A few days ago, my husband and I were lying in bed, talking about our money troubles.  This summer is rough for us– we have the additional expense of cooling a large house and running a swimming pool, there are a million weddings and graduations to attend (with all the associated costs), and all three of us have birthdays in the summer.  We will soon need to move Scribble into a convertible carseat, buy a new stroller, and babyproof our house.  We also have a few quarterly expenses coming up– health insurance, car insurance. We are breaking even, but that’s about all. We haven’t dipped into savings, but we also aren’t saving much ourselves.  Goals that we have for our family– to travel more, to enroll Scribble in classes, to prepare for TTC round 2– just aren’t advancing.  We comfort ourselves with small spends– random dinners out, a few small splurges on the weekends– but the thrill of those spends doesn’t last long.

My husband and I are naturally goal-oriented, but right now we seem to lack a vision for our financial future! So yesterday while baby napped we sat down and thought about what we could do to move forward with our goals. We have never thought of our lifestyle as being particularly extravagant, but once we started thinking creatively, we found a lot of places we could make cuts!

Living proof that the best things in life are free!

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But before we commit to cuts, we have to have a goal to move toward. We love to travel but haven’t been able to do much since we bought our house. We decided that a vacation, scheduled for next spring, was a good goal to keep us motivated in our day-to-day.

Here’s what we’re thinking to get us there:

Cable: Right now, we pay 80 dollars a month for basic cable and internet. Savings: We’re thinking we can get this down to 50 a month or possibly less if we shop around for an internet-only plan, yielding 20 dollars of savings per month.

Insurance: Husband works at a mid-sized organization where insurance plans for employees are a little more expensive than the norm, and spouses and children are not covered at a discount. So Scribble and I are currently on a private plan, and hubby is going to switch over to a private plan as well. We think we can save 30 or 40 dollars a month this way.

Food: As I’ve blogged about here before, we are changing the way we eat: no more processed crap, fewer grains, more local. This has resulted in a skyrocketing grocery budget. Neither of us is willing to go back to our old way of eating, so the challenge for me is to find ways to cut costs while also maintaining our current diet. I have a lot of ideas for this that I’m planning to share in part two, but my main idea is this: for every new fancy ingredient I buy, another processed convenience food or paper product has to go–for good! I’m hoping to limit our spending to 300 dollars a month, which will save us about 50 dollars monthly on food.

Spending Money: Between hosting showers and parties, dinners out, and buying gifts for friends and family, we are managing to blow through 100-150 dollars every week on incidentals.  We’ve decided to cut back on this number drastically by budgeting our spending money. We used to do this back when my husband was in law school, but we’ve fallen away from the practice over time. We’re back to our old school ways: 20 dollar per person, per week. This is for everything– going out to dinner on Friday, replacing my camera’s lost battery, buying toys for Scribble, etc. If we need more, we can borrow forward or save up money to spend. If we manage to maintain our 40/week budget, we will save between 10 and 60 dollars a week!

Use the Same Credit Card: Right now, I use a debit and personal credit card for my purchases, and my husband uses his credit card (which has cashback rewards) for all our bills. We’re planning to get another copy of his credit card so that we can more closely track our expenses and take advantage of rewards options. We may not be able to save much this way, but hopefully we can gain a little extra jingle!

Big Box Subscription: We have a Sam’s Club membership, but since we’ve started using cloth diapers, have stopped using paper towels, and are buying far less processed foods, we don’t use this enough to justify the cost. This is only 40 dollars a year, so it isn’t much savings. But one idea we have tossed around is to swap our Sam’s Club membership for an Amazon Prime account. This would allow us to ditch our Netflix account and get free shipping on all the baby stuff I’m buying on Amazon.  Savings: 40 dollars/year, or possibly as much as 120–200 dollars a year if we swap Sam’s Club and Netflix for Amazon Prime.

Use cloth dipes 90% of the time: We still use cloth diapers a lot, but we have had some setbacks. Scribble went through a rashy period between months 5 and 7, so we used disposables a lot at that time. Since then we’ve been slowly returning to cloth diapering, but we default to disposables more than I would prefer. Our (very generous!) family often surprises us with gifts of disposables, so our plan is to use cloth primarily, and only use the disposables that we get as gifts. Not sure the savings on this; since we’ve always used either cloth or gifted disposables, we have only spent about 100 dollars on Scribble’s diaper needs since he was born!

Take Advantage of Resources: For entertainment and fun money, we’re planning to look the resources we already have, or things that are free. Two of our main non-necessary expenses are pool supplies and power, and our country club membership.  In the winter both of these expenses feel like terrible burdens, but in the summer they become resources for us! We can spend every Friday night grilling and swimming instead of going out to dinner; we can hold potlucks poolside and invite our friends over. Our country club membership requires a monthly food expenditure; we often neglect to use it since it is hard to bring a baby into such a quiet environment! It never occurred to me to order food to-go for picnic lunches or easy suppers. So this summer we’ll be using that to our advantage as well!

If you add all that up, it amounts to 130 dollars in savings per month, plus the purchases we make will be more efficient!

Future Ideas:

Trash Service: Right now we spend 20 dollars a month to have our trash hauled away. When we moved here I was heavily pregnant and unable to get to the dump, and my husband’s time for hauling off garbage was limited due to his work schedule. So we scheduled trash service. It has really saved our relationship, but it is an expense we don’t require. My new goal is to minimize the trash we have by composting organic material, reusing containers that I would usually throw away, and opting to buy items without containers whenever possible.  Now that Scribble is older, he can also sit in the car while I haul off the garbage too! One of our goals is to add a used truck to our family vehicle cadre, and when this happens we will scrap the pickup service altogether, and save almost 250 dollars a year.

What are some ways you’ve cut back on expenses for your family?

Mrs. Sketchbook’s Getting Back to Budget Series part 1 of 3

1. Getting Back to Budget Series: Part 1 by Mrs. Sketchbook
2. Getting Back to Budget: Grocery Pantry Challenge by Mrs. Sketchbook
3. Getting Back to Budget: Grocery Budget Dos and Don'ts by Mrs. Sketchbook