The Mild Wife and I are trying to save up as much money as we can, so we started a budget that we try to keep to every month. Honestly, it's not even so much that we want to spend less money every month, it's that we want to make sure that we spend it on the right items. Generally speaking, we can live with the results if that's the plan that we go in with.
Now, it just so happens that we tend to spend a bit less money when we actively try to track our expenditures, so it all works out nicely. I know I've certainly had moments where I decided I didn't want an extra beer, after all, because I knew it'd get me dangerously close to, or above, the threshold we set for ourselves. I didn't want to be the one to throw the budget off, you know?
Regardless, the beauty of all of this is that we've gotten a lot better at estimating what we do and don't need for a given period of time. Yes, that block of cheese will likely last us through the week. No, that chicken won't get us through the entire week, though we will have chicken broth for a while as a result. You get the idea. We're constantly trying to estimate the value and volume of our purchases now, and we have a nice, clean way of measuring it at the end of the monthly period. If we came in under budget for that category, we did a good job. If we didn't, then we still need to tweak our estimates. Wash, rinse, and repeat until we feel like we're optimizing our spending.
The one very amusing side effect of this, however, is that we also know how much we should consume in a given period of time. If we were to somehow finish six bottles of wine in a week, something would have gone off the rails in a serious way. That seems like a fairly dull, straight forward concept, until you start applying it to far more fun purchases. For example, let's say we decided to track the consumption of these:
Yup, we effectively have a hot Cheetos quota for the month. It was a bit of a convoluted story as to how that happened, but at some point, the Mild Wife decided that she couldn't justify spending that much money on that particular snack. So, she limited herself to one bag per month. In turn, that meant that she tries to spread out the consumption of those Cheetos over the month. It's no fun to eat all of them on January 1st and then have to wait a full month to eat some more.
The actual, unofficial rule is that she has to have some Cheetos left in the jar on the last day of the month. It doesn't matter if there's only puff left in the jar on that day; so long as there is a non-zero amount, we have succeeded in allocating and budgeting Cheetos correctly for that month (side note: I actually looked up what word to use to describe a single Cheeto. "Puff" seems to be the winner).
Given that, I should note that today is April 1st, and we have yet to buy any Cheetos for this month. So, we only have what's left over from March. I present to you the results of our monthly allocation:
Success!
Now, it just so happens that we tend to spend a bit less money when we actively try to track our expenditures, so it all works out nicely. I know I've certainly had moments where I decided I didn't want an extra beer, after all, because I knew it'd get me dangerously close to, or above, the threshold we set for ourselves. I didn't want to be the one to throw the budget off, you know?
Regardless, the beauty of all of this is that we've gotten a lot better at estimating what we do and don't need for a given period of time. Yes, that block of cheese will likely last us through the week. No, that chicken won't get us through the entire week, though we will have chicken broth for a while as a result. You get the idea. We're constantly trying to estimate the value and volume of our purchases now, and we have a nice, clean way of measuring it at the end of the monthly period. If we came in under budget for that category, we did a good job. If we didn't, then we still need to tweak our estimates. Wash, rinse, and repeat until we feel like we're optimizing our spending.
The one very amusing side effect of this, however, is that we also know how much we should consume in a given period of time. If we were to somehow finish six bottles of wine in a week, something would have gone off the rails in a serious way. That seems like a fairly dull, straight forward concept, until you start applying it to far more fun purchases. For example, let's say we decided to track the consumption of these:
 |
| We don't usually get the extra, extra hot ones, but we don't stick to the original orange ones, either |
The actual, unofficial rule is that she has to have some Cheetos left in the jar on the last day of the month. It doesn't matter if there's only puff left in the jar on that day; so long as there is a non-zero amount, we have succeeded in allocating and budgeting Cheetos correctly for that month (side note: I actually looked up what word to use to describe a single Cheeto. "Puff" seems to be the winner).
Given that, I should note that today is April 1st, and we have yet to buy any Cheetos for this month. So, we only have what's left over from March. I present to you the results of our monthly allocation:
 |
| I included the bananas so no one worries about how unhealthy we are eating |
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