Inflation Is Definately Here.
Every time I drive into town, stop by the grocery store or even hit the dollar type store, I’m seeing prices inching up. Right now, I’m able to handle price but if things go up much more, I’ll be going into total saver mode, trying to live on what I get every couple of weeks.
Right now, the price of gas is higher than I’ve ever seen it around here. Regular gas is running about $5.69 give or take a few cents while Diesel is about $6.09 with one station showing $6.15 per gallon. My pickup takes 35 gallons so the fill up is extremely expensive. I’m going to have to quit going to town as much shortly so my tank of gas will go further.
I’m hoping the price of fuel oil doesn’t raise as much or at least has a chance to drop before winter, otherwise the cost of heating my house is going to be sky high this winter. The last price I saw advertised, over a week ago, was around $4.85 per gallon and when you need a few hundred gallons, that really hits the pocket book hard. I’m expecting to pay at least double what I spent last winter.
To make my heating fuel supply last longer, I’ll be supplementing the heat with wood and coal. I have a stove in the living room I can burn either coal or wood in. I can usually find free wood by clearing out people’s yards and coal is under $200 per ton. A ton usually lasts one winter and cuts the amount of heating fuel I have to burn.
Although there is no dollar store nearby, I managed to visit one when I went down to see my parents interred in the cemetery. They had a note at the door that everything was now $1.25 instead of $1.00 due to inflation. A quarter may not sound like much but it adds up and for many people that quarter means they can’t afford as much as they could before. Instead of 5 items, they are only getting 4. I know it would have made it harder on my parents to have to buy less.
I just went to the grocery store today and noticed that much of the fruit I love to buy was running at least $1.00 more per pound, if there was any. The store was littered with signs saying that there were things that hadn’t arrived yet and they were sorry. It’s hard shopping for food when half of what you needed hadn’t arrived so you have to change your plans. I was looking at buying a six pack of eggs but the 18 pack size was half the price of a dozen so I bought the larger pack and will end up using eggs in a lot of my creations.
Honestly, I’ll be going with lots of noodle, bean, and rice based dishes, soups, and other dishes that allow me to use fewer vegetables and stretch what I have so it goes further. I’m also going to look up some depression era recipes to get ideas of things I can prepare that should cost less. My grandmother had a depression era cake recipe she’d make all the time. It used few ingredients and didn’t have any eggs.
I’m afraid the inflation may get really bad before it gets better. I’m hoping interest rates on houses do not get back up to the 12 and 15 percent they hit in the last century. I’m hoping the price of gas and groceries slow down and reverse, otherwise, I’ll have to start cutting back so I’m only driving the car once or twice a week. For the rest of the summer, I could ride a bike into town as it’s only seven miles away and once I get to town, I can hop the bus. In the winter, I’ll just plan to do everything in town once a week.
It is time to tighten our belts, cut back, so we can come out the other end in good shape as my father would say. Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear. Have a great day.
