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Jeff and Sue's Journey:
Still Finding Ways to Challenge Our Budget
Happy fall to all of our followers. Not sure about you, but we’re looking forward to the cooler days and crisp nights that fall brings. We enjoy the fall harvests and have been busy freezing some produce to use down the road and are looking forward to visiting some orchards to get apples for applesauce and apple slices for the freezer. It also means no more air conditioner and hopefully a while before we have to turn on the furnace – we refer to this time as the “free zone.”
As we sit here finishing the month of September, we look back at the last four months and are amazed how far we’ve come. As we’ve said before, our “system” is set up to basically run on its own. Automatic deposits and transfers are extremely helpful to planning our savings and expenses. We do have to make some weekly transfers, but the time to do these is minimal. We sometimes feel like we just aren’t doing much and find ourselves wondering if we could be doing more.
As a result of this, we are now searching for ways where we can cut our budget even more. Sue cancelled one of her magazine subscriptions and Jeff will not be renewing his satellite radio subscription. It doesn’t amount to much, but it is something. Weekly, we are challenging ourselves at spending less and less on groceries. When we started Project Money, we set our grocery budget at $900 per month (that calculates to $225 per week). In July we were spending $175 per week and in September, we reduced our weekly grocery expenses to $160 per week. This is mainly due to shopping the weekly sales and utilizing items that we already have in our pantry and freezer. We feel that we are still able to eat as healthy as we were before and feel that it really amounts to not overspending. You don’t always have to have that name brand label, find recipes that you can get multiple meals out of (like chili or soup) and stock up on sale items for future meals (chicken for $0.99 per pound).
Our savings is increasing every month, too! We make sure that we assign money to be automatically transferred to savings accounts for Christmas, life insurance, homeowner’s insurance, pet expenses, and our vacation savings. Our emergency savings account has grown quite well since we are now putting the weekly “excess” money into it. We are anxious to see some serious debt reduction on our refi loan in the upcoming months. We have found that even the small changes can add up to big results! All of this makes us feel proud of our accomplishments and they are teaching us to build a strong financial future!