This year I really need to work on saving some money. I started using a new website to track all of my spending. It shows me exactly where all of our money is going. I was a little shocked to see how much money we really spend going out to eat or on fast food. I’m setting a budget for everything. I know we can’t cut everything off cold turkey so I’m going to have us do a step down method for our spending habits.
Right now we spend about $500 a month of groceries. I would like to get that down closer to $300 or less but I know we need to work towards that. To start I’m setting a budget of $400 a month or roughly $100 a week on groceries. I think we can manage to cut back by $25 a week to start with easily, especially if I really work to use up what we have in our pantry. The following month I’ll move it to $75 a week. If we do really well with that I might even be able to move it down a little further but I’m not going to go crazy.
We’re taking a closer look at television and cable services along with movie rentals. We purchased a few pay per view movies on demand this month. This is really silly considering we pay almost $20 a month for Netflix, we just need to send back our current DVD to get the next one on our list. My husband and I are thinking about turning off our cable television because just about everything we watch is available online and we do have Netflix. We pay about $100 a month for cable so that’s more money we could save every month.
I know groceries and entertainment aren’t the only way we can save but at least it’s a start. I was able to easily identify these ways to save and will do some digging into other ways to save that I might not be soo obvious to me.