.

Chicago Round #2

On Sunday we left for Chicago, the 4 hour drive necessitating packed sandwiches, snacks and sodas. So we piled ourselves and our stuff into the car, plugged in the USB travel playlist, and set up the GPS. The drive there wasn’t that difficult, except a couple of wrong turns (though to be fair, the sign for the NEXT exit on the highway should be on the right, underneath the correct lane for the turn. Not on the left, unless the bloody exit is on the left. I mean come on).

Since check-in wasn’t until 3pm, and we were scheduled to arrive at 12.30ish, we had booked a movie to watch before arriving at the hotel. So we sat in the soothing darkness and watched Oz – seemed like it would have made a better fanfiction than movie, but it was okay. Not epic, but okay. And since we signed up to the cinema’s newsletter we got a coupon for free popcorn. And parking was free for customers. Which is awesome!

The hotel check-in went smoothly and the room was much better than I thought it would be. We stayed in the same hotel as our last trip to Chicago, but in a cheaper room, so I was expecting it to be a small bedroom with a King bed crammed inside and a bathroom. But it had a separate sitting room with TV and desk, as well as a good-sized King bedroom. Sure, the pillows were unreasonably tiny, like little bags of sand, and the TV remote didn’t work, but I can’t really complain.

We loaded up the fridge with the booze and food we had brought along with us. It’s always good to bring your own food if you can, because while we were on vacation to treat ourselves, buying each meal from a restaurant can really add on a ridiculous amount of calories and expense. So while we didn’t bring salads to eat and halos to wear, we went with a comfortable middle ground.

Having said that, we still ate far too much. The microwave meals we had bought were HUGE. Then, breakfast was a buffet affair with waffles, muffins, eggs, bacon, basically all our favourite treats. And coffee. That day we walked around Chicago, not necessarily seeing any touristy sites, but wanting to explore different parts of the city than we had before. And honestly, I’m not used to so much walking, so we headed back after only a few hours. For lunch we had hotdogs and chips, and then we napped.

That evening, after a few pre-drinks, we headed towards a Jazz and Blues club that was recommended to us. We unfortunately left at around 6pm, so it took us an hour and a half to drive the 18 miles downtown. The club was sort of a disappointment, but it wasn’t their fault that the act started at 9.30pm and the garage we had parked at closed at 10pm and then towed all cars left after that. So we decided not to stick around in that club, and went to a pizza place instead.

The pizza place turned out to be a well-known pizza place, and it was packed, but we were seated within 10 minutes and we ordered a couple of beers for the meantime (I figure I can drink beer and coffee while on my period, just to make that week slightly more fair). We chatted in a buzzing restaurant and took selfies on our phones and had a great time eating awesome pizza. God that cheese was amazing. And I was getting a good buzz going. John had switched so soda because of the driving, but his metabolism is so fast I don’t even think it’s possible for him to get drunk. His buzz is more like a blip.

When we got back to the hotel, my buzz had pretty much worn off, but John took me to the hotel bar for another drink and some cheesecake. It didn’t bring my buzz back, but it was a good way to cap off the evening.

The next day we had another too-huge breakfast (man, I love hotel waffles). Though we could justify that, since our lunch plans had fallen through. We decided to get going home a couple of hours early and arrived home by about 3.30pm. I spent the whole journey home reading my book and being anti-social (we were giving our friend a ride with us, so I let him and my husband chat and sat in the back seat).

So that was our weekend getaway. Most of the photos we took were of ourselves, since we didn’t do anything touristy, and my hair looks terrible, so I won’t be posting them. I guess they call it the windy city for a reason.

 

 

April is our Month

I probably have no reason to feel even the slightest bit optimistic. The new job I was going after seems to have fallen through, since they said they’d call and they didn’t, and I refuse to call them. My husband thinks this is ‘giving up’ on that job, but I see it as retaining a small part of my dignity, because I don’t need to crawl after them. I have a job already, thank you very much, and I’m far too busy and imporant to sit around wondering whether they’ll call. I gave it 100% in my interviews and if they’re not professional enough to call me after they’ve said they will, it’s not the kind of place I want to work anyway.

