Laundry 5 Cents per Load

I've been doing 1 load of laundry a day, and it's getting very close to the point where I'll only have one load to do on any given day. I'm very pleased with this consistency and with the order it's allowing me to introduce to our home.

I used the last of my laundry detergent recipe today, so I had to whip up some more. I have never been successful with the liquid soap recipes I've found online, so a couple of month ago, I switched over to the (mostly) powdered version. I'm very happy with it.

Laundry detergent recipes pretty well are ubiquitous on the web, and I won't pretend that I'm original in my concoction. All the same, I am proud of what I've learned and figure I ought to show it off.

I found a recipe I like (no idea where) and made a very slight adjustment to make it easier to remember. I changed the ratio of ingredients to be 1:1:1. It was pretty close to that before, and this gets my clothes fully clean.

1 cup grated Fels Naptha (a bar soap available in the laundry aisle at the grocery; look on the top shelf)
1 cup Arm & Hammer Washing Soda
1 cup Borax Washing Powder.

Fels Naptha cost around $1 a bar; I think I pay $1.19. A 55-oz box of Arm & Hammer runs $1.89, and a 76-oz box of Borax is $2.89. Going by the weight of a cup of each of the powders and calculating the cost per ounce of the powders, I was able to calculate that the powder portion of my detergent costs me about $0.53/batch. I usually can get about three batches out of two FN bars, so I figure more or less 1.5 cups per bar.

Total cost: $1.39 for about a month's worth of detergent. I use one heaping table spoon full (that is, not a small cutlery spoon, one of the larger ones) per load, and our clothes have been cleaner and have smelled better since we switched to this. At one load per day, that puts our laundry detergent cost at about $0.05 per load.

Naggy Mom

If you remember, I recently started following the Naggy [profanity redacted] on Ravelry for housecleaning plans and tips. It's working remarkably well.

Housecleaning

A friend who comes over often came in yesterday and went kind of wild about how great the place looks. She said the house seems to have gotten bigger.

The best part? I'm staying on top of it. There are little things here and there that I haven't been able to bring myself to do. But for the most part, it's looking good.

Here's what I do every day before work:

• Make my bed
• After my shower, grab my washcloth and swipe the dirtiest surface in the bathroom before I toss it in the hamper
• Empty the dishwasher, which should be full of sparkly, clean dishes from the previous evening's delightful game of Crack The Whip Over Your Teens Who Hate You and Know You Are Out To Get Them. If I lost that game, then I load the dishwasher instead of emptying it.

When I get home from work:

• Spend 2 minutes (timed, yo) on a crap magnet. This is a surface in my house that just magnetizes crap. For some, it's their kitchen counter. For others, it's the desk. We have an abundance of crap-magnets in our house; some aren't even horizontal (yes, the fridge).
• Process ONE load of laundry. I don't care about wrinkles, so I let laundry sit in the dryer once it's done. So for this task, I fold yesterday's clean clothes right out of the dryer, throw the clothes sitting in the washer into the dryer, and then throw a load into the washer from the waiting basket. Then my load is done for the day, and I can forget about it.
• Open and process the mail. I don't let myself get up from the desk until the mail is filed, tossed, set in the shredder pile, or schedule (and filed)
• 15 minutes on my current declutter project (currently the craft room)

That's my basic routine. On different days, I like to add other things in. For example, I'm about to start a project to relocate a major piece of furniture (white Ikea 5x5 Expedit bookcase) from the living room to the library. I'm very excited about it. I'll post before and after pictures next week (hopefully). So today I have a task to spend 15 minutes moving books from one room to the other.

Family Planning (but not like that)

Mark and I have also scheduled a weekly 30 - 45 minutes to synchronize our calendars and double check the budget. Mark is the calendar nerd, and I'm the budget nerd. We set the timer for 15 minutes and review the calendar for that long. He's really good about writing EVERYTHING down, so this generally is his chance to make sure my calendar is up to date. We also plan who will pick up the kids from different activities. This week we had to figure out how to work around Mark's scheduled surgery. He's having a hernia repaired.

