I have to admit that I have cut back on doing certain things, like crochet and knitting, I still do it, but aside from a few orders here and there, I've just been doing things for myself and my family. It's pretty nice actually. I've started the insanity workout (13lbs of baby weight to go) and been working on doing a lesson plan for Monday-Friday for my mini-me, meal planning for a month at a time and keeping track of our budget more. Meal planning for the month and budgeting go hand in hand. In our house we have individual budgets for every member of the house separate from our general and grocery spending. I'm attempting to be smarter with that and already started Christmas shopping from Mr.M's budget.
Budgeting is becoming more important for us! I've realized that we buy whatever we want whenever we want it and that's a bad habit, it also makes it super difficult to buy for us during holiday times. We also need to work on saving for our vacation, weekend trips, and new house that we hope to start building by the end of the year.
On that note, the budget that we seem to have the most difficulty with is the GROCERY budget. It seems like we set it and then ignored it! In March I tried just tracking our spending and did my usual weekly meal planning and it seemed to be okay, until the last week when we went over by $80.
This month I took a new approach and tried planning for the whole month. The first thing I did was pantry cook! The last week in March I knew that we would go way over if we didn't, I also knew our cabinets were full and it still seemed like we had nothing to eat. I cleaned out the cabinets first, I was surprised by how many things had actually expired! Those items hit the trash, then I assessed what we had and planned our meals accordingly, only getting what was necessary, sadly we still needed many things because I hosted Easter dinner.
The last Friday night in March I worked on planning out meals for HOURS. I started with my go to meals- sweet potato shepherds pie, healthy turkey meatloaf, pork chops, spaghetti squash with roasted vegetables, Greek chicken and whole roasted chicken... I decided we couldn't have each meal more than twice a month. I then decided that we would have one left over night a week, we've never been good at eating left overs and it seemed like an obvious way to save money, we also kept with one meatless night a week, and making a dessert as our fun activity on Thursdays. The I searched for the new things I wanted to try.
Once I figured out EVERYTHING I was going to make I figured out what things I would need for multiple meals, ie. Chicken breasts, ground turkey, yeast and then all other things that could be bought in bulk, paper towels, water, formula (I already have diapers and wipes on recurring order on Amazon.com) I made a bulk grocery list and then the list for everything else we needed just for that week. Our in bulk shopping trip came to $350 (including formula) and our week trip $150.
I then decided I needed to color code things to give myself a heads up on certain days, like crock pot days.
Pink was for regular meals
Green was a pre-made frozen meal
Yellow for left overs and Eat out days
Blue for Crock pot
and Orange was for desserts
Our breakfast and lunch menu is pretty basic and revolves around 3 standards. We have completed 21 days on this plan and have stuck to it! We also finished our last shopping trip for the month! After the first week we spent another $400, bringing our total to $900 for the month before diapers and eating out...in the end we have finished $20 below budget! That's the best we've ever done!
I wasn't super prepared to blog about it this month, so my goal for May is to blog about it while planning and give details on planning, with meals, recipes, and lists.
I highly recommend planning for the entire month of May this week!
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