March Recap / April Goals

Well if I thought February flew by, I definitely wasn’t prepared for March.

The Bee family financial goals in March were:

• Find a way to share our budget more effectively.
  Hmm. I don’t think I did well on this. I actually liked last month’s format, and I might keep it. When I write a full-on budget post, I think I’ll share all of our categories, but to be honest, a lot of them just collect money and go up until they get used, like car registration or our renter’s insurance.
• Reduce restaurant spending to under $300.
  Holy guacamole, am I proud of this one! We did it! I thought we would come in under $200, but we ended up at about $230 due to a last-minute pizza outing last night because I just did not want to cook.
• Meet our retirement savings goals of $1600 per month.
  This one we also blew out of the water. Oh man, time for the awesome details.

So for our financial month of March…

Winners

• We contributed $1759.72 to our regular retirement accounts. This is excluding the extra $1000 we put into a Traditional IRA for Eric to receive the Saver’s Credit. So our total retirement savings for the month of March was $2759.72! This is awesome.
• We spent about $228.22 on restaurants for the month. This is better than we’ve done in a long time, and since we’re creatures of habit and we’re in the habit of eating at home, we expect to continue into April with good momentum on this.
• We spent $188 on gas this month. Our targeted budget amount is $200, and in the past, we have gone over this a lot as Eric’s truck gets horrible gas mileage.

Losers

• Groceries. I feel so dumb admitting this. I just wrote a post about how to stick to grocery spending! We spent over $600 on groceries this month. Part of it was convenience type foods to make dinner at home instead of going out, even though those foods weren’t in the meal plan. Part of it was my frequent trips to get Coke that get labeled as “groceries” in the budget. I think I need to just quit drinking soda. We’d save so much money.
• My own fun money. I had a great time going out with a friend last weekend, and in turn, spent a lot of April’s fun money already. I’m practically in debt to myself, and it is frustrating, but I think I can move forward well.

I’m feeling really positive about this upcoming month, and I hope we can stick to the goals we set ourselves.

Overall financial goals for April:

• Reduce our grocery spending for the month. Stick to the meal plan as is, and not on the fly. Don’t count soda as part of groceries and see if it curbs the habits.
• Keep positive on the house-hunting front. It’s hard to shop for houses! Stay focused and don’t look at homes outside of our budget, no matter how pretty they are.
• Save $1600 for retirement, or more if possible. Not every month will be like March, but Eric should have a pay increase that should make this really doable.

Good luck through this month! I think we can all make April a great month financially, and make positive strides toward our goals.