This Month - 5/22 - 6/18

I read this post about a Family No Spend Month the other day. Their goal is to limit their family spending to $250 for a month.

The $250 includes:

• food & eating out
• gas
• clothing
• coffee
• household necessities
• entertainment

Not included:

• tithes and other gifts
• house payment, insurance, bills
• health expenses
• work expenses
• savings
• investment

For several months now, I've been beating myself up about our spending. We are loosely following Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover, but I'm not doing a great job with maintaining our envelopes. I also have a hard time making myself budget for eating out. As I've said before, I have a hard time admitting to the fact that we do it. I try to make myself believe that if I don't plan for it, we won't do it. And that's just ridiculous. Grow up, Wendy!

SO, here's what I'm planning. I need to get a handle on exactly where our non-grocery/HBA dollars are going. I don't want to cut my usual $250 for groceries/HBA (although I would like to try the $250 for everything challenge eventually). I'm going to give us a budget of $500 for a month and break it down into $125 per week.

$125 per week for:

• food & eating out
• gas
• clothing
• coffee & beer making supplies
• household necessities
• entertainment
• crafting supplies
• gifts

My plan is to stick to that budget and track my spending in those categories. That way, I'll have a better idea of how to distribute our money in the envelope system. However, if this system works for us, I might just stick with this. Working = living comfortably within these limits while finding ways to cut expenses further.

I'm leaving myself the option of redistributing the amounts - rolling any extra forward to the next week. $500 is set in stone, though.

Here's where you come in. I'm going to track our spending here. In a perfect world, I'll update daily. At the very least, I'll update our spending once a week.

This is a great month to follow along if you're just getting started couponing. We've been hitting the stockpile hard this past month, so I'm in a rebuilding phase. I'm out of RRs and ECBS, so I'll be working on slowly building those back up.

I'm not a big menu planner, so I think I'll try to post "after the fact" menus every couple of days or so.

I'm having a garage sale next weekend. The garage sale money is going straight into savings. We have some upcoming expenses. Derek's in a wedding in June - I'm not sure what our expenses will be with that. I'd like to get a toddler bed for Kira - I'm thinking from Craigslist. I'm still deciding on what I'd like for the kids' schooling in the Fall - again, not sure exactly what our budget will be, yet.

So, what do you think? What am I missing? If anyone would like to join us in the $500 Challenge - I'd love to have you!

p.s. If you know me IRL (which I think is like 5 of my 7 readers), please don't think we're going into hermit mode. I can't track our entertainment budget if we don't get entertained!