With the purchase of a new home comes many new responsibilities & expenses. It is time for us to crack down on spending and be prepared for (almost) anything that comes along with those responsibilities.

The first place I decided needed work would be our eating out/fast food/Starbucks budget as well as our home groceries.

Thanks to www.mint.com I found that *I* spent $120 on miscellaneous Starbucks trips in the month of September. I gasped for a moment, shocked that I had spent that much on Shaken Passion Iced Tea Lemonades & Lemon Loaf slices. It was true, I needed to cut back.

Another area we have problems is my husband Nick’s lunches. He works 39 miles away from home and works 10 hours shifts, with 1 hour for lunch.  The easiest thing for him to do is to grab a bite to eat at his work cafeteria or a nearby fast food joint. This isn’t working for us. According to Mint.com we spend $389.00 on fast food, and $679 on groceries. Those are staging numbers for our family size and income.

So, here is the start of our financial change, and hopefully we’ll inspire and help others to live more frugally as well.

Here are a few things we’re going to change.

• No more eating fast food for lunches or otherwise. I’ll be making Nick’s work lunches to take with him.
• We lowered our Netflix plan from 5 movies at a time to one at a time with unlimited online watch time. We’re currently on the lookout for a good used (and cheap) Roku Netflix player to use on our TV.
• No more Starbucks trips. We have lots of coffee at home for Nick to drink and I have devised a clever, but cheap way to imitate the Starbucks drinks I occasionally like to drink.

Our monthly grocery budget is $400 and we’re going to stick to it.

I’m also not a fan of car payments. In two more payments our car will officially be ours. It’ll be nice to free up that car payment and put it into savings.

I love hearing from others and their frugal tips. Feel free to comment away!

My next post will be details on the grocery budget, shopping list and tips for low cost meals!

5th October 2009 Frugal Living 4 comments

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 9:07 am and is filed under Frugal Living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.