We wanted to buy organic. We also wanted to buy as locally as we could. Fortunately for us, Bloomington has this wonderful local grocery/co-op called Bloomingfoods. We became members of the co-op in 2007 and have already recouped our membership fee in the savings that we have received. We also joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program in 2008. More on the CSA in a later post. When we met in 2001, Bryan was a vegetarian and I was a meat eater. I didn’t know how to cook for a vegetarian, so I converted him back. In the fall of 2006, I decided to give up meat. So our roles have switched which can make meal planning a bit of a challenge.
We knew that if we wanted to move towards a totally organic diet, we would be spending a significant amount on groceries. This made it hard to carry out another goal of spending less. So, we figured “If we are spending more on groceries, what can we spend less on?” After reviewing the credit card statements, we realized that it would be clothes for Jessika and books/dvds for Bryan. And it worked! We spend roughly the same amount of money in 2008 as we did in 2007, but we are now able to buy all of the organic groceries we want without spending more money.
At Sunday morning breakfast, we were mentioning the “more organic food=spend less on clothes and books theory.” My father in law asked if this meant that we were buying our clothes at Goodwill or garage sales. Not yet. Right now we have just stopped buying clothes. This was a big change for me as I love to shop and love to have new clothes to wear. We have been able to reduce our clothes spending by about 75% over the past year. We are both very fortunate that we have wardrobes large enough to accomodate this new philosophy. I have been having fun trying new clothes combinations to revitalize my wardrobe instead of running out to buy a new sweater when I get bored.
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