That Time I Spent $172 at Aldi

I used to boast that I could fill up a whole cart at Aldi and still come in well under $100. Well, I decided not to shop with a list a couple weeks ago. (That's grocery budget 101 stuff, Ashley!) And when I got to the front of the store and started tossing everything onto the belt, I realized I'd made a major mistake. It was one of those weeks when Aldi had, like, so many cool things that were those limited time buys. So, I got sucked in and stocked up.

And then: $172! Ahhhhhh! I was hoping for more like $100.

Here's what I bought:

I haven't gone over what our weekly food budget is in a while. It's been anywhere between $75 and $125 a week in recent years. As we examine our debt and budget options, we're still trying to figure out a number that would work well for us monthly. It needs to accommodate not eating out, school lunch stuff, and special things for our tiny toddler (because she NEEDS to eat, so sometimes I NEED to get her special stuff).

We've experimented with shopping once a month and had good success . . . so I realize that spending a ton at one time isn't always a reason to freak out. But this time was a mistake. A wakeup to get meal planning again. I do actually meal plan each week, but it's been very rough lately.

Anyway, this story had a happy ending. I was able to get groceries for like $65 this week, making the total $240 for the two weeks -- or -- $120/week. I think this sounds like a realistic grocery budget for us. I may bump it to $125 -- or -- $541 a month. Of course, the pay-off-our-loans girl in me says maybe we can shave it down to $500 a month.

But I need it to be realistic and leave some room for wiggle. We try our best to eat a variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, whole grains, etc. And without eating out, we like to cook a couple "fun" meals each week so we don't feel too deprived.

What I've found in my years of writing about our food budget is that grocery costs vary WILDLY across the country (and world). So, these figures may sound either astronomical to you or like "how can you even feed your family" on that amount. I get that. So, no judgement. I'm just sharing our struggles and triumphs with this stuff.

Whatever the case, I'm glad we're back into the rhythm of buying most everything at Aldi. There are still a few items we cannot get there. Tofu comes to mind. But resisting Wegmans has already lowered our food costs by quite a bit.

Do you have a grocery budget or just buy whatever? How do you figure out how much to spend? Do you end up revisiting the budget often -- like we seem to do?

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Money Matters // An Update

I can't remember where I left off with our debt and repayment + debt-free goals. I made those goals last January and declared we could be debt-free in just 15 months. We were doing OK with our plan of attack for a while, but then summer hit (vacation we shouldn't have gone on, etc.) . . . and then we had thousands of dollars of repairs needed for various things in the fall. And then we planned to be frugal at Christmas, but ended up spending more than we intended.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Major setback is what I'm saying.

I am sharing this post to hopefully keep myself accountable. Stephen and I sat down yesterday and looked at our whole financial picture. That savings we had in the bank has dwindled to just two months of expenses. We needed that money for a lot of stuff, so I get it. And I'm glad we didn't go into debt paying for the repairs we needed for our home and our car. But still! It stings.

Anyway, enough of you (and my friends) have said to look at Dave Ramsey. We were loosely following those goals last year when we started. Mostly, I am afraid to drop our emergency fund to just $1,000 because history has shown that we regularly need more than that in emergencies. I think a cushion of more like $3K would work for us. But -- for those of you who have done this -- is that all the money you have in your bank account? That makes me nervous.

But then I realized we've done so much of this money thing backwards. We actually had like nine months of living expenses in the bank when I left my full-time job to stay home/work from home. We retained that cushion for a very long time because I was afraid of losing work and needing that cash. All the while, if we needed a car or a major something (furnace, for example), we'd finance. Adding to our debt. In a way, we had a very false sense of security, right?

We are now thinking of going through the Ramsey steps. We already have a very good budget that we just need to follow again. It's realistic. It's tight. But it's very doable. We can pitch some of our money in the bank to pay off a few debts from the get-go, freeing up money in the monthly budget to start the whole snowball thing again. And we can kick a lot of our debts out by the summer this way.

Milestone: Stephen and I each now have less than $5K left in student loans. This is HUGE, as we both started with more than $30K.