After 15 minutes, we reset the time and spend another 15 looking at the budget, evaluate whether we have any unplanned expenses coming up for the week and try to figure out how to pay for them. Once that's over, if we have any more energy and haven't started arguing, we wrap up any loose ends.

Overall, we're beginning to really get a handle on things around here. Our goal for February (financially) is to recover to the point that we have our Baby Emergency Fund back in place. In order to really do that, we'll need to stay on top of everything else.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Most everyone has heard that Obama proposed spending caps over the next few years, and to be honest I think he's right to do so. Unfortunately, in his budget proposal released today, he proposed canceling my bread and butter outright: NASA's Constellation Program. For now, I'm still employed, but that might not last until September. Our goal now is to fund our emergency fully before the pink slip comes. Thank goodness this bill has to get through Congress first. And that our work has a 30-day stop-work notification clause. 

Oh, and About the Cost

Materials were not cheap. I think I paid $105 for lye, coconut oil, palm oil, peppermint essential oil, vanilla fragrance, shea butter, grapefruit seed extract, and beeswax enough to make a little over two batches of soap and shipping for all of those. Then we also purchased distilled water and olive oil separately for $25; there was enough water for four batches and olive oil for three.

So if I engage in a little fuzzy math and round out the number of batches to 2.5, the cost comes to $52/batch of soap or $1.11 per bar. Probably not super-frugal; however, we didn't add the value of the chemistry lesson for the girls, and when you consider the cost of buying handmade soap as a gift, it becomes incredibly cost-sensitive.

Thanks to Miss Hannah for the instructions and help getting supplies!

Also, it looks like another mutual friend found a local option for buying supplies which would cut out the exorbitant shipping costs.  The first list of supplies was $27 to ship, which added $10 to the cost of each batch or about $0.21 to the cost of each bar. Apparently, the local option also is less expensive for the supplies, as well. Win on all fronts!

Being Debt-Free

Mark and I are 35 and 34, respectively. We have been married five years and two months, and two months ago today we made the last payment on our last non-mortgage debt. We liberated ourselves.

We started our journey three and a half years ago in January 2006. We had been married about a year and a half, and that month, Mark started his first professional job out of college.

Our income doubled overnight, and I feared that we would end up broke all over again because we were so unaccustomed to having any money. So I asked around, and several people recommended that I try Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. So we signed up at the church. Money was so tight that we had to ask the church to cover the $100 cost for us. At that time, we had no commitment to being debt-free. It was a kind of pipe dream for us: something everyone said you should do and no one believed you could do.

During the second or third class, we watched the “Dumping Debt” lesson. If you never watch or read anything else by Dave Ramsey, watch him teach that lesson. You actually can buy just that lesson here. This lesson gave us our first glimmer of hope. I went home, pulled all our bills – from $45 owed to the dentist to $24K owed to student loans – added them up, and found that between us we owed $63,754 for cars, furniture, student loans, medical bills, computers, and general living.

Dave says that, “Children do what feels good. Adults make a plan and follow it.” By his standards, I guess we’re teenagers. We made a plan and more or less followed it. In fact, we even paid it off ahead of our original schedule; however, we could have gone even faster if we’d been a little less impulsive. For example, my husband encouraged me to buy a spinning wheel. We bought a laptop. We ate out.

All the same, on September 4, 2009, Citifinancial Student Loans debited the final $1,501.01 from our checking account, and we went to bed that night free of all debt except our mortgage. When we started, we had so many monthly payments that we could only pay $50 a month extra on our debts. By the time we focused on the final debt, we made a consolidated $2,500 payment each month on that debt.

I thought I could imagine how it would feel to be debt free, but I was wrong. It’s more liberating than the sweetest siren song could make it out to be. More importantly, our dreams have gotten much, much bigger. Four years ago, I could barely entertain the notion that people could live without consumer debt. Now we have a real dream: we plan to pay off our house.

