So hubs has realized that we are nickel and diming ourselves to death! We are killing our money slowly but surely. We don’t spend more than we make and we don’t live paycheck to paycheck, but we’re not saving either and that is the ultimate goal. We need to have a few months worth of money in the bank to cover us in case something happens!
Now, I am going to go to the bank each Friday and pull out our money for the week as follows…
$20 – Hubs allowance
$20 – Wife allowance
$40 – groceries
$10 – toiletries
$65 – Christmas fund
$10 – entertainment
Total $165.00/weekly
OK, so the Christmas one will eventually go down in December because the last one will be taken out Dec. 11. This fund will start over again in January, but will be much smaller because we will be starting much earlier next year. My girlfriend that does this all year is already done with all of her Christmas shopping! Could you imagine being done with your shopping in September! That is my goal. They rack up on presents after Father’s/Mother’s day and stuff like that throughout the year when things go on clearance and end up spending much less than they budgeted. With the money that’s left over they go out!
Entertainment “fund” is a small weekly amount because we will just have to keep accruing each week until we get the funds to do something, but if we save up some of our allowance than we could possibly do something each week or do something really nice at one time. We have some gift certificates for the movies and coupons from the entertainment book. Not to mention the specials you can find online.
Groceries is my normal one and I’m going to try and spend less than $40 each week. I am only going to buy what we “have” to have and what I can get for free, next to free or meat that is marked down or on sale for future week’s menu. I am going to include all paper products in that too. That’s going to be hard, but we HAVE to do this. I’m going to ATTEMPT to include dog food but we shall see how that goes.
I had to add $10 for toiletries so I can learn to play the drug store games. I am going to learn how to play the CVS game and get ECB’s so I can keep rolling those over to new deals and eventually get all of our toiletries for free. Some people have been doing this and keep doing it and it’s been years since they’ve actually used any of their own money towards toiletries. If they can do it, so can I!
I have coupons to get $25 gift certificates to K-mart for transferring or filling a new prescription. I have two I can do now, that will cost me $10 each to fill, but I get $50 gift certificates. That’s $30 for free! I can use that for more groceries at our local Super Kmart, dog food or paper products. Or I can go ahead and start looking for stuff for our oldest’s birthday party coming up at the end of the year.
I will learn how to live within this new budget. I have to. I guess it’s all about planning ahead and learning how to get stuff for free and work the deals at various stores. It is going to take me more time than I’ve been dedicating to staying within my grocery budget. We should be saving so much more money than what we are. And hopefully one day soon we will see the results of us living frugally on this budget.
So… here’s to living on a budget and living frugally. Hopefully by the end of the year we will see a difference!
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