I am having a hard time coming up with budgets for any area other than grocery. I guess for everything else, we are *pretty* good at not spending a lot, so I just don’t budget for it. We’d likely be better off if we had some sort of guideline, but for now we don’t.
So, in June I decided that I wanted to start a grocery budget. I decided to start at $400 a month. That is for 2 adults, a 5 year old and a 4 year old. That may seem like a lot to some people, especially people in the States because of couponing etc. But in Canada, at least where we live, it is hard to really find any super deals on anything and coupons are not anything exciting here most of the time. We have no Register Rewards, Extra Care bucks or catalinas.
In June we started budgeting our food in the middle of the month, so I allowed us $200. We spent $300. July was really hard to even calculate. Because we were over $100 in June, I only allowed us $300 in July. There were some problems with this. We had two trips booked where we knew we would be eating out. I decided to count that as travel expenses (haaa) instead of grocery/food! We still went over by $100. August has been good. Again, I tried to stay within $300. At the beginning of the month, our favourite grocery store ran a double promo. If you spent $100, you got a free package of frozen ribs. The same week, if you spent over $115, you got a nice discount at their gas bar. So, I decided to make a menu plan for the month and do a month’s worth of shopping at once. We walked away spending $157 on food and about $27 on bedding for the boys’ new room. I could not believe that we had spent only that amount and other than milk it should have lasted the whole month! As usual, I forgot a few things here and there and we had to run out and grab a couple things. We also decided to make a trip to the States and stock up on a few things (using coupons of course, oh, I SO wish stores here were like the American stores…) So as of right now, we are approximately at $270 for the month. The amazing thing is that plans have changed several times and sometimes I didn’t need to make supper or I made something extra from leftovers, or a meal has lasted 2 nights and I will have alot of the food leftover at the end of the month to use in September. With that in mind, even if I stay under budget this month (which I should), do you think I could adjust our budget (at least for September) to only $300? It seems like I could!
