With just a little prep work and planning, our dollars seem to last a longer.
One thing we do is spend cash for most things bought locally.
This is the monthly cash I’ll use for groceries, my spending money, miscellaneous expenses and if we go out to eat.
The $200 is to buy our monthly card at Walmart. We use that card for gasoline. This method works best for us as in our town, Walmart has the cheapest gas and the stations are very convenient to our home. Having the card means we can pay quickly at the pump without the hassle of going to the window 2 times as in a cash purchase.
My husband also has spending money but he doesn’t keep his in a cute envelope with a bird on it. ๐
And no, I don’t carry all this cash with me everywhere I go. I take what I think I will need and the rest is at home, usually in a safe.
I planned to shop for a few groceries, but before I made my shopping list, I looked in the fridge and made a list of the fresh produce we still had and that I need to plan the next several meals around.
This list is on the front of our fridge to keep me reminded what to use.
Then I made a shopping list.
I divided it out with which products I planned to buy at each store. I went to Dollar Tree, Aldi and Walmart. All 3 stores are close together and none are far from our home so this multiple store shopping is not as time consuming as it may sound.
Below are 3 grocery items I like to buy at Dollar Tree.
I’ve blogged about this shelf stable milk from Utah before.
The 4 pack of Dannon yogurts are a favorite of my grands and much cheaper at DT than other grocery stores.
The coffee is a 6 ounce bag. My husband really likes it as he like plain, black, basic coffee. I don’t drink coffee so I can’t give you my feelings on it. Our son in law has drank a lot of fancy coffee from coffee shops and he says this DT coffee is good.
And in case you don’t know, everything at Dollar Tree costs $1 or less.
One big way we don’t spend much is we rarely eat out. We just aren’t crazy about most restaurant food or the restaurant experience.
Even on our trip to California, we only ate at 3 California restaurants during the 5 days we were there. And we ate a couple of airports meals as we had some layovers.
I’ve been doing this careful budgeting for a long time and for us, it has paid off.
If you have a good method, I hope you’ll share it.