Good morning everyone – and happy September! I do LOVE September and fall vibes so much, but I am so so sad to see summer come to a close! I will start pulling out the fall decor after Labor Day – which will work perfect because if I’m honest, we are still unpacking from vacation!!!

Speaking of vacation – Audrey has been on one basically since March (well we all have, but she had school to report to) so picking back up on a routine will be huge and also our budgeting goals had gone on vacation too. COVID really threw a wrench in things and I’m ready to get back to normalcy!

Today, I thought I would share some ways on how I plan on getting back into a routine and a little budgeting challenge I plan to follow all month.

Routine Reset

In a couple weeks, Audrey will be attending Pre-K 3 days a week. School begins at 8 a.m. this year, which is a half hour earlier – which shouldn’t sound like a big deal at all, but it is for Audrey. She is our night owl and LOVES to sleep in. We’ve been able to get away with that for the past 6 months, but now it’s time to slowly start making the change.

First off, we plan to make our bedtime earlier. Realistically, I would love to have the two big kid’s bedtime at 9:00 p.m. – 9:15 p.m. every night.

This means, I set a timer on my phone at 8:45 p.m. to give them the 10-minute warning before heading up to brush teeth and get to bed. This should be easier to do now that it is starting to get darker earlier.

To make mornings go smoother, I plan on purchasing this alarm clock to help wake her up so we aren’t scrambling and harping at each other!

Lunches can be prepped ahead of time since Audrey will be attending pre-K on consecutive days. The same thing goes for checking the upcoming weather and having her clothes folded and ready to go in the appropriate cubby inside her closet.

This year, Audrey is attending full time for a couple days. It has been hard to have a routine that works for me over the past 6 months because having youngsters can do that, but I am curious to see what routine I will fall into while Audrey is at school and the boys are napping. I plan to share our routines once we get a feel for things, but for now, this is my game plan to get some sort of structure in place.

Budgeting Reset

Last year around this time, I shared how we track expenses and come up with a realistic budget. Right now, it is very manual, but it works and actually makes you realize how ridiculous spending can get out of control!

You can read all about our savings challenge last year in these posts:
LIFE LATELY: BUDGET REVIEW – SAVINGS CHALLENGE
LIFE LATELY: SAVINGS CHALLENGE – MID-MONTH UPDATE
TIP JAR: SAVINGS CHALLENGE – THE FINAL VERDICT: SUCCESS OR FAIL?

A little summary on how we track expenses – we actually use excel…

The excel document we use 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: These are monthly projected costs.

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

Here is my savings plan for September

Since food and eating out spending IS ALWAYS our overspend culprit – I plan set a limit as to how much we will spend at the grocery store. I used to pull out cash and put it in an envelope labeled food/grocery. Once the cash was out, we were done for the month (or at least conscious to not overspend by a long shot!). Since cash is not accepted everywhere, I have to switch this up and use my card. I plan to set weekly limits on grocery/food and challenge ourselves to stay under every week!

How will I set this weekly limit?

A detailed grocery list!

This has been huge for me! Meal planning, going through store ads, comparing prices and making estimates on costs of the items was huge for me! I also would provide myself a $15-$20 buffer because there are always the items you forget you need!