But our total debt right now is sitting at just about $25K. That's an improvement from last year's $34K, but we did add to our debt by incurring credit card debt on vacation and buying a washer + dryer set via a Home Depot card. It's 0% for that last debt, but it's still just sitting there. We should have purchased them with the money we had in the bank.

OK. I hope to update you more as we go through the steps. I know many of you have gone on your own debt-free adventures. Are we on the right track? Is it just a matter of moving forward? I don't know how we fell so far off from our goals. Any suggestions on that? And is anyone else starting this journey . . . or starting it again, like us?

The idea of being debt-free is so liberating. I know it will happen eventually, but we definitely have some savings goals in mind and would love to lighten up a bit. You know, take a big trip or do something FUN with our money again. I can't wait to get there!

I'm off to my Excel budget spreadsheet! You can read more of my debt-related posts here.

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Bad Spending Month // Recovery Plan

March, you guys. Oh, March. Where to begin? Stephen and I are in the process of switching to a more local bank. We have most of our money (which isn't much!) in Bank of America, but there are no local branches. It's made the cash system costly. The month we did take out cash, we discovered that we were being double-charged. We had taken out our cash in two installments . . . and it ended up (FOOLISHLY) costing us like $30.

So, we joined a local bank which now makes ATM transactions free. In the process of switching, though, we haven't transferred around enough, so we decided to just do our debit card last month. I still shopped for our food at the beginning of the month in a large shop and stuck within budget. After that, though, it was a landslide of spending . . . and I'm really not proud of it. This is our current plan to get debt-free, and I hate already deviating from it.

Without having the physical money, we find ourselves venturing out to the store and buying all sorts of things we "need". We find ourselves without a plan -- and that's dangerous. I haven't looked at the ugly numbers yet, but I plan to do that later today. Part of me is actually just nervous/scared to look at how much we over-spent on our budget. Does anyone else ever feel that way when you're looking at a bad over-budget month?

Here's our plan for recovery:

Chatting about the Why

Stephen and I know very well why our spending got out of control. He started coaching track and is now gone long hours and Saturdays. This means we are trying to do anything and everything to make ourselves feel better. And that usually means eating takeout or getting extra food all the time. Because home-cooked meals are sometimes hard to make when life is crazy AND eating delicious sandwiches with fresh ingredients from Wegmans several nights a week just sounds . . . amazing.

Ugh. The schedule isn't changing until a couple weeks into June. If we keep spending at this pace, our bank account will look frightening by summer. This is one of the main reasons why everything went to crap this month. So, we need to recognize it and move on.

Going Back to Cash

We need to take out cash for this month. Period. I'm going to figure out the total number I want to take out today and then divvy it up into my cash envelope system wallet. Then I'm going to write out our spending plan for the month.. There isn't much more to say about this one. If you're prone to mindless and excessive spending when you use cards . . . cash can help so much.

Simplifying Our Meals

We have $500 a month set aside for our food. We have a pretty well-stocked pantry right now, so I may forgo the big monthly shopping trip and try to just use up what's in the pantry for as long as possible. I'll need to buy some fresh produce and other items that expire more quickly. But otherwise, I am going to try to plan our meals around what's already at home. This may mean eating pasta more frequently this month.

My goal is to spend just $300 of that $500. SAVINGS: $200, maybe more.

Planning a Personal Spending Freeze

I budget $200 a month to an allowance fund for the family. This money is essentially fun money, money for stuff each of us might need or want, and etc. This month of April we are going to try to spend as little of this money as possible. Along with that, we have a $135 monthly weekend fund to do stuff out. Instead of breaking into that, we're going to try to just doing free stuff on our weekends and skip eating out, etc. I'm hoping the nicer weather may help with this. Having a blizzard and all that jazz definitely contributed to us spending more money.

SAVINGS: Potentially $335, but we'll see what ends up happening. It definitely won't be all of this.

Changing Vacation Expectations

OK. Yeah. So, this is where it gets tricky. We are also heading up to Burlington to visit my brother mid-month. What I think may happen is that we use some of these weekend/personal funds to pay for what we are doing up there versus spending any extra on top of the budget. Does that make sense? We've had this trip planned for a while . . . and we originally intended to stay three nights. I think we're going to cut the trip back to just two nights and try to save that way as well.

