I remembered not posting the March monthly report, but I can't believe I forgot February's, too!
At any rate, here are the reports from both months.
We went over in March due to a car repair, and the grocery budget was way over the top. Let me direct your attention to the “Dining” portion of the budget. Pretty good.
As I review my budget worksheet, I realize I need to plan for finance charges being incurred by the credit card debt. And so you'll see finally for February I've begun budgeting $200 for the credit card interest. I guess at one point in time I had hoped I would be able to transfer balances from one card to the next, finding no fee to transfer options and getting 0% interest indefinitely. That has unfortunately become less of an option, and the last time I opened a bunch of new credit cards it had an negative effect on my credit score that lasted for twelve months. As we would like to keep the option open to refinance our home, I'm not willing to sacrifice points to open new accounts.
I'm not quite ready to post April's report, but hope to have it by the 15th.
How is your budget faring?
As with all things in life, I apply my situation to others’, so when I saw the high (for me) totals for grocery bills my jaw dropped and I thought to myself “what are they buying – cured meats, fancy cheese, and the highest quality produce?” but then I realized you have more people to feed and it all clicked into place. I thought it was pretty funny for a second though. 🙂
Good job on the dining out – that’s an expense we definitely need to cut back on!
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 7th, 2010 at 8:23 am
Hi Chloe: You can bet I cringe when I see that amount come up on the report I run from Quicken. For one thing, I should have adjusted the monthly budget for groceries, as we remove money every week and there were five Thursdays in April. That means we spent $206 on groceries. When you consider we are feeding four adults, three who eat home cooked from scratch food for every single meal, this boils down to a cost of $51.50 per person per week. When you break that down to three meals a day, the cost is $2.14 per meal. That’s really not all that bad. Now granted, AJ is eating fast food as he’s on the run quite a bit, but he still eats breakfast at home, and several other meals. We actually are buying no dairy products at all (except for butter) so no fancy cheeses, and if any sandwich meat is purchased Mr. A tries to buy it on sale or clearance. And we can’t afford organic food. We rarely use coupons, because they are just not available for fresh fruits and vegetables, and meat.
I still think, if I were the one in charge of grocery shopping and meals, that I could do better and spend less. But I still don’t have the energy to take over the grocery shopping, and I am thankful that my husband does the best job that he can. I have to chuckle a bit over you saying your jaw dropped, I felt the same way. Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
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Do you have a spreadsheet that does this for you? Would you share with me? 🙂
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 7th, 2010 at 8:25 am
Hi Mrs. Money! As I’ve revealed on my blog, I track everything in Quicken. Then once a month I run a report for the month and export the data to the clipboard in Excel format. I have a template in Excel that I use to enter the data from the clipboard. I can send you the template if you want to use that. Let me know. 🙂
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This is fabulous that you post this. I love your site. The name of it makes me think of myself although I would have to change it to something like Will be out of debt (again!). I haven’t started the process of trying to get out of debt again. It’s way more than I had before I married my ex-husband. So overwhelming! Good luck keeping up with your budget.
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Mrs. Accountability Reply:
May 7th, 2010 at 8:39 am
Hi Petula: I don’t remember seeing you comment here at my blog before, so welcome! We aren’t out of debt again YET, lol, we are still working at it. I got myself out of debt several years ago, so my blog’s title is to indicate that we’re getting out of debt again. So you remarried your ex-husband? Me, too! I went over and read a bit of your blog, nice to meet you! Thanks for visiting and commenting!
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