No Change

 I tend to get rather disgusted when I see shows on tv about our poor economy. All the people they show had a ridiculously high paid job and, of course, they can't find another..anywhere...(but if you are used to making that kind of money and think you are worth it maybe you aren't looking in the right places). These people, of course, had savings but have now used it all and while they are telling you this, they are showing pictures of their gorgeous house with two stories and a two car garage with new cars inside.
I thought I would do this post so others would understand how the rising gas and food prices have really been affecting us. I can remember when our prices first went up and one day we went to town and they had jumped up to $2.50 a gallon and we were scrambling to figure out how we were going to get more gas money into our budget that week. These days $2.50 a gallon is just a nice dream. Last week when I filled up it was $3.75 a gallon and it is probably higher now.
So what does that mean for us? Well, when I first got my job it cost me $20 a week in gas to go to work and shopping on the weekend. It now costs $50 a week. My paycheck has only gone up $ .50 a hour which meant I made a whole $12.50 a week extra. However, I was extremely lucky and my job changed and 2 more hours were added on to my work day. Extremely lucky money-wise but 2 hours out of my day means that I am constantly wishing for more time at home so I can get more done here. The reason I only had a part-time job to begin with is because I have so much to do here at home. My extra hours add $85 to my paycheck.
My children and grandchild moved out, that took away all but one of my dependents. Trust me, the extra $85 now goes to taxes. So that takes me back to just the $12.50 more every week.
As for Phil's paycheck: His boss decided that he needed help to keep his company going so started taking out and extra 5 % from Phil's pay for the company (yup, he has good lawyers), work also slowed up. Phil ended up making $100-150 less almost every week. It has been like that for about a year and has just started picking back up this year again and his boss (after about $8000 worth of Phil's money) has stopped taking the 5%.
We bought the truck and now Phil has to pay a lot more for his gas. He puts about $90 in gas in every week.
We do have less people in the house, which means less food to buy and less of an electric and water bill but no by much.
Food prices have not been really bad until lately. I can still find a lot of deals in the produce section but we are having a hard time keeping ourselves in meat. Meat prices are terrible! We basically walk down the meat aisle in the one store that puts out reduced meat and we hope they still have some meat in the reduced section.
I will be ever so glad when the pigs and chickens are ready for slaughter because it will mean we have some decent meat that we don't have to buy.
That brings us to feed prices. We have a great feed store here. Our feed store is not without their own means. If the feed prices go too high, he simply stops buying and makes his own.  We can tell this has happened when we start getting feed in plain brown bags. A bag of laying mash has only gone up $1.70 at the feed store ($11.70) but if you go to Tractor Supply (when they opened they were cheaper than the feed store, not anymore) a bag of laying mash (the Dumor cheap stuff) will cost you approximately $14 (that is up $5 ).  I cannot give you a comparison on pig pellets as I have just started buying them but they are $11.95. This week I mixed mine with cracked corn ($9.95).
So how has our life changed? We shut off our Directv and went to Netflix. Our spare room now stores a decent amount of food. That's it. We are dealing with the high prices and adjusting to them as they come same as we have always done. Looking for deals and getting them when they are there.  We don't have a big house and big bills and there are still other ways we could cut back on those bills if we had to. Basically life is the same as it has always been here.