I have been using mint to track my budget. So i utilized its "trends" section to see how much I was spending on food. It was great because it gives you the option to check out the current month, or compare many months, or give you an average of since you've been using the program. It gives me a nice bar graph depicting my expenses each month. So I typed in groceries and it pulled up how much I spend on groceries each month. Great! I now know I spend about $150 on groceries each month (plus the $50 on prepared foods/restaurant/fast food). Really $150 for one person per month?? That seems like a lot. Well it turns out there were different reasons for my monthly grocery spending - and each month was different from the next.
To get to the point, all this info didn't really help me figure out how to budget for food. I realized that it wasn't enough knowing how much I spent on food to fix the over spending and carelessness. I needed to come up with a weekly plan for food. How am I supposed to budget for food, if I have no idea what I spend it on?!
It's not that I'm bad at budgeting, I'm bad at planning meals or cooking for that matter!
So here are the steps I'm going to take to fix my carelessness about food spending:
- I'm going to start thinking about my meals at the beginning of the week, and plan ahead. This way I will have a rough estimate of the ingredients I need to buy and I can make decisions on what meals to cook based on my budget.
- Speaking about staying within budget. Instead of thinking about a monthly budget, I'm going to think weekly. Instead of knowing not to go over $130 a month, I'm going to budget about $30 a week. That number and time frame seems more manageable.
- Finally, I'm going to make sure I always allocate enough money for milk, bread, and vegetables - to eat HEALTHY!
I'll let you know how it goes!
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