pocketmint

The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Results

(This is Part Two in a series. See the Introduction and Part One if you missed them.)

Our new budget system accomplished everything I hoped for, and then some. Still, I’ve been surprised by a thing or two about my own reactions, and even moreso by Jak’s.

I fully expected that for at least a month or two I would have trouble not bumping up against the $250 limit, especially since Jak and I had been averaging between $250 and $300 per month on restaurants. (Mind you, that was down from a high of around twice that much, a few years ago when we were both working full-time.) Food has always been more my priority than Jak’s; I suspected he would prefer to spend his money on things like sports and music and electronics, which meant that I needed to be prepared to pick up the restaurant tab if I wanted company.

What actually happened was that the moment the new system went into effect, I clamped down on my spending more than I would have believed possible. That first month, my only restaurant expenditure was $6.54 to Chipotle. I spent $104 overall out of my $250 (and $24 of that was involuntary, to pay for a library book that was inexplicably sucked into some parallel dimension). Nor did I feel deprived; what I felt was more like ‘burning determination’.

Apparently, having a substantial cushion in my personal budget was more important to me than anything, even sushi. Who knew? At the end of the month I rolled over almost $150 unspent. The next month I did go out to eat, carefully, but still rolled over $260. Six months in, I had accumulated a surplus of almost $700 … and that’s through a major family vacation and Christmas.

Once I had a few hundred dollars banked, I stopped getting a big high from underspending and watching the cushion grow … but I still haven’t felt compelled to spend any more. My expenditures have been pretty steady since month three, at around $150-$170. We have been going out to eat about once a month, less than at any point since at least the early nineties. With our restaurant outings so infrequent, Jak has been happy to pay his own way.

I should say that it surprised me only that I got to this point so quickly, not that I got here at all. One of the many things I’ve studied in the last few years is the psychological phenomenon called ‘hedonistic adaptation’. This could and probably will fill another entire post in itself, but the basic idea has to do with the way your brain resets its baseline for happiness. Knowing how that works, I’ve been able — with surprisingly little effort — to derive about as much subjective delight from one restaurant meal a month as I once got from four, or ten.

Other things have had exactly the effect I intended. When I set up the budget rules, I was thinking very specifically about ways to counteract our specific personal spending flaws — my own no less than anyone else’s. One thing I wanted to do was lower expenditure and consumption of alcohol. I cut way back at first, then ramped back up a little once I had saved a solid cushion. I can’t make a precise dollar comparison because previously I didn’t track wine separate from groceries, but I’m definitely spending less. When we do eat out, I’ve rather easily adapted to having just one cocktail or glass of wine with dinner instead of two or three.

Before The Budget, I judged that my biggest remaining financial weakness was buying housewares that, upon reflection, weren’t strictly necessary. I had been successful at not spending frivolously on myself, but I’d left some kind of psychological loophole around buying things ‘for the house’. If the pillows got a little flat, the sheets a little discolored, the towels a little stiff, then whoosh — I was off to buy new ones. On sale, of course, but true thriftiness would have required that I keep using the still-functional ones we already had. I wasn’t quite as impulsive about kitchen equipment, but there was room for improvement there too.

I hoped that by making these purchases all part of my finite personal budget, I could force myself to evaluate them more realistically. So far in the last seven months I’ve stayed entirely away from linens, despite long since passing the point where I would ordinarily have swapped in a new set of bath towels. (Jak had a minor mishap in the laundry room with some bleach … and I’ve just been living with the spotty results. Go me!) I have purchased a few items for the kitchen, but with even more care than before. For example, I wanted more than the two wineglasses we had, but filled in with 50-cent ones from Goodwill instead of buying a whole set of new ones at several dollars apiece. When I decided I wanted to experiment with a slow cooker, I spent $33 on a new one … but only after looking for a used one for several months and not finding what I wanted. (And then I made darned sure to send in the $5 rebate.)

