Aloha money bees!
I know I just posted my goals for the month of April and our budget recap for March, but it is Sunday, and last weekend I had a little too much fun and didn’t get to sharing my meal plan.
I know I’m sharing a lot of goals for the month and the week and it may seem like I set too many goals. I encourage you to set big monthly goals, and small weekly goals that can keep you on track to meeting your bigger goals. At the end of the year, I also set yearly goals for the following year. Because of this, I’m still going to share my weekly finance goals and meal plan with you this week anyways!
This week’s financial goals:
- Return my overdue library book. With the amount of fees I’ve accumulated on this book that I didn’t even read… I could have bought it. Ugh.
- Reconcile the budget 3x weekly. This is one of the things I love about having the accountability of the finance blog. I know I have to keep my categories and budget up to date, because I don’t want to write about incorrect data. It would be disingenuous of me to say, “We only spent $50 on restaurants this month” if I still had 12 days of transactions to enter. With YNAB, you should enter as you use, but I’ve never been good at that. However, if I reconcile every other day, I have a really good idea of what is available in each category to make day to day decisions financially.
- Sell or donate 2 things in our home. I still haven’t sold the highchair, but I would like to sell that and get rid of some other things in our home. We are obviously still house hunting (see this post to see why we didn’t follow through with the home we placed an offer on before), and I want to make sure when we move, we aren’t taking more things we don’t need into our new home.
And this week’s meal plan:
This week, I didn’t plan any days for leftovers because I’m pretty sure all of our leftovers are going to go to lunches. However, I also didn’t plan any meals to be meals out. I have found that I’m pretty good at expecting myself to stick to the meal plan, so if I plan for one meal out, and end up scrapping a day on the meal plan in order to go out instead, I will have gone out twice. There is a possibility that I will end up going out once this week, but I have seriously planned not to. And as I’ve mentioned before, I am a creature of habit, and we are definitely in the habit of eating at home instead of going out.
This week we are trying a new shepherd’s pie recipe, and I wish I could share it with you, but I haven’t made it yet, and honestly, I am winging it based off about 4 recipes that I’ve read, so it would be unfair to share a recipe with you and make something totally different.
And as a positive! This week’s grocery spending for the above meal plan (excluding Thursday’s ground chicken [I use turkey; commissary was out] and the beef for Shepherd’s Pie because I had some frozen) was ~$77! If we can do ~$80 each week, we can come in under $350 for the whole month! (And we still got cat litter, juice, and some other snacks!)
