December 12, 2010
Frugal Scholar’s rather pragmatic look at Pet Costs triggered my usual, utterly emotional, I want a dog now! reaction.
I really miss my dog back home. I haven’t talked myself into bring her up north because there’s just no room for her to lounge. She is, after all, accustomed to a certain way of life. And let’s face it, momma’s girl or not, if momma isn’t home, what’s the point of making her live in a relatively cramped inside space?
She’s really not built for living indoors – she gets squirrelly and waits by the door to be let out with ever increasing impatience whenever she’s done visiting inside. Even though she was raised as an indoor dog, she up and decided quite early on that she was moving into the garage. Up here we’ve got zero yard, and very little outdoor space. It’s hard to imagine her being happy with us in the Bay Area.
In an entirely selfish and practical sense, if we weren’t just thinking about what might make her happy, it still seems like the most sensible thing to do is to bring her up here rather than adding to the family. And that would have the additional benefit of easing my little-spoken-of responsibility of finding my parents a new home as they couldn’t really have moved in to any sort of assisted care facility with a big dog (or two, since idiot sibling is still around with his dog).
That’s another thing for another day.
The thing is, after owning dogs for 17 years now and having worked with animals for a good part of my twenties, it’s a cold fact that they’re expensive when anything happens. And I never want to be in the position of asking myself: can I afford this medical procedure? Those decisions should be made based on whether it’s right for my pet, not whether it’ll put us in a poorhouse. So while it’s enough that I maintain a medical fund for her now, if I ever wanted to adopt another dog, I would seriously consider getting a second job in animal health care for the discount because it’s so freaking expensive.
That or I honestly need to be making quite a lot more money than I do now to afford another pet.
When did I turn into my parents? I’m almost positive they used this line of reasoning with me when I was seven and it all sounded like gibberish and insanity twenty years ago.
August 22, 2010
There will be no more waste.
Life’s been rather chaotic with the odd unexpected meal out, travel that comes up faster than expected, and a few weeks of poor meal timing led to a day when fridge clear-up was more than throwing out scraps gone off before we could eat them. We’re blessed with good food and the good fortune of never wondering where our next meal is coming from, I can’t stomach the thought of taking that for granted and wasting any more food through carelessness.
We’re now being much more careful about eating up leftovers within a day or two and stretching the ends of each batch of food creatively, not just by starting up a whole new meal.
There’s a chicken roasting in the oven now only because it was defrosted before weekend and before we brought home unexpected bounty from a BBQ on Saturday. The rest of this week, we’ll polish off the fresh roast bird and broccoli slaw mix, a variant on Smitten Kitchen’s recipe.
I’m planning more creative meals as well, to stoke appetites and make eating as fun as it used to be when we experimented more.
On the grocery front, I spent $50 today, stocking up on sale fish, which PiC is this very moment dealing out into smaller portions and freezing for later. I’m dating everything that goes into the freezer so we can easily rotate protein into the meal plans regularly. We also now have what would be a year’s supply of cereal, if he weren’t such a cereal glutton, for PiC, plenty of frozen veggies for the end of the week when we tend to run out of fresh, and a back-up chicken for roasting. We’re set for the next few weeks in a way that won’t have us throwing out heaps of wilted or food gone off.
Well-Heeled asked me a while back how I managed home-cooking so often but it was down to better planning and dedicating most of at least one weekend day to cooking more than any special Suzy Homemaker ability.
I’m also very lucky to have PiC who is generally fully capable and willing to do the Costco and other grocery runs with or without me, sous chefs happily, and puts up with any number of odd kitchen stocking requests. A full partner is invaluable in managing a kitchen and household!
July 10, 2010
Despite knowing about our trip down south last weekend for a couple months, I failed to prepare far enough in advance to prevent several wasteful results of being gone and off routine.
Spending, while not wildly out of control, couldn’t be said to be under control either because I’ve honestly not been keeping track of my cash flow spreadsheet. July doesn’t have a single entry listed.
A) While down south, I went to Target fully knowing I needed 4 or 5 items and that they weren’t really budgeted for. Went anyway. Luckily, I found nothing on the list except a handful of really cute and well-priced cards that I needed for weddings, birthdays, and other occasions: $6.
B) We ordered take-out lunch while rushing from lodgings to hospital to see the new baby and parents; we failed to take note of the total price until I asked for it after calling the order in: $70!
