We're retired and living on a fixed income, and AFTER we retired, our youngest Daughter gave us her four kids to raise. So obviously we ain't exactly doin' all that great.
The local Government is broke and not supporting the schools, so we parents(we addopted the kids)have to take up the slack. Our biggest fear is that one of the four kids goofs up and gets kicked off the schoolbus....again. That would be an additional ten precious gallons a week....bummer.
Otherwise we've pretty well gotten in the habit of plotting our road trips like NASA plots their adventures. Every pound of fuel and cargo is accounted for. Every trajectory and maneuver calculated to the nearest millimeter. Some missions are even being canceled.
Our Cable Bill is about $150 a month, and while the cost of Cable has stayed pretty much the same......doesn't there seem to be more commercials here lately? Electricity is slated to go up...again. So we're getting in the habit of setting the air conditioning to around 80F instead of a more comfortable 76F. We started doing that last summer and it worked out pretty well. We are implementing an additional ground rule though. We understand that an air conditioner continues to run efficiently as long as you don't try to go much cooler than about 10F below the outside temp. Don't know if it's true or not; but I read it somewhere. Anyway; if it hits 92F outside, we'll set for 82F inside that day.
There are tons of vacation destinations within only a few dozen miles from here. They'll just have to manage without our support this year. Instead of a few days at Disney or Universal a couple times during the summer, we're spending the bucks on more things the kids can do around the house. One kid got a new Guitar, another is getting an electric drum set. (I even got ME a new Guitar!!)They all(including the Wife!) got new game machines that use very little gas and aren't just a simple and expensive memory after a very short amount of time like a carbon-copy of last years and the year befores trip to a theme park would be.
Some of our favorite eating emporiums are seeing less of us as well, which means our favorite waitresses unfortunately aren't having such a great summer either. After the kids go back to school we'll see our favorite resturanteers again, it'll just be the two of us going rather than all six.
We haven't recieved our economic stimulus check yet, but when it gets here we've pretty well itemized what we want to spend it on. All of it will go to places we believe(hope) have employees that pay into Social Security.
We haven't gotten to the point of clipping coupons for the grocery store yet, but the Wife is starting to think about it again. She used to do it when we were younger and starting to raise a family while I was still in school. She made it almost a hobby! We have made one change in our shopping habits. We've stopped shopping as much for food at stores such as Publix or Winn-Dixie and started going to Wal-Mart.
It's embarrassing.
We try to stay in the food section though. Most everything else they sell in the rest of the store would give ANY country of origin a bad name!
