Feed the piggy!

In an attempt to get this party started J and I sat down and discussed our finances in a frank and honest way, just like the advice people advise. We both acknowledged that our spending habits have gone a tad wayward, what with the eating out and the 3D movie viewing and the single-handedly attempting to save print media and my Bluefly/Loehman's addiction, and what have you. So here are some depressing bullet points that we have reluctantly agreed to in a boring attempt to save money (snooze!):

Eat at home.
In my defense, I cook, like, a lot. And we rarely buy pre-made stuff with the exception of soysage and morning star buffalo wings and the occasional pizza. However, the amount that I cook is often used as an excuse to go out, as in, I made dinner three or four nights already! Can't we just go to Il Capriccio tonight?
And more often than not, J caves and Yay! We are off to a super yummy dinner with delicious wine (see below) that winds up being $60-100. No more! From now on we will go out to eat no more than once a week defined as a meal costing over $10 per person.



Stop drinking so much you frickin' lushes!
I have recently been deighted to see J begin to prefer wine over the cheap Mexican beer he favors. Yay! How fun it is to savor a nice bottle, running your tongue over your imagination coming up with ridiculous flavors your taste buds detect with your love! I love stretching out a good meal this way and there is even a fun chart that supports the idea that the longer you eat, the less fat you'll be. Well all that toungeing at savoring and nuances of grass and pine nuts-ing really adds up! Whereas we use to spend about $15 per week on a dirty thirty of tecate plus maybe a $10 bottle of wine at TJ's we have been recently buying three or four bottles of wine a week and have been up-selling ourselves into poverty. It's been fun but we have vowed to cut back on our drinking to save dough, so now we will only drink on the weekends! (We'll see.)

No more fancy clothes, no more fancy books :(
I think maybe LA has begun to rub off on me because I have developed a mild addiction to discounted designer clothing. Over the past few months if you ran into me while I was shopping not-for-work it was probably at Crossroads, Buffalo Exchange, Loehman's, or you were gchatting me while I was multi-tasking over at Bluefly. Well, I have vowed to cut that out! Now I can e-window shop for that storied poignant ridiculously priced and worn only once designer dress, the one for my wedding! And J has promised to stop buying so many fancy rare zines and photo books unless its through credit at work.

Make it a Netflix night!
We have promised to only go out to the movies once every two weeks. Its really easy tell yourself: "But I work in movies! I have to see this film!" But then before you know it you have spent $192 on movies alone in a month! We will trim that down.

So hopefully these measures will enable us to start saving some real money so that we can feed you lovely people good food and me and my mom won't be cooking all night the day before to make that happen. I'll post some recipes and other DIY type stuff as they come up that I'm sure will fill my hours now that I have all this extra time not spent shopping and drinking and seeing first run films.