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Posts tagged with: grocery budget
Jul 1, 2012    |       5 comments

A Great Day Of Travel!

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I have to hand it to our kids!  They’re great travelers…even when I make them wake up at 4 am for a 6:30 flight!  By 8:45 am  mountain time we were walking through the grocery  store.  I had the menu ready and spent $175 of the $200 grocery budget.  Steve took kid duty while I tackled the list.  We will be sticking to the Real Food challenge this week…which is getting less than thrilled reactions from the kids.  Honestly I don’t think they ever expected us to take the good food show on the vacation road…so perhaps they were looking for more restaurants in our future. They took the news pretty well using lots of humor to get through the announcement.

I packed some great homemade goodies for all of us for our travels but timing and appetites were such that we caved and let the kids have a fast food farewell at McDonald’s.  We had a 90 minute drive and their behavior while grocery shopping was excellent so at our suggestion, we stopped.  They said their farewells to fast food.  At dinner some hours later, everyone gobbled up our whole wheat homemade tortillas, veggie fajitas with a little chicken (I say a little  because  I’m learning how little meat we really need in these meals and tonight 6 people were fed with one good size chicken breast) and black bean with corn salsa.  We will also use more homemade tortillas for wraps for our day at Rocky Mountain National Park tomorrow.

Our travels were seamless and I am looking so forward to our time here.  We do need the temps to drop though.  Ironically we just checked the current temps here and at home.  It is currently 99 degrees in Colorado…and 73 with rain in SA!  The irony!

Spent today:  $175 groceries (regular budget item)

$20 for the cab ride to the airport (no takers on picking us up at 5 am on a Sunday…and parking would’ve been $70).

As a reminder, I’m sharing our daily spending because I need to…vacation makes it very easy to not worry about spending and I can very easily turn off my debt reduction thinking in this setting.  Hey, I’m  honest!  Thanks  in advance for putting up with the frequent posts.

Jun 6, 2012    |       12 comments

Grocery budget adjustment

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We are now half way through the second week of summer.  For the love of all that is holy, the two boys’ appetites have got to find a limit!

We have accepted that $125 a week in groceries was too conservative a number with the boys home for the majority of  the day.  They are both remaining very physically  active with sports camps (one free and one for $50)but with more time on their hands, the food is disappearing at alarming rates!  This is tough bc you never want to begrudge children food but we also have to set some limits.  On the upside, we are not eating out so we don’t have a fast food bleed on top of groceries.  They do not waste the food by any means so that’s good too.  They are  just bottomless pits.  I’ve talked to them about the tendency we all have to snack for the sake of snacking and they both understood.  We have increased food money to $200 per week.  I saved $50 in coupons this past week and that was just regular good old-fashioned couponing.  No stacking, no doubling…just buying what was offered so I’m very pleased with that!

A comment regarding utilities made a good point that our heightened awareness about all spending right now likely impacts our view.  While I know the boys have always eaten a lot, this summer will definitely be a marked increase.  They are growing and now at the age of true athletics.  Once again, we found a way to increase the grocery budget without changing the Dec 2013 payoff.   I’m proud of our planning and saving making that possible.

 

 

 

 

 

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