What's for dinner?

Hugh and I are pretty big on budgeting and saving, but with a baby on the way there is always room for improvement. I started calling area daycare centers and in my research I’ve discovered that infant daycare costs run anywhere from $850-$1350 a month. Wowza!! That’s a lot of money. This made me realize two things: A) Why am I not in the daycare business? And B) We need to start adjusting our budget now so we aren’t surprised when we have to start parting with this amount of money each month.

In the past two years, Hugh and I have been the victims of multiple identity theft occurrences. From these instances we realized that using our debit cards is something that we no longer want to do. We started using a credit card to make all of our monthly purchases and we simply pay off the bill every month. The great thing about this (other than the cash back) is the online tools. It takes our purchases for the month and divides them into type. After looking at our last statement we realized a little problem. THE GROCERY STORE! It’s evil. We spend so much money there that it’s embarrassing. For three weeks, we managed to stop at the store every three days. UGH! Even worse, I can’t tell you how often we end up having to throw stuff out that goes bad.

The solution?

A monthly menu plan and one trip a week to the store.

I went through both of our freezers and made a list of all the meat we had available. We frequently “forget” about things we buy and put in the freezer. From this list I came up with several different dinner options. I then used a calendar to write down all of the dates that we knew ahead of time that we wouldn’t be home for dinner in December. Then, I simply filled in the dates. I know that we can typically get away with cooking two or three times a week. I took a list of the recipes that we would be using and made a list of all ingredients. Then, we spent some time going through our pantry to see what we already had and what we needed to purchase. It’s amazing what you can find when you actually LOOK through your pantry. After crossing out all of the things we already had, we had a staples list for the grocery store. Now, we’ll have to go to the store once a week for things like bread, milk, fruit and yogurt but the stuff we need to actually cook our meals will already be purchased for the month.

Is this going to work? Will this help us cut back even more on our spending? I really don’t know, but I do think it’s going to make us feel like we’re wasting less food. I’ll keep you updated on how it works for us.