I haven’t really been tested on bed linens yet, as I happened to have bought a new set of sheets (yes, on sale) last spring. I honestly don’t know what I’ll do when I start to feel like replacing them. I may yet buy new linens when we don’t strictly need them. I mean, few things give me more personal comfort than a really nice bed, and it might turn out to be just that important to me. But at least it will be a thoughtful purchase; I’ll be weighing the pleasure of new sheets against everything else I could do with that money, instead of fooling myself that it’s ‘for the house’ or ‘for the family’ and so doesn’t really count.

So what else have I been doing with my money? Well, among other things, I’ve given small amounts to a political campaign, to a Kickstarter project, and to a homeless person on the street — all things I didn’t do before. I suppose I had felt like I’d need to get Jak’s agreement first, and those are difficult things to rationally justify. Unlike him, I hadn’t felt particularly restricted by our prior arrangement, but apparently it was constraining certain decisions without my realizing it.

Jak’s spending patterns have transformed under the new system too.

Where I covet bed linens, Jak covets electronics. Smartphones, big-screen televisions, e-readers, speaker systems, computer monitors … Before the CFFB, I would get nervous every time he would drool over a new gadget; I felt like I had to squash his enthusiasm right up front with reminders that we didn’t really need whatever shiny new thing he was looking at.

I would never have imagined that, given a budget of his own, he would go seven months without purchasing a single electronic gadget. But here we are. He doesn’t buy music or dvds like he did before, either, making more use of the public library instead. And remember when I couldn’t get him to stay under $30 per month at coffee shops? Now he’s down to an average of $5. In fact, the only area of Jak’s spending I correctly predicted was soccer team fees and equipment, and even there he gets nearly everything from Goodwill.

He’s saving about 20% of his personal allotment overall. He, too, likes having a cushion in case something expensive comes along. When he spends big money, it’s mostly on extra trips — one to Glacier National Park with Claire; another solo jaunt down to Portland to visit Michaela after she moved.

But really, he’s turned into just as much of a frugality freak as I am. Which I didn’t anticipate at all.

Here’s Jak’s perspective, in his own words:

“I liked the idea of the new budget because we would be saving money and I would have the freedom to spend on myself and the kids without discussing every purchase every time. I knew that the autonomy would make me happier; what I didn’t expect was that I would actually spend less than before. When I was buying things with ‘joint’ money, I was less diligent about cost — less likely to try to think of ways to do things frugally. Turns out being frugal makes me happier most of the time, but I can still be extravagant about something if my budget can afford it. It’s liberating.

“I’ve discovered that I’m not spending all my monthly allotment; it’s piling up on ‘normal’ months and then I use a lot of it all at once for something big, like a trip or an expensive experience. I didn’t really understand this about myself before, but now I have a lot more data on my own spending habits. That’s cool too.”

One other surprise for me has been a small but noticeable change in how I feel about gifts from Jak. For the first time in over a decade, I am able to accept a gift from him without also worrying about the cost. Partly this is, I think, because he’s being more frugal in his choices; partly it’s that I just don’t feel responsible for everything anymore. When gifts came out of this undefined cloud of resources, I always had to worry whether that money could have been better spent elsewhere.

Also, when Jak has a finite amount that he can spend on himself, and he chooses to take some of that and spend it on me … well, it feels like more of a sacrifice, and somehow seems to mean more.

The same phenomenon means I actually get more pleasure from spending money on Jak. too. For example, I’ve long been buying most of his clothes, because it’s not the sort of thing that he thinks about; if it weren’t for me I think he’d wear the same jeans and t-shirts until they were more holes than cloth. (Metrosexual he is not.) But when I bought him a nice new (well, used from Goodwill, but new to him) pair of jeans last month, I definitely felt more pleased than in times past. I think it was because of my implicit sacrifice.

But the absolute best part? Is that we don’t argue over spending on the kids anymore. It’s always been extra tricky because of the shared custody and the necessary back-and-forth between our household and the kids’ mother’s. Many times one parent will pay for something up front, and the other parent will reimburse afterward for half the cost. In theory, all such expenses are supposed to be explicitly agreed upon in advance; in practice, optional expenses — camp, a trip, lessons, etc. — are often implemented without prior discussion. Even necessary expenses can be wildly different in scope depending upon the thrift of the spender.

