Category Archives: Budgeting

Budget Post 12/21/2013

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Matt will be finishing up the final Christmas present today! I am excited to report that we have really reduced/maintained our spending this Christmas!  I know that the kids will not miss extra stuff and in additional there will be no worries as to how we need to adjust for January.

One of the new things I am trying is a financial journal. Each day I am trying to keep up with exact where we are in regards to spending and plans for extra money. I am most excited that we are still on track to end the year even! I even have a little extra money. But I want to hold on to this to make sure that everything arrives as it should!

I have moved the hair fund to an envelope  but it has not been fully funded yet but we have used for petty cash and it is much easier this way.

We only have $50 left in our gas fund for two weeks, we ended up with an oil change and new wiper blades out of this fund. I think we should be okay as we just filled both vehicles this week and with Christmas our driving will be minimal!

I am going to borrow a couple of items to start including in my budget post from Carla

A few things I saved on this week: Harris Teeter trip purchased 5 12 packs of Diet Coke, 2 jars of pickles, 2 cans of frosting and 2 12 packs of toilet paper for $23.07

My budget fail this week: Doing great so far!

Thursday-Budget Post 12/05/2013

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I was able to cross several items off my to do list today including establishing and resetting our budget. For the month of December, the focus will be on staying on track so that we can end the year “even”.  I have made some major allowances for eating out and a couple more gifts that I need to purchase.  I am most disappointed that I did not get an emergency fund in place but it will be a in place next year!

Several major changes will be occurring a couple of highlights are:
budget will be based on two checks a month, and will include Matt’s steady income. In January and July, I will receive an extra check which will be used to pay for vacations and extras.
eliminated the “auto fund” instead small repairs, oil changes, taxes will come out of the gas budget. At the end of each month, any amount left in the gas fund will be transferred to the second account for more majority car repairs or saved.
added dinning out envelope this will allow us to eat out once a month or if we are careful twice a month. The plan is to add to this account with extra money that is found or left from the previous month grocery fund. This is a cash only envelope which is harder for us to spend. Grocery budget will remain at $600 a month as this is our average for the year!
hair fund has been moved to a cash only envelope. This will also be the “petty cash” if needed!

In April or before if we can pay off the Home Depot card, that payment will be transferred to our emergency fund.  I know that it will take several years but I plan to leave this as a regular schedule payment until $5000 is in the account!

I am excited that we are on the right track and I think we are in a good position to succeed this next year!

 

Best Laid Christmas Plans!

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At the start of last week, I was excited, in my mind, I had a list of things to accomplish over the holiday weekend which would have me well prepared for December.  So the best laid plans have now been way scattered. First Lily was sick on Monday and stayed home from school. Next Matt became sick on Wednesday and pretty much was out of commission till Friday. Finally, the Christmas tree that I was so excited to arrive on Thanksgiving morning and even comment how much fun and easy it was to decorate has fallen twice now!  Which resulted in late night re-decorating and cleaning.

Third time decorated!

Third time decorated!

So now I have a list of things that I need to get caught up on prior to Lily’s Birthday, which is Friday.  Here is the short version:
1. Complete and order 3 photo gifts including a calendar for my dad!
2. Seal, address and send Christmas cards.
3. Wrap all presents so that we can use my closet again!
4. Complete decorations outside.
5. Complete Christmas shopping, luckily this involves only 1 more present besides the photo gifts.
6. Ship gifts to family out of state.
7. Budget for December as well as a new system budget for next year!  I may be able to postpone the new budget another week as I am sure this is more brain power than I have left.

Matt has graciously agreed to take over the house cleaning this week so that it is presentable for Lily’s party but I still need to order tickets for Disney on Ice on Saturday!

Moving Rooms-Remodeling on the cheap!

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The  old master bedroom has seen it’s fair share of updating and painting. Prior to her senior year, Haley decided to paint it a bright blue and pic, (check it out). The other big change came in 2010 when we pulled up the carpet and placed a laminate floor down. At the time, we chose a cheap laminate with the idea that in about 5 plus years we would need to update and replace. However in less than three this is what the floor looked like…

Part of the problem was a cat with a major behavioral issue but I firmly believe that the majority of the problem was the quality of the laminate.

With Haley’s decision to move to her father’s, we knew we would need to replace the floor prior to Lily moving into that room. So that is what we have been working on the last several days. I am very pleased with the result. In total we spent $500 for a new toilet, paint for the half bath that is attached and new flooring for bedroom, walk in closet and half bath. This is a vinyl laminate that is self adhesive. It took us about 4 hours to lay the floor and that included the mandatory breaks that occur with three children in the house.

Lily’s bed with the new floor
New commode with the opps paint we purchased for $10.

November in Review

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I am posting these a day early so that I can share a major way to save money tomorrow on home renovations!

