Welcome to yet another Friday, friends. Today, I’m in Denver at Cents Positive, and I can hardly believe it’s here. I’ve been waiting for months for this weekend, especially when sitting at home when it seemed like everyone was at FinCon back in September. But now it’s my turn, and I get to be at the very first financial independence conference just for women. I’ll be sure to recap the event later once I’m home and have time to digest everything that went on this weekend.
Friday is the blogger add on day to the conference, but Saturday and Sunday are for all self identifying women interested in financial independence, and many of the ladies attending do not have blogs or podcasts, but simply want to be a part of an event where they can talk finances and financial independence in a safe space just for women. If you’re considering it for next year, know that it is absolutely welcome to all, content creator or not.
Friday’s Frugal Five
1. Remember that $50 gift card I received for getting a flu shot at work a while back? I picked a Home Depot gift card because we always find ways to spend money there and I just kept it in my wallet until our next trip there.
My husband and son have been building a bird house together over the last few months, usually on evenings when I’m at my volunteer Commission meeting, and they were finally finishing it up over the weekend but needed a few more pieces to complete the project. We headed over to Home Depot for the metal pole to install it on, a few more random clips, and some suet and feeder to attract the birds. We also had a few other small things to pick up there as well, but didn’t spend all of the $50 gift card so walked out without having to swipe our card at all.
2. We visit Uwajimaya, one of our local Asian grocery stores, maybe once a month, and we somehow landed on the week of their anniversary sale. We were at the register checking out when we realized that sale meant that we got an additional 10% off our entire purchase.
Along with regular grocery items, we picked up ingredients to make bibimbap Sunday night when we had a Personal Finance blogger meet up at our house while Simplistic Steph and her husband were in town. They were joined by Millennial Boss, A Purple Life, and Oscoey. I’m regularly jealous of the DC and Minneapolis meet ups because there seem to be so many people in those areas, but we have a pretty great group in the Seattle area.
Most of them had never been outside of Seattle proper, so we also went on a short hike through the trails behind my house so I could show off how great an area Kirkland is to live. It might not be the center of a bustling metropolis, but there’s a lot to be said to living somewhere with trail access (and still close enough to walk to the grocery store, the bus, and a few services and restaurants).
3. I had a full vegetarian day on Monday, which is a pretty rare thing for me. I now regularly have days where I have meat in just one meal, but a day where I’m fully meat free doesn’t happen often. For all the reasons Bethany laid out in her guest post here, I have real incentive to reduce my meat consumption, and while I don’t expect to ever be fully vegetarian, I would love to get to the point where 100% of our animal products we consume are sustainably sourced. In order to get there, I need to reduce the amount we eat or hugely balloon our grocery budget, which I have no interest in doing.
4. I returned a book to a neighbor after finishing it last week. She had read it initially and loved it and passed it on to me. The book was wonderful, and I’m so grateful to have such wonderful friends as neighbors. Not only do we trade garden produce, random household goods, and watch each other’s kids and pets, but we also trade books with each other, which is always going to be the way to my heart.
I wish I could explain exactly how our neighborhood came to be, because it’s a model that would make everyone’s lives better if they got to experience something similar. Perhaps things used to be more like this when we all knew our neighbors? I’d like to think so.
5. After dropping my son off to preschool, I took the bus to work instead of walking the 2.7 miles. I first looked for a Lime Bike, but there wasn’t one close enough to be worth walking over to make it worth it. It was an overcast morning and very dark, so I just didn’t feel comfortable walking down the secluded trail that is the majority of the distance. In general, it is a very safe place to be, but I decided it just wasn’t worth risking on a dark, early morning.
I still did get to leave my car parked for a round trip to work this week though, so it was still a success. It just meant fewer steps and a $2.75 bus fee that I don’t have to pay in the summer months.
Running Update
To mix it up a little bit this week, I went for my runs on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday but lifted on Tuesday instead of Monday because the kiddo wanted both Mommy and Daddy to pick him up from preschool that day. He knew I was headed out of town for the weekend, so I think he just wanted a little more time.
Otherwise, I did average about 20k steps again this past weekend. On non work days, I just naturally walk a lot more, so that many steps isn’t hard to hit. The hardest part of Monday through Friday is definitely the amount of time I spend sitting at my desk. I still manage to get perhaps 12,000-13,000 steps on an average weekday, but it takes a lot of work to get there.
How do you get moving on work days? When do you tend to get most of your steps in?