Pocket Change

The past couple of weeks have been pretty tight around the Penman household, because we used up most of our money buying a car, and the rest buying the parts to fix it. Luckily we only needed a couple parts and they weren't really that much. We figured out we had just barely enough money to make it to our next paycheck, which will hopefully get here tomorrow or Saturday. Unfortunately, our plan didn't quite work out. We ran out of bread, milk, and eggs Wednesday (yesterday). There aren't a lot of meals you can make without these, as we discovered (even Mac n Cheese takes milk!). We didn't want to use any money from our nearly empty checking account, so I got creative. I went through the house searching for change. I gathered up all our spare coins from the dresser, my coin purse, and the cupholders in the car and counted it. It came to $4.50, so we went to Smiths hoping we could get at least some bread and milk on that much. As it turns out, the total for the cheapest bread, milk, and eggs at Smiths today is just about $4.30, and with tax is just over $4.50. Hooray for Fresh Values Card discounts! We had fun laughing at ourselves as we put $4.38 in the coin acceptor in the self-checkout line, and after a worrisome moment when our last quarter wouldn't go in on the first three tries, we finally made it out of the store with food to last us the next couple days, and a little bit of spare change for the next adventure!