yogurt and retirement

So, my first batch of yogurt is yogurting as we speak. As I type. I've been talking about doing this for about....3 months now? Well, here we are...it's 9 pm...and I have to wait 4 hours for it to finish. I'm an idiot. I suppose I could go to sleep and set an alarm...but that's probably not going to happen. I'm a little too excited about it, honestly. I have two dead bananas to blend up with some honey to finish it off, it's gonna be awesome. I haven't crunched the numbers to see if this is actually cheaper than buying, but I suspect it is. Especially since I can just use half of the half-gallon milk I usually get for my cereal. I need to check the price of the yogurt I buy just to make sure, though.

I also went to the grocery tonight and stocked up. Not sure how it's going to go, but I'm going to try to do a meal plan for my dinners from thursday to next tuesday. I think you're supposed to do that before you go shopping, but I'll just do it the other way around this time. I picked up a bunch of dry legumes (lentils, yellow peas, green beas, and lima beans), some rice, some veggies, and breakfast/lunch supplies. There should be enough to get through a week (and more).

As far as more hard money matters go, I started looking into retirement accounts on a whim today, and discovered there might be one that I can open up and start funding really soon. I'm really surprised and excited by the prospect. From what I've heard from both Suze and some blogs, it's a good idea to start with one of the bigger investment houses, because they do a lot of the work for you. I've looked at Ameritrade before (I'm a sucker for sam waterston), and today I checked out T. Rowe Price. I'm glad I did, it seems I was harboring some false assumptions about how much money you have to have to start your retirement savings.

As it turns out, that number is $0.00! I think I'm going to be able to open up my Roth IRA at T. Rowe Price next month! With their Automatic Asset Builder Service there's no minimum balance to open if you sign up for automatic debits of at least $50 a month. And there aren't any management fees. I really can't believe I can start investing with so little. Now that my emergency fund is a little settled, I feel really comfortable getting started with this. I'll start putting $50 a month into that fund, and about $70 a month to my short term savings.

Really, I couldn't imagine when I started this thing I'd be contributing to my retirement within a year. I guess I'm not such a screw up, after all.

a grocery dilemma

I went grocery shopping on Wednesday (the first day on my new budget). This is the first time in a very long time I was consciously trying to squeeze the most food out of my dollars and not get the fanciest local organic stuff available. I imagined trying to shop like my mom did when me and my brothers were little. Sale jelly, sale peanut butter, sale yogurt, sale bread, bulk cream of wheat, etc. Just the staples. And I did good; I got breakfast and lunch supplies for a couple weeks for $17.

But when I got home I looked a little closer at what I had gotten and was really frustrated. Everything I bought except for the cream of wheat has high fructose corn syrup as the second or third ingredient. This makes me even more angry at those creepy corn lobby sponsored HFCS commercials. They talk about "consumed in moderation" as if it's not used as filler in every single food thing you eat in one day if you can't afford the types of things that don't include it. I bet I would have easily spent closer to $30 on the same things if I had gotten the Stonybrook organic yogurt, the local traditionally produced jelly, and so on (not the natural peanut butter though, that stuff is gross). It's maddening.

I'm just glad I'm not raising kids on a budget like this. I would hate for my choices to be feed them crap or not at all. As for me, I think I'll just spend a little more next time.