Monday, June 23, 2008

Sharing a Car

J and I have been sharing a car for over a year now. This is a hard result of the current economy but something we are also inordinately proud of. To my surprise I discovered that going down to one car instead of two seems to be not at all unusual. Of the 4 women I work with, 3 are sharing a car with their adult daughters (the 4th one can only afford a moped.)

It’s amazing how well J & I have managed to cope with the one car. One way was by living in the same town we both work in and a plus to that was how it cut our gas bill in half. This didn’t just happen to work out that way ... oh no, it involved a move and my daughter limiting her most recent job search to nearby places.

Over time we've also gotten pretty good at figuring out how to eat cheaply. We are intimately familiar with the dollar menu at Burger King. We always eat when we go to Sams Club to pick up our prescriptions. We live near a Fresh and Easy and have learned what time of day to hit the store to get first dibs on the marked-down goodies.

Another treasure trove has turned out to be the 99 cent store! You can get everything at the store near us from fresh produce to frozen goodies. Yesterday we picked up a couple of frozen pizzas for $1.29 each (perfectly meal size for J.) Canned beans and veggies run about one-third of what they do at the grocers. We’ve also been getting our dog treats there and rationing them carefully. The cheap sodas aren’t bad either!

It's amazing how much our lives have changed and yet how enjoyable life still is. Our condo has a huge heated pool right outside our back door and we make a point of swimming at least once a day. We go to the library to check our email and rent free DVDs and books. And we splurged on a TIVO rental from the cable company so we can tape all of our fav TV shows. We hardly ever go out to eat and thus appreciate it so much more when we do.

1 comment:

Di said...

One of our splurges (in the sense of being junk food) is the fried chickekn at our local grocery store. We can get 10 pieces of dark chicken for $4.49 (when it's on sale). What adds to the value is that the dogs get the crispy skin and the chicken bones for treats. (I've read that chicken bones are dangerous for dogs but they don't seem to have a problem with them.) We usually get 3 meals out of it, plus a few weeks of dog treats.