Budget Update Week Two

We are still going strong with our budget!  We have now gone 9 whole days without eating out AT ALL (this is seriously a big deal for us)!  Every meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner, plus dessert some nights, drinks, everything) has been made at home.  I have definitely felt tempted to say, "Can we just eat out tonight?" But I followed my menu plan, even on the days when I didn't feel like cooking, and I'm SO glad I did!  Sunday was especially hard since both Billy and I were sick (he seems to be over it, I'm feeling a little worse today but it's just a cold so it could be worse).  I just made one of the easier things I had planned for this week and we're doing the same tonight.  If I can make sure to plan ahead some simple meals throughout the week, it is so helpful when something unexpected comes up.

This past week's recipe success (everything was good, this was just extra, surprisingly good) was definitely the crock pot creamy tomato soup.  I was quite surprised, considering I never even liked tomato soup until a few weeks ago when I had it at a friend's house.  This was even a low-calorie "skinny" soup, and it still turned out great!  It was perfect for a cold Saturday night.  It was also very inexpensive to make.  We figured we spent about $2 on it (for 6 servings), but I also had most of the ingredients on hand.  It would definitely be a less-than-five-dollar dinner, even if you had to buy most of the ingredients.  I even used homemade chicken broth that I made after cooking a whole chicken this week.  Very simple and so good.

I wanted to post our menu plan for this week, since it helps me to have it in multiple places (just in case my list on the refrigerator gets snatched by little munchkin hands...)

Breakfast:

Freezer Breakfast Burritos (for Billy)

Oatmeal, toast, fruit, eggs, pancakes (for girls)

Toast or muffins from freezer (for me)

Lunch:

Sandwiches, quesadillas, pasta, leftovers, baked potatoes (whatever works that day)

Dinner:

• Cinnamon rolls and bacon
• Beef tacos and rice (I use this recipe for making my own taco seasoning)
• Baked sweet and sour chicken with fried rice (this is one of Billy's very favorite things for me to make; it's a lot of work, but very good!)
• Sour cream noodle bake (x2), easy homemade french bread (x3), green beans (We are taking meals to two different families this night, so I figured we might as well all eat the same thing to make life a little easier!  The casserole fills a 9x13 dish, so I plan on making two batches which would equal 4 8x8 casseroles--1 for each of the families, 1 for us, and 1 for the freezer)
• Potato soup and English muffin bread
• Crockpot Italian chicken using homemade Italian dressing with potatoes and corn
• Freezer soup and bread

Extras:

Apple butter and applesauce (I ended up using the crock pot a lot this past week and never seemed to have a free day to make this stuff...and I got a little lazy.  I really need to get this done this week!)

I am realizing that we go through food a lot faster now that we're eating at home pretty much all the time (duh).  I always felt like $50 worth of groceries still seemed like a lot of food at the end of the week...but that was really because we weren't always eating at home.  Now I'm finding that we're definitely using up what I buy and $75 doesn't seem like much.  I'm still trying to plan inexpensive meals that usually leave us with leftovers, since that helps a lot when it comes to lunch the next day.  I've also been trying to stock the freezer when I can (like muffins for breakfast/dessert, casseroles that can be split into two 8x8 pans and have one for dinner and the other goes in the freezer for another week).  Right now we are doing fine and staying under our weekly grocery budget (I spent $72 this week), but I'm also noticing that we are going without some of the things I put on the list (mostly wants and not needs).  Definitely a good exercise in prioritizing!  This week I actually circled the items on the list that weren't necessary so I would know what to skip over if we started coming up close to our limit.  Of course, today I realized that we're very low on sugar, but we have enough left in this week's budget to pick that up without going over.  Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is that my perspective has really changed now that we're actually eating what I buy.  This is definitely a good thing and I'm interested to see how things go over the next couple of months.

I'm really excited for November, because it will be the first full month of our budget.  It's hard to really see the big picture for the month of October because we weren't on track for the first half of the month.  We can already see a huge difference in our eating out budget (we're actually under budget for that, even with starting in the middle of the month), but all of the other categories are kind of messed up.  So I'll be glad to start a new month and see how we adapt things as we go along.

I have to brag on Billy for a minute...he has been very diligent with selling some items we've had hanging around for about three years.  He inherited a ton of comic books from his dad and has been avoiding selling them for a while, just because it's a bit overwhelming to go through all of them and list each individual book.  He has been working on listing and selling comics multiple times per week and everything he makes from that is going straight into our student loan debt.  He is also selling some DVDs that we don't need anymore and putting those profits toward the debt as well.  It's amazing how we've both become less attached to possessions when we look at our debt.  We are being much more liberal with selling our stuff (and we also console ourselves that when we're out of debt, we can replace those things with better versions haha).  If it's something that's taking up space, not being used, and has monetary value, we are basically selling it.  And it feels good!