On the trip, we get free breakfast at the hotel, so that's a savings. I'm going to look up as many free things to do as possible. And we will try to eat modestly out and not spend a ridiculous amount of money on all the meals. Gas is the other expense. I'll try to write more about our travel budget soon.

SAVINGS: $100 -- at least that's what we'll call it for now. It's complex because we didn't totally have budget for travel right now BUT we also want to see my brother and his girlfriend.

Postponing Paying Our Debt

This might not be a popular bullet point, but I think right now we need to preserve the money that's in our bank account. And that means skipping a month of paying an extra $1,000 to our debt. This isn't really a savings, but it will help us in the short-term preserve our emergency fund.

I am actually experimenting with taking on a bit less work this month because things have been crazy with Stephen's new schedule. Basically, we're needing to go back to our original pay-off plan to tweak it a bit. It may make better sense for our to try and allocate $500 a month toward debt versus a full $1,000. I am having trouble sustaining writing so much when Stephen has 11-hour weekdays and was gone from 8:00-5:30 on Saturday.

Final Thoughts

This isn't the most organized or most inspirational budget post I've ever seen. I more just wanted to get it out there. We had a bad month. We recognize that we cannot go back to our old habits. Back-sliding it just not fun at all, especially when it comes to finances. We are admitting we messed up. We are doing a few things to help recoup some of the extra we spent. And all we can do now is more forward and have a good month.

What do you do to recover from a bad spending month? Any suggestions for us? I'm off to see exactly what the damage is!

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Running on a Budget

We've always been careful with our spending. But now more than EVER, we've been examining our finances. Recently, this has taken shape as several meticulously maintained spreadsheets in Excel tracking our monthly expenses.

The fixed.
The variable.
The emergency.
And the sneaky extras.

Running falls into the "extras" category as -- theoretically -- we feel we should be able to slap on a pair of sneakers and set out for next to nothing. In fact, we've always regarded the relatively cheap cost of the sport as a plus. No fancy equipment, like bikes, to maintain. No particular gear, like wetsuits, required.

But then . . . those sneakers get worn out and we need to buy new pairs. (Stephen's closer-to-nature, "barefooting" habit is particularly pricey, ironically enough.)


Tons of fun local races pop up as spring approaches, so we spend cash on those faster than we can remember.


Then there are those big destination races that require hotel stays, eating out, and higher participation fees.


I don't know exactly how much money we've spent in past years on all these items (and more, if you add in doctor visits for injuries, gym memberships, clothing, etc.). I do know it was a lot. And we no longer have room in our budget to continue at anywhere near the same rate.

How much have we allotted in our new plan? $800 a year (roughly $66 a month), which sounds like a lot . . . but ultimately equals two pairs of $100 shoes for each of us twice a year and $200 each for race costs. So, actually not much to go around at all, yet I still think we're being overly generous and could cut more, which we might do.

How do we plan to stick to it?

• Keep it local. Smaller races around the neighborhood are far less expensive than those larger ones in cities. The gas and hotel money adds up while traveling, too. We plan to do one "big" event each year, likely in Philadelphia where we have family to stay with.
• Train for specific events. This is versus running everything that arises. It's easy to add up all the races we've participated in. But I could run 10,000 races and not do well at them. In which case, I question: Why does it matter? No. It's not the number of races that's impressive. It's the quality of our participation in those events.
• Resist flashy workout wear. This one's hard to do because we both have some serious buying habits related to running clothing. But when we dug into our closets, we found we have way more stuff than we ever thought. No need for anything new in the foreseeable future.
• The same goes for shoes. Like I wrote above, we get two pairs of sneaks each year. Hopefully they'll be less than the $100 amount we've allowed leaving more room for racing!
• Spend our allowances. For all things that fall outside these guidelines, we each have a modest monthly allowance (yeah, flashback to middle school days!). Oh, and we also have weekend money but -- again -- not much. But we have to keep in mind that these funds serve as a safety for all other overages we might encounter in other areas of the budget.

