Budget Update

Ok one month down. We did pretty good. And the best part is...we paid off Great Lakes!! We paid off $3380 in 5 months! Next debt we're attacking is Box Elder Credit Union which is my car. We have $6300 left and now we'll be paying a minimum of $242 each month instead of $164. Plus adding any extra money from each month onto it. If we can get an extra $260 a month we should have it paid off in a year, but my goal is to do it faster than that. Maybe by Feb or March of 2012.

As for the budget for June, we came in $184 below budget! This money will get thrown towards my car loan. Our dentist appointments ended up being about $90 less than we originally budgeted and we spent $25 less in gas. That and Mike's checks were on average $20 more than we anticipated. I'm keeping our income the same, since his checks to vary from month to month, but any extra money is nice. And gets us out of debt faster! July doesn't really have anything big other than an oil change. And the weeks are weird so we have an extra offertory payment for church and an extra daycare check. But coming up in August, Mike will have 5 paydays! Sweet!!

I did want to share my grocery savings tracker for the year. We're halfway through and I've managed to stockpile a lot of food and save a ton of money!

Hopefully this shows up larger, but as you can see I've saved 44% this year on groceries alone. There are some rebates that I've sent in, but I don't track those. But $5000 worth of groceries for only $2900!?! I'm quite impressed with myself :) My $17.75 newspaper subscription has been paid for. And so has my few hours a week of coupon clipping. I'll get some pics of my stockpile and post those soon. Oh and this savings tracker is courtesy of The Coupon Project. I love her blog and her Couponing 101 is what I used when I first started up.

Lastly, we signed up for e-meals this month. We have been making a meal plan each day but I felt like it has been the same things over and over. And we were making it a month in advance, which was nice, but it was hard to shop for. E-meals uses the sales ad to create a menu and then you can shop the sales. Add coupons to save even more! So far we've made 2-3 things from each week's meal plan and have loved them. I highly recommend.