Having hundreds of dollars of unexpected charges turn up periodically wasn’t working for either Jak or me, but we tended to handle the situation differently. Jak typically advocated for reimbursing money we didn’t agree to (and would not otherwise have spent) in order to avoid an argument with his ex; I preferred to stand our ground and refuse the outlay. Add to that the aforementioned tendency for divorced dads to give their children All The Things, my increasing frugality, and our reduced income, and you have a never-ending string of disagreements.

All of that stopped cold the moment we implemented the new budget. Giving Jak both full responsibility and complete control — within agreed-upon limits — derailed that whole dynamic. So far he’s not saving back any of the kids’ money, but he is staying within the budgets we agreed to, which means an overall spending reduction. Plus, now that every kid expense has a clear cost — either it means there’s something else in the future they can’t have or do, or it comes out of Jak’s own budget — he is more inclined to hold the line against the pressure (internal or external) to spend more than we can afford.

But that’s coming entirely from him, not me; he no longer feels like I’m the reason he’s having to push back, because I’m not even involved. In fact, I don’t have to worry about it at all, which is a huge relief.

Not that I broke the worry habit instantly; I still sometimes have to stop and remind myself that it’s not my problem. But then I enjoy the fact that I can just let go and not evaluate each expenditure. And I cannot overstate how happy I am that we never need to have that particular argument EVER AGAIN.

So you can see why I’ve come to call it the Conflict-Free Family Budget. For us, I’d say it’s been an unequivocal success. In the final installment, I’ll discuss adapting the system to your own situation.

(Photos by 401K, Smaku, Piutus, and masochismtango.)

The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Our Plan

(See the Introduction if you missed it.)

First, I started with by calculating our net income from a single day job. (At the time it was me working and Jak at home; more often it’s been the other way around, but either way we’ve been on a single income since late 2008.)

Then I started thinking about what expenses were absolutely necessary. Like, if we suddenly had no income whatsoever, what would we still have to keep buying or paying for? I came up with the following list of Needs:

• Rent or Mortgage
• Groceries
• Electricity
• Water/Sewer/Garbage
• Natural Gas
• Internet
• Phone
• Health Insurance
• Prescriptions
• Dentist
• Veterinary
• Car Insurance
• Gas
• Car Maintenance

Some of those categories are straightforward, but a few could use further explanation. For example, ‘Phone’ could theoretically mean anything from a local-only landline to dual smartphones with unlimited data. We have a free VOIP phone setup at the house, so I thought if necessary Jak and I could share a single cell phone on a pay-as-you-go plan. (In June I calculated the cheapest option to be $22 per month, including taxes and fees, using a ‘dumb’ LG phone that we already own.)

For some people, ‘Internet’ would be properly a luxury, but since neither Jak nor I can do any work — salaried or freelance — without it, for us it’s a need. ‘Groceries’, for simplicity of recordkeeping, includes all necessary consumables — not just food but also things like dish soap, toilet paper, toothpaste, and pet food.

Gasoline was the one area where I opted not to be draconian right out of the gate. To be strictly accurate, we should keep mileage logs and distinguish between required and discretionary trips … and if it ever seems like we’re overusing the car, that’s what we’ll do. But between frugality and environmental concerns (and, it could be argued, a homebody lifestyle), Jak and I have been pretty good about keeping our driving to a minimum. An employer-paid bus pass is usually a job perk for us; without that, we’d have a Public Transportation budget as well.

After tallying up the Needs, I moved on to Savings. Jak and I agree that maximizing our tax-advantaged savings each year should be a priority, which in our circumstances means:

• 401(k) (when available, up to the employer match)
• IRAs for both Jak and myself
• HSA for the whole family

Taking our single net income and subtracting all of the above left us, as of July 2011, with $570 per month. This is what we would allocate to our family’s Wants. The next step was to distribute that discretionary money into ‘accounts’ for each family member. We started with the children.

