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.

Prius v: Budget friend or foe?

     So my husband and I recently got an offer we couldn't refuse to buy out 2009 Toyota Corolla. With a new baby, I was thinking maybe it'd be nice to have a slightly larger car to fit all related baby gear and who knows in the future maybe there will be another baby and more stuff. Well, we looked at cars that were supposedly bigger, like a Camry for example. Except that the Camry just had more legroom, but less space in the trunk. That's a bummer. The Honda Fit supposedly had tons of storage - we could definitely fit more in our Corolla. So the only thing that would work would be a small SUV like a Rav4 or CR-V, but I just couldn't bring myself to 1) up the price of the car and 2) have to get a car with low gas mileage and I'll be stuck paying a ton on gas. So we almost settled on just getting a new Corolla since it was the only car that looked like it might meet our needs.
     Then along came the Prius v - a hatchback station wagon with lots of storage but also gets great gas mileage - especially in the city where we do most of our driving. Somehow I was convinced to go along with a new car with such a hefty, by my standards, price-tag. I'm a little worried about spending so much initially because I don't know that gas savings will make up for it. According to fueleconomy.gov, annual fuel cost for a Prius v is $1,350 and $1,900 for the Corolla. So that's only $550 - so for a car that's $9,000 more expensive that would take 16 years to make it up - so basically gas doesn't make up for it. But I guess we're paying  premium for space and comfort.
     Those are just estimates though, and based on doing 45% highway driving whereas we do much less than that - and that will make a bigger difference since unlike regular gas cars, the Prius gets better mileage for city driving. I'm curious to see the difference in our monthly gas budget - we;ll gt an official answer after driving it all month in September.

Saving

So this is just sort of an overview of what we've done so far in attempts for saving, especially with a new addition to the family.

1) Buying things used

Especially with a lot of baby things - we have found craigslist to be great. We spent about 150 dollars and got a full wardrobe of baby girl clothes to last from birth-12 months and some pieces up to 2T. It's all in good condition - nobody would know the difference. We got our swing on craigslist, our glider, way better than paying full price. We also went to a consignment shop to buy our Ergo baby carrier. Obviously you don't want everything used, but there's a lot of good stuff out there. The Boston area has a very good craigslisting population.

2) Coupons

Initially it was my husband who wanted to start couponing and I thought he was crazy. I saw those shows on TV with people diving through dumpsters for coupons and coming out of the stores with 1000 cases of ramen and sports drinks and having it take over their whole house. Well, I've found that couponing has worked well for us even though we only do it really basically and just get one set of coupons from the Sunday paper which we get delivered to us. What's really helped is Kathy Spencer's How To Shop For Free (HTSFF) - she posts coupon match ups and alert you to good deals. But what I think is the best is there is a coupon database. So now all I need to do if I know I want to buy something is type it into the coupon database and it will tell me if there's a coupon for it and if so, where to find it. I also recommend Kathy Spencer's book - I checked it out from the library - I didn't read the whole thing but it was good to skim through for the basic information I was looking for.

3) Lifestyle changes

We already downgraded our TV package, changed insurance companies to get a better rate, and big things like that. The biggest change for us is really going to be with regard to our food budget. We are used to eating out way too much so my new goal is to eat at home more. We've really kicked the comparison shopping into high-gear - for everything, but especially groceries. My new goal I'm just starting out with is meal-planning. I want to at least have good things to eat instead of just making junk because it's fast and easy, you didn't think ahead, and now you're starving. Still a work in progress, but hopefully I will find some good recipes and can post them here.

Budgeting

Getting Started

    When setting up a budget for our family, I initially downloaded a budget template on Excel and painstakingly went through our credit card statements and checkbooks, categorized each transaction, then totalled them all up. What a pain! It took forever. Then my husband told me about mint.com.

     If you haven't yet - check out Mint. It's a great, free, site to manage your finances. If, like me, basically all of your purchases are on credit cards, it's pretty amazing. (And really purchasing everything on credit card then just paying it all off at the end of the month is the way to go since you get points, which is basically free money.) Anyway, mint.com syncs up with your online accounts for your banks and credit cards, so all of that junk I was doing in Excel? Mint does that for you automatically. Every single purchase you make on your credit card gets categorized automatically and it will total up expenses in each category. If you set a budget it will show you how much you've already spent each month in each category you set, so you have a good visual on how you're doing throughout the month. It took a little bit of tweaking to get it set the way I wanted, but once you do that it's pretty low maintenance.

How much to budget?

    To figure out how much to budget I first went through all of our set costs - the things that are the same every month: the mortgage, student loan payments, internet/tv bills, etc. Then after subtracting that amount from our monthly income that's what we had left for things that change month to month like food expenses, utilities, gas for the car, general shopping, and other miscellaneous spending. Some things I had a basic idea, like for gas - we usually fill up once a week, so I budgeted about 120 dollars a month. Some things I just took a random guess - baby supplies? 100 dollars a month - and we'll see how that turns out.

     In an attempt to be somewhat scientific I found average monthly food costs as per the USDA. For a family of 2, a moderate budget is around $600/month, "low-cost" around $480/month, and "thrifty" around $375/month. I guess we're somewhere in between. I set a budget of $250/month for groceries but also $250/month for restaurants/coffee shops etc. So $500/month for food. Though I do count non-food items in grocery like buying toothpaste or trash bags. Too hard to separate it all out.

Keeping it up

     I hope to use this blog to help keep track of my progress and document some good finds and money saving ideas. I plan to make one more post as an overview of how I'm doing up to now, then get going in real-time.