- Groceries: $400 (yep, for 6 people, this is where couponing helps)
- Eating out: $150 (really almost unrealistic for my family since we have caviar tastes on a shoestring budget but it's what I feel the max we should spend is)
- Haircare: $48 (I am really bad about getting everyone a haircut and they typically look like they have tumbleweeds on their heads by the time we get around to haircuts but we usually go every 2-3 months)
- David's Money: $50 (someone has an addiction to soda and snuff, he also gets haircuts every two weeks so this has to cover it all)
So here is what we put in savings: (we do this because these expenses we only access every 3-6 months so to have cash just lying around in an envelope in our house would not be good, just sayin')
- Gifts: $180 (for Christmas and Birthdays...we do have 5 kids)
- Clothes: $100 (again...5 kids, well 4 at home and we do pass down clothes a lot so this is the emergency fund disguised to look like our clothing fund)
- Oil: $150 (to heat our house, took all the bills from the last two years added a few hundred for inflation and averaged them...)
- Vehicle Maintenance: $93.00 ( we averaged out our oil changes and other misc things we need to have done routinely)
- Chiefs Dues: $17 ($200 a year, will not get in to this now)
That's it. Well, we do have other monthly bills but those stay about the same and are just that, monthly.
So far, so good this month. We are on track except for eating out. We have blown most of that. Might be in part due to my husband being away for the past few weeks and I am too exhausted to cook. I also have incurred some scouting expenses that were not planned for. These I took from my grocery budget since I don't need most of it this month but I will repay it. I need to re-evaluate and add those into our yearly budget as well and since they don't happen every month they can also go into savings.