Jak’s elder daughter graduated last year and moved out over the summer, so we’re no longer financially supporting her. However, we agreed to jointly allot $120 a year — $10 a month — for gifts and other help.

My younger stepdaughter still lives with us half-time. Most of that cost is already wrapped into our Needs — a larger house, utilities, medical, groceries — but that still leaves clothing, restaurant meals, gifts, entertainment, extracurricular activities, and random optional expenses like school yearbooks. I proposed $50 a month for Claire’s discretionary budget; Jak worried that wasn’t enough. We compromised on $60 per month, or $720 a year. (If we didn’t share some expenses with her mother, the total amount would be higher.)

Whatever was left over after Needs, Savings, and the kids’ Wants — in this case $500 — Jak and I split. (The precise amount adjusts up or down as income or Needs expenses change, but it’s remained pretty close to that number.) That $250 is ours to spend however we want, no questions asked, no unsolicited opinions expressed.

It’s worth calling out some of the things that are considered optional and so fall under the personal budgets. In every case, my touchstone was ‘If we suddenly dropped to zero income, would we need to buy this thing anyway?’ We aren’t just talking restaurant meals and entertainment, but also such things as:

• clothing
• beauty products
• sports equipment & fees
• alcohol
• gifts
• charity donations
• cell phones
• electronics
• small appliances
• kitchen equipment
• housewares
• furniture

All of the above comes out of our personal $250. (We each get an $11 credit against our monthly cell phone bill — half of the $22 I calculated above.)

The only things not covered in this setup are major random emergencies; those are handled separately. For unplanned medical expenses, we have the Health Savings Account; for everything else, we have savings in a separate emergency fund. So if the water heater suddenly dies or the car transmission fails or someone breaks a leg, we can cover the cost without accruing any debt. This is critical; if we didn’t already have a solid emergency fund we would need to cut our personal budgets back until we had built one up.

The final piece of the puzzle involved assigning responsibility for budgets other than our own. Most of the items on the Needs list are fixed costs; there’s not any discretion involved in paying the mortgage or the electric bill, and things like Internet service and auto insurance only need to be price-checked two or three times a year.

However, groceries is our largest monthly expense after housing, and it involves a whole bunch of decisions on at least a weekly and sometimes daily basis. In our case, we agreed that I would be the sole arbiter of the grocery budget. I do almost all the shopping anyway, because Jak dislikes it … and while I wouldn’t say I love it, I don’t mind it so much. Not coincidentally, I have a lot of practice at being both thrifty and efficient, and I also do all the cooking, so I’m the best person for the job in more ways than one. This doesn’t mean that Jak can’t buy doughnuts on a whim if he wants, just that if he does so without getting my approval first, he risks having to pay for it out of his $250 personal budget instead of Grocery.

And last but perhaps most importantly for us, the kids’ budgets. Previously, a fair percentage of our financial disagreements revolved around spending on entertainment and other luxuries for the kids — with me, unsurprisingly, on the side of ‘less’ and Jak on the side of ‘more’. (In some of my research on stepfamilies a couple years ago I discovered that this was a typical pattern for divorced parents and especially for fathers: for emotional reasons they tend to spend significantly more on their children’s gifts and entertainment than parents who are still married to each other — despite the fact that two households means higher expenses and generally less money to go around.)

Because of this dynamic, I proposed that Jak have full control over the kid’s budgets. I could offer suggestions or opinions, but the decisions would all be his. And if he wanted to spend more than the agreed-upon amount ($720 for Claire or $120 for Michaela), he could — out of his own discretionary budget. (As could I, if I wanted to buy something for either of them that he didn’t agree to.)

So the system in a nutshell is this:

1. Calculate one after-tax income
2. Subtract bare-bones Needs
3. Subtract priority Savings
4. Apportion a reasonable amount to cover Wants for each child
5. Divide the remainder by the number of adults
6. Assign each decision-heavy budget to a single adult

(The Needs/Savings/Wants trichotomy was influenced by a great many things, but particularly the book All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Tyagi. However, I took the concept a lot farther than the authors did.)

