Home Budgets and Extreme Anxieties

I've watched the TV shows of people spending hours cutting coupons, making maps of grocery stores and searching circulars for the best deals. Who has time for that? People with stockpiles of diapers and baby formula and they don't even have a prospect of a future boyfriend. It's all quite overwhelming, gives me anxiety and, quite frankly, I don't have time for that!

In our home we have 1 giant man, me, 1 soon to be 20 year old vegetarian, my stepson who is here every other weekend and holidays (soon to be more), a 2 year old and a baby starting starting solid foods. I have a budget of $100 a month for our food and sundries. Here's how I do it!

The last Thursday of every month I sit down and write out a monthly menu. I don't scour the sales papers or go through pages and pages of coupons. To tell you the truth, most of the time there is nothing that we eat or use in our home.

I keep things simple by making big meals on Sundays and break up any left overs for meals during the rest of the month. Example: a chicken dinner will give us chicken salad for sandwiches, chicken and dumplings and possibly chicken fajitas. See, Easy!

In the monthly menu I break things down into weeks. Each day has a theme. Sunday, as noted before is a big meal. Monday is Italian night, Tuesday is Chinese and so on. This keeps me on track and adds variety to our table. From this I am able to make shopping lists ahead of time and cut down on the constant struggle to keep good food in the house.

When it comes time for my weekly shopping I inventory the beauty supplies, cleaning supplies and sundries. To keep the cost of these things down I have gone natural/ green on a lot of things.
-  cloth napkins                                       
- homemade toothpaste
- cloth diapers  
- homemade shampoo and conditioner
- homemade laundry detergent
- cloth "paper" towels
- cloth baby wipes

I will post recipes, etc in future blogs. But keep an open mind on all of these things as they are fantastic, toxin free and practical.

So that's how I do it! It takes an hour a month to stay in my small budget. In the summer I hope to get down even lower than $100 with my vegetable garden! The seeds we planted are coming along nicely so I have high hopes for this year!

Leave a comment below and let me know how you budget for your family!