When I retired earlier this year, I had no idea what an actual weekly grocery budget would look like since it had been years since we'd shopped or cooked like normal people. Prior to quitting work I would plan my Sunday evening meal, and maybe two other mid-week meals, on the fly without regard for what was or was not on sale. My spouse did the shopping, adding in the convenience items he needed to get through his workweek, and I'd pick up take out, or have pizza delivered, to fill in the gaps. I'm going to guess we were spending about $175 a week all together, but even at that we had no stockpile because our whole food shopping and meal prep routine was so inefficient.
Flash forward to today - we have a firm amount budgeted for our weekly grocery expenditures, and by using the techniques of planning meals and stockpiling around sale items that I've blogged about previously, I am actually under spending by about $20 a week.
So, what to do with the unspent amount each week? Well, we have both agreed that going forward we will divide the excess accumulation 50/50. We'll keep 50% in our grocery fund as a hedge against the higher amounts we spend when we are entertaining, but we're going to begin to regularly donate the other 50% to a local food pantry.
Up until now I confess that I've allowed my spouse to make most of the decisions about where our charitable contributions were made, because if truth be told, I just wasn't that interested. My focus was on our own needs and the needs of my two daughters, and I didn't think much beyond that.
Well, I'm happy to report that I've come a long way in the last few months. The idea to donate half of the extra money to a food pantry was my spouse's, but I was immediately on board. And the next idea was all mine - to donate what we would have spent on Christmas gifts for each other to a local family in need instead.
So an old dog can still change . . .
A very Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
First, a quick thank you to Frugal Texas Gal for posting a link to my Grocery blog of October 25 on her blog. Sorry for the reply snafu you experienced - not sure what the hang up is, but I've had it mentioned by at least one other reader, so it's definitely not just you!
There was rain in the forecast for this past weekend, but my spouse and I went camping in our trailer anyway. In spite of the rain, which arrived on Saturday as promised, we came home completely relaxed, revitalized and ready for the comforts of our home. Which brings me to the point of this post - building in brief periods of discomfort in order to enrich your life.
In his book, The Joy of Not Working, Ernie Zelinski suggests that if you regularly do the difficult and uncomfortable, life becomes very easy. I interpret that to mean that in order to fully experience joy, or even contentment, there must be an offset somewhere else. So, using my working years as an example - waking up to an alarm clock after not enough sleep in order to hurry up and rush off to a long working day was uncomfortable, but almost anything I did upon arriving home in the evening became joyful by comparison. Of course, the problem with this example is that it's completely out of whack - way too many hours of discomfort compared to relatively few hours of joy.
In early retirement I'm trying to reverse this, but I do get that I need to keep some discomfort in my life to prevent it from going flat. So I'm working to achieve this balance in a number of ways - I exercise daily, to the point of mild discomfort, in order to release and enjoy those wonderful endorphins. I take piano lessons and practice, practice, practice diligently so that I can experience the joy of mastering a new song. I spend hours with flash cards trying to build my Spanish vocabulary in the hope that I will eventually be able to understand and converse in a second language. (My spouse and I plan to take a 30 day cruise around South America once he retires, and my goal is to be fluent in Spanish before this occurs.) I take classes in areas outside of my comfort zone that force me to dig deep and open myself up to new concepts.
And I go camping in the rain so that I can get away from the comforts of home, recharge, and return home ready to appreciate those comforts all over again.
I will confess that one of my greatest fears before retiring was how I would occupy my mind (as opposed to losing it). I have a difficult time remaining in the moment and simply being; and have struggled with that my entire life. It's actually the primary reason I took up running 12 years ago - the chemicals released by running calm my brain and give me several hours of mental calmness and well being. In the 12 months leading up to my retirement I found I was increasingly turning to TV as a way of decompressing from the stress of my workday. The problem with this approach was that while it did occupy my mind, it did nothing to lift my spirits, and subsequently left me feeling lethargic, restless and dissatisfied
My goal in retirement, really, was to try and build a life that generated regular doses of peace and serenity. Since I didn't necessarily know how to do this from the get go, I started with the obvious - limiting TV to one hour or less per day, ideally the end of the day, and filling the remainder of my day with a variety of activities that developed either my mind, my body or my spirit. I've blogged about this in prior posts, and I still think it is extremely essential to living a balanced, contentment-filled life, but I'm just now beginning to discover the softer, sweeter side of slowing down. I am beginning to find peace in the moment. And it is tremendously exciting, particularly, most particularly, to someone like me that has struggled to be able to do this for so many years.
I still have the majority of my days scheduled out with places to be and people to see, but during the in between moments I'm also finding tremendous joy in simply being. A simply being moment might be sitting on my front room sofa reading a book and feeling the sun coming through the window. Or going through my baking books looking for a way to use up a few pieces of ripe fruit in something yummy and homemade. Or sitting down at the piano to learn a new song, enjoying both the process of working through the measures and the way it begins to come together and turn into a lovely melody. Or going out into the front yard to do some weeding, noticing as I do so that life, in the form of each plant I touch, is bursting all around me. Or watching the way my sweet dog's eyes close and her breathing relaxes when I lightly rub her tummy. Or working through the process of organizing my thoughts and creating a new blog post..
My point, my discovery, is that this ability to begin to appreciate and live in the moment is when I feel most fully alive. During my pre-retirement years I could only get there by releasing exercise induced chemicals. Lovely chemicals to be sure, but short lasting. To understand I can also control my well-being the other 20 hours of the day by learning to still my brain and live in the moment is life changing. And to think that I'm just beginning this next journey of self discovery thrills me to my core.
