Family Budget

Quite a while ago I wrote a post about a little trick that we use to stretch out our grocery budget. Since then, I have found a slightly different way of doing things that makes it much easier on us and much better for our budget. The previous method assumed a bi-weekly pay period but a monthly household budget. With that assumption in place, then two months out of the year (about six months apart) there are 3 paychecks within one month. We were taking that third pay check and using most of it to fund a “grocery account” that we would pull half of our food money from each month for the next six months until the next 3-paycheck month.

This has worked really well for us for the past several years but there was always a problem. Along with bi-weekly pay periods, we were allowing our grocery budget to follow the same bi-weekly schedule. Every time we would hit a month with 3 paychecks, we were forced to also make a sudden shift to our grocery budget where we had to wait 3 weeks in between grocery money being added for 2 grocery cycles and then we could go back to normal after that. Needless to say, this was almost impossible.

Finally I got smart. I realized that in a six month period, there are 13 pay periods (again, assuming that there are 26 bi-weekly pay periods in a year). So we switched our grocery budget schedule from 14 days in between money being added to 15 days. Just ONE more day every grocery cycle made all the difference! It is almost imperceptible to us that we have to wait one more day in each pay cycle before more family food money gets added to the account but the result is that we no longer have to try to stretch out the “missing” pay cycle in the 3-paycheck month. The ONLY downside, if there even is one, is that we have to maintain a separate grocery budget schedule instead of just relying on the pay periods to tell us when “grocery day” will be.

As I did with the original post, I would recommend anyone to try this if you think you can make it work. It has really helped us keep our family budget running smooth from month to month and I love having a reserve of food money just in case anything unexpected happens.