- Groceries £2800 (£54.00 per week for two of us having 3 small meals a day and occasional visitors)
- Dining out £200 (it will have to be treats only and our picnic stove will have to come out and be in the car ready all summer. Or our guests will have to treat us in exchange for free B&B!)
- Gifts £300 (more homemade things planned but we have a growing brood of grand kids)
We are going to have to check our buying of bird food - our flock of house sparrows, numerous blackbirds and finches are costing us a fortune.
I will continue to explore the budget options of this software but I can recommend doing this as it makes us very conscious of our bottom line and we thoroughly check all debits on our accounts each week.
It's a sobering experience when you sit down and work out what to spend because you can't kid yourself about what you have to spend. Sounds like you are getting your moneys worth with the £5 Amazon buy. I'm blessed with a growing family too but we've had to agree as a family that gifts are mostly bought for the little ones in the family otherwise we would all spend all our time and money out shopping for gifts. Hope nothing comes along this year to scupper your financial budget : )
ReplyDeleteWe know we need a new oil fired boiler and that is taking up quite a lot of thinking about. We may have to dip into capital for that. Agree little ones come first in the gift giving.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with your plan, I want to make more homemade gifts, I also spend rather alot on the birds.
ReplyDeleteAs soon as I found out that the bird feeders were attracting mice that was the end of that. As soon as we stopped putting seed in the feeders the mice problem diappeared! They'll have to make do with the huge abundance of berries on the bushes and trees.
ReplyDeleteDont ! Cant stand mice! I am insisting all the bird food goes into sealed plastic mins and bird food is not scattered on ground near the house!
DeleteI have set up a spread sheet in excel and I will be entering the amounts monthly to give me a perspective on a years spending. Then I can see where we need to trim the fat! Tx
ReplyDeleteI used Excel to do an analyse of the food in detail over 6 months and that was interesting to see where we could trim. I did it several ways and one showed average prices paid for some items.After that I realized if I brought a good basic that remained stable it was not worth swapping between discounts and various supermarkets - at the end of 6 months the incidences of bargain weeks did not bring the average down much and I stuck with a good basic brand! Good Luck with the trimming!
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