I forgot to check in on Monday – maybe because I don’t have anything super exciting to check in about! I’m roughly on track to spend what I predicted on variable expenses this month.
I’ve successfully gotten my partner on board a bit; he’s eating PB&J sandwiches for lunch at work now (also good because he doesn’t like to eat big lunches). And I found this funny article + video about “Norway’s boring lunch,” if anyone is looking for an (un)exciting new cheap meal 
That was a fun read
And you reminded me that my dad took a PBJ sandwich (with a very thin layer of mayo on the bread), a green apple, and a thermos of coffee for his lunch every single day for 40 years.
Except for one lone day when my mom made him a tuna sandwich because she was bored of making PBJ, after which he asked if we’d run out of peanut butter
My now-husband had nearly the same lunch (no coffee, but the pb&j + apple) throughout all of k-12. People don’t necessarily need to eat something different every meal of every day.
Wait, he ate a PBJ that ALSO had mayo?!?
Yup. Took us years to figure out why me making him a pb&j didn’t taste the same as when his mom made it.
That’s how my mom learned to make sandwiches (at the end of WWII) - mayo was cheaper than butter, but a thin layer of either prevented the (handmade, not processed) bread from getting soggy I’ve seen the tip in a few cookbooks from that time period, but as a kid I just thought my dad was weird 
I ate a tuna sandwich, an apple or orange, carrot or celery sticks, and a (one) cookie every day K-12 except on the rare occasion in high school I would get a big salad at the cafeteria. I turned out fine (or did I?) 
My parents put margarine on the bread of pb sandwiches. So did I, as a kid. Learning that the rest of the world didn’t, and had better sandwiches, was a crucial moment in my growing up.
I have had peanut butter and honey sandwiches for lunch 95% of the time since I was a toddler. I recently stopped because of stopping gluten, but I loved them sammies. Alas.
Peanut butter and honey is really good. And the honey doesn’t make the bread soggy – it sort of crystallizes if you pack it in the morning and wait until lunchtime to eat it, so that there’s a slight crunch. That’s actually only a good thing, too. But I bet you know all that…
Yes I do. This conversation isn’t helping me love my new gluten free life.
Actually, oatmeal has become my new cheap, boring lunch. Tons of fibre and it’s slightly better than my pb+h because it’s warm!
My fondest childhood packed lunch memories included cheddar cheese on white bread, with a plant in the side. Pretty norwegian. Still a comfort food. Nut butters were not a thing in my culture, and as a result my tolerance for pb is like…3 sandwiches a month. Working summer camp was hard… Jelly on a sandwich, by the way, is a dessert, not a meal 
Sorry. No more sandwich discussions from me. However, I’ll point out that oatmeal is pretty good with peanut butter and raisins in it, so I bet it would also be good with peanut butter and honey in it.
Late to posting but I’ve been tracking!
Week 1 Groceries: $47
Week 2 Groceries: $63
Total (listed under Food + Drink): $110
Other money spent so far (I’m only tracking categories I can control/that vary, so not rent, medical, charity, etc.) Oh, and household means stuff like cleaning supplies, tp, litter and cat food, etc.:
I’m trying to keep the shopping at $0 so I can roll over the $235 allotted for October and combine it with next month’s $235. That way I can use as much as I need on black Friday and knock out all our Christmas shopping, husband’s birthday gift, some work clothes for DH, and the apartment items I’d like (throw pillows for couch, new cloth napkins, need a new bread pan and baking sheet, placemats, and fresh candles) in one fell swoop.
We don’t actually spend $235 a month on shopping, but I like to super heavily pad every category for those incidentals that always come up eventually (like a new laptop, a trip, etc.). I transfer a set amount from checking to savings ($600 a month right now), then everything else stays in checking, so anything I don’t use stays “available” for the next month, versus the savings account money which is truly an emergency fund. Once the emergency fund gets too big that overflow gets pushed into our IRAs, but we’re also saving a lot pre-tax, this is just net.
Rice cakes with peanut butter marginally fill the toast size gap in my life. Like when you use whatever random shit you gave around (toothpaste, toilet paper, whiteout) to seal holes when you leave a rental and then move into a rental with a bunch of suspicious “patches” and spend the next 3 years picking at them trying to guess what they used.
You are not a convincing advocate for the rice cake with peanut butter thing.
Well see, the rice cakes tend to explode when you bite them IME, and then you have sticky projectile shards. Taste wise, a good replacement, and texture wise a good mock toast, but difficulty of eating is much higher.
I second using oatmeal as a base for certain tasty sandwich fillings- banana and PB, PB and jelly, PB and honey are all great in there. Yogurt also works well for the same. And PB&J chia pudding is pretty damn good.
And yet…
This brunch is on budget. And I can still squeeze in friend date tomorrow, camping, and friend date next week into budget. Because like an adult I did groceries at 9 am and acquired milk for my tea instead of buying tea out on my way to work.
waves wand (recasting!)
groceries: $150 --> groceries & nutritional supps: $250
clothing/personal care: $100 --> clothing/personal care: $150
restaurants & bars: $250 --> $200
hobbies/entertainment: $100 --> $150
non-fixed costs misc: $150 --> $100 because I’m separating out gifts
NEW! gifts: $200
I was going to type out a really complainy post but instead I am just going to say, WOW, has this all been an eye opener for me. The concert ticket notwithstanding (which is an outlier, I go to maybe 1 or 2 concerts a year and am very selective), I do not think my spending has been extravagant at all. Yet I am blowing through money like nobody’s business and I don’t really have it available to spend.
I am not sure what to do about this. It really drives home how much I was relying on my side business income (which these days is practically zero) to plug the holes.
