Last year around this time we used our tax refund for two things:
1. An upright freezer
2. A quarter of beef and a half pig
(I guess that’s actually three things)
I did a TON of research before making these purchases — Do we want an upright or chest freezer? How big of one do we need?Which local meat market has the best prices? Will buying meat in bulk like this actually save us money?
I love to research. I can spend hours on Amazon reading reviews to find the absolute best _____. I’m the queen of Google. But that part of my personality makes it SO difficult to stop researching and just make a decision.
I hate making decisions.
What if I’ve overlooked some detail? What if there’s still something better out there that I just haven’t discovered yet? And mostly — what if my decision makes someone else unhappy?? (#EnneagramNine)
With a deadline approaching (the end of a sale on the freezer) I finally showed my husband my research and the conclusions I’d come to. He was happy with it (whew). I made the calls and spent the money.
Tip: When the time came to fill the shiny new freezer with the freshly packaged meat, we counted every piece that went in and typed up a paper for the front of the freezer, so we knew exactly what was in it and could cross things off as we used them.
Then we played Tetris to make it all fit.
It turned out, when I had talked to the meat market about our order, there were a number of cuts of beef that we didn’t really think we’d eat, so we just had the extras added to the ground beef.
We ended up with 150 pounds of ground beef. My research had only prepared me for 70-90 pounds.
After a bit of panic, we finally got the freezer door closed and had a good laugh about the mounds of hamburgers we’d be grilling over the summer. And I realized it would all be okay.
Meat, ice cream, breastmilk, chicken nuggets, and cheese. The important things in life.
Sometimes we get our research wrong, or things simply don’t end up the way we expected them to. So we adjust our course and move on. It’s a discipline I have trouble with, but I’m getting better.
How about you? Are you an indecisive researcher like me? Or do you have tips in how I can overcome this? 🙂
About that meat! It’s been SO wonderfully simple over the last year to meal-plan around what we have on hand (yay for easier decision-making!). It was quite the cost up front, but being able to avoid the meat section of the grocery store (except when we want chicken) has been helpful to our monthly grocery budget.
Plus I know this meat was locally raised, meaning higher quality and support of our local farmers.
I’ve also learned we sure love our sausage and bacon. Maybe we’ll get a whole pig next time…
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