The Key to Grocery Budgeting

So there have been a few questions about how to keep grocery budgets low, and I will tell you that this is still a struggle for us from time to time. Let's face it, we can't all be extreme couponers! In fact, I did several months of coupon clipping and researching deals trying to figure out how to cut my grocery bill the way they do on that TV show and I just couldn't do it. After two months of arduously studying deals and clipping coupons, organizing them into little folders, I only managed to do one shopping trip that came even remotely close, and to be honest, it was stuff we didn't need!  I got 10 boxes of pasta and 5 boxes of brownies for $7! At the time I was excited, but that was the only good haul I had after two months, and the more I thought about it the worse I felt because I don't need 5 boxes of brownies. The pasta we do actually use and we still have 3 boxes left a year later.

Anyways, I want to share a few things I have learned about grocery shopping and budgeting for food.

1) Coupons aren't for me.  The more coupons I clip, the more money I spend on stuff that I would never buy normally. They don't send out coupons for the cheap stuff that I typically buy, so using a coupon just means that I have to pay more before I can get that $.50 off. The only exception I will say here is that Safeway often has coupons for $10 off if you spend $100 in a single trip or some variation of this deal. I do use these coupons because they have a cash value and they apply to my overall bill instead of being brand/item specific. If you are good at using coupons and can control yourself, unlike me, go for it, but I wouldn't sweat it if it is a hassle.


2) Club cards make up for not having coupons! As I said in response to a previous comment, having a club card to your local grocery store is a HUGE help. They do club card specials which can get you some pretty awesome deals even without coupons. The things we see the biggest deals on are soda and meat. We drink a TON of soda here, and with the club card we can usually get B2G2 deals. Recently there have even been a lot of B2G2 + a free bag of chips! Since we don't have a junk food budget for chips or sweets, this kind of fills the void. It is also notable here that most of the club cards now have online functionality or smartphone apps that allow you to load coupons directly onto your card online and then they are automatically applied at the register. I consider these different from regular coupons because I don't feel as compelled to go out searching for the items on these digital coupons. Instead I load them onto my card and forget about them, any time I get a discount from them is a bonus I wasn't expecting. Some people argue that going to Walmart or other similar big box stores is cheaper than going specifically to the grocery store. I disagree for a few reasons. Primarily, I hardly ever see any deals on groceries at Walmart that are significantly less than what I pay at the regular grocery store. Secondly, my club card gives me fuel points which save me money on putting gas in the car. Third, I pass 8 different grocery stores on my way to the closest Walmart, so the drive alone makes it not worth my time.  

3) Outside, top and bottom. Believe it or not, companies spend a lot of time analyzing shopping patterns before they place products on their shelves. There is a methodology behind product placement that will make your head spin. The best way to avoid being drawn into this marketing scheme is to stick to the outside of the store. Consider this: stores are generally organized so that dairy, fruit, breads and meat are around the outside. These are the essential parts of any diet (arguably bread could be removed, but I happen to like my carbs, thank you very much). The inside aisles of the store contain things like boxed meals, canned (and sweetened) fruits and veggies and junk foods. Now, I understand that you can't completely avoid walking down the aisles (how would I get my soda!?), but you can definitely eliminate a large part of your bill by not walking up and down every single one. You need ketchup? Only go as far down the aisle as you absolutely have to to grab that big red bottle. And when you get there keep in mind that marketers place the most expensive name brand items in the center of the shelves at eye level. Discounted and generic brands are either on the top shelf (out of reach for poor little me) or on the very bottom shelf (who looks down there anyways?). Knowing this has actually brought me to realize that there are store brand varieties of nearly everything, even things that I had only ever known by their name brand.

