I’ve been on a personal crusade for better data in my budget this year. While not the sort of declaration that makes for a great party, it’s become something I’ve been focusing on to gain a more accurate idea of how we spend.
A lot of people don’t like the concept of a budget, maybe because they don’t want to face the truth about how things are going, or maybe it’s because they don’t think that sticking to one is very realistic.
Lately, I’ve been working on ways to be way more accurate and way more successful with the biggest budget buster we have in our country, food.
To do this, I realized I needed a better idea for how much we actually spend on groceries. I had combined groceries, paper goods, toiletries, and items from the pharmacy section into one big Needs category. This follows my concept of only creating a category for what you need to track. If we were staying within our budget each month while getting all of the groceries and other needs taken care of, then this budget category wouldn’t be a problem. However, with the cost of groceries rising and our need to not just coast, but increase our discipline when it comes to food, this big category just wasn’t getting specific enough for us.
So, I broke up my big Needs category into three separate, very trackable categories: groceries for food only, paper goods and cleaning supplies, and toiletries and pharmacy. Just think of how these items are organized at Target, and you’ll have a really clear picture for what category a purchase needs to be pulled from.
In other words, I’m wanting to know specifically how much we’re spending just on groceries each month, without the picture getting muddled up with other things. How much does it take to get food for our family of five? With that more specific data, I can make better decisions about how much I should be budgeting for our real essentials, which gives me a better idea of how much we have to spend on those other needs.
Now that we have better data for the three separate ways we spend on needs, we’ve moved on to the next step of finding ways to stick to our numbers.
Making a plan for your money is great, but what we’ve discovered is the need to make a plan for how we stick to that number.
Tell me if this is familiar. You budget for the month, setting aside enough money in each category to have plenty to spend, while also holding back enough that you hit your goals. However, since you’ve been holding off until you have money to spend, now that you have it, it’s time for a little treat. And so you start spending and living large and enjoying your money at a rate that’s not going to last the whole month. Now, you’ve blown through your budget, but are faced with either white knuckling the rest of the month with no spending whatsoever, or blowing your budget and therefore your goals.
Instead, we’ve been planning how we’ll eat each day. Something that helps us connect the number we want to spend to how we’ll actually do that is our calendar. As our kids get older and the number of activities they’re involved in multiplies, we just don’t have the time to wing it anymore.
Some people are amazing at meal prepping every Sunday, where they invest time preparing food that will then enable them to just grab lunches and dinners from the fridge for the rest of the week. We should do this, and maybe it’s time to try, but I just haven’t been interested. Perhaps I would feel like I don’t mind giving up my afternoon on Sunday once I experienced the return on the time from preparing dinner each weeknight. It’s a good plan, just one I haven’t given a shot yet.
Instead of meal prepping, we’ve just been meal planning. It’s deciding, for the week, what we want to do for food each day. We’ve been literally jotting in the calendar what we want to do for dinner each night as we consider our kids’ activities and work events.
Importantly, part of that has been deciding what nights we’d like to eat out.
This gives us two really good frames of reference.
First, when we break our monthly budget down, how much do we have to spend each week(for groceries and eating out) to make it on budget?
Second, how do we spend those dollars so that we can successfully meet those numbers?.
I’m not sure how ubiquitous this is becoming, but for the grocery store we most often use, H-E-B, their app has been a huge help. It probably started during COVID, where the demand for curbside grocery parking soared. Now, I can create a curbside order for groceries and get the total before even checking out. That’s been around for about five years. But now, using their shopping lists, I’m able to create a grocery list that accurately reflects the prices I’ll find in the store and also organizes my list in order by aisle for the most efficient trip. Recently, these shopping lists began adding the total for your trip at the top, so that I can make a grocery list, ensure that I’ve got everything for my weekly plan, and stick to the weekly number in my head that will help us stay on budget.
I know H-E-B is a major grocery store in Texas, but I’m sure we’ll only see the ability to do this multiply in the next few years.
For the days you said you’d eat out, how much money do you have for those meals? Where do you need to eat to make sure that happens?
It’s taken a lot of trial and error, and we certainly mess this plan up, but when it comes time to eat, the conversation has shifted from “what do we want to eat tonight?” to “What did we say we were going to eat tonight?” Now, it’s just following through with what we already said we’d do.
It’s helped us make big improvements when one of our biggest budget busters was food, which makes the whole budget more likely to be successful.
So ultimately, it’s not just making a plan for your money that helps you be successful, but making a weekly plan for how you’ll stick to that number in the first place.
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