October Budget Challenge – Week One

October started for me yesterday with summer temps (at least midwest style summer temps), two shopping trips, a trip to the bank, a trip to the library, and having friends over to swim and grill at our pool.  It was a very busy day.

As I had mentioned I would do in last weeks post (which you can check out here), I made a menu plan for the whole month of October.  It just about killed me.  I am not great at menu planning anyway, but having to do it for a whole month is really hard for me.  Then I remembered that I don’t have to have a new thing every day, and it got a little easier.  I looked over what I had and repeated the recipes that we tend to have too many leftovers of.  I will just freeze half of that meal right away and we can have it again a couple of weeks later.

After I made the menu, I made a list of everything we would need to cook those meals, except very perishable things like salad.  I looked over my list and made a separate list of things that I thought might be cheaper at Costco.  Since I wasn’t sure if they would really be cheaper, I took the kids there Friday morning to price things out.  Once I got there I realized that I forgot my pencil.  You know, the one that I had in my hand until right before we walked out the door.  So I went around Costco taking pictures of price tags with my phone.  I felt pretty silly, but fortunately it was not super busy.  I came home, did some math, and compared the unit prices to how much I know things cost at Target (where I do all my grocery shopping).  My friend, Kristina, suggested that I post some of my results.  I will do that later this week.

So I made my trip to Target (with kids), and then a trip to Costco (without kids – and without my list – oops).  I used my Target Redcard to pay for the groceries at Target to save 5% and used cash at Costco.  Out of the cash I took out yesterday, I set aside $40 for our dates this month.  If we do free dates, that would be great, but I thought budgeting $10 a week would be a doable goal.  I also had cash left from my Costco trip, because I forgot my list and ended up buying less stuff.  It is stuff that I think we can live without, so I tucked that cash away in a safe place.  I did NOT leave it in my wallet, because that is a dangerous place for cash.  With cash in my wallet, I am much more likely to say, “Oh, let’s just go through this drive through on the way home, because it is past lunch time and I don’t feel like making lunch.”  With no cash, no drive through.  That should save us some money too.

If you count all the money I spent yesterday and the cash I got, I have spent half of the money that I budgeted for our weekly expenses this month.  Yikes!  But I did buy most of the food we need for the month, and the rest of the money will go for milk, fruit, fresh veggies, etc that we will need each week.

Today I am going to spend some time cooking for the week.  Ben will go somewhere with the kids so I can cook uninterrupted, and I will hopefully get some meals going for our freezer.  That also reduces the chance of me calling for pizza on nights I am too wiped out to cook.

If you are doing the monthly challenge, what things have you put into place to help you reach your goals this week?  Anyone else cooking some freezer meals?  Anyone else not really have room in their tiny freezer after their trip to Costco yesterday?  I guess I should have taken that into consideration when I planned these freezer meals.

October Challenge Activity

Tomorrow starts the October Challenge! Today I am taking the kids to Costco to price out the things on my Costco list that I think are cheaper than Target to see if they really are. Oh and to pick up a coupon book, since I didn’t get one in the mail. Tomorrow the shopping will begin!

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!!