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Finding our Budget
In May we were able to save $1000 for an emergency fund, pay off $1900 in debt, and save almost enough for our June expenses–pretty awesome, considering we did this on an imaginary budget.
By “imaginary budget” I mean this: we have variable weekly salaries and we were using the program on Dave Ramsey’s My Total Money Makeover. It was useful for estimating our expenses, but there was no way to watch the income and outgo over time or adjust things as our checks came in. Our May budget was purely theoretical–and I don’t know much about budgeting, but I know that make believe budgets are a no-no.
So I started looking for more sophisticated alternatives to TMMO budgeting program. I looked at Mvelopes and You Need a Budget…people seem to like both programs, so I made the cheap choice: a one-time payment of $19.95 for You Need a Budget (for Mac) over Mvelopes’ $13.20/month (first month free).
We’re only 3 days in, but this makes so much more sense! The awesome part is that we saved up so much in May, we’re just a few hundred short of being a month ahead as YNAB recommends, our paychecks this Friday will round out our June expenses and then we’ll be saving for July and paying off debt.
I’m also seeing how this type of budgeting, the “recording every little purchase” type, helps a person save money. It’s like keeping a food journal; recording every bite helps you see how much you’re really consuming and keep it in check–and knowing that you have to write every little thing down makes you stop and think, “Do I really need this?” before diving in.
Still, we’re totally new to keeping a real budget and I’d love some advice…tips? Tricks? Motivation?
Ways to Save on Your Grocery Budget
The grocery bill is a popular place to attack overspending—and at $900 a month spent on groceries and restaurants for just 2 people, our grocery bill deserved to be attacked.
It’s been about 2 months, so I’m still very much a beginner at this, but we’ve chopped our food expenses in half. $300 is the food budget for May and I’m fairly sure we’ll pull it off.
Here’s what has worked for us so far:
1. Have a Plan! This is by far the most important part of grocery store strategy. There are 21 meals in a week, plus snacks—what will you eat? At minimum, you should have a plan for dinner. (The books Saving Dinner and Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way are a great help if you’re clueless, and the recipes are inexpensive, healthy and seasonal) You need a list, and you need to know what the foods on that list will cook. And then, you actually have to cook—more on that in a later post.
2. Loss Leaders, grocery store sale fliers, whatever you call them, they need to be right in front of you as you plan the week’s meals and your grocery list. This week, for example, Safeway’s sale flier had a coupon for a $1 carton of eggs and another for 4 lbs of Strawberries for $4, so I planned on two egg breakfasts and one omelet dinner—and I scrapped my idea to buy cherries ($2.97/lb) and went with strawberries instead.
3. Consider going to more than one grocery store. This one is easy for us, because Mister actually works at a grocery store, but I think other people can probably swing it too. It goes like this: While looking at the sales you’ll see that if you bought from the best sales at 2-3 different stores, you’d seriously trim your grocery budget and still get a lot of variety. I’m still figuring out the best stores to shop at and when—it will likely depend on the sales each week and what we want to eat.
Some considerations in our case: our local King Soopers doubles coupons up to $.50 and is on my way home from work—no extra transport to get there so it’s easy to stop and grab the best deals. Sunflower Farmer’s Market (our version of Trader Joe’s) has organic and natural food and ridiculously low sale prices on some items—Wednesday is the day to shop there because it’s the day when last week’s and next week’s sales overlap—double savings! There’s definitely a balance between convenience and savings with this tip—you’ll never catch us driving across town to catch some deep discounts on kitty litter and pudding snacks, but I’m finding that 2 small trips to different stores is doable and helpful. (Caveat: The multiple stores tip only works if you have a real list and stick to it—if you don’t, you’ll likely end up spending more because of all the little extras you throw into the cart on each trip.)
4. Coupons. I’ll have more on this one later, but coupons can be fun! I use them only when the item is already on sale and it’s a product we definitely use. Toiletries and laundry detergent are a great place to start because there are so many coupons for these items and you get a chance to compare the best deals. I still haven’t figured out how to organize them properly and I’m very much a beginner, but I’m saving at least $12-15 a week by using coupons.
5. Try The Grocery Game—I’m not totally “sold” on this service, but I think it can be good for people who are coupon newbies. My first week with them I was amazed at the deals, but even by week two I was figuring out deals that The Grocery Game missed. Also, I’m fairly sure that GG lists are chosen based on highest % discounts, so the list might instruct you to go for a great deal on asparagus (60% off!!) when it would be cheaper to get the broccoli at 20% off. Still, it makes saving money fast and easy and time is one of the bigger obstacles for people trying to save money at the supermarket. In other words, you shouldn’t trust the list blindly—but the $1 4-week trial is definitely worth it if you have no clue where to start with coupons and supermarket sales.
Ok, that should do it for now…got any tips I should add? I’m still new at this and looking to learn!
$2480 or “Stuff We Sold”
Me and Mister are recovering broke people. By “recovering broke people” I mean this: a few months ago, Mister had to go the bank and ask for an extension of our credit line so that we could make rent. Humbling, humiliating–whatever it was, we were done with it.
We stopped ordering take out and going to restaurants. We canceled cable and newspaper delivery and then we had our land line disconnected. I started clipping coupons and packing lunches. We sold stuff on ebay and craigslist. We took extra hours at work. We’re planning the Mother of All Moving Sales…and we won’t be needing that credit line again.
Meet our old stuff–it’s other people’s stuff now:
= $2480
It was a good week!