Of course, paying off the debt really just brought us up to the starting line. We still have plenty of Responsible, Grown-up Things to Do. Right now, we’re working on our three-month emergency fund. After that, we need to replace Mark’s car, a decrepit 1986 Toyota Celica. We anticipate replacing the central heat and air system (including extensive duct work) and insulating the house. We plan to complete all of these without using debt by June 2010. Then we'll pad the emergency fund to cover six months of expenses. After that, all our extra money will go toward Burgundy’s college and paying off the house.

Get that: We have the freedom to decide what we want to do with our money. We can sell the house and live in a yurt. Buy cashmere goats. Carve totem poles and sell them on Jamaican cruises.

Anything. We. Want.

Note: This is a lightly edited post originally published on my old (mostly locked) livejournal account. Apologies to readers who came here from there.

Planning for Christmas

We always fill our weekends with way too many activities, plans, and goals. This weekend was no different; however, I accomplished so many things that I’m beginning to feel giddy. I finished making the jam two weeks ago, and I made three loaves of bread and a batch of yeast rolls Saturday. I finished another Morsbag, and we took the girls to Houston Grand Opera for the second weekend in a row, this time to see Lohengrin. We really enjoyed it, but I don't think I will see live opera two weekends in a row again anytime soon. Especially not when one of them is Wagner. Holy cow.

I’ve now completed six out of twelve Morsbags for our Christmas project. Basically, I'm going handmade this Christmas. For all our parental and sibling sets and for our close friends, I'm making each family a Morsbag. So far, I've made one bag from fat quarters I had, four from a large-ish scrap of cloth I found in my craft room, and one from an IKEA pillowcase. The remaining six probably will be made from the rest of the IKEA sheet set. It cost $1.99, and I bought it to use in place of fabric on a different project.

We'll stuff each bag with a jar of homemade local jam, a bar of homemade soap, a hand-packed beer bread kit, hand-dipped chocolate spoons, homemade hot cocoa mix, and a mini-loaf of my homemade bread. If the girls feel like it, they can bake cookies or brownies or cookie bars and add those to the gift bags.

The Morsbags are by far the most time-consuming aspect of the gifts. Each one takes about an hour to make by myself, and neither of my girls knows how to sew or how to iron precisely enough for machine sewing. Of course, after a while, my ironing isn't terribly precise, either.

In the spirit of the Under $1,000 per Month blog, I calculated the cost of our gift bags vs. their value. The fabric for the bags themselves I consider free for two reasons. First, I already had the fabric in the house; likely, I've had it for a few years. Second, by using up the fabric, I'm saving on the cost of a decluttering professional to save me from my crafty hoarding tendencies.

• Reusable grocery bags are usually on sale 10 for $10 at the grocery store, so I'll call it $1/each. My cost: $0.
• A half-pint of homemade jam probably could fairly cost $3. My cost: $1.88/jar (including the cost of the jar)
• A bar of homemade soap from Miss Hannah's Handmade Soap would cost $5 - $7, so we'll call it $6 even. My cost: About $2 (and many thanks to Miss Hannah herself for her kindness and generosity in teaching me.
• I last saw beer bread mixes sold at a craft fair for $7 in a baggie or $10 in a beer bottle (a cute gimmick to be sure). I'll call that $7 because I won't be using beer bottles. My cost: $0.25
• A six-piece chocolate spoon set was $6.50 on Etsy. My cost: $0.60
• I found a three-serving set of hot cocoa mixes on Etsy for $6. My cost: $0.31
• Finally, it disturbs a bit to say, but I found homemade bread on Etsy for $12 a loaf. Mine are mini-loaves, so I'll call them $3 a loaf. My cost: $0.34

So I will spend about $5.38 per family while giving each family a gift valued at $32.50. My family will love receiving these handmade gifts that they can eat and enjoy. Most of our family and close friends are very green-conscious and will love having their own Morsbag. And noone has to coo over another Christmas figurine that they didn't want and now can't re-gift.