Another successful no-buy month. I was sure it would be a buy month as the weather turned very cold and I did not seem to have enough warm clothes but then I did a cupboard cleanout and found some extra things. I also found that my Ghanda round the house jumpers were nowhere near as “ratty” as I thought they were, and they really do not need replacing.
Keeping the tally – Our record thus far – January, February, April, May = nothing bought. March = something bought. One out of 5 = a buy month. Can I make it 1 out of 6? We will see.
No Spend Days
I have not been keeping a tally of meeting goals for no spend days and it occurs to me this is where my struggle is the hardest. I did not have a January goal. I have only met my goal in one month which was February. Though the April fail was due to an automatic payment and not something I could control – if we did not count that payment I did meet the goal that month.
For May my goal was four no spend days and I had 7 spend days. Epic fail, though one of those days I will not begrudge as it was an experience spend (May 10th for Gruen). The final spend there I got paid back for right away and it was an epic WIN actually – after 5 months of trying I finally managed to get my parents to buy new mobile phones.
We ran out of milk in our first fortnight this month, which caused an unexpected Aldi spend on the 17th. I have upped our milk buy for each fortnight. We are now up to 6 litres of milk each – mine is soy, the other half drinks A2. In the cooler months we like to have a cup of tea before bedtime and this is where the extra milk is going.
What the heck was I doing at Woolworths, I hear you ask. Didn’t I break up with them years ago? They had the Nivea oil I wanted for $7.50 instead of $16.45 I would pay at Coles, so I bought that and saved $8.95, and they stock another item I was sent in the next Black Box which I wanted to buy in other flavours. More about that when I review the box.
We bought some material to make up new door curtains from Spotlight, and have since blocked off the spare room door. We also got some weather strip at Bunnings (on The Other Half’s card so not seen here) to stop drafts from particular doors.
No Spend Goals For June
I would like to manage 5 spend days in June. I know I can do it! Now is the time to focus in on this goal because I have the grocery spending under control.
Grocery Spending
May grocery budget = $620
Coles – $88.70
Aldi – $468.71
Woolworths – $16.50
Bulk items $15.97
Total grocery spend – $589.88
Grocery cost of $19.02/day.
That is $30.12 under budget for the month. Potatoes were the bulk items.
Grocery Spending Goals For June
Grocery spend = $600
Bulk Items Budget = $120
I have set a bulk items budget for June. If Coles has the chicken mini roasts on special we plan to stock up. If they had them for $12 each, we might buy 8-10 of them and freeze them. This would save us $3 per roaster – if we bought 10 we would save $30 in total.
The truth I am beginning to see – bulk meat should probably have a separate budget because we do not eat all the meats in that same month. We have chicken still in the freezer from our bulk spends in January and February.
When we bulk buy chicken we prepare it in three different ways – breast steaks, breast pieces, and chicken kievs. If we are doing kievs, that time we might only prepare kievs and pieces. If we have enough kievs we might only prepare steaks and pieces. If we have enough kievs and steaks as we did the last purchase, we only made pieces.
At the end of our first 6 months I may be better able to estimate a good yearly bulk meat budget by looking at what we have spent so far and adding on an amount for the items we already had in the freezer. It might be better to track that separately from the grocery spend.
May Thoughts
Lurker Cat lurks in the background
We did some bulk buying this month – I bought 2kg of mushrooms on special which put 7 packets in the freezer, we bought two smoked hams from Aldi and sliced them up and froze 8 packets. The small hams you can get from there are incredibly tasty if you have a way of slicing them and they are great value at $12.99 a kilo. We have a meat slicer.
I definitely need to budget better and plan ahead with the supermarket shopping. Even when I meal plan I seem to swing by the supermarket every other day and even on a daily basis! It’s frightening! When I see things on special at a greatly reduced price, I can’t help but cash in on the bargains. I take my hat off to you and wish I had your willpower!