How much room in your budget do you leave for running/sport-related expenses? Have you ever thought about it? And if you're doing so for the first time, are you shocked at how much you spend? We'd love to hear your thoughts!

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Grocery Bills: Major Fail

OK. Before you lose all faith in this blog, in us -- consider that since we began our slashing grocery bills quest a little over a month ago, we've saved over $120 (approximately). That being said, we had a slip-up this week, mostly from laziness. Partially from overindulgence. And most definitely from lack of planning.

Here's the ugly truth in black and white:



And here's the story:

First, we can indeed deduct some amounts from this bill. We bought our beer for the week (as we mentioned in another post, beer comes from our "entertainment" fund), and that was $10. Some toilet paper, $3.50. But that's only dropping the total down to $68. Yeah, it's still (awesomely) better than when we started out, but we were averaging almost $15 beneath this total -- and still eating large, so to speak.

$15 is $15. And as we've grown older, made our own money, and paid all our own bills, every dollar counts.

I blame our situation mostly on poor planning (lack of, really, as mentioned above). We typically grocery shop on Sunday. This week, we waited until Wednesday! Which leads me to another admission of guilt: We also visited the store Monday to buy ingredients for "dinner" and spent about $30 buying random stuff. Add that to our $68, and you may see now why exactly we've failed for the week. Grand total: $98 -- approximately $45 over budget.

Back to the "real" grocery shopping day: We didn't make a list until right before we left for the store. After I had gone running and was ravenously hungry. I wanted treats of all kinds -- so throw the "one treat a week" policy out the window. We also bought lots of dairy products because we were simply craving them at the time. I can't stress enough to go shopping (and plan for shopping) on a full stomach. Your mind will be far less crowded with all the foods your body is craving, and you'll be far less inclined to want to purchase treats all at once.

In the scheme of grocery bills, this week's wasn't too entirely bad. It's more the lack of control we displayed. It's more the laziness and absence of care that went into shopping. What's worse: Though we bought many ingredients, because we didn't plan out our meals for the week, we don't have foods that necessarily match to make meals. So, the issue is complicated further.

I won't go on. What's done is done. And all we can do is work toward a better week next week. Have any of you had a total grocery bill fail? A particular total that embarrasses you? Ever feel like you left the store with a ton of food, but with -- ultimately -- no real planned meals (think radishes and peanut butter and brie)? Leave us a comment or email us at neverhomemaker@gmail.com.

And if you'd like to read our journey from start to now, check out the following posts:

• Slashing Grocery Bills: We're Going Strong
• Eating Well Need Not Cost a Fortune
• Slashing Our Grocery Bills: Progress
• Slashing Our Grocery Bills: Even More Progress

And if you haven't already -- go check out this month's Blog Love Fest. It's a special edition because we're not only sharing the links in a list this month. We're creating a categorized blogLOVEroll. For all the gooey details, just visit the BLF post.

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be the first to know what the (never home)makers are up to. And we’ll love you forever!

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5 Critical Reasons You MUST Read Your Bills

I'm sure the question on your minds is: WHAT happened??? Those of you who are friends with us on Twitter are already filled in. Saturday afternoon -- after a lazy brunch out at a new diner with our neighbors; talk of childcare costs (for them, not us), bills, and taxes; and realizing those taxes are due, like, soon -- we scrambled to get all our W2s and other important documents together. We also got our mail. Oh, yes. It wouldn't be a Saturday afternoon unless we received a visit from the bill fairy.

This particular bill was from our mortgage company. Our escrow balance, specifically. (And escrow account is the account, at least in our case, established by our mortgage broken for paying things like our insurance and taxes all in one convenient place.) So, let's talk numbers. I noticed our escrow amount was less this year than it was last -- maybe by 65 dollars each month -- it never really made sense to me, but we decided to not ask questions. We're new homeowners after all, this is probably a normal adjustment. WRONG. And this bill was our notice that we owed $1,300 to the bank. In April! As in 2010.

