Sunday, July 01, 2007

Budgets

I updated Quicken yesterday and man...well, let's just say I had a good day of beating up on myself just for being dumb. I talk all this great talk about getting out of debt, but the straight fact is that if we don't follow the plan, it just ain't gonna happen.

In the last 30 days, we spent over $120 on eating out, and over $400 on groceries. That's over $200 over budget for those items. IN 30 DAYS!

I'm just so ashamed...it's me, we both know it's me - dh is not the type to run out and get something to eat just for the sake of it.

The good news is...it's helped me to make a plan. I have meals all set up for the week, with things we have here at home, no additional expense necessary. We didn't go out this weekend - we had a possible auction for today and/or a flea market, but we stayed home instead and I shampooed the carpets (which really needed it and it was a good day for it anyway). We also need to get some stuff done around the yard. But - we have about $200 to get us through to payday (the 20th)...that will be tough. We can use the money from the dress that I got, but I really don't want to - that was set aside for savings.

Next month, we go on the envelope budget. It works for me, it helps me see what I have and how much is left. It helps me set some cash aside for the second half of the month (the whole "getting paid once a month" really screws me up a lot - it's been 5 years, you'd think I'd be used to it). I just have to get off the debit card and deal with it.

What's the saying? "Put your big girl panties on and deal with it"? Yeah. That's it.

We're grilling out tonight - lots of great food in the house, I love to pile stuff on the grill and have days and days worth of food. So we'll have that.

Ugh. Money.

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

Hi Kris,

Don't be so hard on yourself. $400 for groceries is not so outrageous. What was your budget amount? Does it include non food items too (toilet paper, etc.)?

For eating out, can you limit it to once a week at a set amount?

If you try to go too low or have no dining out budget you might be setting yourself up to fail.

Jennifer said...

Oh, and check out the cool graph I added to my blog from net worth IQ. You might like it as you're the one who turned me on to NCN Network. (You can link there from my blog if you want to check it out.)