C) Vending machines in hospitals take credit cards now. When you’re there all day for multiple days and only brought one bottle of water: $10
D) Groceries that I didn’t have time to prepare beforehand went bad (some salsa, some pasta sauce, some veggies)
E) Grocery shopping only happens on weekends so getting back late on Monday night meant eating leftovers brought back from the weekend OR …. eating out. One night, a high-earning friend was in town and insisted on going to Ruth’s Chris so also insisted on treating so we now owe her the next dinner, instead of just paying our own way each time.
F) It could have been worse, without fresh veggies to fix lunch either, it was a peanut butter sandwich every day this week. I’m glad that I really like PB!
G) Almost forgot, I also spent $40 on groceries for the new parents. A gift, let’s call it.
Bills didn’t go unpaid, thankfully because I tend to pay them every two weeks and the day before any trips, but I did forget to calculate my net worth for the month of June, I forgot to set up some invoices, and barely managed to meet other online commitments.
It’s time to get it together.
1. Invoices – prepare and send
2. Net worth – pull it together! Since I’m still in between paychecks, it should be fairly accurate
3. Grocery shopping – at least decide what recipes are up for the week and make up the list. Perhaps even go today. (I’m still pretty achy, yesterday was a tough day.)
4. Cooking!
Prepare chicken stock for soupbases for the week.
Defrost another chicken and have PiC learn from the fabulous @HeatherSolos from Home Ec 101 how to wield a knife and break down a whole chicken (almost the only kind of chicken I think is cheap enough to buy). I prefer to hog kitchen duty but my bones and muscles can’t handle the heavy duty stuff.
Perhaps defrost all the jambalaya making stuff and make up a whole tureen for the week?
That’s more than enough for today since I also have to get some work-work in before Monday. And PiC promised to sit down with me and crunch numbers for some possible trips we’d like to take.
June 22, 2010
Yesterday’s experiment wasn’t the best pub transit experience ever. While I remember some stress-fraught days waiting for an employer-affiliated bus to show up, they were 90% on time coming and going, and with minor exceptions, the train was pretty solid as well.
Running late seems to be par for the course for Muni, Metro and their cousins. Option A sounded pretty solid on paper. In fact, there’s no good way to figure out which of the 4 possible stops on an intersection a given bus pulls into as a first time rider. In fact, there were multiple possible stops on one of the 4 ways, so I ran around like a nutjob trying to figure out where to be. Of course I missed my first shot out and was late for my first day in the new place. Not a huge deal, but mildly frustrating. The butt burner was the fact that people requested stops EVERY block. Add on another ten minutes to a joltingly long ride.
Going home was no picnic, either. I realized that my two-stops per hour train route was really difficult to match with the bus routes/schedule. Coming into work using BART per Option B will call for matching yet another set of schedules to the BART/Muni pairing: that of the free shuttle. There’s a very conveniently located free shuttle that’ll take you to the nearby BART stations so I could avoid paying for parking since it goes the opposite direction of my current carpool. The problem is that there is one schedule, period. That shuttle would dictate which BART and then which Muni I could take afterward, no compromises.
*sigh*
And as it turns out, taking on the commute like this isn’t just time, of course it costs a lot extra as well. My costs are doubling, sometimes more than that, depending on whether I have to drive and pay for parking that day. All told, the cost of going to work now ranges from $8.50 to $12 per day!
While I’d factored about $100 into the transportation budget, that pretty much blows it out of the water. At this rate, between starting up investing again and this chunk, I’ve used up any slack in the budget found when cutting back on spending. It almost might be worth paying the equivalent cost in parking and saving myself the run/wait/run/wait aspect of the commute.
May 25, 2010
I’m not big on summer or high season travel but this year’s trips have suddenly piled up as a California highway is wont to do on any given day. Not having the itineraries settled was annoying me at odd times. Completely inappropriately like, say, during meetings my brain chose not to attend. In keeping with my neuroses, I’ve started a joint expenses tracking spreadsheet to total up this year’s travel spending now that Partner in Crime and I are in the same area at the same time.
So we sat down with pencil and paper (seriously!), computers and calendars to map out the summer months.
Airfare is no joke, folks.
I’ve been juicing the value of some Southwest credits (just over $600) to pay for my travel to attend a graduation, the Comic-Con expeditions, and had a little left over for a solo trip that PiC is taking. I have no interest in traveling 3 weekends out of 5 in a month, so he’s on his own for that one. They actually stretched to pay for 7 one-way trips so that’s a big fat sigh of relief, but it most certainly did not cover the wedding in LA.
Road trip! And over the holiday weekend, that last. Pray for me!
With only $100+ in the travel fund, covering my share of the rental car, food, comics, and any other gifts from Con will be an interesting challenge. Though, let’s be honest, if I do well enough on the current savings challenge, I will share some of that bounty with … myself.
