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Maintaining Self-care On A Budget

September 28, 2022  As we both work fulltime and are in Grad school, the stress of everyday life sure can add up. Alisa loves massages and I pedicures, but with massages being at least $90 for 1 hour and pedicures being $50 a visit, they sure can add up. How is it that, even though self-care is important, but sure can be costly and usually FSA and/or HSA dollars do not count towards it? We don’t know either, so we’ve had to get a bit creative with what we spend, as well as how we define “self-care”. Self-care is not only massage and pedicures, but can also be:
  • Calling and/or hanging out with a friend
  • Reading a book (the library is free and you can even get audio book options!)
  • Taking a walk
  • Cuddling and taking a nap with our pup
  • Going to a movie (matinees and/or student discount days are our favorite!)
  • Coloring or doing something artsy
  • Going to a museum (Milwaukee has some nice free days)
  • And, more…!
In the past, from about March to October/early November, I would go monthly to get a pedicure, but with my favorite location being a 2-hour commute away, that naturally just cut my pedicure expenses in half. It wasn’t just about getting my toes trimmed and beautifully painted with a nice foot and leg massage, but also would also go with a friend or two so we could catch up. Now, I just get a pedicure when I have a big event to go to. To still continue self-care with seeing my friends, though, we meet every 1-2 months by meeting halfway between where we live and getting brunch or dinner.             Alisa still gets massages, but usually only when her back is really “out of whack” from travel or if we were doing strenuous yard work. Her new self-care indulgence though, is to go for a float. She’s tried a few places over the years, but her favorite one actually offers a student discount. With her college ID in hand, she has been able to save 2/3 the cost of one float!  We still treat ourselves, don’t get me wrong – just not as much as we used to. Thankfully my in-store frivolous shopping habit halted when we bought our house a few years ago. Very rarely do I go to ‘regular’, non-TJ Maxx-like, stores anymore, and definitely not Target!! When ‘stocking’ our house or when the seasons change and we need ‘new to us’ items, I usually turn to the Facebook Marketplace first. It has been pretty neat to see what items are out there and what a great deal you can get. All thanks to Alisa’s knowledge sharing and confidence boost, I have even started negotiating on some items. This is something I never would have done before, but as Alisa always says to me – “what’s the worst they can say – no?!”. Once we negotiated on an exercise bike (also part of self-care) by getting $100 dollars off and giving them a bottle of one of our (good) wines. A win-win for all! If you haven’t yet dabbled by looking at the Marketplace, you should!
            Being Pumpkin Spice season, though, one thing we won’t negotiate on is where to get our Pumpkin Spice Cold Foam Cream cold brews from Starbucks. Last year we tried a few non-Starbucks places to get our seasonal fix, but they just were not the same quality or volume, so we felt that to be a ‘waste’ of money and just keep to our Starbucks splurge, but limit it to once/week – MAX. We also both have the Starbucks app and like to see which one of us has the better deal to order; just another way to save and still enjoy a nice, seasonal treat.   All of these self-care treats that we do for ourselves, we budget for each month as we know they will be a regular expense and helps us better keep track of our spending. We would love to hear how you treat yourself while still staying within budget. You might also be interested in Whew and wow! This has been quite a challenging and eye-opening process! It has been very hard to do this project as part of a couple when both of us appear to handle finances and money very differently. If I’ve learned one thing it’s that you can start out with very similar goals and desires but unless you are actually working hard towards them each week, they aren’t easy to maintain collectively! While we probably aren’t in last place, we sure aren’t in first either and that's okay. During the week of November 23, we wrote about how we were going to look into options for cost-saving measures. One of those measures was to analyze any balance transfers that may have been available to us. One of this balance transfers ended up being a very good offer, 0% interest for 18 months with a 3% transfer fee. It was time to take a couple small balances and one larger balance and combine them into what will be one card payment using this balance transfer offer. This past weekend, we took our annual trip down to Chicago, which was also paired with a trip to the theater. With being in Project Money, have been more conscious of our trip expenses and we heavily discussed if we just go down for just the evening or spend the night, like we normally do. With traffic and the unknowns of early winter weather, we decided it would be best to spend the night down there, and so we did. Something that stands out lately are the number of outlets competing for one’s time, attention, and especially our hard earned money. I don’t know about you, but it can be exhausting dodging solicitations and avoiding temptation left and right, especially around the holidays! It seems I can’t make a move without a text, email, phone call, commercial, mailer, advertisement, etc. attempting to draw me in on the next latest, greatest thing I supposedly ‘need’ to buy. Ah, consumerism. If it wasn't so cold out right now, we might not believe that the end of the year is fast approaching, but alas – it is! With that, we have been starting to crunch our numbers and see if we met our savings and debt payoff goals for this year and are starting to make some savings goals for next year. To assist with this, we have also started looking at what are current expenses are, current loan and credit card rates and seeing where we might be able to cut additional costs by either canceling services, negotiating costs and/or switching companies. Initially, we weren’t sure exactly what to write about for this week’s blog post. However, the subject came to us this past weekend as we were reviewing certain aspects of our finances. We both have credit card debt we are working on paying off and recently made sizable progress towards that goal. However, we’ve noticed that our low interest credit cards have recently experienced additional hikes in their APRs (and appear to continue climbing). For example, one credit card has now climbed to from 9.9% to 15.85% due to varying APR with the market based on the Prime Rate. Many of us enjoy hosting parties with friends and family for seasonal activities and Holidays but don’t want to break the bank doing so! For me and Krystal, a Fall Halloween event is one of our favorite gatherings we host each year with close loved ones. Here are some of our money-saving tips to ensure sure the fun doesn’t become overshadowed by ghastly receipts! I don't know about you, but I, Krystal, grew up in a pretty cold house during winter. We lived in a rural-ish area where natural gas did not run, thus propane was our main heating source, until my father installed a wood stove when I was late middle-school age. Nevertheless, the heat in our house was turned down low (better for breathing we were always told, too!) while we slept and were away at work or school. One thing we’re still working through is being a bit more proactive about unexpected house costs. Sure, we have small savings account for house expenses, but mostly this is to cover our homeowner’s insurance deductible. Like my father taught me with my car insurance deductible, I try to pretend this money just doesn’t exist, thus, why we need to plan better for those unexpected house-related costs.  This week’s two unexpected costs were our dryer needing a repair and our fence project taking a lot more money than expected. 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