October Budget Challenge

One of the things that has changed in our life with the move to Arizona has been our budget.  Living off support (you can read more about that here, if you don’t know what I’m talking about), and me not working has drastically reduced our monthly income.  Obviously when that happens you have a few choices: find a way to increase your monthly income, decrease your monthly spending, or live in denial and wrack up huge amounts of debt.  Anyone who knows we well knows that number three is not a true option.  Right now we are trying to discern what I should do at the moment job wise, so number one is not in play right now either.  That left us with decreasing our monthly spending.

Since this is (hopefully) a temporary decrease in monthly income, we did this a number of ways.  We stopped contributing to college funds, we stopped saving for retirement (temporarily), we raised our insurance premiums, we don’t have cable, and I can’t (as often as I used to) say, “I’m tired.  Can we just go out for dinner?”

I have learned a lot about my old spending habits and patterns over the past few months.  I will find myself in situations where I think, “Well, I’ll just go buy _________”  Sometimes it is for me or Ben, but mostly those are things for the kids.  However, that thought is now followed up by, “Oh, you can’t or shouldn’t just go buy _____________, you don’t have the money for it, and you don’t need it.”  I am really good at saving money, but I am also really good at spending the money that I have on things we don’t really need.  This season in our lives is teaching me how often I used to do that.

Although we live on a new, tighter budget that doesn’t mean we don’t have any fun.  Ben and I have been enjoying date nights that Michelle has blessed us with, and there are times when I am too tired and convince Ben we need to pick up a pizza or something.

We finished September right. on. budget.  No extra wiggle room there.  I am not a fan.  I like to finish months with extra money that I can stick into our savings account.  So I analyzed what we spent our money on, and decided to issue myself a budget challenge for October.

I am the kind of person who gets really easily overwhelmed by any kind of challenge or task that I don’t think I will be successful at.  Therefore I do much better if I tell myself that I only have to try something for one month, or one week, or one day.  I think that will make this challenge doable for me.  I would like to see if at the end of October I can have some money to put in the bank.  Mostly I just like putting money in the bank, but I will be using this money to help pay for Savannah’s cardiologist appointment last month.

With any goal it is important to lay out some objectives.  Here is how I plan to accomplish this task.

• Plan out my menu for the entire month.  I did this once before, and I actually really liked it.  I hate to cook and I hate to menu plan even more, so knowing that I didn’t really have to do it again for a whole month was really nice.  I used it loosely, meaning if I really wanted to make Thursday’s scheduled meal on Tuesday, it wasn’t a big deal.
• Try to do one big shopping trip for the basics I need with my menu for the month.  I use a Target RedCard (that I pay off every month) to save 5% on our groceries each week.  I buy those groceries at SuperTarget, because it not only has the lowest prices of any grocery store I have ever been to (unless you are going to extreme coupon at those stores), and I get the 5% off.  I have an extra 5% coupon from filling five prescriptions there with my redcard (thanks, Savannah).  I am going make a master menu based on what is on sale next week at Target, paired with coupons, and my discounts to try to spend less on our groceries for the month.  I will obviously still need to buy fruit, veggies, and dairy each week.
• Bake?  This one gets a question mark, because I’m not sure it is a great one for me to do based on some other personal goals I have.  I like to have a little somethin’ somethin’ sweet each day, and I usually buy that at the store.  I would say I spend $3.00 a week on it.  I could bake something for much less, but I am notoriously bad at portion control, and I fear that I would eat way too many calories and then spend even more money replacing my baking supplies.  I guess we’ll see what I decide.
• Get creative with date nights.  We don’t spend a lot of money on date nights, but I want to see if we can spend even less this month.  Michelle comes over at 6:30, and we usually feed the kids and then get something to eat on our date.  It would be just as easy to eat with the kids for October and not eat out.  I have two movie passes we can use one week.  That makes a free date.  We could pack up our stuff and go hang out at our own pool for the evening.  You know, sit in the hot tub with no kids.  Free date.  It is finally cooling off in the evenings, so we could just go for a walk and share a dessert somewhere.  Cheap date.  You get the idea.

Now you have it.  My goal and my objectives.  What about you guys?  Are there any budget areas you would like to trim up next month?  What would you do with that extra money?  Pay down some debt?  Emergency fund?  Fun shopping trip?  Diapers?  If you want to do it with me, let me know in the comments so we can all encourage one another.  I go grocery shopping on Saturdays, so I will update each Sunday (or Monday) on how I did the previous week.  Let’s get saving!!