I don’t have a job at the moment. I’m on family and medical leave. I did the math last night to see how if we kept our spending the same, where we would be by the end of the year. It was $30,000 in debt. I brought this up to my husband, with the suggestion that we see what we can do to value engineer our life in the next three months. He heard it as “what are we going to sacrifice?”
When I think about value engineering, I think about a few things.
Are there things that we are paying for that aren’t bringing value to our lives?
For me, this is the $30 a month I pay to Save the Children. While the cause is dear to my heart (I thought I would work in international relief), I donate because of a street canvasser, and that practice makes me feel icky. Over the course of a year, that’s $360 that makes me feel icky.
Are there ways to get the same experience but spend less?
The easiest thing for me here is thinking about grocery spending. I priced a meal of my favorite chicken curry at $12.82 for 4 servings. Chicken is on sale this week, as are the frozen veggies use. That same recipe, is now 10.15 for 4 servings. That is $0.67 savings per meal. If we were able to do that for one meal a day for both of us for a full year, that’s nearly $500 in available money.
Last year, we spend $105 dining at Smashburger. Costco sells packages of $100 worth of Smashburger gift cards for $75. Had we bought a package of those, we would’ve been ahead $25. I did the same with Old Chicago gift cards for the last time we were in Hays. Two were for Christmas gifts, and the other two I kept, saving us $25.
Are there things that bring us more value for less money?
This is the hardest one, but also the one I’m most interested in. For me, the closest thing I’ve achieved here is riding my bike to the office. If I drove, it would be $12.35 for parking at the office. If I took the train, it was $5.10 round trip. If I biked, it was free. I also got in some of my daily exercise, and I had the freedom to arrive and leave when I wanted (like if I drove). I also got experience the outdoors, which was good for my soul and stress levels.
The second type of value engineering is rampant across the internet in frugal living websites, coupon match blogs, and more. A part of the enjoyment of this is inthe hunt. One of my dear friends was an extreme couponer in grad school. She excelled at getting a huge number of things for pennies on the dollar. When she moved, I inherited a huge number of things from her stash. I think I finally used them up over the last move.
The 1st and 3rd types of value engineering are more akin to the principles of Your Money or Your Life, which is one of the best books for rethinking your relationship with money, and Vicki Robin’s most recent update is spot on. The basic principle is that you turn your time into money every day that you go to work. Then we spend that time when we spend our cash. I’ll do a longer post on that later, but it really puts things into perspective. Is my $5 latte worth 20 minutes of being on the job? Could we have a life that brings us so much joy that we don’t have to work full time? What is possible?
As an Amazon Affiliate, I earn from qualifiying purchases, so if you purchase Your Money or Your Life from this link, I get a referral fee! You’ll want the paperback version to scribble all your notes in the margins!