oops! Penny pinching…

So… we are one month in – and 5 days into February (for the Superbowl) I messed up our food budget.

I bought what I thought was going to be cheaper pizza since I had a coupon.  It wasn’t. In part because I bought an extra medium due to wanting a little more variety than just meat pizzas, we ended up with WAY too much pizza at way too high a price.

So now we are stuck eating a lot of cold pizza – that is no longer yummy, and penny pinching for the rest of the month.  I think If we have a low grocery bill for the upcoming week, we might be back on track, and I’m still going to do everything I can to get us there, but it’s going to be tight.

You see – at the beginning of the month, I have to project out and plan around events in the month (family in town two different weekends and Valentines Day). Don’t get me wrong, we aren’t going to go hungry due to a Superbowl party slip-up, and we still have a little space for our ‘semi-fast food Valentines Day dinner’ plans, but we do have a lot less wiggle room.

So let this be a lesson to myself, I’m not a budget expert yet. 🙂  And moral of the story – just because there is a coupon or sale does not mean I should buy it – nor does it mean that gives me the freedom to buy more of the sale item.

But I am learning.  I am saying “no” to myself – I did not go out this week to McDonald’s to get a Shamrock Shake. That took a lot of will power.

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January by the Numbers

Here we are one month into our goal to be Debt Free by the end of 2012… how did we do? Did we make any progress? I’m happy to report, yes we did!

This month we paid off $6,740 – which was the total of our 2 smaller student loans

We also made some extra money, which comes in outside of our budgeted income – so it is helpful in applying right to debt.

$150 on Craigslist sales

$7 from Pennies for Debra

$75 from a stack of silver coins we had floating around the house (finally rolled them and made them usable)

$94 in a Cash Back savings from our Energy Company

Totaling $322 extra dollars of income.

In addition to all of that – we also (of course) paid our minimums on everything else – further chipping away at principle of what we owe.

Finally – I’m happy to report an additional, unexpected bonus to living on a budget.

The biggest change is that we are using the envelope system for food. I specifically budgeted $100 less then what we had been averaging on food because I figured if we paid attention to where our food money went – and were a little more strict in our eating out – we would be able to make this lower food-a-month goal.  I’m happy to report that including a birthday party and a birthday dinner for the hubby – we met the new food budget goal no problem!

AND to top it off – we both lost weight this month. Budgeting is good for one’s health. 🙂

Total Debt paid in January: $7,276*

*For the purpose of Baby step 2 we are not factoring in our home mortgage