Financial goals:  November has been a better month for us, however with the expenses of car insurance, which I had not completely saved this time and lot of Christmas shopping it was an expensive month.  We were able to reduce our monthly expenses by $100 by reducing cable and eliminating our home security system. This new number will begin in December so I will be developing a new plan for the 2014 with these new figures.

  • Pay off Lawn mower by March 2014, so no interest is charged. Payment of $100 made, almost a triple payment. Steady progress. I have added to this initial debt with the purchase of flooring but have a plan to still pay all off prior to interest being applied!
  • Pay off all outstanding debt except the mortgage by June–  No progress this month but no new debt. We missed this goal obviously but my new goal is June 2014!
  • Emergency fund to $2000–  I have been talking and being in January this will be a major goal and I will be adding a line item to our budget to make it a reality.
  • Maintain a budget using a form of the envelope system -Slight adjustments in this area as well. I am going to be moving several items to cash envelopes such as hair to make this easier.
  • Groceries: Spend $600 or less a month  We have spent $453 this month. In December my plan is to stick to less than $200 by eating out of the fridge and pantry!
  • Gas- Goal Met!! We currently have $150 left in our gas budget which we used for part of our car insurance.

Blogging:  Goal: 15 per month:  This is post number 14 with another post with pictures about our new flooring!

Devotions: Goal is 5 a week   Goal Met! I am really enjoying my morning time.

Weight: Goal to exercise 3x a week and to be down to 150 by December by losing around 4 # a month.. I have been consistently exercising 2x a week and actually lost some weight in addition to my clothes fitting much better. I will be continuing to work on this next year.

So my goals look much better this month! In December I will be spending some time reviewing each goal and deciding how to proceed for next year. I will plan an several post on budgeting and at least an update in December with new goals stated for January. Progress should be celebrated!

Productive Weekend

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I was able to get some extra hours off of work this week so I have been planning ahead to get things done this weekend. I am really excited at how much we have managed to accomplish!  I know that the next several weeks will be progressively more busy so I am so glad to feel like I am ahead of the game. Here is a list of thing that we accomplished this weekend:     1. Snow village is total complete!
2.  Christmas decorations are almost complete except for the tree which we will be picking up on Thursday. As a bonus, I have even managed to get some of the boxes back up in the attic
3. I am over 75% complete with Christmas shopping. My goal for this next week is to finish up all that I can  face the dreaded wrapping.
4.  I made an early morning trip to CVS this morning and saved 80%. I will be posting more about this trip on Thursday, when I return to CVS to use up the ECBs that I earned. I always look at these trips as one because I am carrying things forward.
5. We were able to purchase flooring and a new toilet for Lily’s new room. It would be awesome if she actually got to move into her new room on her birthday weekend. But that is a lot of work between now and then!
6. Naps on both days!
7. Finally, we have managed to clean out the fridge so that we can have some really comfort hot meals this week as the weather is too cold for my comfort!

 

Saving Money/ Budget Update

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We did it!!! We decided to cut our cable bill.

I have been unhappy with our  cable company for several years. The last time our “contract” was up they sent us a letter which I didn’t read carefully, that locked us into our service for another 2 years. Finally this past weekend that “contract” ended. Matt and I have been exploring objects over the last month. Because we do live in a small town, the options are limited.  We also received a new offer from the cable company in which they were only going to increase our current pricing by 5% or $10 total.  We both were appalled to pay $180 a month for our bundle of tv, internet and phone. Unfortunately, with Matt’s business there is not another option for us in regards to internet and after some research we discover that without losing our current number or having a “long distance” number from this area, we also are stuck with phone service as well.

Our initial plan was to eliminate cable tv completely and  reducing our phone to “local” only, is would drop our bill by $100.  However, we also discovered that live television is very difficulty to obtain without a huge antenna. So after spending almost an hour on the phone with Time Warner, we ended keeping basic cable (13 channels), our phone with no long distance and internet. Matt turned in all the other boxes and gadgets from them as well.  In the end we dropped our bill by $80!

When combining this with cancelling our security system, we will be decreasing our monthly expenses by $110 a month!   I also have a plan in place to have us end the year even for the year and start next year with a zero budget!  I also hope to get a small emergency fund in place as well.

Have you saved any lately?

Saving Money in November

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One of the advice that you will receive reading any financial advise is to check your budget and eliminate as much as needed. I thought we were on top of this; however as we have discovered there were some major savings that we found.

The first of which is our security system. This was initial purchased around 6 years ago. At the time, we had two teenage daughters and 3 very small kids in the house. Our biggest concern was not about someone breaking in but rather someone getting out unexpectedly. When we started to try to find money in our budget three years ago, one of the first things we did was call this company. We were able to reduce our monthly monitoring fee by $10 and received some new free equipment.

