Every Monday is Intents and Purchases day at Living Behind the Curve.

Here’s a fabulous idea for a project!

Get yourself a tiny notebook.

On each page, write the name of something you consume.

Every time you’re at a store or perusing a sale flier, write down what that item costs.

Now remember to take the book with you every time you shop.

Sound like fun? I don’t particularly think so either.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept, a price book is used to track regular and sale prices of goods, usually groceries and consumables. With this data, you know if something is a good deal in comparison to other deals you can get, and you know where to go for the best price when you need something. I was first introduced to the concept in Amy Dacyzyn’s Tightwad Gazette. Get Rich Slowly sums Amy’s concept up nicely here.

While I have kept a price book several times in my life, I gave up the practice for several reasons:

• I’m forgetful. I never remembered to take it with me when I was shopping.
• It’s expensive. Price books take time to maintain. I’ve found that one hour of my time per week is more valuable than the few cents I may save on chicken.
• It’s inaccurate. Gas prices change, and food prices change with them.

A lot of good can come out of price booking, however. Because of the research I’ve done in the past, I know that (at current prices) powdered milk is cheaper in the tiny boxes from the grocery store than it is in bulk from the discount grocer. I know that when we run out of the 20 or so pounds of pasta in the basement, I won’t pay more than 25 cents per pound to replace it – a sale price that has been consistent over the past few years. I also know that WaWa always has the best price on half and half, no matter how much dairy fluctuates.

Because of this, there are certain things I still do track loosely, on a reference sheet that I keep in my pocket on our shopping days. I’ve found that I get the most value from tracking these items, because the sale prices are fairly consistent and we buy them often enough to keep the data current.

• Meat and poultry (priced per pound, by cut)
• Toilet paper (priced per roll)
• Laundry detergent (I use the small bottles of concentrated detergent, because it’s easier on my back – but it’s expensive, so I buy multiple bottles when it’s on sale)
• Shampoo and conditioner (Again, we buy in bulk when the price is too good to pass up –- we probably won’t need any for another year)

While I’ve learned a lot from my price booking experiences, I plan to stay with my reference sheet for now. What are your experiences with the tiny book of numbers? Tell me all about it in the comments.

Every Friday is 11 Things day at Living Behind the Curve.

What is a blog without a good top ten list? We go one better with “11 Things” Fridays. From frugal crafts to completely biased opinions, we give you 11 Things to last you all through the weekend. To start things off, here are 11 Things That Living Behind the Curve is Not:

1. Uptightwad
Amy Dacyczyn, author of the Tightwad Gazette, has a place of honor in our hearts, along with Alton Brown, Julie Andrews and Mike Callahan. The Tightwad method is a marvelous way to cut spending, reduce consumption, save money, and reduce waste. When taken to extremes, it also starts bearing a remarkable resemblance to a cult. We’re big advocates of reducing consumption to save money and simplify, but we’re not going to scold anyone for not felting their dryer lint and making hats for the entire family.

2. Hard-Core Finance
Financial blogs are a dime a dozen (at 4.92% interest, compounding quarterly). I recently found one blogger who deposits 86% of her pre-tax day-job income into a retirement account. Not all of them are quite that extreme, but financial bloggers love numbers, obsessively comparing annualized rates of return to see whose is bigger. Budgeting and saving for retirement are important, but we try to strike a balance between penny pinching and fine living - Dawes, Tomes, Mousley and Grubbs be damned!

3. Donna Reed
If you came here looking for the kind of recipes to serve from your sparkling kitchen in your high heels and perfectly starched apron, you might want to look here. I have nothing against Donna Reed – I just don’t wear pearls when I dust. Hell, I rarely dust. We’re busy people, with a busy life, and an insatiable lust for good food.

Ed. Note: Did you know there’s a drink called a Donna Reed? The frozen version sounds delightful. There’s also a soundtrack released by Nick at Nite.

4. Goat-Milking
There is a large contingent of people who equate simple living with abandoning modern life and establishing self-sufficient farming communes, where the goats are milked by hand, the produce shines chemical-free in the sun, internal combustion engines are a distant memory, and you can hear the sound of paradigms shattering for miles. Nice work if you can stand it — we can’t. Simplicity is possible in even the most spiritually corrupt suburb.

5. Predictable
Well, on Tuesdays, anyway. There’s just no telling what the Kitchen Sink posts will bring. There will probably be some discussion of silly hats, for example. You never know.

6. Impersonal
If you love us, we’ll love you back. Whether it’s a comment, a link, or an email, if you’ve got a thought for us, we’ll think back. To illustrate the point, we have some advice for Jeff, who laments the loss of our original tag line. Always remember, Jeff, that without geometry, life is pointless.

7. A Top Ten List
David Letterman totally did that already. 11 Things are better, because there’s one more!

8. Cheezburger
We appreciate a good LOLcat reference, and I’m sure we’ll make a few, but there’s a time and place for verbing your nouns, and this blog isn’t it. Kthxbai.

9. Perfect
It may sound strange, but I’m looking forward to sharing our failures with you, in addition to our successes. Everybody screws up – the important part is to pick yourself up and keep on keepin’ on.

10. In our Right Minds
We’re two twenty-something people working full time jobs and going to school who, at the same time they are working to simplify their life, decided to create a blog and commit to a posting schedule. We’re a little off, and a little twisted (and occasionally a bit punny.)

11. Kidding
We’re not kidding about how easy it is to life a more simple life, or get your finances under control. In the spirit of full disclosure, however, we weren’t kidding about the puns either.

This concludes our week of introductory posts — Monday will start us off with the actual content portion of our program. If there’s something you’d like to see here, or if you have fabulous sources for silly hats, please let us know in the comments.

Every Monday is Intents and Purchases day at Living Behind the Curve.

Do you break out in a cold sweat when the bills come, or when you think about retirement? I used to. (Insert random anecdote here about me crying over a pile of past-due statements.) Managing your finances can be very overwhelming, and sometimes even panic-inducing. Mer and I take a different approach to finance. We set financial goals and work toward them, practice selective frugality, and tie our finances to our simplicity. On Mondays, we talk about the techniques we use to become a bit more financially zen.

Goals can be scary, too. Growing up, I learned that there are three guarantees in life: death, taxes, and having goals — we just never talked about death or taxes. I was taught that the relentless pursuit of goals was the only path to success, and anything less was failure. Mer and I don’t believe that goals need to be restrictive or confining. We see goals as guidelines — they give us a general direction to move in. As long as we are working toward those goals, we are successful.

We will bring you real-life examples from our own lives and (hopefully) those of guest posters. We’ll give you financial recaps and milestones, our frugal and non-frugal methods, our insights on investments and saving, share some ideas on short-term and long-term goals, and generally give you a window into our overall progress. Occasionally, there will also be links to and commentary on posts from related blogs around the interwebs.

And, because we will eventually run out of things to say, we are always open to suggestions. If there’s something you’d like to see here, please let us know in the comments.

Tune in tomorrow, when I introduce Kitchen Sink Tuesdays, where anything and everything can happen.