It is important to us that we are smart with our money and living in Hawaii sometimes makes that a little difficult, seeing as things are more expensive here. But for the most part I think we manage our money well, we have our system dow but there's always room for improvement.
Zach and I both agree that it is important for us to save up for the things we want, the places we want to go, and for our future.
Our number one goal is to be debt free as much as possible. Yes, we both have credit cards we are working on paying off and a car payment but we have goals to pay those things off and those monthly payments are a part of our budget.
Since Zach and I moved to Hawaii we have struggled with meal planning and grocery shopping; it's not our favorite thing. I'll admit I'm not a cook and some days when I get home all I want for dinner is a bowl of cereal (great thing Zach loves cereal and he's OK with that meal option). But I want to get better at cooking and meal planning, I think it's important for our future.
We got to a point where we were fed up with spending $90 a week on groceries and coming home and asking, "what can we cook?". We were just getting the basics..... milk, bread, cereal, rice, oats, beans, cheese and occasionally produce so we could juice and that was our whole $90 grocery budget. I knew we were missing something. We did some research and decided this month we'd try grocery shopping 1 time for the whole month (we'll still get produce/milk once a week). So we created our monthly meal plan and made a shopping list. We went to Costco during the Super Bowl on Sunday (have I mentioned I love Zach?) and got the bulk of our shopping done. We were surprised that we stayed within our budget and that we came home with things we could actually cook! We aren't that many days into following our meal plan but I think this is going to work for us and I'm feeling confident that we'll be able to save at least $60 a month by shopping this way. Of course, we'll see how we're doing towards the end of the month.
We only have to plan out 4 meals a week because Zach works 3 nights a week, which makes our first attempt at meal planning easier.
February meal plan.
We even put cereal nights on the calendar!
Our big Super Bowl shopping trip.
This past Sunday we also explored along Diamond Head Beach.
It was good to go for a long walk on the beach.
We'll keep you posted on our February goals.
No comments:
Post a Comment