We’re almost done with February – I can’t believe how quickly this month has blown by. I wanted to update my January totals and share how we finished the month out in terms of spending, and also update on how we’re doing so far this month.

Here’s how January ended up:
Groceries – $126.91
Coffee – $78.01
Eating out – $448.74

A note on our eating out total – I apparently miscalculated when I originally was tallying everything up. I’m thinking I must have counted something twice. So we actually spent less than we thought, which is good… but it was still way over the top!

We’ve already made a huge improvement this month. Here are the numbers as of 02/17

Groceries – $71.51 (this would be higher but we had a $100 gift card to use so that saved us a bundle) out of $350.00 budgeted
Coffee – $64.67 ($50 of this was to load a Starbucks card, so I haven’t consumed that much coffee this month!) out of $50.00 budgeted
Eating out – $97.46 out of $250.00 budgeted

See? Much better!

As for my grand plans with meal planning… not really happening. I’m just not feeling creative in the kitchen. At all. So I’m repeating a lot of recipes and making easy things like spaghetti and meatballs. I don’t really care, though, because at least we’re eating at home.

Slightly related, yesterday we had a real estate agent come by and take a peak at our house to give us a market appraisal. We got some pretty sad news about the market in our area and we likely won’t be able to sell our home for as much as we were hoping. That means we’ll need to tighten things up even more, to save for potential high costs at closing. Which means I’m going to reduce my coffee shop budget even more… and I probably should also track my knitting/yarn spending, too. It eats up a large chunk of our fun money and, after organizing my stash recently, I honestly don’t really need to be buying yarn right now (as much as it pains me to say that!!!). But at least these things are just temporary – you gotta do the hard stuff now so you can reap rewards later, right? But….I do have a ton of gift certificates from Christmas to my local yarn shop so… there’s that at least 🙂

Anyway, back on topic – meal planning and all that. I’m really happy with our progress in stopping eating out so much and so I’m cutting myself a break on not going nuts with the meal planning just yet. In March I’ll try to pick that back up again. Slow and steady and all that jazz.