Before we had Miss, my money-nerd self got serious about budgeting (which I always want to spell with two "t"s for some inexplicable reason). My boss at the bank who I love - and who, incidentally, has occasionally stopped by The Mrs to drop a comment here or there - will tell you that me and budgets go together like garlic roast beef and horseradish. Or something that you think goes together really really well. If I were to list some of my all-time favourite activities, budgeting and thinking about budgeting would likely show up multiple times each. Right up there with being warm, eating Wendy's (more about that some other time), and listening to Miss talk.
So now that we've established my love of budgeting, here's where it goes wonky: I cannot for the life of me keep our grocery spending under control. We used to work with cash for this kind of stuff...the money that we had for variable expenses that weren't bills we took out in cash every week. But we stopped doing that for a few good reasons (it was hard to track in Quicken, for one thing), and now I can't get it together.
We have a budget of $120/week for groceries and other things found at grocery stores - like diapers, toothpaste, and cat food, to name a few - and since the first of September we've spent about $180 each week. That's $780 over budget.
For those of you who may not know the whys and wherefores of budgeting, that's bad. I won't do the math to annualize this, because I like my sanity.
And in the interests of preserving my sanity, and so I can stay at home when April rolls around, I'm going to work VERY hard to keep my groceries under (way under) budget. So after our shop on Sunday when Mr and I take Jr and Miss to what she refers to as the cookie store, I'll report back, and hopefully shame myself into clawing this number back to something resembling it's fantasy-land budgeted-for counterpart.
