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Archive for the ‘Budget’ Category

Ah…Feeling low. I just checked our accounts and it seems as though we’ve already spent $890 on groceries and restaurant purchases this month (we are aiming for $800/month for our family of four). We would only be at $800 if we hadn’t treated a couple of relatives to lunch a few weeks ago but considering they had driven all the way up to see our child get a high-orange belt in hapkido it would have been rude not to pay the lunch bill (plus, you always feel good when you get to treat!). Of course, I could have made a lunch at home and saved money and now I realize that’s what we should have done. But at the time I couldn’t see myself dealing with the stress of cooking that day what with the fact that I was still a bit sick with a cold/fever and was trying to spend most of the weekend writing my book.

So now I have to figure out what to do. I mean, it isn’t as if we are going to go broke or anything, it just is disheartening when you don’t meet your goal, you know?! The only thing I can do now is damage control. That means no more food purchases for the rest of the month, of course. I just went to the store yesterday and got 4 dinners worth of food and some lunch and breakfast stuff.

So I think I can stretch it out for the next 9 days. I’ll make that my new goal. The dinners I had planned are: spinach crepes (recipe here), beans and rice (recipe here), honey-lemon chicken (recipe here), and bbq lobster tails (recipe here). We also have a side of fresh green beans with almond-butter to prepare at some point.

Now, believe you me I realized that the lobster tails were going to be expensive but I didn’t know how much until I got to the store. $10 a piece, frozen! I only bought two. They aren’t a frugal item in the least but I bought them a) not knowing that we were over-budget and b) because I wanted to surprise my husband, who told me the other day that he’d never eaten lobster before.

As far as the recipes go, I have made the spinach crepes and honey-lemon chicken tons of times so they are both tried-and true favorites in my family. The beans and rice recipe will probably not get eaten by my kids but all 71 reviews for the recipe are good so I am confident that at least my husband and I will like it. We’ll see about the lobster tails!

Woohoo! We only spent $290 on groceries/restaurants so far this month and we are already half way through the month. That is $100 less than what we are aiming for at the mid month (our budget is $800/month). Here’s the budget screen-shot from our Mint account:

The numbers on the right under the column heading “100% budget over?” (which is a ridiculous name for a column, by the way) are based on our actual spending from the time at which we started tracking our spending on Mint. That’s why we are aiming for $800 a month on groceries and restaurants combined but the budget column has $1040 listed. I could change it, I think, so that the budget column reflects a budget amount that I set, but I kind of like to see how far below our previous spending we are.

The hilarious part is, of course, that our entertainment spending is at $30. Holy cow! I guess food has been our entertainment. Since we have two little kids and pretty much work and take care of them 24-7 we do nothing for entertainment other than watch an occasional movie. We have been known to splurge every other year on super-fancy vacations by ourselves (kids with grandma) so perhaps that makes up for the embarrassing entertainment budget somewhat!

Food Budget Update

First off, our budget is looking so great this month! I am excited to announce that we only spent $707 this month on food. I don’t expect that we will spend any more money in the next few days either. So that brings us in at $93 under budget! You know, it has actually been really easy to get our food budget down and it makes me wonder just how in the heck we were spending SO much ($1100-$1200/month) on food before we started keeping to this budget. So, since we have been eating relatively well (we are not living off of beans and rice alone, here!), it makes me realize that if we were to start eating off the super-cheap stuff we could probably cut it down by at least another $200. For now, though, I am satisfied to keep it at this level of spending.

