July has turned into a very rough budget month for us. My car has required two larger repairs, one we were able to fund with money we had saved; however the second forced us to dip in our emergency fund. The bright spot is that we had the Emergency Fund to us. We have done fairly well in the areas of both gas and groceries. In our gas fund we have $144 remaining. In groceries, we have only spent $300 but because of the huge amount we were over in June, I would like to keep this capped at this amount. Looking to the week ahead, we should have no extra expense and plan to eat our of our freezer and garden until our beach trip in 3 weeks.

We are planning to spend a week at the beach in August and I will post a detailed budget for that probably in the next week or so. One of the ways that we are able to afford this trip is we will be eating in the majority of the time but in order to make it a vacation we need to plan ahead so no one has to spend hours in the kitchen cooking. I spent most of my day today, cooking for our trip. I have frozen all the meals I prepared in throw away containers so that we will not have to bring anything back.

So now to the cooking part. I started with a bag of chicken quarters in the crockpot this morning. I was able to make 2 chicken casseroles to freeze (one for the beach) in addition to 2 bags of shredded chicken to be used for other meals. I also will be freezing between 10-15 bags of chicken booth for future use as well.  Next I prepared a baked Ziti, for the beach. I have also made and frozen a dozen muffins in addition to the remaining dozen for breakfast in the morning.  Finally, a pot of chili with some frozen for our hot dog meal at the beach. In addition I was able to cook lunch for everyone and dinner for our family in addition to supplying a meal for a family in our church. I am feeling quite accomplished right now and very happy to make one major item off my to do list!