Planning our meals

I have been doing some research on meal planning and its affects on money saving. Several PF bloggers such as Nicole Humphrey over at Families.com and Kris over at Simply Us have been some insightful reasons why meal planning is the way to go if we want to save money.

Back in June 2007, one of the articles that I wrote also advocate the planning of meals. Practicing it is a different story. This is our strategy in an attempt to plan our meals better.

We have a lot of food magazine like Super Food Ideas, Delicious and Good Taste, and frequently try the recipes in them. So our idea is to us a display folders with a few empty inserts. We take a recipe from one of these magazines and placed them into one of the empty inserts. We usually just tear the page out from the magazine.

Each of these recipes are for each weekday. Currently, we are only focusing the evening meals, but we are planning to cook that little bit extra so that the left overs can be use for lunch the next day.

Do you plan your meals, and what strategy do you us to keep it interesting and on track?

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ALDI newsletter

A few post ago, I wrote about how we are going to give ALDI another go. Recently, we have found that the weekly specials that ALDI have are literally running out the door. On the day of the sales, the weekly specials are sold out within two hours! Apart from receiving the ALDI catalogue in your mailbox, it is difficult to know what the specials are.

Searching through the website, I discovered they can email you their weekly specials in a form of a e-letter. I have signed up, and have began to receive regular emails with the weekly specials. Sign up for the newsletter here if you are interested. You can unsubscribe at the same location as well.

cheap on-line photo printing

One of the family's favourite past time is to snap away at photos. When the digital camera revolution arrived about 4-5 years ago, the number of photos that we took seem to have tripled. Most of them ending up on the PC, and only a small selection of them ever made on to printed media as we have found that it is quite expensive to print out the photos.

We have tried the two popular options, either printing the photo out ourselves, or using one of a photo kiosks.

Printing the photo has its benefits. It gives me some satisfaction that I have hand crafted a photo worth putting in a album, but it also ends to be about $0.45 per print. We did all the frugal things like cutting up an A4 photo paper in a four A6 paper, and also using non-genuine inks. We have never managed to get below $0.30 per print. We even switched to an Epson printer where each colour has its own cartridge so only the empty cartridge is replaced, not the whole cartridge.

The photo kiosks are quite cheap, but they are rather inconvenient. Our closes photo kiosk is a five minute drive away, and using it frustrates my wife endlessly as it is badly designed. She usually get a couple of of the details wrong and the whole batch is ruin. It is something we try to avoid. The cheapest photo kiosk that we have found cost $0.19 per print.

Recently, one of our friends from our ante-natal classes pointed us to www.getdigital.com.au. For standard 10cm x 15cm, it cost $0.10 per print, and there isn't any minimum quantity! You can order 1 print if you wish. They will usually turn your photos around 1 one working day, definitely in two working days. You also have a choice of picking it up at a shop for a service fee of $2.00 or have it delivered to you for $8.50.

We tried it and send across 67 photos to be printed and be picked up at our local pharmacy. The results were pretty good, definitely good enough for putting into a photo album. It cost a total of $8.70 for 67 prints , sweet!

One word of warning, the website does not appear to be compatible with the Firefox browser. However it works pretty well with Internet Explorer. We discovered this after spending 1 hour uploading the photos!

Using www.getdigital.com.au has certainly help us the printing cost of photos and have saved us many dollars since we have discovered them.

photo credit: V Fouche

Don't Panic!

The current financial crisis that we are experiencing is quite nerve racking. Today, the All Ords feel by about 7% and all the gains, if not more, made over the last 12 months. Today, it closed at 5222 points, down by 408 points. As reported by The Age, this is the one day biggest drop in the share market in the 18 years, and the longest losing streak since January 1982.

Luckily, it does not really impact me significantly as we only own a small parcel of Telstra shares, which was purchased during the T2 offering. However, the real impact to us would be how our superannuation will be performing. Like many other Australians, some part of our superannuation are invested in the local Australian share market. With the investment mix of my superannuation, about 10%-15% is expose to movements of the sharemarkets. The way I view it, superannuation is a long term investment and is not due to mature for another 30 years for me. So I have decided not to panic and leave the investment mix alone to ride the down slide out.

My friend calls this the sleep factor. If the situation is affecting you to an extend that it is disturbing your sleep at night, it is probably time to be less aggressive with the investment mix.

The market did slide down quite significantly when the dot com bubble busted just after the turn of the century and my superannuation net worth actually went down, but it recovered in spectacular fashion.