4) Clearance groceries! One of the best kept secrets in grocery shopping!!!!! Now, I will start off by saying that I will not buy clearance dairy products for any reason, only because we do not use them quick enough and they gross me out. However, the very FIRST thing I do when I go grocery shopping is rush to the refrigerated meat section at the back of the store. Somewhere, hidden, no matter how small is clearance meats. The variety changes weekly, and I never see ground beef in there. We have gotten 3 pounds of beef and pork ribs for $3.40. Two weeks ago I managed to snag 2 gigantic rib-eye steaks and a couple of NY strip steaks for a total of $7. 4 lbs of chicken breasts for $3? Score! So, as you can see, shopping the clearance meat has actually increased our quality of eating because we are no longer on the Hamburger Helper diet. I wish I had saved my receipt from my last shopping trip to share with you all so you could see my savings on meat alone. I will put it this way, I saved $66 alone on just meat, which was over 80% savings on those items. First my club card discount was applied, followed by the clearance coupons that are stamped on the packages, ranging from 30-50% off each. As soon as I bring this stuff home I break out the Ziploc baggies and separate everything into portions for our family. This way a single package can be split into multiple meals and stretch us through 2 weeks at a time.

A few last minute tips: Go shopping by yourself. Bringing Logan and Jason to the store with me almost always leads to excess stuff. They just can't keep their hands away from the snacks! Take a list. Stick to the list. My mom used to say that if it wasn't on the list when she walked into the store it wasn't going to end up in the cart (of course, we could always just add stuff to the list in the store, but that's cheating!).

Now For A Personal Challenge

After reviewing our grocery bills for the last month or so I have decided that we drink entirely too much soda. It really isn't good for us at all, and it is taking up a massive chunk of our budget. We buy soda whether it is on sale or not, so it fluctuates from about $12 a week upwards of $25. In a budget of only $125 every two weeks for groceries this is completely out of proportion, and can probably explain the lack of fresh fruits that I would much rather have in the house. So I have issued a personal challenge. I am going to cut down to only 1 can of soda a day. In theory 1 12-pack of soda should last me all but the last 2 days of a 2 week period. This will be about half the amount of soda that I normally go through. On the downside, Jason isn't on board with this one, so he may take up my slack and just drink the extra soda himself. :( I think I will have to hide it from him somewhere (Haha!). This will eliminate extra trips to the store just to restock on soda, and force to drink more water, which I have always been terrible about. 

Maybe someday I will be able to cut soda completely out of my diet, but today is not that day.

So, what other tips do you have for grocery shopping? Other questions about shopping for certain items? How about vices that you could cut back on to save yourself some money?! 

End of Month 1 Progress Report

Well it has been a chaotic month around here for us. Moving has caused a bit of a disruption in our normal spending and shopping habits, which has made an impact on our previously planned budget, despite efforts on my part to avoid it. So, here is where we currently sit:

On our first loan we have made more progress than anticipated. I made the regular $25 payment on the first of June, followed by our $100 bonus payment for the month. This bonus payment counted for July's payment and made it so that the next payment wouldn't be due until August first. Well, out of habit, I went ahead and made another $25 payment yesterday in preparation for the regular July 1st payment. The end result is that we don't have an actual payment due again until September first now, and the $25 payment from this week was applied just like a bonus payment!

Of course, I have every intention of continuing to make the regular $25 payment at the beginning of every single month, as well as the $100 bonus payment, so it is looking like this loan may go down even faster than I thought! It is amazing the difference I am already seeing in the amount of the payment that is applied to interest every single time. Before, $9 out of every $25 was being applied to interest. Now we are closer to $4-5. Part of this is caused by the lower principal amount, but some of it is also caused by making 2 payments in a month so that the interest for the month is split between them. Even if it doesn't make a huge difference in the actual amount of interest being paid overall, it is still giving me a positive boost just because I can see that a larger percentage of every payment is being applied to the principal.

Naturally, all of the other regular payments were made on our loans for July 1st as well (except for AES because it is due in the second half of the month). I have not totaled the amount of change overall yet, but I am assuming it is close to the .4% difference seen after the 1st of June, so I am probably safe to say that we are barely approaching the 1% mark at this point for overall debt paid off going into July. It is a seemingly small number, but to think, as we get each loan paid off and snowball these payments together we will begin paying off chunks of our loans 5 and 10 percent at a time near the end! I can't wait!!!