I have been having good days and bad days at the grocery store. One day there was an ‘important’ meeting and there seemed to be no staff at all left in the store. So customers asking where things were, lining up to check out, and generally needing help in various ways were either fobbed off with an ‘oh, it’s over there somewhere, but I can’t leave my station’ or had to wait a very long time. They weren’t happy, I wasn’t happy (especially since it’s my primary job to keep the lines down and I wasn’t even able to do that).

But the better days where we have enough staff, enough help, and no bloody store-wide meetings, after an almost two-week straight row of bad days. I know that eventually it has to get better, but part of me still believes it’s like those torture devices where you’re strapped to a rack and they stretch you out, bit by bit, with enough time in between that you forget the pain, and then they turn the crank some more, etc. Pleasant imagery, eh?

But they did give me a mailbox at work (something only the department leads or managers get) and so seem to be moving forward with my full-timeness. I am trying to look at the bright side, and since I’ve been there a year already I get a paid day off (one, woo) and I’m legally guaranteed a job afterwards if I do get pregnant soon (something I was worried about when it comes to starting a new job – especially since I want to remain responsible for 1/4 of the bills).

So, overall, I’m feeling optimistic, and here’s why. Firstly, I booked a desperately needed week off. And I cleverly booked it off after I found out I had the last two days of this week off, so I have 9 days off in a row, not just 7. Secondly, we’re going to be flitting off to Chicago tomorrow! We haven’t really ‘been’ anywhere since we got married, aside from a couple of immigration-related road trips to Milwaukee, La Crosse and Minnesota. And that was great fun, but it’ll still be nice to ‘get away’ from it all for a couple of days, for no reason except because we can. We’re planning to see a movie as soon as we get to Chicago (in the same theatre we saw a movie in last time we went there, like it’s now a tradition or something. Plus I want to watch Oz), then check in at the hotel and have a relaxing evening, then spend Monday doing our own touristy thing, which may include drinking too much, and then Tuesday we have a planned lunch at a restaurant with our musician friend who will be down there.

That’s not the only exciting news, John’s birthday is coming up this month, and even though we’ll have no money after Chicago I still want it to be special for him. He makes me feel special every day, I think I can rustle up a plan to make him feel special for just one day a year. Hopefully.

I also feel pretty good about my baby-making chances this month (TMI alert, maybe). I just started my period, some 35 days after the start of my miscarriage, so I feel like my body is officially back on track. Last month I would have liked to get pregnant just because I felt like I deserved to still be pregnant, but I didn’t know when or even if I’d ovulate, and frankly I couldn’t get myself in the mood most nights anyway. But now I am past it, and ready to start again.

Geez, I bring up way too many topics in one post, don’t I. I really should make a post about each topic so I don’t feel like I have to skim over everything. But then, I like to waffle way too much for my own good, so some skimming is good.

Confessions of a Crazy Couponer

I swore it would never happen to me, after I saw how low some people would go to get their fix. The fraud, the policy twisting, the overly entitled attitudes all turned me off from couponing in the first place.

But I am weak! I gave in to temptation. My husband took me down a dark path (he’s really into the whole thing, and takes charge of organising/clipping the coupons in fact, he sees it like a puzzle), and we got to the grocery store at 6am sharp with 10 planned orders and a stiff latte.

194 items. Retailing at $368.36 (more than our grocery budget for the month). The dramatic music and camera angles kicked in. We ended up paying $114 – approx $11 per order.

