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Saturday, August 11, 2007

Grocery Update- My Budget is inadequate!

My total receipt from the store this week was:

$125.93..... eeek! How much of that was groceries.... not much.

I broke it down like this:

$71.52 was honest too goodness grocery expenditures.
$54.41 was stuff we needed but had not budgeted for at ALL

So what did the 54 consist of? dog food, shampoo, magazines and pull ups for the little one.

I am beginning to realize my budget needs a serious overhaul. I may have to limit my debt payment a bit more so we can afford to eat. Well, not really eat, but obviously shampoo is a necessity (I will go into greater detail with that in a seperate post. Of course the magazines were 9 dollars.... ouch. I thought I was going to get a discount on them but apparently not as much as I thought.

Now, last week I told you I was going to add up the total I got for buying store brand vs. name brand. My total this week was $6.45. I could not believe that!! It would be higher but I bought only two cans of veggies to try out. Next week I will buy more if we like them. The true total is $6.90 because if I consider the extra tax I would have paid on the savings it brings it to an extra 45 cents. Not too shabby in my opinion.

So, the grocery experiment really is going close to what I had planned, the problem is that there are extra expenses that need to be budgeted for. So even though I am spending more than I planned, I am also learning a lot about myself and my finances. I will be posting soon what my action plan will be to deal with this and about the shampoo problem....

2 comments:

paidtwice said...

the "grocery" budget is seriously the bane of my existence sometimes. ugh. by some miracle in July overall I managed to be close to budget but august is already shot and it is only the 11th.

Good luck figuring out what works for you! and I am a big beliver in store brands generally :)

Jen said...

It is always hard to figure out how much you are going to spend on what you eat. I guess mainly because you don't want to eat the SAME thing all the time. Hey, if I could make it on ramen noodles I'd be a millionaire.... I wonder if I can talk my kids into that :)