January Wrap Up

January 2020 has passed already! 

Let's look at how we did.  Let's start with week five.  We had to fuel up the vehicle this week.  We were really good about avoiding eating out - and I think only bought a six-pack at some point.

Home Maintenance was just a few more odds-and-ends for Jordan as he was finishing up our to-do list before he heads back to work tomorrow after his paternity leave comes to an end.

Here is our summary for the entire month.  I'm largely happy with this.  I think I need to look at how we budget - because I budget monthly we are paid and manage most expenses weekly - so January had a fifth week but I didn't change the budget which isn't really reasonable.

Our total spend on groceries is the stand out item here - $1,365.  It's more than we spent on any one month last year.  It's also the least we spent on eating out all last year.

Combined, on average, we spent $1,261 (881 + 380) on groceries and eating out in 2019. The only other change that I can attribute some of this too is Daycare.  We're now packing lunches for the kids every week - which means buying (and making) a lot more snack foods for them. 

I've really enjoyed keeping an eye on our spend on a weekly basis so I'm going to continue through the month of February.  We'll see what we can do about that groceries bill.

Weekly Spend - January (week 4)

Okay!  Week four down - and we've landed a bit high.

Groceries had a spike because we did some extra groceries to have around 15 people over for Baby Girl's first birthday.

Little Man needed some special cream for his hands so medical was higher (usually it's zero).

Kids Stuff was 1/4 payment of a photography session that we booked last minute for Baby Girl's birthday.  I'll finish paying for this in the first week of February so the balance will show then.

Vehicle Maintenance was a surprise new battery for one of our vehicles.  The car hadn't been run for a couple of months and the battery burst in the cold streak that we had.  So that's annoying.

Looking at the total spend to date we are at 98% of the budget and still have the rest of the last week of the month to get through. So we most certainly will be over. 

Soup Stock Day!

It's Soup Stock Day!

Every month or two or three, I save scraps of carrots, onion, celery, and bones from Roast or Chicken so I can make a big pot of soup stock.  It's a great way to make your food budget go just a bit further - plus it is tasty.


Unless your four - in which case, my toddler will tell you that soup = yuck. Every time.


It's actually been a while since I've done this so I had quite a few prime rib bones saved up! 

I added mayyybe a tablespoon of salt to the whole batch, brought it to a boil then simmered for around 16 hours.

I first used my big strainer to catch the big bits of bones, and then ran it through my fine mesh strainer twice to catch and little bits.

My mom's trick is to then get the stock cold enough that you can scrape off the fat that sits on the top, keep this in a separate container and freeze both.

When you're ready to actually make soup - use the stock-fat for frying up all your vegetables. You wind up with less fat overall in the soup, don't have fat separating in your soup and add more flavour back in then if you used oil or butter when you are making your soup.

Caselot Sale!

I spend a bit of time lurking on Reddit's personal finance forums and there seems to be a lot of chatter about how much people spend on groceries.  So I want to spend a bit of time thinking about how our money is spent in this area, in more detail. 

I don't typically keep grocery receipts, but did for last week's big shop.  We only have two grocery stores in my community - so suggestions around going to your local low cost shop don't work for me.  We plan ahead, try to get to Costco every couple of months or so and we watch for local sales.  Here's a peek at what some of our local costs are.

If there is interest I can post this again as I get more historical information.  My mom and I both track sales in the same excel worksheet, so that if I can't remember what a good price is I can go back and look.  I've been negligent in keeping this up to date, but I am going to start doing this for a while again. 

...and no, we don't by strip loin steak very often but we did this trip so wanted to show it on the tracker. They were too thick and delicious looking to pass by.

Weekly Spend - January (week 3)

Okay - here we go - week three!

Before even doing my summaries I know that I'm closer to being on track than we were last month.  Reason being?  I was able to manage credit card payments (100% of the balance), without drawing from our Line of Credit! 

Woohoo!

For the first time in three weeks, we fueled the Escape. We did a big grocery shop (case lot sale), stocking up on essentials.  We went to the bakery twice and the liquor store once.  We did one stop at the dollar store and spent $20 on kid's art and craft stuff.

Here's the combined 1-3 weeks summary -- >>


You can see we have $550 left to spend in the budget.   We do have baby girl's birthday at the end of the month so hopefully, we can stay on track.

Eating In

We've been working hard at meal planning - in part to help just manage the after-work-daycare rush and in part to go out to eat less often.

Don't get me wrong, we really enjoy eating out, however; we want to be more intentional about it.  We want to go out when we're planning to do it - as a social thing not as an 'oh crap, did you take something out for dinner, no I didn't, we need to feed the kids' event.

Last week we planned to have a pizza night.  Recently we've been doing this with store-bought pizza shells.  This time, however; I found a great recipe online - quick and easy and made the dough myself.

It was amazing!  So good!  We did one pepperoni and one cheese.

Paint Paint Paint

We recently 'finished' a basement renovation - finished in that we paid the last bill and our contractor has wrapped up.  Now, that contractor just happened to be my Uncle - and he's infamous for giving homework when he's working for family.

The kids did amazing during their first week of Daycare last week - and so this week Jordan's expecting to have four days uninterrupted.  He has a stack of closet doors to paint and re-install, walls to patch and paint (after moving all our furniture downstairs the walls got pretty beat-up).  I'm so excited for all of these small jobs to be finished - and I know he's excited for me to stop talking about all the tasks left on the to-do list.