I’m also hoarding a couple other travel credits (a free round trip and some other airline credits) in case my hypothesized short vacation to see a host of relatives and friends on the East Coast this fall proves true. But that’s a whole other story. For now, I plan to be a complete homebody in the months of August and September.
What does this summer hold in store for you?
April 29, 2010
Have you ever rushed to the store with a soon-to-expire coupon because you didn’t want to “lose” the $15 (off $30 purchase)? Or gone shopping online to take advantage of the stackable coupon codes expiring in a couple days? Specifically, have you spent money because you could “save” money instead of saving on a necessary purchase?
Guilty and guilty.
It’s a habitual behavior, I’ve noticed. If you’re ignoring all coupons, it’s easy to keep on ignoring even the juicy ones. But once you open the floodgates and start matching coupons to sales to cashback sites, it’s on.
Of late, I had to purchase some work clothes because of the Bekins debacle which is the only time I’ve shopped without even considering price. That meant my Bargain Antennae (powered by guilt!) went up, which has cost even more.
My clothes went astray just after I’d already ordered a replacement for the “good” jeans that I detroyed; I went for trouser jeans which are even more elusive than regular jeans. Supply and demand totally kicked my butt: trouser jeans that fit never make it to the sale rack.
After resolving to suck it up and jump on the fattest coupons I could spot, I was too eager and bought the first pair at only 30% off with free shipping ($69). When a 40% off regular priced merch came up, I couldn’t say no. I knew it was only a matter of time before I broke the new jeans. With free shipping: $59.
Confession: Since I won’t wear jeans to work right now, saying they’re for work is a little disingenuous.
*Note: I actually wore them to work once. For a half day, as we had an offsite that included 5 hours of walking for which my knees demand tennis shoes.
At least I won’t buy jeans for more than 3 years as the average life span of my jeans are 2 to 8 years.
Last night, another sale was on and there were two work-worthy tops in the right size, so I spent another $52.
Luckily I had some forethought. Knowing that I was tempted, I’d redeemed CC points for gift cards so all but $11 of the above purchases totaling $180 was not cash out of pocket. Regardless, that’s a lot of money spent just because there were sales and/or coupons. It’s not that I won’t use them – I’ve cycled through three pairs of pants and 5 shirts over the past 12 days – but it’s definitely a slippery road where buying because of a “bargain” becomes a reflex.
February 11, 2010
In a previous post, Pets and money: where do you draw the line?, we talked about a situation where a family had to choose between necessities and a pet’s health. The woman literally didn’t know how she was going to feed her kids, but with an unemployed husband, she still brought home a sick puppy.
I’m an animal lover, as my “retirement plan” clearly indicates, but I’m also a very practical person as my blog shows. At no point would I ever want to be faced with an either/or situation when it comes to the health of my family, including the furry, wet-nosed and four-footed members.
Knowing what I do about the costs of health care for animals, I could not, in good conscience, take on any more pets without a solid pet fund. Saying that aloud makes me feel like a Murphy’s target was just painted on my back.
I recommend being proactive: get an emergency kit and fund put together. You never know when an incident may strike and if it’s minor, a kit could save you an expensive visit to the vet’s office.
Lemons and the case for an animal emergency kit
So many people think: “it couldn’t happen to me. My pet is calm, quiet, and well-behaved, he/she/it wouldn’t ever need emergency anything.” Once in a while, that’s true. Some pets can go his/her/its entire life without needing more than routine maintenance. It’s a rarity, though.
I’m a mutt-lover. Each of my three dogs were a variation on a Mutt, and only one of them developed truly life-threatening health problems later in life. I was lucky enough to be working at a clinic at the time and he received top-notch care at a discount, but there were times I knew that, as a regular client, I would have been forced to make a final decision based on cost. Even with a 75% discount, I spent more than $3,000 on him on an $18,000 salary. My other two live(d) unnaturally long lives – the chihuahua lasted about 18 years, the large breed mix is still hobbling along at 15 years of age. We probably only have a few, if that many, years left together.
Some people believe in the power of the purebred. They think that good bloodlines are security, a bit of insurance against the run of the mill illnesses that plague mixed breeds, mutts, and scruffy rescues. To some degree, they’re right. They’re very unlikely to get a Parvo Pup from a reputable breeder – though there aren’t any such guarantees if you’re dealing with a disreputable breeder or even worse, a puppy mill.
