Frugal Framnett

One of the things I hate about goals is the self-examination that comes with failure to meet them, but that is what goals are for and in this post I review how we did in 2008 with respect to the goals I set in this post 2008 Goals!.
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In my previous post I discussed about saving money on heating bills using wood heat. Is wood heat more inexpensive than natural gas, electric, oil, or propane? One would tend to answer yes, but not so fast, hunches are fine but in order to definitively answer that question you need to run some numbers.

What you can not measure or calculate you have to rely on hunches and while hunches are a good first cut at answering a proposition they can often be wrong.

I keep coming back to the E85 situation, it is cheaper to fill your vehicle with E85, your money is staying local and going to local corn growers & ethanol plants so that may bias you into concluding E85 is more inexpensive, but when you calculate the cents it costs you to drive a mile on E85 vs. E0 or E10 my experience shows the hunch wrong — E85 is more expensive!

Onto calculating heating value.
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When grocery shopping, that is.

I’ve always heard the theory that shopping the perimeter of the grocery store - buying the fresh foods and not the processed ones - is less expensive overall. Now that my spouse is following a specific meal plan, I’m buying almost exclusively fresh food, when I used to buy a mix of fresh, canned, frozen, and some processed food. And lo and behold, my first week shopping, I spent almost twice my normal grocery budget. Now, some of that was “start up” expenses, foods that I can buy in bulk and use over time, but a lot of it was things I will have to buy on a weekly basis (produce doesn’t last forever, after all). I expected this to be the case, but it begs the question - contrary to popular wisdom, is shopping the perimeter really more expensive?

Source: Why My Perimeter is More Expensive Than My Aisles – I’ve Paid For This Twice Already… (From financial imprisonment to financial independence, a penny at a time. This is one family’s story.)

In the comments section I already explained that she is inviting a question not begging it, but of course there is a larger thought here…

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Getting close to the end of IV I noticed the following. I did not close out week III properly, I left out one record of the totals. Of course this means we spent more than I had originally thought. DOH!

This week, we seem to be ahead of the spending game by quite a bit. However, Sunday is our main grocery day so we can catch up, but we do not have a large shopping list this week. There is only one item Lorie and I can think of we need to purchase and there is no immediate need so if there is no coupon, perhaps we can skip the Sunday trip to the grocery store. However, we are starting to get low on tangerines and almonds, but I think we will be able to defer that to next week.

To date our grocery spending is amounting $76.37/week but like I said I will wait until we close this week to count on that number holding. I am hoping we can pull it down.

Good! We are getting a good idea on what we are spending on groceries and it is more than what I had thought, but it does not seem to be out of line with norms and a fair amount of food is going into storage.
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I am going to make this post a high-level and quick introduction to spreadsheets.

Lesson one: rows, columns, and cells
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What you are looking at is one of my expense detail tracking sheets. It is one of many and is full fledged, no other sheet has more fields than this one does!

Each sheet contains a number of data points, such as date, the location (or vendor), the total amount spent, sale-tax, realized coupon or rebate amounts (i.e. rebates & coupons actually resulting in savings - brainstorm I am going to add a coupon & rebate potential to try to track rebate conversions), and description of the purchase. I then have fields where I total by year, month, and week spending. Click on the sheets to see them close up.

How do we add up the totals? By using the sum formula. in my case that the annual total is =sum(c4:c999) and the monthly & weekly totals are similar. I have yet to add averages, however it will be a bit of time until average numbers are helpful and I have not yet added in the potential coupon savings.

May be found here. Open Office’s Calc spreadsheet. What is the cost of obtaining the software? The cost of downloading and installing it, it is free for the download.

In addition, you can open and save Excel spreadsheets. Compatibility is not 100% but darned near, the only time I have compatibility problems is when attempting to open Excel sheets with macros.

The formulas are not quite the same, but all is close enough you can readily transfer your knowledge of Excel to Calc.

What you are looking at in the above screen grab is the summary sheet from my expenditures spreadsheet. There are roughly 14 sheets, each sheet tracks expenditures by category, for example there are sheets for utility, grocery, and clothing expenditures.

The summary sheet gives at a glance the grand total, and totals broken down by category, and month.

Partially visible are the numbers rendered into percentages against the particular total and not visible are pie charts, both year and for January. Of course, as the year progresses I will create pie charts for each month.

Next posting I will show a pie chart. My Lord, I can almost see this transforming itself into a full fledged web-based application.