Free baby food score

This past week at Stop and Shop there was a sale on Gerber baby food pouches for $1.50 each - both the organic 2nd foods and Gerber Graduate pouches. There were also internet printable coupons for $0.75 off of one pouch. So once that doubles baby food is free! Between me and my husband we printed 8 of each coupon - so that's 16 free pouches of baby food. Our baby isn't eating solids yet, but the pouches don't expire until May, so figured we'd might as well stock up now!

Adventures in Cloth Diapering

     So in my latest quest to save money, I've started to look into cloth diapering. And by look into I mean that it's been my obsession for the week.

I'm lucky enough to live close to the Diaper Lab, and I'm doing their "experiment to own" program. I liked cloth diapers in theory but wasn't daring enough to just make the plunge and then end up saying "I hate this! I'm just goint to use disposables... and now I spent all this money on cloth diapers I won't use".

So far at least, I'm really liking it. There is something that just really appeals to my sensibilities to buy something, wash it, and re-use it vs buying something just to end up tossing it in the trash. I don't mind doing a little extra laundry - it's actually quite easy. Before having a baby I thought the idea of washing poopy diapers was gross, but I wash poopy things all the time now anyway. No big deal.

The Numbers - is it worth it?

My baby is about 4.5 months old right now. Most estimates go based on a baby being in diapers until 30 months. So that leaves us with 25 months to go in diapers (rounding down).

Disposables: I'd estimate that we spend about 50 dollars a month in diapers on average. So 25 months = 1250 dollars in diapers.

Cloth: We're looking at start-up costs of around 450 dollars. Definitely there is a lot more up-front cost. But that will average out to a savings of 32 dollars a month vs. using disposables. Theoretically we shouldn't have to buy any more.

Even better, if we end up having another baby and can re-use these diapers that's a whole lot more savings. So I'd better take good care of these diapers!

I'm planning to get mostly pocket diapers - if you went with mostly prefolds and covers this would be a lot cheaper - but after all was said and done I really liked the Babykicks Basic Pocket Diaper a lot - so I decided to just go with that - but still got a few prefolds and covers so I wouldn't have to buy quite as many pockets. That way if I run out before getting a chance to do laundry I have some cheap backups!

August Budget Roundup

     This past week has been crazy somehow - didn't find much time to write about what I did. I feel like it's kind of too late for details, but there were good sales this week. Free Shredded Wheat, free Lunchables, free Progresso Meal Starters, free Totino pizza rolls, catalinas galore. Cooking food for the week was a fail. I did make some Beef Stroganoff and that was good, but there was more I should have made in addition to the fact that we bought some produce and didn't end up cooking it which is a waste - don't know if it's still any good. I embarked on a new cloth diaper journey but that merits a post in and of itself.

Monthly Budget

So onto the real topic of this post: how we did for the budget this month!

Net for the month: -428 dollars.

Now normally I wouldn't be too happy with that, but when you break it down it's actually not that bad.

Where we failed

1) Gas and Fuel: 80 dollars over budget.
     Way over budget but this includes 3 drives between Boston and NY which is not typical - this is really a one time overage. And I'm excited to see what it is next month now that we have the Prius v.

2) Restaurants: 150 dollars over budget.
     Doh! A lot of this is because we went out for a fancy dinner for restaurant week - but I even tried to plan for that and say - knowing we're going out for a fancy dinner at the end of the month we have to not eat out much before that. This was just a budget fail. It's our weakness! Really want to make it within budget next month.

3) Baby Supplies: 240 dollars over budget.
     A lot of this is due to buying a new car seat for 150 dollars. Also a baby monitor for 30 dollars. 35 dollars for cloth diaper trial (more on this later). Even taking out these one time expenses that's still over my 100 dollar budget I set. Probably about 100 dollars on diapers this month, maybe slightly less. I was under budget last month so it may be partly timing, but still a lot of money for diapers!

4) Miscellaneous expenses: 1,000 dollars
     I don't know that this can really be called a fail but we had a lot of expenses mostly due to paying medical bills from my pregnancy so that put us over a lot.

Where we succeeded

1) Utilities: 40 dollars under budget
     Energy costs have been good - we are being efficient with both electric and gas.

2) Groceries: 70 dollars under budget
     I think we did pretty well here - only 180 dollars spent on groceries.

3) Shopping: 125 dollars under budget.
     We didn't do a lot of retail shopping this month and finally made it under budget on this category!

Overall

I'd give us a pretty good rating overall with our budget. Not perfect, but given all of the medical bills we paid and things like that, we're not too far out of line. There's a lot more room for improvement. Let's see how much we can cut it down for September.