We also made one other agreement, about how we would handle extra income if we both are working simultaneously: at least 50% of that second paycheck will go automatically into long-term (retirement) savings. The other half will be negotiated when it happens, going into some combination of long-term savings, short-term savings (e.g. for major travel expenses), and/or a bump to our individual Wants budgets.

Next post, I’ll describe how it’s worked out for us over the last six months.

(Photos by amanky, Chealion, and I-5 Design & Manufacture.)

The Conflict-Free Family Budget: Introduction

My partner Jak and I have been together for eleven years now. We blended our money fairly early in our relationship — sometime late in the second year. Ever since then we’ve had a single pool, into which all income goes, and from which all outflows are jointly approved.

Our financial outlooks and spending priorities have always been pretty similar — more alike than most couples, from what I’ve read — but still not identical. Also, they’ve been changing over time, for both of us. In general, I’ve been leading the way down the path of increased frugality, and Jak has willingly followed … about a step or two behind.

Which has made for occasional friction. Nothing major, nothing relationship-endangering, but still not any fun. I would grouse about individual purchases that didn’t match my frugal standards; Jak would grumble that he felt micromanaged and constrained. I tried backing off, but then he’d start coveting some expensive new electronic gadget and I’d get anxious. I suggested we set category limits, like $30 per month on his coffee shop beverages; he agreed, but by the second month he’d gone over, and he didn’t even feel any less restricted. He tried to only buy things that I agreed to, but couldn’t help resenting the lack of autonomy. At one point he suggested a monthly allowance that he could spend however he wanted, but I couldn’t see that stopping me from fretting about whether we could afford whatever he was buying, or whether it was fair for him to splurge when I was sacrificing.

Maybe most of these problems wouldn’t have occurred if we’d never merged finances in the first place, but teasing everything apart now seemed like it would cause as many problems as it solved. Things were not that bad. But neither were they entirely good.

Last summer, after a lot of reading on behavioral economics and with our particular dynamics in mind, I hammered out a new approach for handling expenses. I made a little spreadsheet, calculated some numbers, and then proposed it to Jak.

He had a lot of questions, most of which I had ready answers for, but a couple required that I refine the model. We haggled over details. He was interested, but cautious; it was a pretty big change, and though the potential benefits were obvious, he wasn’t confident that we’d foreseen all the drawbacks. We agreed to try it for three months, after which he could request a renegotiation.

We implemented the new plan on July 1. The three-month mark came and went without notice. In fact, in the last six-and-a-half months we have not had a single negative interaction around spending. Not one.

I want to share this system here on Pocketmint, for two reasons: one, because it underlies or ties into a lot of other things in our lives that I want to talk about, and two, because I think that — perhaps with minor adjustments for individual circumstances — it could be a good approach for a lot of other families.

However, to explain the idea well enough that someone else could implement it, I’ll have to go into quite a bit of detail, which makes for a whole big pile of text. So I’m breaking it up into three sections. Tomorrow in Part One I’ll describe the plan as we implemented it. Then in Part Two, I’ll go over the results, both expected and unexpected. Finally in Part Three I’ll discuss general principles and ways to adapt the budget for other circumstances. Stay tuned!

(Photo by Ed Yourdon.)

Handmade holidays: experiment in wreath-making

On even-numbered years, Jak’s kids are with us for Christmas, and we often end up spending the holiday with his extended family as well. On odd-numbered years — like this one — the kids spend Christmas with their mother, and Jak and I are usually alone.

I wasn’t too keen on buying a whole tree for just two people. Jak and I are both moving more towards an ‘experiences not stuff’ philosophy, which means there wouldn’t be huge piles of presents to put under a tree anyway. I was thinking about going out to buy a locally-made wreath from a farmer’s market, but knew that would probably cost about as much as a tree.

Jak, however, was clever enough to realize that we basically live in the middle of an evergreen forest, and that this might be turned to our benefit. He proposed that we make our own wreaths and was willing to spearhead the required organization.

I’ve never done anything remotely similar before, and frankly, going into this I wasn’t too optimistic that we could make anything that looked even halfway decent. But I was surprised and pleased with the results.