The one downfall this month with moving was that I did not budget NEARLY enough money for gas as I should have. Typically $50 in gas will get me through at least 1 week, but since we have been making three or four trips a day back and forth to the apartment and having to put gas in the moving truck things got out of control quickly. I ended up having to pull $100 out of savings (OUCH!) to cover the cost of fuel for all those trips. So even though I hit my monthly target of $350 in savings, I definitely took a big step back on this one, and I will have to make up for it in the very near future. The good news is that I used Jason's paycheck to pay the first half of July's bills, but I still have a paycheck coming in this Friday which technically still counts as June, so I may be able to squeeze $100 out of this check to put back into savings and be on time for my goal.  It's not a perfect solution but it's better than falling behind!

So let's look forward to another month of making progress, making our goals and hopefully not having any more reasons to take money out of savings!!!!

For those of you who are playing along with me and have set goals, how much progress did you make at the end of this month?

June Update

All of our loan payments have been posted to our accounts and I have updated my graphics! It was a *small* dent this month, but I am still feeling pretty good about seeing one loan drop by more than $100 for the first time in a while.

The graph above shows our regular payment of $24.76 + $100 bonus payment for the month. Of course, some of it went to interest, but the rest was applied directly to the principal.  The table shows our previous month's balance for our loans and our new current balances. The total progress for the month is only $302.57, which amounts to only 0.4% of our total debt. Since it was such a small number, I didn't even bother to update the percentage graph for our total debt paid off, and even if I did, you wouldn't be able to see it at all. Anyways, our total debt for the month dropped from $70757.78 to $70455.21.  

This month also marks the first month that our AES payment jumped from $155 to $230 a month. The $155/month payment was on an interest only repayment plan, which meant that our loan was staying even but not going down at all. Even with our higher payment of $230 we still have a little bit of interest to pay off before any of our payment will start to be applied to the principal. I think it is about $380 of interest that needs to be paid. So, since our bill went up by $75, it will be about 5 months before we see a difference in our principal on that loan. I'm not terribly happy about this, but for a while we had to do everything we could to reduce our payments just to get by, and since the AES loan will never go on full deferment, interest-only was the only option that we had. Right now we also have the choice to pay off the $380 instantly so that we can begin seeing a difference in the principal right away, but that would mean cutting $380 out of our budget from somewhere else, and I haven't quite figured out how to make that happen just yet. Apply our $100 bonus payment to that amount for the next couple of months until it is gone, and then go back to paying off the smallest loan? I think that would make me lose my focus. Hmmm... something to investigate further.

I also managed to pay off a significant portion of our $300 credit card balance this month, and the remaining $150 of savings will be put aside tomorrow when my paycheck shows up. Yay for completing my monthly goal for savings and a bonus debt payment!!!! On the downside, our excess spending is all out of whack for the month because we are getting ready to move and have put a significant amount of money into getting the house ready to be lived in. Cleaning supplies and tools to fix things have cost us a huge chunk of change. Luckily, we did get a bit of a refund on our federal grants for this semester, so it hasn't made a huge impact on the rest of our budget yet. I would love to keep it that way!!! Also on the downside is that both Jason and my phones are broken. We are due for a free upgrade, but even with the free phone upgrade there is an upgrade fee for the account and we have to pay shipping for the new phones. $25/each, but seriously none of the buttons on our phones work anymore. :( 

Ooooh! Another positive just came to mind. We are changing internet services when we move, which is frustrating, but will also drop our internet bill from $72/month down to $36/month for the next 6 months! Woohoo! 

Have you made any progress on your loans yet?!

Going Into Our First Full Month

Well I began this blog at the end of May, and by that point there was no way I was going to be able to complete my monthly goal of a $100 bonus payment and $350 into savings. This month is a whole different story! As of today I sent in our first $100 payment to Sallie Mae. They have upgraded their site once again so now when you send an extra payment it asks you which loan to apply it to AND it asks whether you want to apply it to the principal or next month's payment! This cuts out the extra step of having to send an email explaining how to apply the bonus payment! Woo-hoo!

As of today I have also put $200 into savings. I will have to put the last $150 into saving over the next couple of weeks.The good news is that our paychecks alternate, so we end up getting paid every single Friday. That leaves us with 1 more check from Jason's job, and 2 more checks from my job this month. My checks are nowhere near what Jason's are, but the extra $200-300 every other week is a huge help in this project! We also lucked out this week and I managed to work several night jobs and on Jason's days off, so we ended up only needing the babysitter for 1 day, which means we paid $20 for this weeks babysitting instead of $100.

