Today is my Mom’s birthday, which means we are fast approaching the end of the year. I am already in the process of looking and working on a budget for 2016. I will do a final update and set new goals hopefully this week but today I want to focus on Food.<\/p>\n
\n- Menu planning is still happening although I have not been posting the last couple of weeks have been about a couple of special meals and using up leftovers. This week we have already had a meal using meatballs my sister in law brought, tonight we made a roast and used some the sides we had left-over and tomorrow the plan is to use and make pork fried rice from leftover Christmas Eve shoulder. I am also adding some “convenient” meals to the freeze with the extra time we have this week.<\/li>\n
- Our grocery spending for the month is close to $900 which is way over budget. I have been taking advantage of some sells and stocking up, in addition to some extra meals and appetizers.<\/li>\n
- Our average monthly\u00a0grocery spending for the year is at $691.59. I am totally amazed and excited for this number as it is under my $700 a month that I started in July.<\/li>\n
- I have been looking into some “average” numbers for grocery spending for our size family a “thrifty” plan is $770 and a “Low” plan is $1028 per month.<\/li>\n
- After finding these numbers I am very comfortable with maintaining our grocery spending to $700 a month. I am going to continue to focus on each month but not beat myself up for spending over now that I know it averages out within the year!<\/li>\n
- I was also able to find that the “average” family spends about $200 a month on eating out. In the past, I have not budgeted anything for eating out but this will become a regular expense in the year 2016.<\/li>\n
- We are starting the year with lots of meat in the freezer. I have already paid for 80# of pork that Matt will pick up the first week of January. We also just recently purchased chicken and a large order of ground beef. I am hopefully to not purchase any additional meat until March.<\/li>\n
- Our garden this year did well and we have been enjoying a variety of things. We have enlarged the garden to it’s capacity and hopefully will be able to multiply our freezing stock for the year.<\/li>\n
- I did not even attempt to lose weight with our trip to Disney and the holidays so I will back on track with eating healthier again in\u00a0January.<\/li>\n
- Total random\u00a0thought but at least it is food related. I just received in the mail a total of 6 free 12 packs expiring March 31. I will hold on\u00a0till CVS offers ECBs or I just need them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is my Mom’s birthday, which means we are fast approaching the end of the year. I am already in the process of looking and working on a budget for 2016. I will do a final update and set new … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,39,6,10,14,40,4,19,5,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budgeting","category-christmas","category-coupons","category-cvs","category-goals","category-groceries","category-life","category-menu-planning","category-saving-money","category-shopping-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":false,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2ySyX-113","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3910,"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3909\/revisions\/3910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.teenstotsandeverythinginbetween.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}