Sunday, October 17, 2010

The Pizza Fund

Everyone needs an emergency fund of some sort.  It doesn't matter what you call it.  You need some extra money tucked away for an emergency.  Ours has come in handy in the past 4 months (still waiting for Dave to update you with this one) and it got us through a time when, quite frankly, we might not have been able to make it without it.  

Now that things are getting more "back to normal", I'd like to explain how our Pizza Fund works.  It's not our Emergency Fund, just something we wanted to try for fun.  

We bought 14 frozen pizza crusts for $17.  When we make "homemade pizza", we use spaghetti sauce and cheese.  The sauce is $.40/can and the cheese is $.57 per serving.

The pizza is too big for our oven so I cut the crust into quarters.  I treat each triangle as a separate pizza.  I dress 3 of the triangles as pizzas and the 4th one either goes back to the freezer or buttered and garlic'ed and cut into bread sticks.  

Each individual pizza costs $.50.  Bread sticks are actually a little cheaper, but I'll go with that.  I make tea for $.25/two quarts, which is more than enough for a meal.  The same "personal pan pizza combo" at Pizza Hut is $5.  I can make it at home for less than $.75.  

So I put a "pizza" account in our INGdirect.com account.  Each time we make a pizza at home, I transfer $5.  I could transfer $15, but since we would be more likely to go to Little Caesars than Pizza Hut, the $5 is more accurate for us. 

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