Rule #2 Better spending on food

Food. Quite possibly our favorite category to spend money on. Going out to eat is tons of fun. Even grocery shopping is fun to me – all the possibilities. We're foodies and don't want to sacrifice, we just need to be smarter. Definitely room for improvement here. A couple of things I thought of:

• Bring lunch to work. This is a huge one. My job moved locations this week, from being next to tons of food options, to being next to nothing. So for the past 4 weeks, ok maybe 6 weeks, I’ve had the attitude that my ability to go out to lunch was soon coming to an end so I should take full advantage of it while I could. This resulted in me spending about $75+ a week on lunches. Add hubby’s lunches into the mix and the number just gets bigger. So a new rule is allow yourself one lunch “out” a week, bring lunch the other 4 days. This should save us about $75-$100 a week. Nothing to sneeze at.
• Eat out less in general. Hubby loves to cook, so cooking is not the problem, it’s more about being tired and just wanting someone to do it for us. Typically we will eat out at least once a week with the family and often once a weekend for a relatively “nice” dinner just the two of us or with friends. A family out to dinner or lunch will run us about $60-$75. Dinner out for just the two of us, with a few cocktails of course, is at least $100, but typically more like $150. I can’t decide what our hard and fast rule should be here regarding the number of times we eat out. Maybe it’s more of a budget number than a number of times out. If on average we spent $150 a week eating out, that’s $600 a month. Let’s cut that in half, and include our lunches out in the $300. So that’s a total eating out budget of $300 a month. So if we eat out two “nice” dinners to the tune of $150 each, we’re done for the month. I think we can do this. Even this past weekend, we didn’t eat out once which was unusual for us, but everyone survived it.
• Make a grocery list. We’re on and off good about this. To make a grocery list, it is paramount that you first make a menu for the week. We love doing this, we just need to be more consistent. Check pantry before going to the grocery store to avoid 4 very good boxes of oatmeal in on the shelf (hubby demonstrated this by pulling out these boxes this weekend and piling them up on the kitchen floor for me – great visual). Stick to the list and resist impluse buying.

Last night I was home alone with the boys. We had a few errands to run and as we were heading home at 7:30pm, with rumbly tummies, I was dying to stop for a pizza. But I didn't. I took this as the first opportunity to practice my new "rules" and went home and ate something that was in our fridge. Cape Cod here we come ;-)

Rule #1 Set a monthly spending limit for all things "fun".

Ok, so we're going to cut back on spending, pay off debt and save. Great. Done.

Not exactly...

Like anything, there's got to be some rules to this. Husband and I need to discuss, but here's what I'm proposing in terms of some changes we can make. I'm going to tackle one at a time as I think it's important to understand where we are today, how we got here and what steps we can make to realize results.

Rule #1 Set a montly spending limit for all things "fun".

We're bringing in a good amount of money (we're not making chump change as husband likes to say), more than enough to live comfortably on, but at the end of the month, there's little left. This is because we don't limit our spending. Sounds totally stupid right, but after so many years of scraping by through college (I guess it was only really beer money we needed, but there never seemed to be enough), and then making really low salaries at our first few jobs, it feels good to now have money and not have to worry where every dollar is spent. So we've been fairly free with the cash. All good things must end. It's time to become more responsible adults. Don't get me wrong - we pay all of our bills, contribute to our 401ks, donate to charity, etc. - it's just the savings that suffer.

For the next 18 months, I want to dramatically cut down on "fun" spending. Set a monthly limit and stick to it. This "fun" category of spending is just that - spending on anything fun, i.e. clothes, books, house stuff, entertainment, dinners out, vacations. Anything you enjoy spending money on, i.e. everything but bills.

Areas for change:

My spending at the mall. I currently work across the street from a great mall. I literally park in the mall daily, which means that I'm guaranteed to be within the walls of the mall at least twice a day. Dangerous. Very dangerous. I am not a crazy shopper by any means. I know women who are much, much worse than me. But, I'll admit I can make changes. Mostly I can change my boredom spending, which is, "I'm here, I must need something." One big help is that my job is moving to a new location, hence, less frequent access to the mall. Out of sight, out of mind - I hope.

Challenge each purchase. I've gone through this exercise before and it worked remarkably well. Before I spend more than $2 on anything, I stop myself and require myself to self-discuss whether or not this is something I really need. How will my life be different with or without it? I've been able to stop myself from lots of unnecessary purchases by engaging in this little exercise.

Quality purchases, not quantity. No, or limited, trips to TJMaxx. I seem to have this mentality that if the item doesn't cost a lot, I can buy more of them. So I get into a vicious cycle of buying crap that needs to be replaced instead of good stuff that will last. Don't get me wrong, I love TJMaxx, but you have to be discerning, and lucky, to get good stuf there.

Joint decision making. We are actually better at this than most married people that I know. Neither of us will ever really spend more than $100 without first consulting the other. Under the new "regime", we're going to take it a step further and literally plan, on a monthly basis, how we're going to spend our "fun" money. For example, before something goes on the calendar, like a dinner out or theatre tickets, we both have to agree that this is going to be one of the things that we'll spend money on this month. We can also kind of slot in when we see ourselves as having some set "fun" expenses. School clothes in August. Anniversary night out in November. That kind of stuff.

I'm anxious to get started on all of this, and am definitely implementing some of these suggestions already, but I want to use the next week to get all of our guidelines/rules set-up and really begin on our plan on August 1.

Getting started

So the other night, as we were eating dinner on our deck, I said to my husband, "Let's try something different. I want to set a goal. I want to accomplish something." That was my opener on the subject of the vacation home. It's been a dream of ours since before we were even married, just barely into our 20's, to own a home on Cape Cod. When you're young, anything seems possible - and it should be. But life gets in the way - low paying jobs out of college, the costs of city living, student loans, buying your first car, taking vacations we couldn't totally afford. All these things added up to living slightly beyond our means, which means, no savings. Luckily we were able to buy our first home with the help of our parents. And because of a great profit on our the sale of our first home, we were able to build our pefect house. We plan to stay in it, God-willing for many years to come.

We work hard and we've been lucky. But we've realized that its going to take more than luck to accomplish, what I like to say is "the only other thing I really want in life" - the purchase of a vacation home. So I think I've come up with a plan. I said to my husband, "this is it, we're going all out - balls to the wall (excuse my crassness) - cutting back our spending and getting that house in the next 18 months." He agreed. Actually what he said is that he'd have no problem sticking to a plan like that, I'd be the problem. In my defense, this truly is the thing that I want most, so if I can't make sacrifices to get it, I'm going to be really disappointed in myself. We're going to do it.

I think that the process will be interesting. I'm hoping that we learn a lot and I'm hoping that the end result is a positive one. I've been feeling the desire to write about something lately, and this "journey" seems like a ripe subject. So here it goes. Welcome aboard.