No Lunch for the Wicked

So I am grumpy....Someone stole my frozen meal out of the work freezer today so I had nothing for lunch. Pre-sense, I would have ran to McDonald's or hit the vending machine.  BUT I overcame and reminded myself I had a huge breakfast and only had two hours until I was out of work so I could deal.

To be 100% honest I probably would have hit the vending machine's but I had no cash and ever since my bank changed from the Visa debit card to the MasterCard debit card, the vending machines no longer accept my card. Grrr... but YAY all at the same time.

I have been really stressed out about the February budget since it became apparent we would be going over budget in January.  The finance gods were looking out for me because I just got the bill for one of our debts and the payment due was $61.00 dollars less than I expected. YAY!!!!  With that and some small alterations in the budget, we should be just fine in February.

My biggest challenge with budgeting is keeping my grocery budget in check.  I did some research and per the USDA website, as of January 2015 this is what an average family of my size should be spending:

Thrifty Cost Plan: $1176.10

Low-Cost: $1509.40

Moderate Cost: $1956.60

Liberal Cost plan: $2238.90

Now seeing as January I budgeted $750.00, but will probably end up closer to $825.00 when it is all said and done, I am giving myself a little slack for finding it difficult to meet the budget sometimes.

The past few months I had done all my grocery shopping on the 5^th and 20^th of each month so each grocery trip covered 15-18 days. The thought process was that the less often I went to the store the less likely I could overspend or buy things we didn’t need.  It hasn’t work out as well as expected and I think I need to go back to weekly shopping.

The first issue I ran into is that you can’t get fresh produce to last more than a week (if you are lucky) and canned/frozen vegetables and fruit aren’t quite the same.  I also noticed that my kids eat more when we have more. For example, we usually consume 2 gallons of milk and 2 packs of fruit snacks each week and usually had some of each left over.  Common sense would say that for 2 weeks we would need 4 gallons of milk and 4 packs of fruit snacks. We just finished the first week and we have no more fruit snacks and only 1 gallon of milk left. WHAT HAPPENED!!!

Another issue is that when you plan that far in advance you lose your flexibility when plans change.  This Saturday we had 3 extra kids and 2 extra adults and none of the meals I had scheduled would have fed that many people on top of my 8, so DW had to run to the store to get extra food so I could double my batch. It was an extra $12.00 we didn’t have to spend. If we had budgeted to do weekly shopping I would have known about the large group for dinner and would have been able to plan accordingly and within budget.

So February we will go back to weekly shopping and see how it goes. Cross your finger!