In actuality, my main goal with these trips is not to be one of those customers. I don’t see coupons as money, or worth more than the soul of the cashier, myself, or other customers. The coupons get us a great deal, which only works with the help of the store and staff, and that’s wonderful. When we checked out we let customers go ahead of us/between our orders so we weren’t holding them up too much. We had a fantastic cashier and we let her do her thing. John was only a little late for work, and I partly blame the other crazy couponer who was in front of us during checkout. She was barking orders at the cashier, her stuff needed overriding, and she recognised me as a cashier and gave me unsolicited criticism about my coupons, telling me I should only use the Smucker’s Jam coupon when the jam was on sale for $2.29. I smiled and nodded and didn’t bother to tell her that it was still selling for $2.29, only it didn’t have a sale tag advertising it, just a regular tag. Same with the juice, it didn’t have a tag by it but a sneaky price check told me it was 50% off – $1.12 each, and we had a coupon to take $1 off 2. Double that to $2 off and it worked out as 12c each plus tax. And there were plenty on the shelf because no one knew it was on sale! So we got 6! Muahaha-ahem.

Plus, none of our coupons beeped or required an override, which I am proud of. We’ve had 100% success with that so far, which I think is an accomplishment because I’ve personally always believed the computer over the customer (even if I’m the customer), and I pretty much know that when it beeps it means they got the wrong brand, size, or variety, but for the sake of speed and their own sanity, the cashier just pushes the coupon through anyway. And I believe in my heart that it’s low level coupon fraud that the customer takes advantage of, because they can’t be mistaken of course, and it’s just plain wrong.

So, for your viewing pleasure (?), here is my meager little stockpile, which I believe you can click on to see a bigger version. This picture doesn’t show the extent of yogurts, fruit and milk we’ve gotten, or the bathroom products which have their own separate shelf in the bathroom. Plus the frozen goods that we’re gonna need a second freezer for soon. I told you I had a LOT of cereal! Though the 12 boxes on the ground cost a grand total of $3 (a quarter apiece) and we’re giving them to relatives. Some things we didn’t have a coupon for, like the store-brand canned goods on the top shelf, but they were on sale and my 10% discount expires at the end of April, so it’s best to get them now in bulk! Most items in here were under a dollar each, which is probably high compared to a ‘real’ couponers average cost per item – but we’re not overly fussy about wanting only free items, or buying something just because it has a coupon (though the Dole fruit cups – some were free, some almost free, and we only got them at first because of that, but man they’re delicious, good in lunches, and don’t need refrigerating!). Overall we get things we use, like, and want.

P.S. The ‘bowing’ of the shelves isn’t because of the weight of product on them, they were like that when we moved in. Honest.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pay Hard

I had my second interview at the bank yesterday (though it felt like my 4th, because of the 2 phone interviews before that). I should hear from them within a few days. I am feeling pretty confident that I’ll get the job, and I love how nice everyone seems there, since I arrived while there were no customers and got to hear them shoot the breeze. The manager I sat with today said I seemed like a ‘good fit’ and mentioned a couple of times (once supposedly ‘out of earshot’ and once directly to me) that he was happy I was so local. I’m thinking another one of the applicants may have a long commute.

Current working conditions seem to be getting worse – I don’t know if it’s because psychologically, I’m ready to leave, or because they’re actually tightening the thumbscrews. It keeps getting busier than we’re scheduled for, plus I’m forced to send people home early and ‘do without’ that cashier for an hour. One stressful moment, my boss came over my shoulder and said, ‘I don’t know if you noticed but we have customers.” In a stern way. So I was forced to snap back, “yes, I was looking over my list to see who to call next, since I just sent two cashiers home early.” I was on the verge of either crying or just opening on the nearest register and saying fuggit to all my other tasks. Or both. Oh the woes of retail.

That said, I was only given 28 hours this week so I’m getting a lot of down-time (though they’d never give me more days off, they just make my daily shifts shorter). I just can’t wait to hand in my resignation – whether it’s in a few days or a month or so if I end up applying elsewhere. (See, I didn’t jinx myself because I am entertaining the prospect of not getting the job.)

