So maybe I should ask Amethyst, How did your husband go about setting up a freezer inventory w.o getting you POd?
EDR50, I think you could start a fascinating thread on "How does a couple keep things running without violating one another's staked-out territory?" Or even, "How does a couple agree on territory in the first place?" I will be watching for such a thread in future, hint hint
Sticking to the theme of "tracking costs/finances"--
Food is expensive, and we put time and effort into shopping for it and preparing it. Therefore, it is worth the effort to track freezer contents. This is our method:
When food goes in the freezer, it is labeled with the date and type of food (indexing). There, it soon gets buried, so husband goes through the freezer contents now and then and writes everything on sheets of paper that he posts on the freezer (tracking).
When one of us takes something out of the freezer to defrost, we check it off on the paper. As quality control, he goes through the freezer now and then and either corrects his papers, or creates new papers that he posts on the freezer....and round and round we go. It's low-tech, but it works.
If we decide this weekend's menu will be, say, lasagne (planning), he can tell me how much mozzarella and ground beef are in the freezer (data), and I can decide whether that's enough or we need to buy more (analysis). A giant pan of Amethyst's "Mamma Mia lasagne," baked on Saturday, makes 2 weekend dinners and eight frozen portions, so he tracks how many lasagne portions are in the freezer, ready to be defrosted for weeknight dinners.
I could automate the paper process, but then I'd have to maintain it, so who am I to mess with what works for him? He's retired, paper is cheap, and I like seeing his handwriting
SteveL, I'll think about upgrading to Quicken once I see whether our finances are complicated enough to be worth the $$...thanks for the suggestion.
Amethyst