The big excitement this week is that MH received a 24%-off offer to renew his movie pass.  When "movie pass" went defunct he signed up for the Regal annual pass (truly unlimited movies).  They extended that with the pandemic and his one year pass just expired this month.  He might have ended up having that one pass for two years.  He was going to renew anyway, but jumped on the deal.  For someone who will easily go to the movies three times per week, that works out to about $1.28 per movie. 

I am not worried about one-income mode whatsoever.  MH has always saved 100% of his income.  We have always budgeted off of my income alone.  It's just that we are coming off a few very robust financial years and are used to having a lot of buffer/extra.  So it will be an adjustment as we get back into that one-income mode (without any buffer).  But as long as I have library books and MH has a movie pass, all will be fine and well.  We do also have a museum membership (reciprocal with other museums) and an electric car that costs pennies to run.  That last part makes traveling anywhere pretty easy (other museums, the beach, the mountains, etc.  Various low cost activities that weren't so low-cost when you factored the cost of gas).

Wednesday was a good money day.  MH got an focus group (about electric cars!).  It's next week? & will pay $65 cash.   I don't remember the last time either of us did a focus group.  

I was craving pizza and was surprised to see I had a free personal pizza at Round Table.  Woohoo!  It seems to work out generally buying one large pizza equates a big reward like a free personal pizza.  We had kind of made a big deal about getting a Large pizza before MM(18) left us.  But if we average one pizza out every other month, that's probably going to remain the same.  MM(18) will be back in November and December, and March.  I can probably squeeze some more free personal pizzas out of my big eater.

I dragged my feet for about 10 days but finally contacted our auto insurer to get an "away at college" discount for MM.  I don't know how much that will be but I am going to pocket the money.  MM(18) paid the full cost of the car age 16-18 (license, insurance, gas, maintenance, etc.).  I decided to pocket the insurance savings since we will be covering the insurance/registration in the meantime.  It will probably be at least a year before DL(16) gets his license.  In turn, MM(18) will continue to get free use of the car when he is home.  Should only be a week or two here and there.  He can pay for the gas.  I doubt we will pay for gas.  My gas budget is $0, we are driving 100% electric.   The 20yo gas car is *very* unappealing to drive, but we will do shorter trips to keep the car in good condition.  Which means probably just 4-mile round trips because I can't imagine where else we might drive it but the grocery store or maybe to DL's school.  

MH was told that work should pick up next month and that they will probably need him the week after next?  Not holding my breath, but that's the latest.  The silver lining is that MH can go with us to visit MM(18).  Of course, the whole point of that time off work was to give me some quiet time.  So much for that!  I have mixed feelings about it all because I was going to feel bad visiting MM(18) when MH was really the one having the harder time with him leaving.  Another adult on a road trip is not a bad thing.  Especially with my very moody teenager.  I was surprised that DL(16) even agreed to go with me (but expected very likely it would end up a solo trip, which sounded pretty divine).  

MM(18) continues to be uber frugal.  I don't know all the details but he stumbled upon a Rite Aid and got a $2 ice cream cone.  We used to do that all the time with our kids.  I am glad that could translate into a frugal find in his new locale.  As far as I can tell, that's all he spent his first 12 days of college.  

So that's a wee little bit of what has been going on the last week or so.  

I don't know if I will be able to keep up with it because it always seems to get very time consuming.  But I don't really know what October will hold on the grocery spending front and as our household changes.  So I decided between that and just diving back in with some minutiae posting, I will record daily expenses in my blog this month.  I always track every penny we spend (with accounting software) but this is just sharing in my blog.

I'd say overall our goal for October is to do a more frugal reset.  But that is offset by a trip we have planned to visit MM(18).  It is what it is, we have the savings for it, however it pans out.  & if MH's job comes back with decent work hours, then we might not care so much about a reset.  So I guess October is just a big mystery.  Will see how it plays out.  Mostly I am curious how the grocery spending shakes out and how much money I can shift to college food.  Oh yeah, and the other splurge-y thing is we are going to be dipping into savings probably to get this movie done.  Fingers crossed, anyway.  Yeah, October is kind of a crazy month, now that I think about it.  But through all that we are going to be figuring out how things shift with the smaller household.