I also work for an incentive based company, so I am evaluated on the 7th and 13th week of every quarter to see if I am reaching the next level of goals. If I am, I will be bumped up a pay grade instantly. Unfortunately, I started working in the 7th week of the quarter so there wasn't really a chance to get bumped up then. However, in the last 4 weeks I have consistently improved on my numbers, and have been rewarded with a small bonus on my first full paycheck as well as a lot of extra hours. I have been asked to pick up several extra jobs in the upcoming weeks, and have been placed on a committed full time team. I have also been working 1-on-1 with a training supervisor the last couple of nights because my manager believes that if I can ramp up quickly enough I will be eligible to jump 2 pay grades instead of just 1!  That means a $1.50/hr raise instead of just $.50 for the first pay raise. Considering this is an hourly job on the lower end of the pay scale, this is a massive raise. My last hourly job where I got a raise, the raise was only $.13 and it came after a year of work. I am super excited about the potential to set even higher goals for paying off our loans!!!

On the downside, I am completely exhausted. Between cleaning and getting ready to move, the extra hours at work, full time school and Logan there has been very little sit-down time. I have a few friends who are considering going back to school and are unsure of how to juggle family/school/work all at once. The key is using your time effectively and knowing your limits. Last semester I took too many classes and ended up not doing very well in 2 of them (read: complete failure). This semester I dropped back down to only 3 classes. I take my text books with me to work and do my assigned reading on my 10 minute breaks and 30 minute lunch break. I come home and hang out with Logan and do house stuff, and then as soon as Logan goes to bed, I get online and start doing my other assignments. It is hard to stay on top of things, but I have also lowered my expectations for school a little bit. As it is frequently put to me "What do you call a med student who graduates last in his class?" A: A Doctor. I don't shoot for straight A's. I don't have the time or energy to be a perfectionist in school at this point. As long as I am making some progress towards graduating I am  happy. I don't need to take 18 credits in a semester to make it happen.

So this is my update so far. I will update my graphs and whatnot as soon as the payment has been posted to the loans. I will have to adjust our savings back down because we will have to pay July rent in 2 places, so instead of having $750 + $200 we will only have the $200 that I just put in, which sets us back a little bit on the savings goal, BUT since my job is looking like it might bring in a lot more money than I initially planned for, we may come out ahead!

Have you set monthly goals? Have you figured out a budget?

"Money Doesn't Buy Happiness..." But it Sure Can Help

I continue to read blogs by other people struggling to pay off their debt, and once in a while I find something that really strikes me. I just finished reading a story about downsizing everything in your life and learning to live simpler. The idea is that you will adapt to living this way, and you will end up just as happy as you were with all of your stuff. Now, coming from someone who has a ton of toys and extra stuff in their life, it is totally believable. However, even he said that he was pretty miserable for the first 3 months, he missed his cars and trips to see friends and other hobbies. By month four he was just getting used to some of those changes, but not entirely.

However, the whole reason I'm writing this blog is because I don't have 3 extra cars to sell and I'm not trying to cut extra vacations out of my budget. I'm trying to pay extra out of the little bit that we do have, and while that means cutting back on fast food, it's nothing really drastic. In some cases, I agree that downsizing is better. After moving my furniture 5 or 6 times over the last few years we have decided to just sell the bedroom set. It is extremely heavy, and the house has a lot of stairs to get up to the master bedroom. I don't want to even think about it. Jason's dad had a spare bed frame sitting in his hay loft, which he is giving to us. He also gave us a box spring because ours decided to splinter and break several times in the last month. The money that we get from selling the bedroom set will be put toward buying a new (smaller) dresser, and perhaps have a little bit left over for anything else we need to buy last minute, like a night stand.