But the thing purebreds have going for (or against) them is the predictability of their breeds. Labs have hip dysplasia, Dachshunds and other long, low-riders have spinal problems, Great Danes have gastric torsion, white Boxers are highly prone to cancer and lots of it. None of these mean that every purebred’s fate is set in stone, it just means they’re highly prone to specific illnesses.
What you don’t get in that list of “what they’re prone to” is the list of “what else could happen.”
GB: the cautionary tale
My dear friends bought a very Marleyesque dog, we’ll call him GB for the Good Boy he really tries to be. The cost of just bringing GB home was several hundred dollars, a cost that my pound/rescue supporting self will withhold comment on. They spent hundreds on puppy obedience training, a crate, beds, pens, and all the other conveniences.
The trouble started when GB got home. He was so excited and happy that he had to explore everything and everywhere, and everywhere bought him a big swollen bite on the face. It could have been a spider or insect bite, either way, he looked like one of those hugely magnified Hallmark cards. Off to the vet! Hundreds of dollars and a few shots later, his swelling went down and he worked up a rash instead.
For two weeks he was on antibiotics to treat the rash, infected because GB wouldn’t stop scratching at it, and then his immune system went haywire. He’d never had reactions to his vaccines before but after the bite, he was highly allergic to the vaccines and his vet decreed No More.
Life settled down a bit. I was asked for advice on some suspicious looking pink fleshy scabby things on his face, it seemed to be ok. For any other dog. Knowing GB, I sent them back to the vet anyway and sure enough, more meds. Surprisingly, GB was still in the neighborhood of sub $10,000 at this juncture but he’s nothing if not high-achieving.
A few months later, he couldn’t keep anything down. I didn’t hear about it for about a day, but as they became concerned, my phone started to ring. “Something to do with GB? Yes, take him to the vet.”
X-rays revealed that in his love of turf, he’d scarfed a tiny bit of netting with the grass and it had gotten caught somewhere on the way down to form a little net. Like a sieve, this one inch piece of netting cupped and blocked his intestinal tract, only allowing liquid to pass through. Three cups of dog foods a day came right back up. Two surgeries, another $10,000 later, and GB was sent home with orders to gain 20 pounds during recovery.
He’s had other incidents, like chronic ear infections for his love of swimming with his head underwater, but I’m just grateful he made it through his first year.
He’s a big ticket dog, for which a dog/pet health fund would be highly recommended as part of your arsenal as a pet owner. Pet insurance is always a consideration but it can be hit or miss. I think the decision whether or not to carry pet insurance depends on your cash flow, earning and saving power, and the extent and quality of the coverage offered.
On the more prosaic front, GB managed to injure himself again over the holidays, again sending his parents screaming for my help. Luckily, it was one of the easiest things in his medical history to deal with: a broken dewclaw. The dewclaw on a dog is that thumb-like nail that actually doesn’t serve a purpose but to get broken, chewed on, or hung up on things. The canine’s external appendix, if you will.
For that, I just needed a pair of dog nail clippers, gauze, medical tape and some powder to stop up the bleeding. After clipping off the shattered nail, I wrapped him up and sent him, fat-pawed and resentful, on his way. An emergency visit for that would have cost them at least $100 for the late night visit and then a bit more for simple treatment.
I’d recommend having a Pet Kit on hand for some of the more routine things that your pet could require. My own held the following:
1. Nail clippers. Not the ones that look/act like a guillotine, my dogs hated those. The ones that were more like scissors. They’re easier to control and less uncomfortable for the pet. These are good for basic maintenance, and for situations like GB’s.
2. Cotton balls, long Qtips, and gauze. Pets get into stuff, getting scratches, scrapes and all over in dirt, grass and blood. They’re kind of like kids that way. It’s easier to assess the situation when they’re cleaned up. Long Q-tips are great for keeping ears clean, especially if you’ve got a chronic ear infection on legs. (We did.) Water dogs should also have cotton stuffed in their ears to help protect them from ear infections as well – be sure to check with your vet before you do anything like that, though!
3. Medical tape or wrap that sticks to itself. I used Vetwrap which is like a hybrid between Saran Wrap and medical tape.
4. Towels/rags: Always useful after baths, wrapping up the bedraggled, and containing messes (ahem, vomit).
$$$$
As far as a pet fund goes, I’d be most comfortable with having at least $1,000 per pet assuming I’m still maintaining an outsized amount of cash on hand. If not, I’d like to have closer to $5,000 squirreled away per pet. They can borrow from one another but I don’t like to take for granted that they’ll take turns being sick or injured.
Disclaimer: I’m not a veterinarian- I cannot diagnose your pets. When in doubt, please see your vet.
