2016 Average Spend Review

Here it is, our annual spend summary review.

We're going into the New Year putting a concentrated effort to reduce our spending on groceries.  Doing even more baking/cooking at home, starting to plan for a garden, and shopping sales.  There are no discount grocers in my town, so just going to a superstore/asian market isn't an option for us.

Eating out of course is higher then we'd like it to be, one of the things I'm going to do hear is improve my tracking when we're 'eating out' and when we're on vacation/out of town eating out.  I feel like this is different because it's planned for differently.

The same can be said for groceries and Costco shopping.  I tend to split a Costco shop roughly between groceries, clothes, pets, etc. but I'm not 100% accurate.  I'm going to start tracking Costco as it's own spend.

Home Maintenance is the obvious place where we spent a lot over the year - this was our home renovation, which was spendy and mostly budgeted for.

Overall I feel pretty good about how we managed our money last year.  I am looking forward to making some changes though, and reining things in even more.  I have yet to find a new job since being laid off just weeks before my Maternity Leave started, and Little Man is 14 months old now.  So, without my income, we will sure be spending differently.

Cloth Diaper Covers...Bam!

When I was pregnant, and we had decided we were going to cloth diaper instead of using disposables, my mom picked up the material and tools we needed so we could make some of our own covers (we use inserts/covers instead of the all in one systems).  Well, we also bought some ones that were already made, and then just never quite got around to sewing our own.

We're hanging all of our things to dry, and given that we can't dry outside right now, it sometimes takes a day or longer which means running out of covers!  So, we decided to get sewing.  We have two and a half so far, and enough material for a few more. 

The first one was pretty tricky, but getting into the third, mom and I found a bit of a rhythm.  Check out the first one on our model below!