But there is some furniture I will not give up. I will have a computer desk and a computer. Jason and I both depend on the internet for work. Our only entertainment is completely centered around online gaming, which is $15/month each. We will also have bookshelves. One of THE MOST important parts of growing up to me was reading tons and tons of books about all kinds of things, fiction or non-fiction, poetry or philosophical essays. I read everything. Jason reads everything. And it is extremely important to us that Logan grows up learning to read and be interested in reading. Our combined library is enough to fill at least four 7' tall bookshelves, and we continue to buy books. Sure we have a kindle, and we do have a small library on that as well. But I love our bookshelves, and we actually need to buy more because we don't have enough space on ours anymore. Logan will also have his own bookshelf eventually with his kiddy books on it, which we have a growing stock of. Jason and I typically read different kinds of books at different times, so even though we have all of these books and continue to buy more, I have read less than half the ones we have. Someday maybe when Logan is grown up and not interested in our outdated sci-fi I will consider donating them, but for the time being they are a part of our home and will continue to be. And when I say we continue to buy books I mean we bought a ton when Borders went out of business, and if either of us is following a particular series we usually pick up the remaining books if it is worth finishing, so it's not a huge expense for us, but it is ongoing.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. There are some parts of our life where we can downsize. Bedroom furniture is one of them. There are other areas where we can't. Having 1 car and having to orchestrate how to get Logan to daycare is a pain enough as it is. I wouldn't want to do it without a car, but then again I wouldn't be able to get to work without a car, so it might not even matter at that point. Nonetheless, we aren't getting rid of that. And we are actually upgrading from this apartment to a house.

For all the preaching about how money can't buy happiness I have to say, it does make a difference. We can adapt to living with less, and Jason and I have had our fair share of "less". On the other hand, privacy and stability don't have a price, but they can certainly be bought. Just last night I was sitting at the kitchen table in boxers and a bra when some stranger marched right into our apartment. This is not the first time this has happened. I hate feeling like I have to lock myself in or lock myself out. This apartment complex also has a knack for inventing "welfare" inspections for all sorts of things. Every single month somebody comes into our apartment and checks our bedding for bugs, or checks the blinds to make sure they aren't damaged, or checks the general "safety" of the apartment. I'm tired of it. I hate having to let these guys in to walk around and judge us every month in the name of "preventative maintenance". Any little thing they find that breaks their rules, they fine us for. It's not like they do a damage check when you move out and take the money out of your deposit. They just add a fine to your month's rent bill for whatever they say you've done wrong. So while upgrading to a house is not in the heart of living a simpler life, it does provide us with more stability and control in that we (hopefully) won't have strangers marching in on us all the time. (Plus it is providing us with an opportunity to actually save more money than we are in this apartment, and pay off debt faster.)

The other issue I find with this whole theory of not depending on money for happiness is a psychological one. I have always been taught about budgeting from a very early age. I have been instilled with a sense of urgency to pay off debt and to never let my bills be late. I consider these good qualities. On the flip side I suffer from really really bad anxiety and depression that is directly related to our financial problems. After we found out that our mortgage fell through last year I locked myself inside for a week and went through bouts of crying and screaming and just a complete lack of willingness to continue to work towards anything. There were days at a time when I couldn't force myself to get out of bed to deal with Logan or anything else. I just let it all slip through the cracks because there was no end in sight. At that point all I could see was that we already had a mountain of student loans, we were forced to find this apartment in 2 days, give up our pets, move yet again, all with the knowledge that in less than a year we would have to pack up and move. This apartment is costing us way more than our last several "homes", which meant that it would be even harder to save or to pay extra on loans.

I cannot handle the idea of moving over and over and over for countless years with no destination. I can't handle not having the freedom to put up pictures in my home. I can't handle having landlords coming and going, adding to my bill every month as they see fit. I can't handle not having animals because the deposits are so ridiculous. So what I'm saying is that while money may not buy happiness directly, it can provide me with stability, which keeps me from being a complete basket case. If you have 3 cars and one breaks down, you drive a different one. If you have 1 car and it breaks down, you miss a day of work, which eats into your paycheck, which makes you late on your bills, which frustrates most people, but sends me into a completely different state of meltdown. I don't want to live in a mansion with a pool (actually, I have expressly forbidden Jason from ever buying a pool). I don't want a fleet of cars. I don't want to go on a vacation every other weekend. All I want is to know that if one thing breaks it isn't going to send us into a financial tailspin, and that makes me happy.