So to begin with, Jak and Claire ventured out to the yard and returned with branches of pine, Douglas fir, and holly, plus a pile of pine cones. (That’s our cat Sammy there on the right, inspecting the Douglas fir.) The three of us set up on the cardboard-covered dining table, with the laptop playing a Pandora holiday music station.

First challenge: all the online instructions we found either started with a purchased wire frame or described making your own from a wire coat hanger. We had zero of the former and only one of the latter.

The best bit of luck that we had was when Jak remembered a roll of chicken wire we had in the garage (purchased some years back to patch a hole in the fence of our rental house and prevent puppy escape). Not only did a chicken-wire circle give many more attachment points than the single circle of a coat hanger, but it even happened to be a camouflaging dark green!

In addition to the chicken wire, we scrounged a spool of 30-gauge wire from a craft box (I think a slightly thicker gauge would have been better, but this worked well enough). Our tools were wire cutters and pruning shears. Jak and Claire traded off working on one wreath, while I (being the greater perfectionist) did a second one on my own.

Despite having looked at several sets of instructions, I still really felt like I had no idea what I was doing when I started; I went mostly on instinct plus trial-and-error. I started by clipping a doughnut shape out of the chicken wire (I picked up the dog food dish and traced it in order to keep my circles circular). Then I started trimming pine branches and weaving them around the inner cutout, securing with small bits of wire when needed.

I had vaguely thought that I would use the softer, more flexible pine as the base and layer some Douglas fir branches on top (which is what Jak ended up doing with his wreath), but by the time I had a solid base, the pine was looking nice enough on its own that I decided to just keep going with that.

So I added another ring of pine around the outside, tucking the cut edges of the chicken wire under to secure the branches. Then I took some shorter pieces and filled in a couple of thin spots. By the way, it works best if you face all the branches in the same direction.

Jak had only been able to reach one clump of holly berries, so I let him use those and instead dug out a garland of painted wood beads from my tree decoration box. Still making this up as I went along, I wrapped it around the wreath and tucked the extra ends along the back. The spaces in between cried out for pine cones, then, so I threaded those in.

(In a bit of a cheat, I used pine cones that I purchased from a craft store sometime in the nineties as tree decorations, just because they were already wired. If I’d not had those, with just a bit more work I could have used pine cones from the yard and attached the wire myself.)

So there’s my final wreath, hanging on the front door. I’m pretty proud of it, especially for a first effort. Jak added fir, holly, and a bow to his and hung it over the fireplace. Originally he thought he might try a garland, but we were pretty well crafted-out by then, so he just laid sprays of fir and pine cones across the mantel.

Total cost: zero — we used only materials we already had. I ended up enjoying the creative challenge much more than I’d imagined — so much that I would like to make it a new tradition for every at-home Christmas. Even if we move out of the Pacific Northwest at some point, with all its evergreens, I will still be looking for ways to forage for holiday decorations.

Feed a crowd for forty bucks

The calculations are complete. Total cost per person for our Thanksgiving meal (one generous serving each of six dishes and two desserts): $3.50.

Note that I didn’t skimp on quality of ingredients — I used such expensive items as pine nuts, heavy cream, whole vanilla beans, and real maple syrup. I also did nothing different from my usual shopping habits here — although we don’t usually eat this much, we do eat this well, and this cheaply, all the time.

I also cooked a lot more than we needed. I regularly double-cook for dinners — I like the efficiency of ‘cook once, eat twice’ — but for Thanksgiving I pretty much go at it like I’m feeding an army, instead of (in this case) just four people. So we all ate various permutations of this meal for the following three days. (Each dish ranged from 8 to 16 servings, and for what it’s worth my total expense for these quantities was $41.11.)

With only two people eating meat, cooking a turkey seemed like a waste. Jak said he wouldn’t miss turkey so long as we had cornbread dressing and pumpkin pie. So I decided to make an entirely vegetarian meal.

