Happy Friday everyone! Today I am sharing a recent challenge that my husband and I are going to try out for the month of August. We like to check in mid month and see how we are doing budget wise, see what areas we can improve and also continue to mark down our 2020 goals.
EVERY.TIME. we review and mark down our final expenditures at month end, we are astonished by how quickly things can get out of hand and also the random expenses that just rack up. Since we started doing these monthly reviews, I take each individual section of our budget and mark down any outlandish or unplanned expense down in a comments column to be aware of in the future for buffer planning purposes.
When your daughter does a better job saving then you…
A little summary on how we track expenses – we actually use excel…
Old school, I know, but it is super effective for us and something I enjoy manually reviewing and plugging into each category. The excel document was a template I loaded and customized based on our specific categories needed under each main “‘bucket”.
Each bucket and category have a PROJECTED COST – something you plan for that could possibly be hit if all goes wrong or an allotment we breakdown by month if we know there may be a huge expense at some point during the year. The ACTUAL COST is obviously the actual expenses and the DIFFERENCE column is how much you were under or over budget that month.
Note the screenshot above to give you a visual of how it appears in our document – I chose transportation to show you – boring I know, but I changed around some of the numbers a bit:
Our main expense buckets are:
- Housing
- Transportation
- Insurance
- Food
- Children
- Entertainment
- Gifts and Donations
- Personal Care
- Loans
- Savings
I will save these details for another post, but that is the just of it. I signed up for Mint years ago and stopped using it because I personally liked going through our bank account to plug in expenses manually. It’s just like how I love writing up to-do lists and marking things down on my planners and calendars.
Okay, so here is our savings challenge for the month of August
Since food and eating out spending was literally out of this world the past couple months, we are now doing the envelope system for this particular category. We plan to take out our PROJECTED food/eating amount in cash, remove $100 – place in a savings envelope and stash in a safe place until month end. Here is how this should play out:
- My husband takes out his cash for ‘eating out’ and I take the rest of the cash for me and the kiddos to eat out and for grocery shopping
- We then break it down into weekly amounts and add that envelope to our wallets
- When you are out of cash, you are OUT – ha, I know it sounds harsh, but this is something we really want to try and achieve so if it means getting something from the dollar menu for lunch, that is what needs to be done!
What is really interesting is that I have talked with so many people recently who share the same issue of spending entirely way too much on food. The upside is that it is completely controllable and it is not a fixed expense – so we are hoping to knock this challenge out of the park!
Well, I am going to have my work cut out for me this month in terms of being innovative in the kitchen, meal planning, not overbuying , passing up some Dunkin iced coffees and will most likely be scanning those weekly ads for deals up and down, in and out.
We feel this is such a great practice for us to follow and even those “tiny” savings can add up to help us achieve some of our 2020 goals! I will follow up with you all at the end of August to share how we did and possibly (if I survive) some helpful tips that you can use to cut back food spending costs.
MY TWO CENTS:
One last thing to add – how cute are these cash envelopes by The Budget Mom? I just stumbled across these recently and wow, this could save me from looking like a total fool pulling out a large plain mailing envelope in line at the store! She also is the ultimate saver, and I am going to be browsing her site for more tips and tricks on how to save and budget better!
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