With a new year comes new ideas. We want to tighten our budgets, belts and anything else we can cinch up. A few times a year I write out a new budget just to keep things on track. This year I decided to add new categories like clothing, entertainment, Christmas and birthdays or anniversaries. When talking to someone about budgeting I am always amazed how people dont know how much they spend on things like groceries or dining out. I think the biggest thing is we dont want to know. So the new categories I added are things that I sort of have an idea on what I spend but not really. I even decided to use the trusty old envelope system to keep me on track. As you can see in the pictures above I wrote out all the things we pay out. On the paper that is not pictured i wrote what those things are. Lots of things will remain the same every month like car payment, house payment, insurance but utilities usually fluctuate a little bit or a lot if it gets really cold. I even put firewood in my budget because we actually save a little bit on our gas and electric bill buying firewood and using it in the cooler months plus we enjoy seeing the fire and like our evening fires outside in the warmer months. Since buy firewood balances out and nothing is lost its a win win in our books. Plus if there is an ice storm and we lose power we are good to go.
My weekly grocery budget is $150 a week and that feeds 4 adults breakfast, lunch. dinner and snacks. Thats $37.50 a week per person or $5.35 a day per person. When you break it down like that it really makes you not want to grab a value meal somewhere since that would be all you could eat that day. I am really going to work on getting this number lower. We will save some of this in the summer as we grow our own food and what we spend on seeds, dirt and all the other stuff that goes with gardening will come out of the grocery budget as well. I will keep you posted on how this goes and what we eat.
Entertainment and dining go together and I put $50 a week for this. That seems a bit excessive I think but when you take into account what it costs for 4 people to eat out its not a far stretch. This past weekend we rented a movie from Redbox that cost me .53 and we ordered chinese good which cost $45 so you can see it doesnt take much to reach that total but we did get two meals from the chinese food. I have already spent this weekends entertainment budget. $20.25 on a Dining Coupon book for the year and I got a $50 voucher for $25 to a mexican place we have wanted to try. Since one of my goals this year is to go on more dates with Mr Ladybug I will have to get creative with my money saving.
Making time for blogging is on my goals list as well but I am headed out the door in like 10 minutes to get my boy to his dental appt. More on saving money. time and our sanity tomorrow. I would love to hear about your goals and any ideas you use to save money on anything.
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