Right now, I have four boxes of cereal stored in my laundry basket in my bedroom closet.
(And as I write that, I wonder why I’ve never stored anything in there before. Sure, I have to dump it out when I do the laundry, but it wouldn’t be a bad place to store laundry detergent.)
Why, you ask, do I have four boxes of cereal in my laundry basket? Because I couldn’t find anywhere else to put it. I eat the same kind of cereal for breakfast every morning, and go through a box in about a week and a half or so. So when it was on super sale this weekend, I decided it was smart to stock up. Then I went to put it in the cabinet… and noticed that there was no room, with the extra cans of soup and jars of spaghetti sauce. My kitchen is small and doesn’t have great storage, and suddenly, all my cabinets are full. Which means that I have to start stashing those extra food items elsewhere.
If you stock up on food during sales or just in case of emergency, where do you keep it? I know some people have boxes under their beds that are filled with canned food. Do you have a bureau drawer filled with pasta? Rice in with your socks? Of course, if you have a basement, storage is less of an issue, I’m sure, but for those of you in a home without great storage, what are your tips and tricks?
Megan is a 30-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:
In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.
While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.
Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.
So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.
I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.
I don’t have a ton of space either, so I keep some of my “stock ups” in my linen closet. If the basket is working for you, keep at it!