home management | SoBo Mama's Tips & Tricks

{March 7, 2013} Budget Buster Alert: Falling Behind…on anything!

English: Sample budget (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In order for life to run smoothly, I need lots of routines and structure. Which is why the Ducks Unlimited dinner thing tonight threw me for a loop when I learned about it at lunch time. I’m all about Grizzly going to his hunting support group, but it wasn’t on the calendar.

Part of developing routines and structure, for me, has been setting and sticking to a budget. Do I still splurge occasionally? Well, yes. But I’m proud of my shrinking debt, my developing emergency fund, and my stockpiles.

Problem: I hate to leave my house. My Bunco Babes are worried about agoraphobia(spelling??). I told them I’m not scared to leave, I just prefer not to. I like to be home. But this is becoming an issue.

I’ve not been going to the grocery.

I can feed my family of 5 (yes, the dog counts) and take care of the house (cleaning stuff, paper goods) pretty handily for $50/week. Between coupons, sales ads, and store loyalty cards, it’s a lot of fun for me. But to do this, I need to keep up my stockpiles. And they are dwindling.

Because I haven’t been shopping.

Mind you, I haven’t bought shampoo or deodorant in at least a year, and I just recently bought toilet tissue. But my deep freeze has blank spots. My cereals, of which my comfort level is set at 12, have almost disappeared. I’m scraping things together for dinner (easy recipe to be shared soon!) and lunch snacks are nonexistent.

When did staying home become more necessary than maintaining my tight budget?

A lesson I am learning is that to save so much money on my grocery trips, I will have to be diligent about shopping. I have to spend that $50 each week, or else I’ll be paying much more later on. There is an old saying that t make money, you must spend money. Well, to save money, I have to spend money, too.

So the grocery is about to be added to the calendar every week. This will re-establish one of my routines. Hopefully, this hasn’t been a terribly expensive lesson!

What is your budget-buster? Can you figure out what causes it and how to change it?

~ Katie

8 Common Grocery Budget Busters (mint.com)
Budget Busters to Avoid (savings.com)
Budgeting: Save Money on Food (quicken.intuit.com)
Household Binder: Section 7 (sobomama.wordpress.com)
January 2013 Canadian Budget Binder Monthly Budget Update #1 (canadianbudgetbinder.com)

{March 3, 2013} Household Binder: Section 7 Meals/Menus

The next section in my retired Home Management Binder is Meals & Menus. With my new system, my plan is for Meals & Menus to eventually go in a separate binder, specific to the kitchen. This section helps with meal planning, menu creation, and tracking supplies necessary to those tasks. The things I’ve included in this section are:

grocery shopping lists: I have kind of a standard list I like to use and I add to it as necessary. It’s ok to keep in the binder until I’m actually preparing to go to the store. At that point, I need to check it against my inventories and my menu plan. Then I’ll clip it to the front of my coupon binder and head to the store.
pantry inventory: I only keep the extra copies in here. The pantry inventory has always been on the door of the pantry.
freezer inventor: This works the same as the pantry inventory.
menu planner: I’ve tried the weekly planners in the past but I prefer to plan a month at a time. If I pencil in generic meals/themes, they’re easy to modify and get specific later on. I love Jeepnmom‘s wipe off board on her fridge! I could fill it in for the week and not have to hear “What’s for dinner tonight?”
price trackers: This is something suggested by some other organizational sites and books, but I don’t keep up with price tracking. For some reason the numbers stay in my head and I know I can get those chocolate chip waffles the last week of the month for $1.79/box without looking at a spreadsheet. Sales cycles stay with me. If you can’t remember cycles though, a price tracker is a great tool to use. I’ll post more on that later.
recipes: old stand-bys (Mystery Beans), new favorites (Teresa’s Tagliatelle), and recipes to try (Peanut butter yogurt dip). I’m in the process of decluttering cookbooks. When menu planning, it’s best to have recipes close at hand so you know what you’re going to need.
kitchen appliance manuals: I see the purpose in keeping them in a binder, nice and organized. Right now, though, mine are in a cabinet over the stove.

I also keep basic instructions on how to use some of the every day appliances, like the toaster, microwave, etc., as the monkeys are using these things on their own now. I need to add some cleaning checklists and maybe diagrams/pictures of where things go (Monkey #1 stacks dishes in the drainer when he’s not sure where they go!)

I’m recognizing a theme in my binder process: how to do it, where to find it, and what to do in case of _____!

Can you think of anything else that needs to go with a kitchen section in a Home Management binder?

~ Katie