Boost your Budget (week 3)

As part of a money savings effort I have pretty much eliminated eating out.  Where that is most difficult is on days I have errands to run or grocery shopping to do etc.   The problem is we live quite a way shopping areas.  When you have an hour travel time to get to your location, and even if you spend as little as a hour out accomplishing your mission (which is rare because I save up and do my running around all at once so its more like 2 or 3 or more hours) you have another hour home....its unavoidable to cross over one meal time or another.  It's easy to go through a drive through.  The kids love it.  One trip through a drive through cost my family over $30 on most occasions, however.

So I am making an effort to pack a meal for when we are out.  This past Wednesday one of my children had an appointment the have his pictures taken.  I packed peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, clementines, granola bars and a chip type snack for each child.

Also, in my grocery shopping efforts, last week I went a whole $20 under budget.  This week it was about the same.  What really made that good was last week we had 2 extra kids staying with us for a good part of the week so that was extra food to buy and also last Sunday we had company for dinner so that meant preparing a bigger nicer meal and feeding extra people too.  Then this week I prepared a meal for a family in which the mother just had surgery.  So that was extra to buy for as well.  And both weeks I came under budget pretty well.

I wrote this blog post in response to the budget challenge at Making Time for Mom.