Emergency Supplies

Secondly, after reading Frugal Dad’s recent post Is Recession Preparing a New Breed of Survivalist? I remembered that our emergency supplies are probably all out of date. We have about 12 gallons of water in the garage which is probably 1.5 to 2 years old. I need to remember to dump it on the garden and buy new water. We also need more canned food. This all leads me to another thought: about a year ago I saw a picture in some random magazine that showed a middle class family standing proudly in front of a rack of emergency supplies that they kept in their garage. Now, I think that is great, but the weird thing about the picture was that the rack had like 10 boxes of cereal on it. It is so funny that we have gotten so out of touch about basic survival that we would think that cereal is the way to go. I mean, yeah, it is fine if your power is knocked out for a few days, then you’ve got cereal (what about milk?!), but if it were a true emergency I would think that cooking basics like 10 or 20 pounds of flour, sugar, salt, etc., would be the best and most versatile thing to have. All of that was a long-winded way of saying that I might spend that extra $93, or some of it at least, on new emergency supplies.

Chart outlier warning: I signed up for Mint, the service I use to track my finances, a few months ago, so it doesn’t actually have a full month’s worth of data for December 2007.

What we spend on food and dining out is obviously a lot more than the “average” U.S. spending, according to Mint’s data. I want to know a little bit more about this “average” spending data that Mint uses because it seems to me that if they have a lot of singleton users (i.e, not families) then yes, their spending would be a lot lower because they are only feeding one person. So what I really want to compare myself to are those people who have Mint accounts who are feeding four people, not just one or two.

Regardless, I’ll bet we still spend more than the average, albeit the difference is probably not quite so drastic. The thing I am most happy about regarding this chart is that it shows how much we have cut back on our spending! We spent over $300 less on food and dining in April than we did in March. Yay!

Also, did anybody notice the counter-intuitive trending going on in the US average numbers? I mean, with all this talk about food prices increasing, why would it be that the last 3 months have shown average declines in the amount we are spending on food? The only thing I can think of is that an increasing proportion of less affluent Mint users are signing up over time, thus pulling the averages downward more and more every month. Something to ponder anyway!

Well, we did it! We stayed within budget and then some this month! We had budgeted $800 for groceries and restaurant meals for the month for our family of four and came in at $775. We were helped along by a $50 gift card to a restaurant chain that we got from our rewards credit card. Other than that we did not go out to eat at all, except one trip to DQ for ice cream after the kiddos went to sleep (and who can give up that??!!).

The $775 we spent was way less than we usually spend. I know that we could still potentially save even more money, judging by what I see other people reporting on other financial blogs, but we do tend to frequent a more upscale grocery store which we know charges higher prices. Our reasons for going to that grocery store are threefold: 1) There are never any lines at the check-out counters so we save valuable time, 2) We often see people we know there and feel it is worth the social and networking opportunity, and 3) Great produce from local farms.

Our budget looks great when we look at it on Mint. The numbers on the right show our average spending on those categories for the past 3 months (since that’s how long I’ve been a member of Mint) and the numbers on the left are our totals for this month. There is a $55 grocery bill that isn’t reflected in this yet since it is still pending in our checking account (we just spent that $ last night). Here’s to hoping we can keep ourselves at this level of spending for the rest of the year!

Does candy count in your food budget? I broke down this evening and bought a couple of huge bags of candy and one smaller bag. Total cost: $6.50.  The other day I was at the grocery store wondering why the bags of beans were so expensive at $2-$3 per bag.  Now here I go and buy $3 bags of candy!  Save money on beans, buy more candy I guess.  My husband says candy definitely counts as food and I guess I agree.  So our new food budget tally for the month is…$667.00.

Our grocery and restaurant budget for April was set at $800. You may think that this is not very frugal, but relative to what we were spending before - $1200/month - you will see that it is a drastic reduction! Now, I hadn’t realized until recently that we were spending that much money each month on food. I knew it was a lot but had thought it was more like $1000/month. And with food prices increasing so much these days it seemed prudent to trim away some of this expense.

So far so good. It is already April 24 and we have only spent $660. A lot of our savings has come from not going out to lunch and instead eating left-overs, and not doing going out to eat once a week. We did go out to eat once this month but we had a $50 gift card to the restaurant, courtesy of our Chase Rewards card. Nice! I’ll write more about how I finally discovered how much we were really spending on food in a later post.