The Follow Up

Yesterday we went shopping for the week! This week we decided to go (for the most part) on a cash only system. After reading a book by Dave Ramsey (Total Money Makeover) this last year, we started going through his Financial Peace University about 1 month or 2 ago. It has been great! I hope to write more about it at some point.

A couple classes ago he talked about using cash only. We get miles from our credit card and we pay it off fully each month, but after hearing some of the reasoning behind using the cash only system, we decided to try it out for the rest of this month. I put all of our receipts into an excel sheet anyway, so I already knew how much we'd spent in each category up to that point. I just took the money we hadn't used yet this month and put that cash into the envelops. So, if the blog wasn't accountability enough for the grocery budget, now I have even more accountability!

Changes/Notes to the list

• Went with the "off brand" stir fry veggies instead of the ones on sale and saved an additional $.70
• 12 pack of toilet paper was $1.75 off
• Picked up a $.99 box of Jujubes (I love those things :))
• Added coffee to the list - $3.99
• I also got a pack of jumbo diapers (we are potty training/using disposables/using cloth - doing everything right now basically!)
  

The total this week (including diapers) was $43.98. My estimate yesterday was $33 which was right on because the diapers were about $10 (and they weren't on the list).

Next week we have a very small budget to work with! We'll see how we do :) - should be interesting!