Online budget accountability is great… until you meet a stressor that is likely to be both hard on the budget and hard on blogging.
Like, for instance, getting a new foster child and then immediately getting a stomach bug. And then traveling to pick up a newly butchered beef.
I’m speaking purely in hypotheticals, of course. :-)
So the rest of August was…
| August 11 – Gas Station (snacks while traveling) | $6.79 |
| August 14 – Walmart Grocery Pickup | $35.49 |
| August 14 – Sam’s Club Pickup | $21.50 |
| August 15 – Walmart for Formula | $27.89 |
| August 16 – ALDI | $59.94 |
| August 21 – Walmart Grocery Pickup | $21.79 |
| August 23 – ALDI | $39.01 |
| August 26 – Sam’s Club Pickup | $21.78 |
| August 28 – Walmart | $28.48 |
| August 31 – Walmart | $37.14 |
| Total | $299.81 |
My budget of $123 per week times 3 weeks means I had $369 to spend – so I came out ahead by $69.19 for those three weeks and $186.36 for the month.
BUT…
Lest I get too confident…
I started off September by spending $500 to buy a quarter of beef (197 lbs) from my uncle.
Since I’ll be eating that all year long, I’m going to do a bit of alchemy to spread the load and reset my weekly budget a little lower at $115/week.
Wanna see my work?
$500 minus $186.36 for August = $313.64
$313.64 divided by 43 weeks from September 2018 to June 2019 = $7.29/week
$123 minus $7.29 = $115 (always round to allow yourself the most wiggle room – in this case, down)
And now onto this week…
Wednesday September 6
Shopping was weird this week because we traveled up to Lincoln on Sunday to get our beef and came back down to Wichita on Labor Day – which meant I was in no state to do a grocery pickup order for Tuesday morning. So Wednesday it was.
I spend $34.13 for grocery pickup at Walmart on Wednesday afternoon. All of it was groceries.
Thursday September 7
Then it was right out to ALDI the next morning for more groceries – $62.39 worth.
I didn’t add things up and just happened to end up $18.48 below my budget – but it’s not going to last because I have a GINORMOUS Sam’s Club order coming up next week.
Complicating matters, we do receive a stipend to reimburse expenses for fostering – and some portion of that will be added to my grocery budget to cover the expense of formula. I expect to look over our foster care related expenses and determine how we allocate that stipend at the end of each month – and I won’t necessarily include that in my expense reports. So things might look wonky here and there :-)