For some people whom superannuation are about to be accessible in the next few years, these are certainly nervous times. I would say to them to get some profession advice.

measuring dollar economy on the car.

We have been driving the new car for about a two months, and I was thinking "how do I measure the affect it was having on the household financials?" Since the car is a novated leased car, I need to keep detail record whenever I visited the petrol station and fill it up with petrol. The information that I keep are

• Cost of the petrol
• The amount of petrol I pumped into the car
• The odometer reading when I pumped petrol into the car
• Date and time

Fortunately, these information are all on the collected, printed out on the receipt and handed to you by the station attendant. The standard measure is fuel economy which measures how much fuel is used over a set distance. So far, the car's fuel economy is 13.55 ltr per 100km. I felt that this is more a measure of how the car is performing and does not really give you a sense on how it is affecting the wallet.

From a dollars and cents perspective, I converted this figure to become dollar economy by multiplying the amount of fuel by the average cost of the fuel. This was calculated to be about $18.5 per 100km. Obviously, this figure will fluctuate with the price of fuel, and that is a good thing as it clearly shows the true value of your fuel usage.

To put that dollar figure into perspective, if we drove to Ballarat to visit the in-laws, the trip would cost about $20 on fuel alone. Plus the $20 for the trip home.

I am gathering a spreadsheet to help perform this calculation quickly. If you are interested in getting a copy of the spreadsheet, send me an email tehn.yit.chin @ gmail . com or leave a message in the comments. The spreadsheet should be available in the next few days.

The economics of using Bunnings

It is summer here in Melbourne, and we just had a couple of days in a row that reached 40 degC. The nights did not get below 25 degC. It was pretty uncomfortable all around for everybody.

Unfortunately with the orientation of the house, our son's bedroom window gets a lot of the afternoon sun, which is great for the winter days, but not so good for the summer days.

We decide to install a pull down awning outside his window to give it some shielding from the sun in the afternoon. I went off the Bunnings to get the necessary tools and materials. One of the tools I need to buy is a hammer drill. Historically, I would spent quite a bit of money to get the best tool, usually targeting the Makita or Bosch or even Hitachi power tools. However, in the last few years, Bunnings have been selling extremely cheap power tools from China, typically the GMC or Ozito. For a comparison, the hammer drill from Ozito cost me $30. If I had purchased a Makita hammer drill, it would have cost a few hundred dollars. Another time, I purchased a jigsaw for an incredible $5 whereas a Makita jigsaw would also cost a few hundred dollars.

I must say that the Makita or the Bosch tools are extremely robust and reliable, and if I had to make my livelyhood from these tools, I would stick with the Makita or the Bosch tools. However, since I am using in a DIY situation, I may as well save a few dollars and use the cheaper varieties. I am not too sure if the GMC or the Ozito are of the same robustness or reliability.

The good thing about these cheap tools is that they come with a extremely long warranty period. The Ozito hammer drill that I just purchased for $30 comes with a 3 year warranty. So if the drill breaks down within that 3 years, I just go back to Bunnings, along with the receipt and swap it over for another drill or its equivalent.

From my perspective, it is a win situation.

photo credit: Dennis Bos

Public Transport vs Private Transport

On the weekend, my family and I decided to take a trip into the Melbourne city for the day. We lived about 45 mins to 50 mins drive out of the city, and typically we would take the car. We usually take car as it is more convenient because we can take our two year old home whenever we want rather than to depend on the public transport.

The public transport system in Melbourne is divided into two zones, zone 1 ( which covers the inner city suburbs) and zone 2 ( which covers the outer suburbs). It only just recently that it became two zones, it used to be have a third zone covering the middle suburbs.

On the day of our travel, it cost the family $20.20 for the public transport cost, plus about $2.00 for driving the car to the train station. If we had driven the car into the city, it would have cost $10 for parking, plus about $10.00 for fuel cost of the car. I have neglected the cost of maintenances, insurance etc.

So the cost are $22.20 for public transport vs $20.00 for private transport.

In some ways, it is not extremely compelling for the un-frequent traveling public to use the public transport system given that costing is very similar. In the future, when the cost of fuel increases to something crazy like $3.00 per litre, public transport may be a bit more attractive. However, for the frequent travelers, they have made the switch to public transport already.

Personally, I like traveling on public transport as I know that I am helping with traffic congestion problems and the environment, and it is also much safer than being on driving on the road.

Everyone's situation will be different. Which mode of transport would you prefer, and for what reasons?

photo credit: Benjamin Diehl