I like to think that Eric and I are pretty good with money for our age. We JUST acquired our first large amount of debt in the form of a mortgage + car payments within the last month. We have no credit card debt and no student loan debt (which I’m incredibly thankful for – I know everyone doesn’t have that luxury!)

But we aren’t super anal about money. We don’t have a “budget” per say and we don’t track all the money we make/spend.

One area where neither of us (read: me) are very good is grocery shopping. I’ve wrote about this particular spending problem before – it’s not pretty (think upwards of $800 in one month on groceries!)

Since about August we’ve been sticking to a “strict” $400/month grocery budget. In the past I’ve tried writing down the grocery bill in my planner every time we went but we almost always went over budget. Last month I tried something from the show Till Debt Do Us Part that I’ve talked about before on the blog and put $400 cash into an envelope.

That’s it. That’s all. If the envelope ran out of cash well I guess we were going to be eating out of our cupboards/freezer for awhile.

And you know what? It worked! Maybe it was because February was a short month, or maybe it was the fact that I was spending with cash so was a bit more frugal but we stayed within our $400 budget. In fact, we were $50 under!

Every time we bought groceries (about ever 1 – 1.5 weeks) I would pay for it with money from the envelope and put the receipt and change back in the envelope.

When I realized Sunday night that we were $50 + change under for the month we did what any responsible 20-somethings would do….

….We ordered Chinese Food + sushi!

What?! We deserved a reward!

And I’ve already got March’s cash in the envelope. Can we do 2 for 2, even though March is three days longer than February…I guess we’ll find out!

Once we’ve got the grocery budgeting down to a science maybe we’ll start budgeting elsewhere like gas, or eating out. Maybe…

Do you have a grocery budget? Are you good at sticking to it?

Some of you may have seen me post this to Twitter last night.

Eric and I had a big fat BUDGET FAIL last week.

You see, Eric and I are good about not shopping too much – not spending too much money on THINGS. But food, oh lovely food, when it comes to food we tend to spend a lot of money. Way too much, in fact.

So this summer, knowing we were going to be getting by one one (small!) income we knew that we had to curb back on our eating out and grocery shopping. So we did, big time. For the last three-ish months we’ve probably averaged eating out twice a month maximum. We’ve been good about using all our groceries before buying more and getting the most bang for our buck.

Then last week happened.

It started innocently enough with Eric’s birthday on the 14th (last Sunday). We went out for a nice crab dinner + drinks.

Then, Monday night I came home from work too emotionally drained to even think about cooking so we ordered Chinese.

Friday rolled around and we got popcorn + pop when we went to go see the new Harry Potter movie (friggin’ excellent movie, by the way!)

Saturday morning we decided to treat ourselves to a nice brunch.

Then last night I’m digging out all the stuff to make us pizza when I remember the greek wine that we have in the fridge. And the next thing we know, we’re ordering greek food to be delivered. Twice in one day, yesterday!

And before we know it, in one week, we’ve spent $275 on takeout.

$275 is a lot of money to us. A lot.

This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of you, but I have a history of having a spending problem with food. I know that I need to stay strict with myself to reign in the spending and if it starts to get out of control, well, it spirals out of control. Eric and I have had serious money issues in the past because we go out to eat too often. Seriously!

I know from experience that the more we do it, the more we want to do it. Just look at last week! It started innocently enough and before you know it within a 24 hour span we had ordered takeout three times.

I’m putting us on a strict no-takeout lockdown for the next two weeks so I can bite this habit in the butt before it makes a serious dent in our finances again.

Some people buy drugs, some women buy shoes, I order food.

Oy.

How often do you order takeout or go out to eat? Do you have a problem like me when it comes to spending money on food or can you keep it under control?

The last time I talked about budgeting, I got a lot of great feedback and Holly was nice enough to email me a spreadsheet that her husband created, which has been SO helpful with my budgeting.

For the first time in my life I’m on salary so I know exactly how much money I am getting every two weeks. This makes it a hundred times easier to create a budget, sticking to it on the other hand, not so easy.

I have myself on a pretty tight budget because I’m trying to save money for, well, lots of things! Ha! Some of you will be happy to know I got myself an ING Direct Account for my savings. I’ve got the accounts split up into different things, for example, “Fun and Trips” is one of my accounts, “Car and Insurance” is another one, “Webster and Misc” is another one etc. This is working out well for me because I can’t just dip into the account whenever I want to since it takes a few days to transfer funds.

I’m also trying to do the taking cash out and ONLY spending that. I take X amount of money out every two weeks (I call it my ‘allowance’, hehe) and that’s supposed to cover my groceries/gas/fun for the two weeks. Somehow I always manage to spend the majority of it in the first 2-3 days after I take the money out, I don’t know how this happens but it does without fail!

I recently hid my credit card in a little drawer full of tacks so I would have to stop using it for random little purchases – and online shopping – until I paid off the balance on it. Yup, I’m one of those people that needs to hide their credit card, I don’t think I’d go as far as freezing it though.

Anyways, that’s where I’m at for budgeting right now. It’s a work-in process that’s for sure.

Who else budgets? Do you manage to stay on budget every month? Anyone else give themselves an ‘allowance’?