Budgets

At the end of last year I wanted to make my couponing more exciting. I had couponed for more than a year at that point and while there were some deals that made me feel great, it had lost some of the excitement. So I decided to set myself up a budget for 2011. I gave myself $250 a month to spend on groceries and drugstore items (paper products, medicines, cleaning products, and stuff like that). I found a nice excel spreadsheet that someone had created and put in my goal. The way the spreadsheet works is you enter each receipt on a monthly tab and then it rolls up into a nice summary. Below is my completed table for the first quarter of 2011. It is great to see where you are spending and saving the most. After January, it became obvious to me that I was spending too much at Walgreens for what I was getting, so I stopped going there unless they had a really good deal on something I really wanted.

It is hard to see (I think you can click on the picture and see it better). The great news is I have been under budget each month (in February $82 under) and that my savings rate is around 81%.

I am usually not a fan of budgets. I consider myself a saver but usually when I set myself up on a budget I immediately think of something I “really” need. But this budget has been a lot of fun. It is a game for me. How to get everything we need, and the most, with the smallest amount. And then using those items to create meals. Of course I still have some trips where I just walk into Publix and grab what I want. But those trips get logged in the table as well, so it helps me to try my best to plan ahead. I am still thinking of new ways to throw some excitement into all of this. But for this week 8 cents jars of peanut butter and 50 cent milk has me pretty excited! Happy shopping!