We also opened a CD savings account to officially start saving for a downpayment (!!!) and a third checking account to act as a place to stash our emergency fund. We’ve also officially stopped living on one income, our car payment tipped us over, so I started paying for roughly 1/4 of all bills (so it’s evenly distributed according to paycheque) and we’re allocating both our leftover moneys towards savings. We’re not quite at the zero-based budget yet, possibly due to a phobia of our bank accounts actually approaching a balance of zero. We’re still saving a good amount and paying off the last bits of debt as much as we can.

I’m not sure what we’ll do when it comes to the whole baby-thing (which I’m trying not to think about or obsess over right now, just going with the flow, as it were). But right now my contribution to the bills and savings would necessitate me working at least part time. Which I can do, but wouldn’t be happy about if it means paying so much in childcare that I’d net a $2-3 hourly wage. But for the foreseeable future, I can earn as much as possible (even considering staying at the grocery store for one day a week – $50 a week for my soul? Tempting).

Hopefully if I get the bank job, the extra pay will help us manage, plus couponing like crazy (this week we plan to get $205 worth of food for $95. But we’re still in that phase of stocking up on goods to save money later, so we’re still spending up to our budget, but we have a nice stockpile going). We’re also talking about doing away with our expensive smartphone plans which would save even more money.

Goodness, this post is way too long already.

Grocery Shop Breakdown

I was dragged out of bed by my far-too-chipper husband at 5.25am this morning (I think he was woken up, showered, and dressed by the birds and mice like a male Cinderella – complete with musical number).

We somehow got me dressed and out of the house without the aid of coffee (all out of milk), and we stopped by McDonald’s to indulge in a breakfast to fuel our grocery trip (and figuring we wouldn’t have time to eat at home).

Yes, grocery shopping at 6am, just in time for the store opening. See, it’s double-double day so the local store will double up to TEN manufacturer’s coupons (usually a limit of 5) per $25 transaction. And we weren’t even the first coupon-shoppers to arrive. A woman was waiting in her car, browsing through her huge, immaculately organised binder when we pulled up at 5.59am. We ate our breakfast in the car and headed inside with our rumpled envelope full of coupons.

There are very good reasons to go shopping that early in the morning (before the rush, more likely to have items in stock, etc.) but the main reason we did it was because John had to work at 7.30, and I’m not one of those women who takes on the burden of doing all the grocery shopping alone and does 3 separate orders from one cart and forgets things and stresses out and takes it out on the cashier. Having two of us there makes it faster, keeps it fun, we remind each other of things, spot sales, and we make less mistakes together.

So we were all checked out by 6.40am, and with our 3 orders, we saved a total of 62% on our bill! $52 for $140 worth of groceries! Including processed foods like condensed soups, juice, cereal bars, and hazelnut spread, but also $10 worth of fresh fruit for almost nothing, turkey bacon for $1 each, yogurts for 19-25c apiece, expensive-branded bread for 90c each, milk for 36c a gallon, and a gallon of chocolate milk that I believe we only paid 7c for! (A lot of the deals we got from paying ‘full-price’ for cereal, but when the cereal is 1.99 a box and has coupons inside, and family rewards codes for even more coupons, our average spending per box is still only around $1).

Of course, I take the ‘calculated savings of $88′ with a grain of salt because I work at a grocery store, and some things are constantly ‘on sale’, like the milk that’s always ‘posted’ at 2.99 but always ‘on sale’ for 2.50. They might as well just lower the price, but they like having ‘you saved 49c on this item!’ posted in big bold letters on the receipt. So a lot of the store-brand savings I don’t really count, but they are hard to separate from the total amount saved.

Though I’m feeling slightly daunted by the prospect of doing the same thing next week! We have more coupons to hunt for (I’m thinking canned goods, toiletries, more frozen veggies, and a year’s supply of cereal bars).