Just Another Money Monday

Part 1, written Monday, September 29  

GROCERIES. Ok. This week, I bought A TON of snacks because the last couple of weeks, I have been running out for snacks which snowballs into ALL OF THE THINGS. So. Ok. I spent $370 on groceries and $52 on random household stuff, and this what I got.

What I would like to do is eliminate single-use plastic use from my life. But in the meantime. Look at all this plastic! (I hate the giant laundry detergent containers even though we use a giant amount of laundry detergent because we keep our detergent on top of the washer, and the big containers fall off and break everywhere. So. Small it is).

More plastic! And only a couple of bathroom grooming items missing. You can pry the $3 hairspray from Ben’s cold, dead, sticky hands.

Laundry room snacks for people to grab on their way out the door:

Beverages for the downstairs fridge:

Just a couple of frozens— the kids are on a waffles and ice cream sandwich kick; Cooper loves Jack’s pizzas (lol), and Jack takes Uncrustables for lunch on the days he has clubs.

I was pretty well-stocked in terms of baking essentials, but I can always use chocolate chips and a brownie mix— also we are on an M&M cookie roll.

More snacks! And random pantry things. THIS TIME I DID NOT FORGET THE CHEEZ ITS. Also Cooper is eating more than 20 apple sauce pouches a week but almost no actual fruit. NEAT. Those Nature’s Bakery brownies have a ton of dates, tho. **eye roll** Oh! We are on a chocolate pretzel tear as well Here you might be able to spy 2 bags of white chocolate ones, and I bought milk chocolate ones at another store the other day. Dorothy also eats freeze dried strawberries at an alarming rate, hence 2 bags. These are cheapest at Trader Joe’s (ditto the pretzels) but it is not possible to shop there on football game days, so…

Fresh stuff. People are Very Into Chobani Flips right now. I bought a tub of vanilla too because maybe when the Flips run out they can make smoothies? Cooper and Dorothy are drinking either Naked Juice smoothies (SO MUCH SUGAR) or CorePower chocolate milks en route to their activities (this is working well with granola bars or those date brownies I mentioned and applesauce or strawberries). This whole category is mostly just various forms of cheese with some bagels, bread (I like it in the fridge) guacamole, and salsa thrown in for color.

Produce. This seemed lighter than usual to me, but we already had peaches and strawberries and a couple of salad kits, so I bought a little less than usual.

Dinner ingredients

I made another veggie lasagna and also a pan of bean, rice, cheese, and veggie enchiladas. We can coast on the leftovers through the first couple busy days of the week,  and then we have French bread for oven baked grilled cheese with garden tomatoes; eggs, bacon, fruit, etc, for breakfast for dinner; dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets with boxed mac and cheese and broccoli… and that should take us to the weekend when we’ll probably buy new veggies to go with impossible burgers and fries.

This is about what we spend a week at the store, but then we also spend up to that amount AGAIN in one-off trips— which is what I’d like to target and cut back on this week. CAN I DO IT? And, more importantly, can I do it without ending up with bare cupboards which I think will ultimately be worse to restock?

Part 2, written Friday, October 4.

UGH the sneaky spending! Random charges for things I didn’t even know I was subscribed to and also magazines set on auto-renew! More dishwasher repair (fixed! And! So is our ice maker!)! Just under $100 of kid-related (non-food) pop ups! My miracle face cream subscription arrived this week (WORTH IT) and I changed our Subscribe and Save to the first of the month (even though we just got it LAST WEEK LOL great planning Sarah).

BUT. ZERO ZERO ZERO extra trips out for stuff (except I did need another gallon of milk, and I also bought toilet paper because I saw a FB post about how you should not hoard toilet paper in the wake of the longshoremen strike, so I immediately bought toilet paper because I AM THE PROBLEM.) (Also, agreement reached, so I can probably stop hoarding but might not).

I even made REAL macaroni and cheese instead of boxed. And also pizza roll ups, which the kids did not love but I need to try again because they SHOULD by all measures. (I used a tube of crust, not crescent rolls, and the proportion was off). 

We did need to buy weekend dinner food (but we knew we would).

The ONLY impulse buy this week was a $5 book of color-your-own Halloween stickers from Target, and Minnie, Dorothy, and I all enjoyed them.

All told, we were still WAY OVER BUDGET. So that’s one week roughly on budget, one week way way over, and one week way over. I am starting to think the budget itself is flawed?

Part 3, written a little later on Friday

MOTHER *%^@$#.

RIGHT AFTER I wrote that previous paragraph, we spent SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS on a kid sports thing. And we are now way, way over again, instead of just way over. But! 3 good things came out of those dollars (well, four because the sports thing is also good). 

    1. I was like BEN! I say this all the time about an extra dance opportunity and you are like no that's dumb, so NOW DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEEEEEEAAAAN? And he was like oh yeah, I do see what you mean because he signed up for the thing so Cooper wouldn't feel left out if all his friends signed up, and that's ALWAYS my dance argument.

2. Ben was like oh, I don't really feel like we should count the whole amount this week. It's more like counting 1/4 every time the clinic occurs, and I was like DUDE. THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN SAYING ABOUT MY FREAKING SUBSCRIPTIONS. And he was like oh, I see that now... (we ultimately counted it for this week, but at least we UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER).

3. We both realized we need to make a more nuanced argument against a thing we don't want to buy that the other person wants. Like, saying WE DON'T HAVE MONEY FOR X is not at all helpful because we do probably have money for it, it's just that one person doesn't want to spend it. And instead of shutting down the conversation with that phrase, the spending-averse person should articulate their reasons against the spending. In this case, we of course bought the sports experience thing, but really only because I want to be able to rely on the bandwagon fallacy (ALL HER FRIENDS ARE DOING IT) next time a dance thing comes up.