As the month of October comes crashing to an end, I am thinking toward debt reduction and our budget for the coming year. This year has seen some major financial changes for us, but my God is bigger than any of those!  I will share in more detail very soon the evidence of this! However in the mean time, I have been focusing on readjusting the budget. Our biggest spending area has always been the grocery budget. In reality, I have fed and providing our items for personal use for about $31 a person a week.  For the past 3 months, including this one I have been below budget. Looking back at the entire year to this point I am 50% for meeting budget and on average spend $756 a month. My thought is that with diapers and formula no longer being needed at all, I should be able to reduce this amount to $600 a month. Starting in November, I am going to use this as a stated goal. in addition to this goal, I know that I need to start using cash for grocery purchase. But in order to do this I have to be able to limit shopping for several weeks so maybe November will help in this area also. This month I have spent $725 including my shopping today.

We decided to head to Winston Salem today in order to use one of the gift cards I won at the Fall festival and combine it with an awesome,kids eat free coupon at Olive Garden. Combining both deals we (5) ate for $20 tip included, I also brought home enough left overs for Haley’s dinner and at least 2 lunches tomorrow!  I am really pleased with this deal and combined with the fact we order and ate a free pizza at lunch, no eating out should not be a problem this weekend.

I had read earlier that Harris Teeter was having a really good sale this week, so when I settled on the fact that we were heading to Winston, I decided to plan a coupon trip. To keep things real, I spent approximately 1. hour looking at the sales and pulling out coupons. I spent $31 and saved $63 or 67%!! Even better, I purchased eggs and milk that should last us for a couple of weeks. We will be leaving in 3.5 weeks for Michigian for a week. I would like to clean out some of the food from the freezers. Just in case the electricity goes out while we are away. I hope that will all the items we have been stockpiling, I will be able to avoid shopping  except for trip supplies until after our return.