That's a lot of money!!! Not only that . . . our monthly escrow payments had shot up nearly $350 a month. This meant our total monthly mortgage and escrow was WAY over what we'd signed up for in June 2008. We both freaked out. Called our parents -- both sets of which we couldn't reach -- and then did a bit of Google searching.

That was mistake number 2. I kept finding information about how escrows can shoot up depending on a number of factors. Local and county tax increases. New property assessments. Other adjustments from year to year. Really, a number of things. So, we figured they were probably just right. They're the bank, and it's their job to tell us how much we owe them. They're professionals and wouldn't have sent us an entire year's worth of monthly payment stubs stating this new -- and however outrageous -- amount in bold print unless it was correct.

Double checked.
Signed.
Stamped and sealed.

Nope. After we got our heads on straight, I started actually LOOKING at the bill. Adding up the amounts they provided that made up the astronomical new number. I noticed that the math was wrong . . . and that, for example, they had charged us double city and county tax. That was weird. OK. Then I saw they were charging us for THREE school taxes. And we only had documentation with one of those amounts. Hmmm. To make matters worse, it was Saturday on a long holiday weekend . . . so we couldn't reach a representative to put our minds at ease until Tuesday!

So we waited. I wrote bullet points of all the things I found wrong with their document. And yesterday Stephen called them. After a long hour on the phone, the bank realized their "computer" made an error and charged us way more than we actually owe. Our escrow shortage is more to the tune of $350, which makes much more sense to me. And our monthly payment is only going up by $90 a month. This all makes sense, and the newly adjusted numbers accord with what we originally agreed to at our closing.

All put together, that initial $5,500 number that we would have owed over the course of a year turned into $1,430. Nothing much. Just a $4,070 mistake. Several lavish vacations. Four 50-inch plasma screen TVs. A couple MacBook Pros. A big chunk-o-savings. You know, no biggie.



Unless you're my brother (above), I haven't seen money grow on trees for me. So, here's why you, too, should carefully read your bills.

1. MISTAKES: If the story above isn't compelling enough for you, consider this . . . Billing mistakes happen more frequently than we'd like to think. More times than not, it's computer error, and I'm sure you've seen enough of those first-hand to know this is true. And if you go ahead and pay the bill and find out LATER that it was a mistake, you'll have a much harder time disputing the issue.
2. CHANGES: Again, we're not great at paying bills. I'd been writing my checks to my old lender and hadn't noticed that my school loan company went under new direction. Though I hadn't heard anything bad about this from my lender . . . it's certainly important to put the right name on the check. But changes can include a number of other issues, including to terms and conditions, that might even impact your amount owed. Read the fine print, folks!
3. RANDOM AND FRAUDULENT CHARGES: This one's more for reading your bank statement. But a few months ago, I noticed that we were having about $20 taken out of our account each month for some weird company. Furthermore, I had no idea what product or service we were receiving from said company. When I called, they said that Stephen had signed on for some trial offer of something while shopping online (which he doesn't remember doing -- but sometimes those offers are TRICKY -- so be careful). Anyway, it took us a couple months to catch this small charge. And it took a heck of a lot more effort to remedy the situation. So catch problems early, and we hope you have good luck. It does happen, even if you think you're being careful.
4. DUE DATES: This hasn't happened to us personally . . . but we've heard from our friends that a company changed due dates on them, and then they accrued all these late payment charges -- without even knowing it. I can't stress enough: You must read your bills carefully. And this includes all those that are automatically deducted from your account online. Convenient. Paperless. Dangerous. Those are sometimes the worst because you set a payment schedule and forget about it.
5. UN-NECESSITIES: You may be paying for stuff you don't even want or need anymore. Like magazine subscriptions or other things you've set to automatically renew each year that you're just no longer using. So trim the fat, and you'll be happy you did. Maybe find a new use for the cash . . . or just save it. We're bad at that, too.

If all this money-talk is stressing you out, go check out our first yoga-centric post. And maybe take the heat off and make yourself some no-bake chocolate-mint "cupcakes" . . .

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts or follow us on Twitter or Facebook to be the first to know what the (never home)makers are up to. And we’ll love you forever!

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