Over the past two months, we have again been looking at our expenses with the goal of having a total balanced ( income=expenses) budget to start 2014.

This was an easy decision for us to cancel the contract. One of the biggest factor was that the company no longer supports our equipment.  This of course becomes a problem when we need to replace a couple of sensors and the battery of the main box. Our plan currently is to keep the system in place as we own the equipment. The monitoring  by the company, ends November 30. The one feature that we will lose is that if an alarm goes off, police and/or fire will not be notified by the company.  We did end up throwing away several sensors but for the most part we still like having an alarm on the doors and most windows.

This is an easy saving of $28 a month! Keep reading because a much bigger saving and change are in the works for next week!

Stretching Our Food Budget

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I am attempting to feed 5 of us (both the older girls eat only occasionally) on a budget of $600 a month. Let me break this down a little bit further; that is 35 breakfasts, 31 lunches, and 35 dinners a week, or 430 meals a month.  Both the girls usually eat at school several times a week but both need a daily snack as well.   This amount includes pet care as well as all items except clothing that I purchase to use in the house, paper towel, toilet paper, hair spray, soap, deodorant etc.

Last month, I failed miserable by spending almost double that amount. So one of the things that I will be doing in November to even out the budget for the year is stretching our food.  I had originally thought that our chicken purchase would make 50 meals for 5 people or 250 meals. However I have already added at least 10 meals to this number. Here is how:
1. This is simple, depending on the amount of leftovers, I pack a dinner plate or so for me to take to lunch. For example- after 2 dinners of chicken pie, I packed two dinner plates for my lunches.
2. I use leftover chicken to make a different meal. The World’s best chicken was a disappointment alone, so I made chicken salad out of the remaining breast. The girls LOVED this and I know have eaten for lunch at least 2 days and I had a sandwich last night for dinner.  Another example is I used the remaining chicken breast from the Café Rio chicken for a pot of chicken and rice soup. I chose this because I had some carrots and onions as well that needed to get eaten. So out of the one bag of chicken, we are currently eating meal number 4.
3. Schedule a left over meal. We had leftovers at least twice last week. One of the meals ended up being a vegetable plate, which the kids thought was a great change.
4. This one is a great lunch suggestion- instead of buying individual size jello or pudding. Buy a box and make it at home. We use re-useable containers and once a week. I will make jello or pudding for the following week. The girls enjoy containers of popcorn, goldfish and nuttella with crackers. By buying in a large size and separating at home, I saved a ton of money!
5.  Use coupons to buy some convenience foods for the days you just don’t want to cook. We love pizza and I don’t mind making pizza but on days like today that we have spent busy in the house and outside, come lunch and I don’t want to take time to make the pizza. So we have several frozen pizza in the freezer, we used one of them today instead of running out for pizza or fast food which would have been $10 at best.

If we can control our eating out then our overall budget goes much better. Do you have any suggestion for stretch your food?

 

 

What to Do with 120# of Chicken?

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Day Zero- This actually occurred several weeks ahead of time for me. I started searching for a variety of chicken recipes that could easily be frozen. I discovered that the internet is full of ideas but I eliminated first the ones that required ingredients that I don’t normally cook with or just sounded like the same basic idea and second ones that didn’t sound like they would freeze well or be easy to complete. I printed these recipes up and made a stack to be addressed in the next step.

Day One- I will admit that this step took 3-4 hours to complete. I took my recipes decided if I wanted to double triple or just try it out. Next, was a list of the quantity of dishes. Third was the list of ingredient divided into two parts, items on hand and items that needed to be purchased. Finally I made a list of items to be purchased, including which store to purchase at and searched for any coupons I could find.

Day Two- Shopping.  I purchased most items on my regular trip to Costco and Target but did make another stop the week we received the chicken to purchase the fresh veggies that were still needed.

Day Two and half- I again spread this out over 3-4 days of the week of chicken arrival. I clean and made space for the chicken first in our large chest freeze, then in one of our kitchen freezers so initial freezing will be easier for some of the items. We also located several crates that will make transporting to the chest freezer easier. I also clean out space in the fridge to be able to place at least one of the boxes to  take a break on Saturday night to get the kids feed and in bed.

Day Three- I spent about two and half hours chopping up all the fresh veggies and even beginning to label some of the bags.

Day Four- Chicken arrived, the pick up was smooth and the easiest I have ever experienced.  In total we spent 4 hours processing the chicken into the recipes you can find here. I am only counting time that we (Matt and I) were working with the chicken. I did have around an hour that I stopped to get the kids to bed and another 30 minutes that I took a shower while waiting for the crockpots to finish with the chicken to be shredded.  By far, the best tip I have is the Kitchen Aid mixer will shred chicken in 2 minutes!

Total of 48 set meals not counting left overs, so easily 50 meals totally prepared in 10 hours or less.  Now to see how long it actually last!