Budget Assessment 4: Household Costs and Extraneous/ Fun Money

The $650/ month Household Category has a number of individual items so I’ll break down this category and assess each item separately. Included under household are groceries, toiletries, diapers and baby items, and pets. We also have $180/ month for extraneous/ fun money. Currently it breaks out like this:

  $60 diapers, wipes, diaper cream

  $25 pet food, cat litter

$565 groceries, toiletries, laundry, cleaning supplies, general house upkeep

$180 gifts, clothes, haircuts, projects, dining out

In the first category, $60 for diapers and such, one of our boys is showing readiness to begin potty training. Of course this will be a process and we can’t really put a target date on when he’ll be out of disposable diapers but I can expect sometime this year we’ll at least be able to cut this number in half. Who knows, maybe both boys will be done with diapers by the end of the year. Once we begin the potty training process, I’ll also introduce reusable cloth training pants so at the very least we’ll see a minor reduction in the amount we’re spending on diapers. We already buy the absolute cheapest diapers we can find so getting them out of diapers is the only way we can save any more in this category.

In the $25 pet category, we are at the bare minimum. We have found the Costco food is comparable in quality to the more expensive foods we were using and it’s about half the price. This is a category that I would love to increase when it becomes possible because right now we are not doing any monthly heartworm or flea prevention and have nothing being set aside for vet bills. For now, I just don’t see how we can increase the money in this category.

The next category, $565 household and grocery, is one that we tend to go over on each month. To be perfectly honest, my record keeping in this category is not great as it tends to get blurred with the next category. My initial thoughts were that this category needed to be increased but I’m thinking what I really need to do is keep a better track on the next two categories to really assess where we are going over and why. I know we could do some things better in this category. I’d like to see us cutting down on the pre-packaged foods like individually wrapped cheesesticks, frozen meals like those I take to work as a back-up meal, and other processed foods. We could also have more vegetarian meals, it seems like we’ve increased our meat intake over the past year and particularly once I started meal prepping, as almost all recipes I’ve tried center around a meat. For the next couple months, I will be more diligent about tracking expenses in this and the next category and do a better assessment afterwards.

The last category is the $180 “fun money” which covers gift giving, clothes, haircuts, dining out, and the occasional date night. As I discussed above, we go over in this category a lot. When I look at it on paper, I think $180 is a lot to be spending each month on extraneous stuff. But when I break it down into what it can actually cover, it doesn’t seem like much at all. Here’s an example of what $180 could cover in a month:

$20 1 take-out/ fast food meal out

$15 1 haircut

$30 gift for someone’s birthday/baby shower/wedding (this summer has been especially heavy on the special events)

$80 10 lunches out at approx. $8 each (we always try to pack food when we’re going out/ to work but aren’t always prepared)

$10 clothing item for 1 of us

$25 date night: movie tickets, drinks and popcorn

Perhaps I’m not prioritizing my debt pay-off appropriately and we should be forgoing most of the things on the list above. I think tracking for the next couple months to see how we really are spending in the grocery and extraneous category will help me understand where we can truly cut.