However, I did make note of what a whole turkey would have cost, since I know many people can’t imagine Thanksgiving without one. Essentially, adding a roast turkey serving to the existing meal (for a total of nine dishes instead of eight) would have added .49 per person, for a total of $3.99. (This was a special Thanksgiving sale price, not likely on a non-holiday.)

That means you could serve this meal plus turkey to ten people for under $40.

What isn’t included: energy cost to run the oven, microwave, and so forth. Butane for the creme brulée torch. Water from the tap. Everything else is accounted for, including the cost of items I already had in the pantry.

Below is the menu and the cost breakdown by dish (you can see the first six on this plate, clockwise from top; desserts are separate). Where applicable, I have linked to recipes, with the following caveat: I almost never follow recipes exactly as written, so I may have made liberal adjustments.

NEW: I’ve ported my spreadsheet over to Google Docs, so you can see the breakdown of cost by ingredient.

Maple Sweet Potatoes with Pecan Streusel
$5.65 for 10 servings
$0.57

Made this one up on the fly: mashed sweet potatoes flavored with butter, maple syrup, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice, covered with a streusel made from ground pecans, flour, butter, sugar, and cinnamon. (Pecans and real maple syrup account for 57% of the cost.) My only regret is that the streusel made it brown instead of vibrant orange; I wish I’d had a clear dish to bake it in.

Charmoula Green Beans and Carrots
$4.33 for 12 servings
$0.36

I was seduced by the gorgeous photo on Kalyn’s blog into trying this for Thanksgiving. The charmoula sauce is an amazing discovery. I am going to be putting it on everything now. It was crazy-awesome.

Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes
$2.62 for 12 servings
$0.22

No recipe here — just roast a huge wad of garlic cloves in olive oil in the oven, then mash and add to potatoes along with generous amounts of butter, cream, and salt. Potatoes are so cheap that even with the dairy this is still a bargain.

Cornbread Dressing
$4.40 for 16 servings
$0.28

This is a permutation of the cornbread dressing I grew up with in Texas. First you make homemade cornbread, then crumble and rebake with sauteed celery and onions, eggs, milk, broth, and poultry seasoning. Not the most attractive dish in the world (especially since I used whole wheat flour in the cornbread, making it darker) but yummy all the same.

Cauliflower & Brussels Sprouts Gratin
$10.49 for 16 servings
$0.66

I’ve been running variations on this Epicurious recipe for about a year now, to universal acclaim. Usually I make it with just the cauliflower, but this time I wanted a second green vegetable on the table, so included Brussels sprouts — albeit not in the proportions of the original recipe.

This dish is pricey (relatively speaking) because of the cream, Parmesan, and pine nuts. But OH MY GOD is it good. Just ask our twelve-year-old, who was begging to eat more at every meal including breakfast for the next three days. (Yes that’s right, my child eats Brussels sprouts at breakfast. Booyah!)

Spiced Whole Cranberry Sauce
$4.51 for 16 servings
$0.28

Classic fresh cranberries + simple syrup, flavored with allspice, cardamom, and ginger.

Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream
$3.76 for 8 servings
$0.47

I was willing to buy pumpkins and bake them, but took Jennifer Reese’s word that canned pumpkin is actually better. I used her recipe — more or less — for the filling. I did, also on her recommendation, bake the pie crust myself. My very first pie crust attempt ever, so I was worried, but it was actually good! I used Elise’s recipe for the crust, because her directions are specific enough for piecrust newbs. Also: real whipped cream with sugar and vanilla. None of that Cool Whip crap. (Note that my $3.76 includes the whipped cream; without topping the pie would have been $2.82 — cheaper than Jennifer’s $3.68.)

Vanilla Bean Creme Brulée
$5.35 for 8 servings
$0.67

This was Jak’s contribution to the meal. He doesn’t normally cook at all. But he loves creme brulée and so a few years back I got him a torch set and a creme brulée cookbook for Christmas, in hopes that he would be tempted. Well, it finally paid off.

This is the other relatively expensive dish, but like the gratin completely worth it. He picked this Martha Stewart version for his first attempt, and I’d say it was a tie with the best restaurant creme brulée I’ve ever had.