Family Budget

I meant to continue this post on managing family food money a while ago, but we had a lot going on around the 4th of July, so I apologize for taking so long. Continuing where I left off, I was talking about our self-inflicted/self-taught budgeting “education.”

It seemed that we were very slow learners.  Although I don’t really have anything to compare to, I remember the process of learning how to manage our budget was painful. The first lesson that I learned was about communication. First and foremost, there should be some! Imagine trying to climb that mountain while just assuming those around you know what you are thinking and will act accordingly.  No discussing, no planning, no budgeting = no success.  One area in which I feel we went very wrong was that we ignored talking about finances in general early in our relationship. We didn’t avoid the subject, we just never paid any attention to budgeting in our conversations and it left a huge hole to fill.

Continue reading » Managing Family Food Money - Part 2

As I mentioned in my first post, budgeting our family food money has always been something of a struggle. When my wife and I were first married, we verbally decided on some amount of money per month for food (I don’t really remember now how much it was) that seemed reasonable and just did our best to stick to it. Needless to say, we ALWAYS went over budget and the only thing that kept us from going WAY over was usually me instigating family money arguments in addition to nagging my wife every time she bought anything at the store to make sure she hadn’t spent too much.

Also needless to say, this was a VERY ineffective and inefficient method for trying to manage our grocery budget. The next several years were a financial adventure for us, to say the least. By adventure I mean something like showing up to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in shorts, sandals and one of those silk hawaiian shirts that you can only get away with if you’re actually IN hawaii or your back yard for a BBQ and you don’t mind looking silly. Well I did what any ill-prepared, inexperienced and under-dressed mountain climber would do: I looked around to see what everyone else was doing.

Continue reading » Managing Family Food Money - Part 1

Alright, so the site doesn’t look like much yet, but just wait… I have big plans! This site has been a long time coming since lowering my own grocery budget has been a topic of heated debate in our household for several years now. So, I finally decided to pull the trigger and get this out there. I hope that this site will be used to help individuals and families in better managing the amount of their budget that is allocated to groceries as well as managing the way that money is spent.

The links and sections on the site are not set up yet, so please disregard those for the time being. I am working on getting some helpful tips put together about lowering grocery expenses in general. There are also several tools I’m looking at that will aid families in defining and managing their grocery budget.

If there are any questions, comments or suggestions do not hesitate to reply here or send an email to brad@lowermygrocerybudget.com . In fact, I’ve already had one great email from someone in my local area telling me about a program he found that lets him buy bottles of milk for just around $.50!! I’ll post more about that later though.